White Night (The Dresden Files #9) - Jim Butcher Page 0,67

ghoul's flailing claw ripped through Thomas's jeans and tore into his calf. He lost his balance for a second, caught it again, and kept fighting as if nothing had happened—but blood a little too pale to be human dribbled steadily to the Water Beetle's deck.

I clenched my teeth as the power rose in me. The hairs on my arms stood up straight, and there was a kind of buzzing pressure against the insides of my eardrums. My muscles were tensing, almost to the point of convulsing in a full-body charley horse. Stars swam in my vision as I raised the blasting rod.

"Harry!" Elaine gasped. "Don't be a fool! You'll kill us all!"

I heard her, but I was too far gone into the spell to respond. It had to work. I mean, it had worked once before. In theory, it should work again if I could just get it to be a little bit bigger.

I lifted my face and the blasting rod to the sky, opened my throat, and in a stentorian bellow shouted, "Fuego!"

Fire exploded from the tip of the blasting rod, a column of white-hot flame as thick as my hips. It surged up into the smoke, burning it away as it went, rising into a fiery fountain a good twenty stories high.

All magic obeys certain principles, and many of them apply across the whole spectrum of reality, scientific, arcane, or otherwise. As far as casting spells is concerned, the most important is the principle of conservation of energy. Energy cannot simply be created. If one wants a twenty-story column of fire hot enough to vaporize ten-gauge steel, the energy of all that fire has to come from somewhere. Most of my spells use my own personal energy, what is most simply described as sheer force of will. Energy for such things can also come from other sources outside of the wizard's personal power.

This spell, for example, had been drawn from the heat energy absorbed by the waters of Lake Michigan.

The fire roared up with a thunderous detonation of suddenly expanding air, and the shock wave from it startled everyone into dead silence. The lake let out a sudden, directionless, crackling snarl. In the space of a heartbeat the water between where I stood and the next dock froze over, a sudden sheet of hard, white ice.

I sagged with fatigue. Channeling so much energy through myself was an act that invited trauma and exhaustion, and a sudden weakness in my limbs made me stagger.

"Go!" I shouted to Olivia. "Over the ice! Run for the next dock! Women and children first!"

"Kill them!" shouted a man's voice from the general direction of the attacking ship.

The ghouls howled and leaped forward, enraged to see prey making good their escape.

I leaned on the rail and watched Olivia and company flee. They hurried over the ice, slipping here and there. Crackling protests of the ice sounded under their feet. Spiderweb fractures began to spread, slowly but surely.

I gritted my teeth. Even though Lake Michigan is a cold-water lake, this was high summer, and even in the limited space I had frozen, there was an enormous amount of water that had to be chilled. Imagine how much fire it takes to heat a teakettle to boiling, and remember that it works both ways. You have to take heat away from the kettle's water if you want to freeze it. Now, multiply that much energy by about a berjillion, because that's the amount of water I was trying to freeze.

Olivia and the women and children made it to the far dock and fled in a very well-advised and appropriate state of panic.

"Harry!" Elaine said. Her chain lashed out and struck a ghoul that had slipped by Thomas.

"They're clear!" I cried. "Go, go, go! Thomas, we is skedaddling!"

I stood up and readied my shield bracelet.

"Come on," Elaine told me, grabbing my arm.

I shook my head. "I'm the heaviest," I told her. "I go last."

Elaine blinked at me, opened her mouth to protest, then went very pale and nodded once. She vaulted the rail and ran for the docks.

"Thomas!" I screamed. "Down!"

Thomas hit the deck without so much as looking over his shoulder, and the ghouls closed in.

I triggered the rest of the kinetic rings: all of them at once.

Ghouls tumbled and flew. But I'd bought us only a little time.

Thomas turned and leaped over the side. I checked, and saw that Elaine had reached the other dock. Thomas bounded over the ice like something from one of