Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,5

called sharply, and Murph swiveled to peer out toward us. The flare had blinded her to anything beyond the immediate reach of its light, but she’d ignited it to show us where to find the boat once she’d realized I’d gone into the drink.

The water suddenly thrashed with nearby motion.

“Go!” Lara called, and upended into the water as smoothly as an otter, vanishing with a kick of legs that were way too distracting, even in this mess. I spun in the water and started thrashing toward the boat. I was in good shape, but swimming was not my thing. I churned at the water and slowly drew closer to the ship’s side. Murphy hustled over with the flare and said, “Over here!”

A lean, dangerous-looking Valkyrie came vaulting over the locker at the back of the main deck, where we stored the ship’s lines, a coiled rope gripped in one hand. Freydis had short red hair, bright green eyes, freckles, and a boxer’s scars and was dressed in black tactical gear. Her hands blurred as she unknotted the line and flung it out toward me.

The coil hit the water a foot from my head, and I seized it. Freydis started hauling me in, hard enough that the counterpressure from the water made it difficult to hang on to the rope.

“Harry!” Murphy screamed, pointing behind me.

I whipped my head around in time to see a bow wave rushing toward me as something massive gathered speed in the water.

I started hauling myself up the rope, but the harder we pulled me, the harder the water pushed back.

“Harry!” Murphy shouted again—and flung the marine flare at me.

It tumbled through the air, dizzying in its brightness. At my size, I’m not an acrobat or anything, but my hand-eye coordination isn’t too shabby. I reached out, batted it into the air instead of catching it, then with a last desperate clutch managed to grab onto it—just as the tentacles chewed into me again and dragged me under, the magnesium flare blazing even brighter as it hit the water with me.

Magnesium flares burn at about twenty-nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. So when I shoved it against the tentacle around my waist, it peeled away as swiftly as a snapping rubber band—and the spider-silk suit reached the limits of its endurance, tearing off me like tissue paper, leaving pinched bruises all over my torso in its wake.

I looked down through the dark water and saw the kraken spreading out beneath me. It was . . . vast, its eyes gleaming with feral awareness, throwing back the light of the flare like eerie mirrors. For a second, I hovered there, meeting that gaze . . .

. . . feeling a dark, horrible awareness suddenly swelling unbearably inside my head.

What happened next would haunt me a while. The eyes are the windows to the soul. And wizards, if they meet your gaze for a moment, can sometimes get a peek in there. In the frozen dark of Lake Michigan, in the blazing, limited light of the flare, I soulgazed a kraken.

Soulgazes are serious business, because whatever you see there gets burned in. It never fades, never diminishes in horror or awe. If you see something bad enough, such as the n—

—something bad enough, it could do horrible things to your head.

I don’t even know what I saw that night. A blur of images, alien and strange and somehow nauseating. I felt my limbs, spread out and floating in the water. I sensed other creatures like me, writhing in obscene embraces on the floor of the ocean, amid broken columns and ancient statues of things that somehow seemed to bend themselves into more than three dimensions. Sensation flared through my thoughts, so absolutely alien to anything in the human experience that it might as well have been pure agony.

I heard myself screaming, felt the bubbles pouring up over my face.

But here’s the thing.

When a wizard looks into your soul, you look back into his. You see him the same way he sees you, clearly, a gaze that pierces veils and deceptions to see the world for what it truly is. The kraken stared back at me, and its warty hide began to ripple through fluttering bands of color, the skin distorting, becoming spiky, its tentacles coiling and curling in upon themselves.

I ripped my gaze away from the thing, my brain screaming in protest, but somewhere deep down, the instinctive part of me that almost enjoyed the benefits of the Winter mantle recognized