Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,48

a thunderous report.

Two things happened immediately.

First, the round passing through the plane of the circle, sent there by my hand and will, disrupted the essential magical screen of the ritual circle. Stealthy the working might have been, but nothing works right when it’s falling to pieces, and it shattered away in flickers and shards of scarlet light.

Second, the round tore right through where the drummer’s liver should have been.

The hooded head whipped around, owl-like, nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, with such unnatural speed that the hood was flung back.

In the scarlet light of the disintegrating circle, I could see a ruined, desiccated face. The skin was drawn tight over the bones of the drummer’s face, withered and weathered like a corpse exposed to the sky. The eyes were milky white; the lips were leathery strips of jerky partly covering yellowed old teeth. Hair hung on to the scalp in clumps of soiled tangles, but much of it was bald and grey-white.

A vampire of the Black Court. And I knew her.

“Mavra of the Black Court!” I snarled. “You got a permit for raising zombies in my town?”

“Oh,” Mavra said. Her body turned to match the facing of her head, the motion weirdly liquid and mechanical at the same time. “It’s you.”

Five of the other six figures turned to face us, hoods coming down.

Black Court vampires. All of them. I didn’t recognize any of the others—but it seemed pretty clear that Mavra, as the drummer, was the least among them. The Black Court had been all but exterminated, thanks to a really underhanded move by Lara’s people a century and change back. The only ones who were still alive—well, who continued to exist—were the oldest, wiliest, most vicious, and most powerful of their kind.

These vampires were old-school, the real deal, nightmares of the Old World. A Black Court vampire was a match for any dozen counterparts in the Red or White Court.

And we had seven of them.

“My lord,” Mavra said. “May I suggest violence.”

The last and tallest of the hooded figures straightened his shoulders, turned, and lowered his hood with one hand. In the other, he held a ritual athame, an ancient knife of rough iron. He stood over the bound figure on the ground. His face was not like those of the other vampires present. No rotted corpse he; his face had the severe, angular regularity of a marble statue’s, beautiful in the severe fashion of frozen mountains and crackling ice. Thick black hair swept back from his face and down his back. His hands were long and white, the fingers fine like an artist’s.

But his eyes.

Dark.

Black.

Empty as the soul of hell.

I had just looked toward them, and they’d nearly sucked me in. Hell’s bells. I shored up my mental defenses with as much focus as I dared spare from my environment and kept my eyes away from his face.

“So,” he said. His voice was . . . pure, smooth whiskey, touched with a soft, throaty accent. “This is the city’s wizard.”

“I’m in the phone book and everything,” I said. “In the name of the city of Chicago, and by the authority of Cook County and the state of Illinois,” I said, loudly, hoping to give River that much more of a distraction, “I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the next convenient parallel dimension.”

Ramirez choked.

“Welp,” Wild Bill drawled. “That oughta do it. Thanks, Harry.”

“Who is that?” breathed Yoshimo.

“That,” said Chandler in a low, shaking voice, “is Drakul.”

Okay.

My eyes might have gotten a little wider.

I might have had trouble swallowing.

“Oh boy,” I breathed.

And Drakul smiled, as if genuinely delighted, and said, “Wise enough to know, but not wise enough to run. Wizards. Arrogant. Take them, my children.”

Chapter

Twelve

Elders of the Black Court do not screw around.

Before Drakul had entirely finished his sentence, the air sizzled and spat with magical energy, as five elders of the Black Court unleashed a tsunami of sorcery.

I lifted my shield bracelet and stepped forward to meet it.

Once upon a time, that gesture would have been futile. Defensive shields were a fairly standard working of magic, but they had limits. The more kinds of energy you want to defend against, the more layers of shielding it takes—and the more power you have to put into it. Back when, my shield had been handy for stopping objects that were moving very quickly and not much more.

But times had changed. I was older now. I’d learned