Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,141

he said. “But not for long. You must complete the binding as quickly as you can.”

“I,” I said. “Buh.”

Marcone turned and slapped me.

“Hell’s bells,” I spat.

“Focus,” he snarled. “I know it hurts. I know what you’ve lost. I know you’re tired. But you and I are all that stands between that creature and this city.”

I clenched my jaw.

“If we fail now,” he continued, “everyone who has been lost has been lost for nothing. Your people. And mine.”

The water of Lake Michigan flared with red light.

Gulp. Ethniu had reclaimed the Eye.

“Dresden,” Marcone hissed, giving my chest a little push. “Are you going to sit there while that happens?”

I thought of Murphy’s body, silent, small, back in the Bean.

I thought of my little Maggie, in her pajamas, small and vulnerable.

I snarled at my sluggish brain, forced the gears to start grinding again. Then I met the eyes of tiger-souled John Marcone and said, “No.”

He bared his teeth. And the weird purple eyes . . . smiled.

Marcone rose, turned to face the water, and started spinning off defensive spells. Different ones. From each hand. Simultaneously. Evidently, a few years in private tuition with an angelic master of magic as a teacher really got some results.

Maybe if there was a later, I needed to get back to school myself. The very thought was exhausting.

Christ, it had really been a very long day.

A Titan was about to send the world into a new Dark Age while Knights of Winter and Hell tried to get in her way. Several Queens of Faerie had been beaten bloody, half a pantheon of supernatural terrors had smashed one another to pieces in Millennium Park, and they’d knocked buildings down like Legos while they did it.

Double Dragon boss fight beside Hell Knight Marcone now?

Yeah.

Sure.

Why not?

Chapter

Thirty-four

Ethniu didn’t arise from the waters of Lake Michigan so much as explode from them, her raw power and agility belying her mangled limbs. Stars and stones, she was functionally halfway to being a quadriplegic—biplegic, I guess—and she still moved like a damned gymnast.

Marcone began muttering in a language I didn’t recognize and pointed a finger at the ground twenty yards away and to his left. He indicated another position to his right with his other hand, at a point equidistant from the first, said something, and there was a crackling sound in the air, like . . . broken wind chimes, maybe.

Ethniu came out of the water with the Eye already bursting forth in a tidal roar of red energy, lashing out unstoppably at Marcone.

Marcone simply stepped to his left and vanished into a chorus of broken wind chimes—reappearing at the point he’d pointed to with his left hand, clear of the beam.

Ethniu shrieked in rage, slewing the gaze of the Eye around wantonly, though the motion was slower than it should have been and seemed to take physical effort from her straining neck muscles as she swept her gaze around, searching for Marcone. She spotted him with another scream, but he simply took a second step, vanishing from the first point of the triangle he’d indicated, and appeared in the second in another shower of clinking-crystal sounds.

Holy crap. Direct point-to-point translocation was something that the White Council kept in a section called “Highly Theoretical and Dangerous Magic” in the wizard’s library at the complex in Edinburgh. I knew, because years ago when I’d asked about it, I’d been put on the no-access list for the entire section.

Which . . . well, to be fair, probably wasn’t entirely unwise.

Ethniu spent the energy of the Eye’s blast while Marcone played freaking peekaboo with her, using magic I wouldn’t care to touch until I’d had another forty or fifty years to practice, at least.

And while Marcone kept her busy, I got to work.

I grounded the Spear next to me. Working with one hand was a pain, but my left hand wasn’t cooperating very well and couldn’t do much more than wave vaguely and grasp Marcone’s bloodied knife. I opened the bag I’d had tied closed, rested my palm on the skull inside for a second, and said, “Bob!”

The eyes of the skull kindled to light, even as I held him up so that he could see what was happening. “Did Radio Mab go off the air? Is it over? Are we . . . Oh my freaking God!”

Beyond us, Ethniu seized a boulder the size of a basketball and smashed at Marcone with it. The gangster stood there calmly while the rock shattered on a dim violet