Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,118

eyes widened as he stared down at me; then he shot a glance over his shoulder at the Titan, who was rapidly drawing nearer.

Butters drew my hands to the spot where I’d been punched and pressed them down. “Hold them here, Harry. Keep up the pressure. I’ll be right back.”

And then the little guy stood up, his limbs shaking, his face ashen, and put himself between me and a goddamned Titan.

I felt my teeth stretch into a wolf’s smile. Hell. If Butters could do that, I could do my part. It was hard. But I drew in enough breath and focused my will, infusing my voice with Power.

“Titania,” I wheezed. “I summon thee.”

Maybe half a dozen of the armored foot soldiers around Ethniu, confused and looking for direction, sensed her intent and went flying forward like hounds on a trail.

I labored for another breath, and to hold my hands where Butters had put them.

Butters lifted Fidelacchius and brought the blade to life in a buzz of angelic choral fury.

“Titania!” I rasped, louder. The Name echoed weirdly, or it seemed that way to me. “I summon thee!”

The first of the heavily armored ape-armed troopers reached Butters.

And the little guy went full Jedi on his ass.

Fidelacchius sliced the trooper’s weapon in half and took part of the arm with it. A second swing split the trooper’s heavy shield in half with the rest of him, and the pieces fell in separate directions. The other five hesitated—and Butters went up the middle like a human Cuisinart, striking down three more in less time than it would have taken to call his name.

Ethniu strode closer, shouting something in a tongue I did not understand, seized the corpse of one of my volunteers from the earlier engagement by the calf, and flung it overhand at Butters and his remaining opponents, smashing all three of them out of her way.

But the little guy had bought me time enough.

I drew in my third wheezing breath as the fire of the Eye began to kindle, poured my will into my voice, and screamed, “TITANIA! I SUMMON THEE!”

Chapter

Thirty

Titania doesn’t like me on the best of days.

It’s hard to blame her; I killed her child.

So when I completed the summoning, without anything like any kind of control over the being I was calling in, I wasn’t really expecting roses and chocolate.

Neither was I expecting to get struck by a bolt of lightning.

But here we are.

There was an enormous sound, a flash of light, a shock against my body like a spray of frozen fire. And the next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back, wheezing, with chunks of concrete and other debris pattering down around me. I tried to get up and I think my legs and shoulders twitched. But other than that, nothing much happened.

I lived static interference for a while, waiting for my brain to start tracking again. The next thing I knew, Butters was helping me sit up and saying something like, “. . . lucky that the bullet didn’t puncture the abdominal wall. The lightning actually cauterized it, or you’d still be bleeding.”

“Tough love,” I gasped. I got a look at my bare chest. I had a lot of blood and what looked like a horrible burn along the entire horizontal length of flesh beneath my ribs on the left side, shaped vaguely like the spreading branches of a tree, or maybe wave patterns in sand. At least that would be kind of a cool scar. Everything I could feel was encased in fuzzy white static, and I was grateful for the insulation the Winter mantle was giving me against the pain.

I couldn’t feel it, but I knew my body was taking a terrible beating. While I could keep driving it forward, this kind of thing was taking a toll. I still had limits, even if it didn’t feel like I did. If I didn’t respect that, I could tough-guy myself right into a grave.

I lay there quietly for a moment, staring up at the sky. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. Everywhere around us was smoke and dust, lit only by smoldering fires. But from where I now lay, it was like looking up from the bottom of a well, a long column of clear air that stretched up into the night sky, where clouds were boiling into existence out of nowhere, while thunder rumbled with low menace.

When the Queens of Summer and Winter took to the same