Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,42

throbbing drumbeat and primal screams. “Some kind of iron alloy. I think the damned thing runs on hate. That’s how you shoot it. You’ve just got to hate hard enough.”

“Seems about right,” River Shoulders rumbled. He had one hand wrapped around my forearm, my entire freaking forearm, gently. The other was braced against my chest—my entire chest. “Okay, on three. One,” he said, and he put my arm back into its socket.

There was an explosion of static and then a bunch of the white noise cleared away. River Shoulders released me carefully and arched an eyebrow. I tried my shoulder. It functioned much more smoothly, and I nodded my thanks at him.

“Yes,” agreed the Erlking, turning from the last throes of the fallen Huntsman. “It makes them easy to lure forward and impossible to drive away.” He paused to nudge the deflated remains of a Huntsman with the toe of one boot. “It is not possible to contain more than a handful of such creatures for any length of time. The enemy has been breeding this batch up of late.”

I grimaced. “Yeah. They’ve been taking people since the Red Court fell.”

“Now we know why,” River Shoulders said.

“Wait,” I said, feeling sick. “They . . . breed more of these things from people? Or they make more of them from people?”

“The process is . . . somewhat distasteful,” began the Erlking.

“Wait,” I said again. “Stop. Just stop. I don’t want to know.”

“This,” he said, “will not be the worst of it.”

“Cheerful,” I said.

He shrugged, hunting leathers creaking. “Incoming,” he noted calmly.

A great grey owl swooped quickly down from the night air, backwinged in a thunder of feathers, and landed in a heap. The heap kind of quivered and then resolved itself into the shape of Listens-to-Wind. The old man shimmied his shoulders a little, then winced and rolled one arm while grasping at his shoulder with the other hand.

“Need to do more yoga,” the old man muttered with a grimace. “Hey, River.”

“Mobility routines are important for a human your age,” River Shoulders said, his tone clearly worried.

Listens-to-Wind broke out into a boyish grin that took a couple of centuries off the old man’s weathered face. “Ain’t been your apprentice in a long time now, tanka.”

“Never listened when you were.”

“What of the enemy?” the Erlking asked.

“Our boys getting hit pretty hard,” Listens-to-Wind said. “They got these gorilla-squid things—”

“Octokongs,” I interjected.

Everyone stopped to eye me.

“Hey, it’s important to have specific language, isn’t it?” I complained. “I went to all the trouble to give them a usable nomenclature.”

“And,” River Shoulders rumbled, “you named ’em octokongs, huh.”

“It fits,” I said.

“Fits,” Listens-to-Wind acknowledged.

“Goofy-looking, right?” I said.

“Goofy-looking and they can carry rifles and crawl on the sides of buildings,” Listens-to-Wind replied. “Hell of an advantage in a city. Things can’t shoot much, but if you get enough of them, they don’t have to be good. Plus, some teams of them fellas in turtlenecks are back there providing fire support. They sniping at anyone with a radio, trying to kill communications.”

“That’ll be Listen,” I said. “King Turtleneck. Way I hear it, the enemy got good help.”

“Annoying when they do that,” the Erlking noted.

“About time we thought about going to help our people, if we’re going to go at all,” the old man said. “They’ll get cut off soon.”

The Erlking nodded sharply and started walking. “Let us tell One-Eye.” Listens-to-Wind fell into pace beside the Erlking, who paused and then added, sotto voce, “If we go without him, you know how he gets.”

“Lot of guys like that got control issues,” the old man opined. “To be expected.”

“Kringle suits him better,” the Erlking muttered.

“Kringle would suit anyone better. Even you.”

The Erlking looked shocked.

The two of them vanished back into the castle.

A fire team of Einherjaren went by, escorting a stunned-looking group of civilians inside, where they would be waved through by the various sentries to the castle’s interior. Out in the night, there was a constant background of crackling gunfire and shrieks and the howling screams of those dark metal spears like the one I held—at least until it started flaking and turning to rust right in front of my eyes.

There was more ambient light now. And more smoke.

Chicago was burning.

“How many can we fit in there, do you think?” River Shoulders asked me.

“Well. We aren’t exactly worrying about fire codes right now,” I said. “Maybe three or four hundred if we pack them in?”

“How many of your people, in this city?”

“Eight million, all told,” I said heavily. “Give or