Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,58
staring at me. I overheard them speaking to one another. They must have fired enough rounds to make their ears ring, because their mutters were coming out at conversational volume.
“Is that him?” someone asked.
“The wizard, Dresden, yeah.”
“Is he for real?”
“Sure as hell hope so. Did you see those things?”
“Bullshit. He’s just a con man.”
“Eyes out!” Rawlins snapped, to all of them. “You think this is a goddamned circus?”
That did it, and they piped down and went back to watching the darkness.
Rawlins led me to an improvised bed made out of a folding table laid flat on the ground, with a layer of soft packing foam on top. I laid the girl down on it, and an EMT, his skin nearly as dark as Rawlins’s, bent over to examine her.
“Lamar,” I said. “Long time no see.”
“That’s because I don’t want nothing to do with you and your weird shit, Dresden,” Lamar said.
Lamar is one of the more sensible people I’ve ever met.
“Then what are you doing here?” I asked.
Lamar shrugged. “What I do.” He peeled back an eyelid on the girl, checked her pulse with a stethoscope, and rummaged in a medical kit beside him. “This your fault?”
“Not this time,” I said. “Honest.”
“Uh-huh,” he drawled, infusing both syllables with skepticism.
“It’s not always my fault,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. With even denser skepticism. He took out a small paper tube from the kit. He snapped it in half and waved the broken ends under the young woman’s nose. She shuddered and abruptly lurched, her eyes flying wide open. She started screaming.
“Back off, both of you,” Lamar said. “Let me work.”
I traded a glance with Rawlins and we backed off. He beckoned and walked over to an empty corner of the courtyard. I followed.
“The hell is happening?” Rawlins asked me intently under his breath once we were out of earshot. “Monsters on the walls with guns, guys with spears that shoot explosions, goddamned mercenaries with military-grade gear. What the hell is going on?”
I took a breath to try to think how best to condense it. “Bad guys from my side of the street have decided to destroy Chicago. And every monster and weirdo in Chicago has turned out to fight them.”
Rawlins stared at me for a moment before he said, “Shit.”
Rawlins was even better at condensing than me.
I glanced over at Lamar, who had gotten the girl to sit up. She was weeping and shuddering uncontrollably, and he was trying to get her to drink some water. “I gotta go, man,” I said. “Every minute I’m here is costing lives.”
“Where’s Karrie?”
Rawlins had been friends with Murphy’s dad, back in the day. He was the only person I knew who dared to call her by a diminutive nickname. “As safe as I could make her.”
He pursed his lips. “Oh. Bet she loved that.” He leaned over to ruffle the hound’s ears affectionately and glanced down at my hip as he did. “That coach gun legal?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Didn’t think so. You got enough ammo?”
“Tonight, there’s no such thing as enough ammo.”
Rawlins snorted. “Ain’t that the truth.” He leaned a little closer and said, very quietly, “Rudolph and his partner were in the middle of putting out an APB on you when the grid blew out. Once it’s up again, I figure they’re gonna have the entire CPD looking for you.”
“Oh,” I sighed. “Joy.” I eyed him. “Why tell me?”
“Karrie likes you. And Rudolph is a prick.”
“Tough to argue with that.”
His teeth flashed very white when he smiled. “Good hunting, Dresden.”
I clasped his shoulder wordlessly for a second, then spun and headed back out of the courtyard to rejoin River and Ramirez.
“Two weeks,” Rawlins muttered as I left. “Gonna die of cliché poisoning.”
I walked back into the darkness and was promptly blinded to anything in it. I stumbled and faltered, but the hound stayed at my side, his shoulder against my leg, guiding me. I kept walking in the direction I knew they were, and tried not to gibber as I walked sightlessly forward.
“I’m just saying,” River Shoulders’ rumbling voice said, “you just draw two little lines from the corner of your mouth and then we have a public relations act. Humans love ventriloquists.”
Ramirez replied in an exhausted, bemused voice. “It might take more than that to establish relations between the Forest People and humanity at large.”
“Gotta start somewhere,” River Shoulders said.
“And the first place you went was a ventriloquist act?” Ramirez asked. “Maybe we should live through the night first. Then think it through for