Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,75

is a price.”

I shuddered. My soul had already taken a beating in the past few days. I don’t know that I needed to add on the psychic experience of living through hundreds of deaths to my list of mental scars.

I gritted my teeth. I could take a little more if I had to. And I had to. A lot more people were going to die if we didn’t stop the enemy here.

I glanced aside at Mab and frowned.

Did she feel it, too? Her command of her subjects? Of . . . me?

Did she feel it when they died? Did she carry their pain, their rage, their terror, upon the back of her own soul, or whatever it was that passed for one now? Did she even have a soul anymore?

I was mortal once. . . .

I’d been waiting for Mab to lay into me with the magically enhanced temptation, the usual trappings and blandishments of corruption. I’d been expecting her, every time we met, to start putting me through Sith boot camp. The Kurgan’s Guide to Conflict Resolution. Evil 101.

The whole time, I’d been wondering, What happens when she does?

The far more terrifying question had never once occurred to me: What happens when she doesn’t?

Maybe the process of becoming something horrible wasn’t about temptation to sin, forbidden delights, and bad impulse control.

Maybe it was about choosing to throw your soul into a meat grinder, over and over again. Until what remained couldn’t even be seen as a soul any longer. Maybe the real monsters, the big bad monsters, aren’t created.

They’re forged. Hammered. One blow at a time.

I was mortal once. . . .

Mab opened her eyes again at last. The look she gave me was, for a second, very human: one weary, determined soldier staring at another. I had, in her eyes, passed some kind of test, some rite, that had changed my status.

And it terrified me.

The real battle for your own soul isn’t about falling from a great height; it’s about descending, or not, one choice at a time.

And sometimes, it’s about choosing to pay a price so someone else doesn’t have to. I had rarely hesitated to hazard my body in the defense of those who needed it.

I looked back at the city behind us.

If more is required of me, so be it.

I offered my hand to Mab, plain soldier.

She took it.

Chapter

Nineteen

I put Sanya and Murphy on getting the arms out to our volunteers. Marcone had planned as if he’d intended a city block party’s worth of amateurs to be kitted out with the one weapon that could do the most damage in their hands: shotguns. A hell of a lot of shotguns. And, given the haze over the city, it wasn’t like anyone could see clearly more than thirty or forty yards anyway.

Not everybody took a shotgun. Dozens had heavier weapons of their own. But by the time we were done, everyone had a firearm of some type, and everyone had pockets full of shells.

I called Toot-Toot in and sent him with a message for Etri. Within five minutes of sending the little guy off, a squad of svartalf combat engineers had arrived, and I’d given them their instructions. They immediately turned to the open earth inside the pavilion and began shaping it into defensible earthworks beneath the enormous, arching trellis that supported the pavilion’s sound system. People stared at that in awe. It’s not often you see several hundred thousand tons of earth moving itself around thanks to the hand gestures of a crew of little grey guys.

“Defiladey enough for you?” I asked Sanya.

“Da,” the Russian replied. “Did not know this park was built on Styrofoam at bottom.”

“Yeah, the whole place is technically kind of a rooftop garden,” I said. “Can you hold?”

“Maybe, but then they go around us,” Sanya said. “We leave one-third here. The rest, we go out and find them. Draw them back here if we have to fall back. They run across all this open space? Pow, pow, video-game easy.”

“If you have to fall back, huh,” I said.

The big man grinned. “Da, am Russian. We are a very positive people,” Sanya said.

“No, you aren’t!” came Butters’s protest from somewhere off in the haze.

Sanya beamed. “I really like little Jedi man,” he confided. “Here, look.” He leaned down to scrape at loose earth with the tip of his knife. “Mab here. Us here. Enemy coming from there, there, there.” He made marks to the north, east, and south. “See? Our people will hold