Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,39

Winter mantle’s influence. As it was, I kept enough awareness to twist on the way down and keep from getting any broken bones—and once I’d hit, kept my breath, drew in my will, and shouted, “Repellere!”

Naked, unseen force exploded out of me in a half sphere, a wave of thick, heavy energy that lifted the Huntsmen from their feet and flung them a dozen feet back through the air. They twisted and bent in graceful arcs as they went, and every damned one of them landed on all fours like some kind of big ugly cat.

I was on my feet by the time they were, but my shoulder wasn’t working so good. I was pretty sure it had been dislocated.

One of the Huntsmen made a sound like a wild boar, and the others moved, clearing to one side as it lowered its spear and readied another blast.

I cross-drew the coach gun from its scabbard, thumbed back the hammers as I raised it, and let him have it with both barrels of Dragon’s Breath.

Dragon’s Breath is a specialty shotgun ammunition. It normally consists mainly of hard pellets of magnesium.

But Molly’s people had added white phosphorus into these rounds.

Twin fireballs bellowed from the coach gun and splattered the top half of the lead Huntsman in a cloud of white-hot pellets of burning magnesium and white phosphorous.

The burning metal didn’t stop burning just because it had been buried deep in the thing’s flesh, and the Huntsman and a five-foot circle of grass around it burst into flames, sending up a squealing scream from the creature that felt like it could burst my eardrums. It thrashed horribly, staggering in a small circle before falling to its hands and knees.

I dropped the coach gun, turned toward the other three, and started to bring up my shield again—but one of them had rolled a higher initiative this round, and a little horn-handled knife tumbled past the hem of my duster and sank into my thigh.

Agony seared through me as if the knife had been white-hot. Pain had been a long-absent visitor in my daily experience, and its sudden arrival sucked the wind out of my lungs. Fire pierced my leg like a bar of red-hot metal. I could feel it searing me to the very marrow of my bones.

At the same time, my shoulder exploded in silver threads of nerve-rending torment as my rotator cuff screamed in protest at the damage.

Iron. The bane of the Fae and their magics.

The Winter mantle screamed.

I staggered and fell to a knee as I seized the bone handle of the little knife and wrenched it out of my leg—just in time to catch a stomping kick to the sternum that knocked me back in a short, brutal arc to the ground. Stars exploded in my vision and something in my head felt loose and hot. The breath was gone from my lungs. I tried to gather my will again, but they piled onto me, tearing with nails and biting, for crying out loud.

And then there was the sound of a dinosaur’s footsteps shaking the ground, and River Shoulders tackled all three of them, swept them into the circle of arms thicker than a horse’s neck, and squeezed. There was a quick series of wet, crunching sounds. River stood up with a contemptuous shake of his arms and dropped the Huntsmen.

What was left was . . . sort of smushed together. Ever seen The Thing? Think in that direction, only more slippery.

With the little knife gone from my flesh, the Winter mantle recovered itself pretty rapidly. I took a couple of breaths and then pushed myself to my feet, the pain once more vanishing into a vague haze. That was the great weakness of the fae, their bane. And mine, I supposed. Iron. Wow, that had hurt.

“How many?” River demanded. “How many did you kill?”

“Three,” I said. “You?”

“Nine,” he said.

Well.

Okay, then.

“Smoke,” River spat in the tone of a swear. “We missed one.”

“What?” I said.

“There are always thirteen.”

The burning corpse and the smushed ones abruptly deflated.

And there was a sudden crashing sound as a Huntsman half a head taller than River Shoulders just shrugged its way out through the front wall of the house, taking maybe half of the front of the house down. It raised its spear and let out a bestial roar that would have set off car alarms had any of them been working.

It leapt toward River Shoulders, its heavy iron spear held in one hand like an assegai,