Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,135

could have gone one way or the other, and a feather’s touch could have made the difference in which way it fell.

I lifted a hand. I had retooled the top of my staff weeks before. It had been fit very closely, so close that you couldn’t see the seam when it was closed. The svartalves had used lasers when I commissioned it. I unscrewed a four-inch section from the top of the staff, where a simple bolt and socket had been set.

Then I drew the dagger from my belt.

My heartbeat thundered in my ears.

The handle of the dagger had been set with the same size socket as the cap of the staff. I set it on the end and spun it, and the well-oiled bolt whirled into place and locked with a simple hinged hook over one side of the dagger’s hilt, to keep it from unscrewing.

Then I gathered power. The runes of the weapon’s haft flared into green-gold light that pulsed in intensity along with the thunder of my heart.

The knife at the head didn’t burst into flame or anything. It just became . . . colder. The edges harder, sharper, more real—so real that anything that you looked at in the background beyond the spear seemed . . . blurry. Symbolic. Transitory.

That weapon carried reality woven into it, dark and hard and unalterable. I felt my will and the weapon’s head vibrating in harmony, along with my heartbeat.

I slammed the butt end of the Spear of Destiny on the ground, and green and gold fire leapt up in a ring around me.

The impact vibrated against my hand and I felt it go out into the ground through the soles of my sneakers. I could sense the substance of the Spear stirring, forming, almost awakening. It drew some of its energy from me. My heart rate started to climb.

“Hey! Regina George!” I called, and my voice echoed over the field as if on loudspeakers.

Thrum-thrum, went the power of the Spear. Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum.

Ethniu’s head whipped toward me, her eye focused on the Spear, wide and alarmed—while Butters and Sanya rushed to flank her.

“Yeah,” I said, and started wearily forward. “Enough foreplay. Time for the main event.”

Chapter

Thirty-three

Sanya and Waldo and I rushed the Last Titan, and Chicago hung in the balance.

Around us, armies clashed drunkenly. Marcone’s amateurs fought like hell beside mine. They didn’t fight well, but they fought hard—and when they went down, they did not go alone. Etri’s people were simply terrifying—blurs that moved across the battle, striking from almost complete invisibility, and could sink into the earth and emerge from it anywhere they wanted, at will.

If we’d had a legion of svartalves, we wouldn’t have needed anyone else. But they weren’t a numerous people—and they were directing their efforts to spearheading the attack of the relief force, to join up with the Winter Lady’s cohorts.

Lara’s people fought beside them.

Watching the two groups work together was like some kind of bizarre outtake from the Cirque du Soleil. Lara’s fighters sailed through the air with the greatest of ease, taking thirty-foot strides in great, leaping bounds, moving almost weightlessly, their shroud-armor fluttering and snapping. As I watched, the wavery figure of a svartalf emerged from the earth and dragged a minor Fomor’s ankles into the ground. Even as it did, a white figure flashed by, spinning a blade on the end of a pole in a smooth arc, and killed the enemy sorcerer as easily as a beast at slaughter, and I saw the unmistakable silvery eyes of Lara Raith as she went by. She snapped the weapon up in a salute to the svartalf warrior as she passed, then engaged a band of war-beasts and their handlers, only to have half a dozen more wavery figures emerge from the ground behind her foes as they surrounded her, a counterambush that annihilated the bunch.

Lara’s eyes and mine met for a dangerous second—and she immediately shifted her direction, bounding across the savage battlefield like a fluttering pale spirit, toward Ethniu’s back.

Sanya, as tough as Butters and more athletic, got to Ethniu first.

The Titan lashed out with the spear’s head, sending it whipping through an arc that would have severed Sanya’s neck if he hadn’t dropped into a slide. He came through with the old cavalry saber held in both hands and struck at the Titan’s other foot.

Ethniu knew the power of the Swords at this point, and she dodged out of the way—forcing her weight onto her wounded leg and sending