Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,55

And while you could whale on a Black Court vampire with a baseball bat all day and inflict nothing more than annoyance, that much weight moving at that rate of speed was an entirely different ball game.

Imagine holding up a fully hung suit and dropping it to the floor.

Now add a spray pattern of ink black, ichorous splatter. Plus a big freaking anvil.

Get the picture?

Mavra vanished, screaming into the night, the fog lit weirdly by argent fire in her wake. The healthy twin stared in shock at the anvil—which suddenly collapsed into gelatinous ectoplasm, mixing with whatever was left of Tentacles Guy, who was still, somehow, thrashing. It looked kind of like the inside of a blender.

I swiped a shaking arm over my running nose and wheezed drunkenly, “I told you, you Black Court bastards! Next time, anvils!”

Ramirez, his arms freed, whipped toward the creature mindlessly feeding upon his wounded arm, snarled a word, flicked his other wrist, and suddenly her head just turned into a slurry of water and powder. The remainder of the body started thrashing around silently, spewing ichor everywhere. Carlos gasped as bones in his forearm snapped in the grip of superhumanly powerful hands.

The other twin seized a tombstone, ripped it out of the ground as if it had been a damned dandelion, and flung it at my head.

There was just time to get my shield up, and the tombstone exploded into gravel against it.

By the time I lowered my hand and looked around again, shield bracelet still dribbling green-gold sparks, the twin was gone. So were the bodies of Yoshimo and Wild Bill.

I stumbled over to Ramirez’s side. We wrestled the stupidly powerful strength still left in the dead vampire’s hands, until I finally had to pit what felt like the strength of my whole body against the vampire’s fingers, one at a time. It wasn’t easy on Ramirez, who must have been suffering agonies, but we got it done.

I pulled him back as he cradled his shattered arm, and we watched the corpse thrash itself across the ground.

“They took them,” Ramirez muttered. “They’re going to . . .”

“Nothing we can do for them this second,” I said. I got into the first-aid pack on his belt. In the dark it was a sloppy mess, but I got a pressure bandage over his wrist and got it tightly covered. It had to have hurt like hell on the broken arm, but we had to stop the bleeding. Ramirez clenched his jaw and hissed but gave no other sign of discomfort. I finished and rose. “Come on. We need to back up River and Listens-to-Wind.”

He looked up at me, his face pale, his eyes too shiny and hard. But he grimaced and nodded and lifted his good hand.

I hauled him up, and the two of us had just turned toward where I’d last seen the Senior Councilman and River Shoulders when the same pair walked out of the fog. River’s chest was rising and falling harshly. He sounded like a racehorse and moved as if his entire body was one enormous bruise. He was carrying an unconscious teenage girl in the crook of one arm like an infant—the victim Drakul and company had been preparing to sacrifice. Listens-to-Wind looked unutterably weary, but unhurt.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He left before we could get hurt too bad,” River Shoulders said, his voice pained.

Listens-to-Wind grimaced and reached way, way up to thump a hand against River Shoulders’ shoulder. “Creature like that, you don’t beat it. You win by surviving. We won.”

“Not all of us,” Ramirez said in a harsh voice.

“Drakul sent Chandler through some kind of gate,” I said. “It didn’t look like the usual passage to the Nevernever. It was all neat and symmetrical.” Which meant that Chandler could have wound up anywhere. Or, worse, nowhere. I leaned into the Winter. My voice sounded steady and rational. “No idea of his status. Meyers and Yoshimo are dead. Probably turned.”

The pain was still there. Shock and the Winter mantle might have been numbing it. I didn’t have a whole ton of friends. Losing three of them at once was going to hurt like hell, later. Even thinking about that made my guts quiver and my heart burn with rage.

Listens-to-Wind seemed to shrink a little and closed his eyes. “I think . . . Ah. This wasn’t an alliance for Drakul. Merely a profitable ploy. If we did not arrive in sufficient strength to stop the sacrifice, the enemy has an