Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,87
didn’t please them. I’d been afraid to lose her, and I’d never allowed it.
Now it was too late.
The eyes are the windows of the soul.
And Murphy’s eyes were just the windows of an empty house.
There was nothing inside to gaze upon.
I put my forehead against hers and wept. Helplessly. I screamed in rage and denial as I did. I knew the sound was ugly, was hardly human.
I felt Butters’s hand on my shoulder.
“Harry, we’ve got to go. We have to.”
I shook him off with a violent twist of my shoulders.
She was gone.
Murphy was gone.
And the Winter mantle did nothing, did less than nothing, for the pain.
I put my hand on her hair. Her head was still warm. I could still smell her shampoo, beneath all the iron scent of her blood.
I felt myself start to scream again. But I grabbed onto that scream and coldly choked it to death.
I leaned down and kissed her forehead, closing my eyes. Felt the pain rising in me. And I embraced it. Welcomed it. I watched the futures I’d hoped we would have die before my eyes. I let the pain burn away everything nonessential.
When I opened my eyes again and looked up, the world had gone grey scale.
Except for Rudolph.
Rudolph was bathed in light the color of Murphy’s blood.
He flinched as my gaze fell on him.
Butters got what was happening. Somewhere in the distance, I heard him say, in a warning tone. “Harry. Harry, what are you doing?”
Rudolph began taking terrified steps back. He pointed the gun at me and I couldn’t have cared less. “Wait. Wait. I didn’t mean . . .”
I rose.
“Harry, no!” Butters said sharply.
Rudolph turned and ran.
That made things simple.
I took off after my prey.
Chapter
Twenty-three
Hate is comforting.
Hate is pure.
There aren’t any questions, any worries about right and wrong, any quibbles about your motivations or goals. There are no doubts.
Hate is serene.
Rudolph ran. I pursued. And when I caught him, I would kill him. Horribly.
Nothing else entered into it.
I’ll give the guy this much credit: He could move. He’d always been careful about his looks, and evidently that meant a lot of cardio as well as expensive suits. He ran well.
But he didn’t have my focus, my clarity, and he hadn’t been running himself half to death every morning for months and months. He was human. He felt pain. It was an enormous disadvantage.
I gained.
He made funny sounds as he ran. Little gasps and whimpers. He was terrified. He should have been. In a city of monsters, he’d just pissed off one of the worst.
He took a right turn into a little loading area behind a building, tried a door, and found it locked. Obviously. Everyone who wasn’t running was forting up. There were more monsters than unlocked doors in Chicago that night. I don’t know what he was thinking.
He turned from the door, desperate, lifted his gun, and started shooting at me as fast as he could pull the trigger.
I raised my shield and slowed to a walk. Some of the shots went wide. Some bounced off the shield. None of them threatened me.
“You can’t!” Rudolph screamed. He fumbled at his armpit and withdrew another magazine. “You can’t!”
Before he could reload, I just walked forward into him, holding up the shield, and smashed him back against the steel door behind him.
Then I set my legs against the ground and started pushing.
Rudolph made a short, high-pitched sound of pain. The shield caught the barrel of his gun and forced it one way, his wrist another. The idiot still had his finger locked on the trigger. I heard the finger break.
“Dresden, no!” Rudolph screamed.
I pushed harder. Fire might have been good, but my damned arm would make it difficult. This felt better. Felt right. I thought about saying something about grinding his bones to make my bread, but I didn’t feel like conversation at that moment. Besides. Why waste breath on a corpse?
We were in pandemonium.
No one was going to ask any questions about one more body.
I pushed harder. Rudolph tried to scream again. There wasn’t enough room between my shield and the metal door for his lungs to expand all the way, so it came out breathy and weak. His eyes were wide and terrified, I noted, but that was to be expected. He was dying, after all.
The sour scent of urine filled the air.
I took note of it and adjusted my feet slightly so that I could lean in harder.