Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,133

an effort to keep her stumbling and off-balance.

And Marcone walked straight into the melee, firing flintlocks and dropping them as if he had an unlimited supply. Gard and Hendricks fought on either side of him, and his people covered his rear as they all pushed forward together, closing to range too short for even pistols to be practical. A lot of people were down in the mud, fighting and biting and gouging. Bad idea, to wrestle Neanderthals. We didn’t get the best of those fights, and once they realized it, the enemy threw themselves forward with berserk abandon, and if you didn’t have a friend to shoot the berserk trooper off you, you got slammed against the ground until you died.

The champions got to the Titan at about the same time.

Gard went in first.

The Valkyrie spun full circle with her axe to build momentum, called something in a voice almost like a note of music, and the head of the axe blazed with runic power. She struck Ethniu in the ankle. In the back of the ankle.

In her Achilles tendon.

And for the first time in millennia, mortals heard a Titan scream in pain.

It was like a psychic bomb went off. A wave of agony hit my nervous system with the clarity and intensity of dental pain, pure and unfiltered. The world staggered to one side. I’d have fallen if Sanya hadn’t caught my arm.

Ethniu lurched, her foot not bleeding, but brutally broken and no longer supporting her weight—and Hendricks hit her at the hips like the linebacker he’d once been. Titan and professional bruiser went down together—and without an instant’s hesitation, Marcone drew his last and largest pistol, shoved the barrel into the Titan’s natural eye, and pulled the trigger.

There was a howl of sound, a flash of purple light that seared my retinas, and Ethniu’s head jerked back and to one side.

Again, without hesitation, Marcone dropped the pistol, drew a knife, and knelt to drive it into the same eye.

Ethniu kicked. There was the sound of multiple wet sticks snapping. Hendricks gasped. Gard raised her axe again, but the Titan simply seized her leg around the knee and twisted. Bones and ligaments snapped. Gard went down screaming.

Hands shot to Marcone, supernaturally swift, but the Baron of Chicago hadn’t waited around to see them coming and was already in a roll over one shoulder and away before she could seize him.

The Titan sat up. There was a ring of powder burn around her natural eye, a little redness, and otherwise not a mark on her. She kicked Marcone’s legs out from under him as he began to rise, sending him sprawling to one side.

Ethniu lifted the spear.

“No!” I shouted. I triggered the last couple of blasts of kinetic force from my staff, emptying it, but the press was too close, and armored troopers soaked up the blasts before they could get to Ethniu.

The spear came down.

Hendricks took it.

The big man, the gangster’s long-term bodyguard, threw himself in the way of the spear.

It struck home, hard and clean. It transfixed Hendricks diagonally, going in above his collarbone, coming out around his kidneys. The resistance of his body guided the head of the spear off course. It struck into the earth beside Marcone’s head.

Hendricks glowered up at the Titan. And spat.

And died.

Eyes still open and on his foe.

Gard screamed in simple, ancient, human anguish.

And Marcone slid around his dead friend’s back, seized the automatic shotgun from its harness on Hendricks’s chest, swung the barrel up into the Titan’s face, and emptied the magazine.

Ethniu reeled back, shielding her face with her arms and screaming in fury. She was showing more weakness—she had ignored fire that had come at her earlier, but Marcone’s rounds had caused her pain. She swung the spear to one side and back, slamming Marcone with Hendricks’s limp body with a hideous finality of impact. Then she whipped the spear free, sending a column of lightning tearing into the Archive’s position. Ramirez grabbed the girl and yanked her out of the way, but Ethniu had regained her footing.

A needle of fire so bright that it hurt my eyes lashed into Ethniu’s body at the waist, where she had to twist and bend, and where the armor just couldn’t have been as thick. It drew a hiss of discomfort and annoyance from her, and she whirled the spear and smashed back at my grandfather with more lightning. The old man got a shield up in time, but Cristos had been a