Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,49

lessons the hard way and had the scars to prove it.

So five heavyweights hit me all at once: A couple of lances of white-hot energy, a sputtering globule of some kind of horrible-smelling acid, a crackling bolt of lightning, and what looked like a ghostly tentacle made of translucent green mist hit the shield like five separate speeding automobiles. My rough shield bracelet dribbled green-gold sparks and grew uncomfortably hot in seconds. The shield itself flared out in a quarter dome of blue-white, nearly coherent light, a barrier of raw, stubborn will.

Maybe if it had happened somewhere else, at a different time, I might not have been able to stop them all. Maybe if it had just been me, it would have gone badly. But tonight, my city was under siege. Tonight, millions of terrified people were going to die unless they got help from people like me. Tonight, their fear rode the air, an inflammable mist that only needed a magical spark to roar into reality.

Tonight, Chicago fought for its life.

And my shield held against them all. Though it scorched my wrist, though my feet were driven six inches back across the green grass, I stopped them.

All of them.

Meanwhile, my companions had not been standing around with their fingers up their anatomies. Yoshimo’s arms swept out and whirled in circles, and within a second she sent a slender column of whirling air arching up over my shield and down among the Black Court. When the white column touched the earth, it roared up into a whirling dervish of dirt and flying grass, blinding the foe and disrupting their evocations.

Ramirez’s hand came down on my shoulder and he said, “Now!”

I dropped the shield.

Now, don’t get me wrong. What the elders of the Black Court had dished out at us was enough energy to put us all in the ground and then some. But on the White Council, we call people with talent like that “sorcerers.” And we sneer when we say it, for a reason. Yeah, maybe they can throw the raw magical strength around. But magic is about a hell of a lot more than simply power—and though they might have been young, the people backing me up were wizards of the White Council, and each and every one of them had cut their teeth on war.

I checked over my shoulder to see Chandler standing calmly with both hands planted on the handle of his cane. A dozen stones the size of my head floated in a small cloud around his shoulders, and as my shield came down, the stones began to leap forward as if fired from a cannon, hissing toward their targets. Not to be outdone, Wild Bill murmured something to his old lever-action rifle and the old steel of the weapon suddenly pulsed with threads of scarlet fire in the shape of some kind of primitive pictograms. As my shield dropped, he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted on the nearest vampire, and with a word sent a rod of semisolid fire the thickness of my wrist right through the vampire’s belly and one of the huge headstones behind it alike, splitting the air with the thunder of sundered stone.

The vampire let out a scream that ripped and slashed the air it passed through and . . . was apparently pulled back and away from us by some unseen, horribly fast force.

Ramirez cast a beam of pale light at the vampire whose strike had gone all hentai on us. That one was a large male, or what was left of one, and he swung both arms dramatically and sent his ghostly tentacle smashing into Ramirez’s disintegration ray. The collision of forces was enough to turn the whole thing into a thrashing mess that spewed ectoplasm in every direction.

Two of the vampires who might have been twins, or similarly sized siblings, before all the decay had set in, blurred and became a pair of great, greasy-furred grey wolves the size of ponies. Both shot in opposite directions in great, bounding leaps.

“Flankers!” I shouted. “Yoshimo, Bill!”

Yoshimo bounded a step into the air and the wind itself seemed to gather beneath her feet and springboard her with silent grace to the top of the nearest mausoleum. She began to bound in twenty-foot steps, her toes barely coming down to touch the tops of grave markers, statues, and marble tombs, moving as if weightless to intercept one of the great wolves.

Bill immediately swung away from his target—a move that