Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,147
I said. “Sad.”
Marcone let out a low, weary chuckle.
My stomach twitched a lot while breaths went in and out of my exhausted body.
We did not laugh together.
And he was no less an asshole.
But we won.
Chapter
Thirty-five
We should move,” Marcone said eventually. “Without Ethniu’s will to counter those of the Ladies, Corb’s forces will break. They’ll run for the water, and we are in their path.”
He was right, but there was no sense letting him feel that way. And I was too tired to move. “How about you fight them all with your new buddy? Look real good in front of everyone.”
“You first.”
I started to say something childish, but there was a particularly loud ripple of water from the shoreline, and both of us came up ready to fight. Some of us more drunkenly than others.
An ivory sphere a little bigger than a softball, glowing with sullen fire, tumbled out of the waves and onto the beach.
The Eye.
Pulsing with power.
Throbbing with it, really.
Power that could lay gods and monsters low.
I glanced aside.
Marcone was staring at the Eye.
It lay approximately equidistant between us, down at the waterline.
It might have been six inches nearer to me.
He turned and looked at me thoughtfully.
He looked at the Spear.
He didn’t move or reach for weapons. No demented angelic eyes appeared on his forehead. He just looked at me.
I returned the look. I knew what Marcone was. I’d taken his measure, and he hadn’t changed. He was, above all things, a dangerous predator. It was simply his nature. And you don’t let predators know when you’re scared.
Because I was.
Marcone the gangster had been bad enough. Marcone the supernatural power broker had been nerve-racking. Marcone the Knight of the Blackened Denarius was a nightmare I had barely considered.
But it didn’t matter what else you added to it. He was Marcone. And one of these days, he and I would settle things between us.
Maybe today. Right here. It would be a good time for him. I was exhausted after that binding, and he had to know it. If he acted, he could eliminate me and gain the Spear of Destiny and the Eye of Balor, all in an evening. In all this confusion, who was to say what had really happened?
The victor. That’s who.
Marcone hadn’t survived as long as he had without being able to read faces. And from the look on his, he’d figured out what had been going on in my head. I’d seen his small sharklike smile before. But it was more frightening now.
Because I wasn’t standing outside an aquarium. I was in the bloody, desperate water with him. And he was more than large enough to rip me to pieces.
He smiled and stared at with me without blinking while those cold pale green eyes did the math.
Evidently, the numbers didn’t turn out far enough in his favor to suit him.
His smile for a second turned almost human, and he said, “Not today.”
Water lapped on the shore. Shouts and cries and desperate clicks drifted down to us, seemingly from another world.
“Why?” I asked.
For a second, a look of contempt touched his face—but then he became pensive. His fingers came to rest lightly against his chest, and then he regarded me more seriously. “Because I am beginning to learn what it means to think in the long term,” he replied, his voice serious. “And time favors me. You and I will face one another eventually. But for now, I think it best you take the Eye for safekeeping, wizard.”
I scowled. “You’re just yielding the Eye to the White Council?”
“Do I look like a moron? Certainly not,” Marcone said. “To the Wizard of Chicago. This was, after all, your kill. By the terms of the Accords, you deserve first claim.”
“We did it together,” I objected warily.
Marcone’s smile sharpened.
“Prove it,” he purred, “hero.”
He twitched two fingers and vanished behind a veil.
And I sat there in the cold and the damp, exhausted, momentarily safe, and certain in the sinking sensation that the future I was facing had suddenly become about a thousand times more complicated.
Footsteps began to sound in the haze nearby, along with desperate clicking noises.
I grabbed up the Eye and dumped it in my duster’s pocket. Then I reached up and unlatched and unscrewed the dagger from the end of my staff, sticking it back in its sheath at my hip. There was a sense of frustration from the weapon, as I undid it, but the throbbing power behind the blade eased and quieted.