Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,6

something crucial.

Whatever it had seen when it looked back inside me had, for that moment, terrified it utterly. And something abruptly changed inside me, like a switch had been flipped.

The not-squid, the kraken, was afraid.

I was still stunned by the soulgaze, and so was the squid.

It never saw Lara coming.

She hit it from behind and beneath, knifing through the water as if she’d been wearing a jet pack. She slammed the point of my brother’s kukri into the warty flesh of its head, then used the viciously sharp blade on its curving inner edge to begin opening up the creature’s flesh.

Hell’s bells. She meant to cut out its brain.

The kraken abruptly thrashed and twisted, its skin rippling with colors and textures as it turned on her, tentacles questing. It seized her around the hips and whiplashed her back and forth in the water, ripping her hands free of the knife and aiming to break her neck with the force of it.

The knife was still sticking out of the back side of its head. Or body. I’m not sure which it was—the whole thing was just warts and tentacles and that vicious biting beak. So I began kicking down, ignoring the burning in my lungs. Lara hadn’t gotten to cut very far before the thing had seized her, maybe twelve or fifteen inches.

But that was an opening more than big enough for the magnesium flare.

I shoved it into the kraken’s flabby skull, all the way to my elbow.

It went mad.

I was battered by something, shoved back three or four feet, and if I’d had any breath left it would have been knocked out of me. I dimly saw Lara struggling, enwrapped in tentacles, until with her skin glowing like marble, she seized one of the tentacles in both hands and simply tore it in half.

Fluid stained the water in a cloud the size of a swimming pool.

And through that cloud suddenly appeared lean, sinuous shapes, striking fear into the base of my brain that no amount of being a grown-up would ever entirely erase.

Sharks.

Bull sharks, blunt-nosed and with that glassy, quietly desperate stare. Maybe a dozen of them emerged from the murk, the smallest one at least twelve feet long.

Oh come on. This isn’t even fair.

Someone, I reminded myself, and I’m not sure who, just got done telling Murphy that when Ethniu’s forces came, they would have no intention of fighting fair.

The kraken thrashed in agony in the water.

And the sharks rushed the monster.

And, man, did that get messy fast. Tails threshing. Teeth flashing. Eyes rolling back white. Earth’s oldest superpredators went up against a monster out of a madman’s nightmares, and the result looked deadly and savage and beautiful.

Lara’s eyes widened as two more sharks, fifteen-footers, came gliding out of the darkness straight toward her—and between them, gripping a pectoral fin of each, came the Winter Lady, the deputy to the Queen of Air and Darkness—my friend, Molly Carpenter. Molly had been tending to her duties as the Winter Lady all evening, but she’d still found time to provide me with sneaky backup magic in the true tradition of the Fae. She must have had the Little Folk keeping a watch along the shoreline for my return from the island.

Molly wore one of those surfer’s wet suits, with patterns of deep purple and pale green on it in the streaks and rings of a highly venomous sea snake, her mouth stretched into a madwoman’s grin. Her hair, luminous silver in the weird light, spread out around her head in an otherworldly aura.

She and the sharks went at the kraken. She bore a knife in her hand and immediately went to Lara’s aid. The kraken wasn’t done, though. Its jaws gaped and the beak came down on one of the smaller sharks like a pair of enormous scissors. One bite and snip, and it had cut the thing neatly in half.

There was a splash from above, and then Freydis arrived, the lean woman cutting through the water with nearly as much grace as Lara. She swooped down, kicking smoothly, headed for the knife at the back of the thing’s head. Tentacles threatened her, but the Winter Lady flicked her wrist and half a dozen bull sharks rushed in, jaws ripping and tearing.

Freydis reached the knife, seized it in one hand, ripped the pin out of a freaking grenade that she’d been holding, and shoved it in the same hole where I had put the flare. I could see the outline of