Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,156

have to build a nation to get it done, I’ll do it again. You tell him exactly what I said.”

Gard stared at me for a moment. Then a slow, if sad, smile touched her face. “I’ll tell him,” she said. Then she added, gently, “It will please him, I think. If not the twins. Have no fear for your shieldmaiden. In our halls, warriors who died for family, for duty, for love, are given the respect such a death deserves. She will want for nothing.”

I nodded. Then after a while, I said, “If she’s an Einherjar, now . . .”

Gard shook her head. “Not until the memory of her has faded from the minds of those who knew her. That is the limit not even the Allfather may cross.”

“She, uh,” I said. I blinked several times. “She wasn’t real forgettable.”

“She was not,” agreed the Valkyrie. “And she has earned her rest.”

“She earned better than a bullet in the neck,” I spat.

“All warriors die, Dresden,” Gard replied. “And if they die in the course of being true to their duty and honor, most would count that a fitting end to a worthy life. She did.”

I nodded.

“Fuck worthy,” I said quietly, miserably. “I miss her.”

Silent seconds went by while I went briefly blind.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For . . . Nathan. He was a loyal friend to the end.”

“Oh, man up, Dresden,” Gard said. “You’re still here.”

But she nodded as she said it. And she cried, too.

* * *

* * *

We had a funeral followed by a wake at Mac’s a few days later, the Paranet crew and me.

Everyone was dazed, struggling to adjust to the reality that had confronted them.

Tens of thousands had perished. The final count of fallen humanity that night would have overflowed Soldier Field—which was being used for refugees, of which there were more than a hundred thousand.

Ethniu had been even harder on Chicago real estate values than me. Wakka wakka.

The Huntsmen, in particular, had ravaged every neighborhood they went through, killing about ninety-five percent of the occupants—until they got to the South Side. Then it was like the robbery of the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota. Too many people were willing to fight—and they were armed. Sure, there were a lot of bad guys—but there were a lot more citizens, a higher-than-average percentage of them had guns, and once they understood what was happening, they turned the streets into shooting galleries. That was when things had started to turn on that flank of the battle, providing an opening for Marcone.

Apparently, even the legions of epic mythology had better plan for trouble on some of the toughest streets in the world.

The power was out and stayed that way for a while. There was just too much to replace. That made clean water hard to move around. More people got sick and died, and things could have gotten really bad if we’d had a harsher summer. But the weather stayed unseasonably mild and cool, with frequent rains. Maybe a Queen of Faerie ensured that. Or maybe the universe figured the city had earned a break.

Either way, it was raining when we gathered at my grave in Graceland.

We filled a coffin with pictures. I used one of me and Murph arguing that some joker in CPD had taken when both of us had cartoonish expressions on our faces. It felt truer to what we’d had, somehow.

It hadn’t had a lot of chance to grow.

Other pictures went in. No frames. There wouldn’t have been room. If they’d given their life for the city, their picture went in. We used copies of the drivers’ licenses of the volunteers, when we couldn’t find anything else about them. Hendricks’s picture went in. So did Yoshimo’s and Wild Bill’s and Chandler’s. Everyone in the Paranet community, hell, almost everyone in the city had lost someone they knew or were related to.

When people you know die, that gets attention. That was the beginning of the change in Chicago, where the supernatural had just become a threat that was too great to be denied or overlooked.

Butters, moving comically in his neck brace and backboard, stood with me throughout the memorial service. Of the survivors, fifty or so of my volunteers had been willing to attend. In a ceremony that was half comedic and half gut-wrenching, I pronounced them Knights of the Bean and Defenders of Chicago. And then I pinned a dried lima bean glued to a steel backing to their chests, and I made each