White Night (The Dresden Files #9) - Jim Butcher Page 0,138

chocolates held to one shoulder. It had a tiny little barrel, one of those little red dot optical sights, and Murphy's cheek was laid on it, one eye aligned with the sight as she poured automatic fire into the oncoming ghouls in neat, chattering bursts that ripped the ghoul that had been pounding on my shield into a spray of broken bits. It went over backward, thrashing one arm and howling in agony.

Beside Murphy, playing Clifford the Big Red Dog to her Emily Elizabeth, was Hendricks. The huge redheaded enforcer was also kneeling and firing, but the gun he held to his shoulder was approximately the size of an intercontinental ballistic missile and spat out a stream of tracer rounds that ripped into the attacking creatures with a vengeance. Several men I recognized from Marcone's organization were lined up next to him, all firing. So were several more men I didn't recognize, but whose clothing and equipment were sufficiently different to make me think they were freelancers, hired for the job. A few more were still pouring through the open gate and into the cavern.

The ghouls were hardy as hell, but there is a difference between shrugging off a few rounds from a sidearm and wading through the disciplined hail of assault-weapon fire that Marcone's people laid down on them. Had it been one man firing at one ghoul, it might have been different—but it wasn't. There were at least twenty of them shooting into a packed mass, and they kept shooting, even after the targets were thrashing on the ground, until their guns were empty. Then they reloaded, and returned to firing. Marcone had given his men the instructions I'd advised—and I imagined the guns he had hired on must have been used to facing supernatural threats of this sort as well. Marcone was nothing if not resourceful.

Murphy stopped shooting and screamed something at me, but it wasn't until Marcone stepped forward into the peripheral vision of the armed gunmen and held up a hand with a closed fist that they stopped firing.

For a second, nothing but a high, heavy tone buzzed in my ears, making me deaf to the other sounds in the cavern. The air was full of the sewer stench of wounded ghoul and the sharp scent of burning cordite. A swath of stone floor ten yards across and thirty deep had just been carpeted in pureed ghoul.

The fight was still going on all around us, but the main force of ghouls was concentrating on the hard-pressed vampires. We'd bought ourselves a temporary quiet spot, but it couldn't last.

"Harry!" Murphy screamed over the merely horrific cacophony of the slaughter.

I gave her a thumbs-up. I pushed myself to my feet. Someone gave me a hand up and I took it gratefully—until I saw that it was Marcone, dressed in his black fatigues, holding a shotgun in his other hand. I jerked my fingers away as if he were more disgusting than the things fighting and dying all around us.

His cold green eyes wrinkled at the corners. "Dresden. If it's all right with you, I think it would be prudent to retreat back through the gate."

That was probably a very smart idea. The gate was six feet away from me. We could pull up stakes, hop through, and close it behind us. Gates to the spirit world paid absolutely no attention to trivial things like geography—they obeyed laws of imagination, intention, patterned thought. Even if Cowl was back there, he wouldn't be able to open a gate to the same place as mine, because he didn't think like me, feel like me, or share my intent and purpose.

Seeing fallout from the war with the Red Court had convinced me that running when you didn't have to fight was a really great idea. In fact, the Merlin had written a letter to the Wardens directing them to do so, rather than lose even more of our dwindling combat resources. If we hung around much longer, no one was getting out of this abattoir.

Thomas's sword came down on a thrashing ghoul, and he shouted, with desperation bordering on madness, "Justine!" He spun to me. "Harry, help me!"

Leaving was smart.

But my brother wasn't leaving. Not without the girl.

So I wasn't leaving without her, either.

Come to think of it, there were a whole lot of people who didn't need to be here. And, in point of fact, there were some damned compelling reasons to take them with us when we went. Those