Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,4
kraken had planned.
I frantically searched for options. Water and magic mostly don’t mix. Water is considered, in many ways, the ultimate expression of the natural world. Water restores balance—and if there’s one thing wizards ain’t, it’s balanced. We disrupt the world around us with our very thoughts and emotions, violate the normal laws of reality at a whim. But there’s a reason dunking was used by the Inquisition and others, back in the day—surround a wizard with water, and he’d be lucky to be able to create the simplest little wizard light, or a spark of static electricity.
Which . . . left me with very limited options for dealing with a goddamned giant squid.
On the other tentacle, if there’s one place you don’t want to fight the Winter Knight, it’s in the dark and the cold.
I could see the thing down here in the black, my eyes picking up on subtle purple and blue hues of bioluminescence, too dim to be easily noticed in any setting less umbral, and I was uncomfortably reminded of what it was like to use standard antiglamour unguents to see through illusion, only backwards. Maybe the kraken wasn’t actually emitting light—maybe the faesight was simply illustrating it as something familiar for my human brain. But I could see it, plain as day, even down here in the frozen dark. Or maybe especially down here in the frozen dark.
The tentacles wrenched me this way and that, and I felt more of the things attaching themselves, some to my back, one across the backs of my thighs, one around my left arm—and I felt it when they started drawing me closer.
I got to see one great glassy eye the size of a hubcap, and then against the illuminated flesh of the kraken, I saw the black outline of its beak, an obsidian mass of hard, slicing armor that could snip me in half as easily as a gardener’s shears take a blossom.
Then there was a dim, burbling sound of impact, and a second later someone came slicing through the water, swimming with an inhuman speed and grace, moving more like a seal than a human being.
She was wearing nothing more than black athletic underwear, inhumanly pale skin all but glowing in my faesight. Her silver eyes threw back the limited light like a cat’s, and she bore one of my brother’s backup kukris in her hand, doubtless taken from the arms locker belowdecks. She darted through the water, seized me by the front of my coat, and then twisted one cold hand into my freaking belt and braced a foot against my hip, to give her a point of stability as she swung the knife with inhuman strength and speed against the resistance of the water.
The blade sliced into the warty skin of the kraken, unleashing a gouting cloud of purple blood. The creature twitched and writhed, and the hull of the Water Beetle screamed in the water as she hacked down at my feet like a frenzied axe murderer while somehow never striking my flesh.
A second later, the pressure on my ankles loosened, and then the thing ripped its tentacles away from me, taking half a dozen small bites of flesh out of my ankles and calves as it went.
Lara Raith, the queen in all but name of the White Court of vampires, watched the thing retreat for a second, knife gripped in her hand. Then she shifted her grip from my belt to under one arm, kicked off the bottom, and started dragging me up to the surface.
We broke into air and I wheezed as much of the precious stuff as I could into my lungs. Lara’s hand was like a slender iron bar under my arm, firmly holding my head up out of the water. “Wizard, get back to the boat,” she snapped. The water had pressed her coal black hair to her head. It made her ears stand out noticeably and somehow made her look a decade younger. Her eyes were bright with anger. “I will not have my brother trapped out on that island because you are too stupid to avoid swimming with a kraken.”
“How is this my fault!?” I glugged, spitting out water.
There was a sudden cough and a hissing sound, and brilliant light flooded the surface of the water. Murphy had popped a flare on the bow of the Water Beetle, maybe twenty yards off, and stood holding it aloft in her hand, peering out at the water.