Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,15
blind instinct was to lunge at the screaming twit, take my chances, and break his scrawny neck. But that would have been impolite.
I did what he said, slowly, seething with rising impatience and anger the entire time. Hell’s bells, of all the times to have to tangle with the normie bureaucracy, this was not it.
Unless . . . Maybe that wasn’t what was happening here.
Rudolph had been on someone’s payroll for a while, we’d been pretty sure. Suppose he’d been given orders to stop me and take me out of the picture for the evening?
Or for keeps.
And that accidental soulgaze with Bradley had just given him an excuse.
Rudolph might have been someone’s creep, but a creep he remained, and he was scared. If I brought up a shield or tried any of my usual tricks, he’d pull the trigger before he even thought about it, and he was too close to miss. My suit would probably stop the rounds when whole—fae tailors seemed to regard bulletproofing as a standard feature—but the kraken had slashed sections of it to ribbons, and there was always the chance he’d aim for the head or neck, or that the shot would go up the sleeve or something. He could get off three or four shots while I was calling up my shield.
I might chance that. But it wasn’t really Rudolph that was the problem.
The problem was what happened after I openly resisted a duly enabled officer of the Chicago Police Department. Once he started shooting at me, I’d have to disarm him at the least, and after that it might get really complicated, really fast. I preferred to be something other than a wanted fugitive.
Unless I just killed them both.
It was dark. There weren’t any street cameras, any instant backup. We were playing by old-school rules, the Winter mantle suggested. Rudolph had crossed a line. It would be too bad about Bradley, who seemed a decent sort, but there were about eight million reasons around me why the logic came down on the side of eliminating both of them and proceeding to the defense of the city. For all I knew, Rudolph was a Fomor agent trying to take out one of Chicago’s heavyweights. Well. Middleweights.
And it wasn’t as if the two of them could stop me, unless Rudolph got lucky with the first shot, and that happens a lot less in real gunfights than you’d think.
Kill them, said a quiet, hard voice inside me.
I closed my eyes for a second. Maybe I should have run instead of taking the bike. The Winter mantle was apparently reacting to the fear in the air, and it sensed a city full of cowering prey to be enjoyed. It paced the length of the cage I’d built for it in my head like a hungry, restless animal.
No, I said back to the voice in my thoughts. Killing your way to answers is never as simple as it seems. The best way to survive is to keep it simple.
I didn’t bother trying to argue about right and wrong. Those are concepts beyond the scope of that kind of magical construct.
Assuming that’s who I was talking to, instead of, you know. Myself. Gulp.
I opened my eyes and kept my hands up. “Rudolph, man, this is so not the time.”
“Shut up!” he shouted. “If your teeth come apart again, I’ll shoot.”
I gritted my teeth and prepared my shield. Crap. If the idiot started shooting, I’d have to take my chances, raise the shield, and run away. There was no way these two could keep pace with me for long. Dammit, I just needed a second or so to get the shield up. I decided to lunge away from Rudolph, over the far side of the bike. In the dark, it might take him a second or two to find me and realign the weapon. I might have time to pull up a shield before he could even start shooting.
I heard the faintest scrape of movement in the shadows.
I looked beyond Rudolph, across the street, and saw the gleam of eyeshine in the darkness. One, two, three, four sets of eyes approached through the night, gleaming, low to the ground, vanishing into the particularly dark patches.
There was a sudden chorus of bubbling, throaty canine growls that came from the night on every side.
Rudolph’s eyes went very, very wide. He took a panicked little step to one side, flicking his eyes left and right. “What was that?”