Changes (37 page)

45

Both of us had been gathering up our wills during the snark-off, and the first instant of the duel nearly killed us both.

I called forth force and fire, both laced with the soulfire that would help reinforce its reality, making the attack more difficult to negate or withstand. It took the shape of a sphere of blue-white fire the size of an inflatable exercise ball.

Meanwhile, Arianna fluttered her hands in an odd, twisting gesture and a geyser of water erupted from the soil with bone-crushing force.

The two attacks met halfway between us, with results neither of us could prevent. Fire and water turned to scalding-hot steam in a detonation that instantly washed back over us both. My shield bracelet was ready to go, and a situation something like this one that had rendered my left hand into a horror prop had inspired me to be sure I could protect myself from this kind of heat in the future.

I leapt back and landed in a crouch, raising the shield into a complete dome around me as the cloud of steam swept down, its heat boiling the grass as it came. It stayed there for several seconds before beginning to disperse, and when it finally did, I couldn’t see Arianna anywhere on the field.

I kept the all-around shield in place for a moment, and rapidly focused upon a point a little bit above and midway between my eyebrows. I called up my Sight and swept my gaze around the stadium, to see Arianna, forty yards away and running to put herself in position to shoot me in the back. A layer of greasy black magic seemed to infest the air around her—the veil that my physical eyes hadn’t been able to see. To my Sight, she was a Red Court vampire in its true form, only even more flabby and greasy than the normal vamp, a creature ancient in power and darkness.

I tried not to see anything else, but there was only so much I could do. I could see the deaths that had been heaped upon this field over centuries, lingering in a layer of translucent bones that covered the ground to a depth of three or four feet. In the edges of my vision, I could see the grotesqueries that were the true appearance of the Red Court, every one of them a unique and hideous monster, according to his particular madness. I didn’t dare look directly up at the spectators, and especially not those gathered on the second floor of the little temple at the end of the stadium. I didn’t want to look at the Red King and his Lords unveiled.

I kept my gaze moving, as if I hadn’t spotted Arianna on the prowl, and kept turning in a circle, timing when my back was going to be exposed to her before I dropped the shield and rose, panting, as if I couldn’t have held it any longer than that. I kept on turning, and an instant before she would have released her spell, I whirled on her, pointed a finger, and snarled,
“Forzare!”

Raw will lashed out and exploded against her chest just before the flickers of electricity she’d gathered could congeal into a real stroke of lightning. It threw her twenty feet back and slammed her against the ancient rock wall along the side of the ball court.

Before she could fall, I looked up at the top of the wall, seized a section of large stones in fingers of unseen will, and raked them out of their resting places, so that they plunged thirty feet down toward Arianna.

She was superhumanly quick, of course. Anyone mortal would have been crushed. She got away with only a glancing blow from one of the smaller stones and darted to the side, rolling a sphere of lurid red light into a ball between her hands as she went.

I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that, whatever it was. So I kept raking at the wall, over and over again, bringing down dozens of the stones and forcing her to keep moving, while I ran parallel to her and kept our spacing static.

We were both slinging magic on the run, but she had more one-on-one experience than me. Like a veteran gunslinger in the Old West, she took her time lining up her shot while I flailed away at her with rushed actions that had little chance to succeed. All told, I must have dropped several dozen tons of rock down onto her as we ran, inflicting nothing worse than a few abrasions and heavy bruises.

She threw lightning at me once.

The world flashed red-white and something hard hit me in the back. My legs went wobbly and I sat there for a subjective hour, stunned, and realized that whatever she had packed her lightning bolt with, it had been sufficient to throw me twice as far as my heavy punch had thrown her. I’d bounced off the opposite wall. I looked down at myself, expecting to see a huge hole with burned edges—and instead found a black smudge on my overdone breastplate, and a couple of flaws in the gold filigree where the metal had partially melted.

I was alive.

My head came back together in a sudden rush, and I knew what was coming. I flung up my shield, shaping it not into a portion of a sphere, as I usually did, but into a lengthy triangle in the shape of a pup tent. I crouched beneath it and no sooner had I done so than stones from the wall above me, torn free by Arianna’s will, began to slam into the shield. I crouched there, rapidly being buried in grey stone, and tried desperately to get my impact-dizzied brain to think of a plan.

The best I came up with under the circumstances was this: What would Yoda do?

There was a tiny moment between one rock falling and the next and I dropped the shield. As the next rock began to fall, I stretched out my hand and my will, catching it before gravity could give it much velocity. Again I screamed, “
Forzare!
” and with an enormous effort of will I altered the course of the stone’s fall, flinging it as hard as I could at Arianna, abetted by gravity and the remnants of her own magic.

She saw it coming, but not until it was too late. She lifted her hands, her fingers making warding gestures as she brought her own defensive magic to bear. The stone smashed through it in a flash of reddish light, and then struck her in the hip, spinning her about wildly and sending her to the ground.

“Harry Dresden, human catapult!” I screamed drunkenly.

Arianna was back on her feet again in an instant: Her shield had bled enough of the energy from the stone to prevent it from smashing into her with lethal force, but it had bought me enough time to get out of the pile of rocks around me and away from the stadium wall. I smashed at her with more fire, and she parried each shaft deftly, congealing water out of the air into wobbling spheres that intercepted the bolts of flame and exploded into concealing steam. By the fifth or sixth bolt, I couldn’t see her with my physical eyes, but I did see energies in motion behind the steam as she pulled another dark sheath of veiling energy around her, and I saw her take off into an animal-swift sprint, again circling me to attack me from behind.

No. She couldn’t be trying the same thing twice.

Duels between wizards are about more than swatting each other with various forms of energy, just as boxing is about more than throwing hard punches. There is an art to it, a science to it, in which one attempts to predict the other’s attack and counter it effectively. You have to imagine a counter to what the opponent might do, and have it ready to fly at an instant’s notice. Similarly, you have to imagine your way around the strength of his defenses. A duel of magic is determined almost purely by the imaginations and raw power of those involved.

Arianna had obviously prepared against my favorite weapon—fire—which was only intelligent. But she had tried this backstabbing ploy on me once before, and nearly got burned doing it. A wizard of any experience would tell you that she would never have tried that one again, for fear that the enemy would exploit it even further.

Arianna was an experienced killer, but she hadn’t done a lot of dueling with nothing to rely on except her magic. She’d always had the cushion of her extraordinary strength and speed to fall back upon. Hell, it would have been the smart way to kill me—come straight in, shedding attacks and maybe taking some hits to get close enough to end it decisively.

Except here, she couldn’t. And she wasn’t adjusting well to the handicap. Flexibility of thought is almost never a strength of the truly ancient monsters of the world.

Instead of obliging her by standing in place, as I had last time she’d tried to give me the runaround, I darted forward, into the edges of the concealing steam. I got burned, and accepted it as the price of doing business. I clenched my teeth, focusing past my pain, and tracked Arianna’s energy with my Sight, waiting for my shot and hoping that she didn’t have the Sight as well.

Apparently she didn’t, or wasn’t bothering to use it, relying upon her superior senses instead. She got into position and seemed to realize that I’d gone into the steam. She began to advance cautiously, gathering more lightning to her cupped hands. I saw the instant in which she began to spot my outline, the way she drew a breath to speak the word to unleash the lightning upon me.

“
Infriga,
” I hissed, and threw both hands forward.
“Infriga forzare!”

And the entire cloud bank of steam in the air around me congealed into needle-pointed spears of ice that flew at her as if fired from a gun.

They struck her just as she unleashed her lightning bolt, which shattered one of the spears and tore a two-foot furrow in the dirt some twenty feet to my side.

Arianna stood still for a moment, her black eyes wide with disbelief, staring down at the spears and shards of ice that had slammed deep into her flesh. She looked up at me for a second and opened her mouth.

A blob of black blood burst out and spilled down over her chin. Then she shuddered and fell, simply limp, to the ground.

From the far end of the ball court, I heard my godmother throw back her head and let out an eerie howl of excitement and triumph, bubbling with laughter and scorn.

I watched Arianna twisting upon the spears of ice. She’d been pierced in dozens of places. The worst hit came from an icicle as thick as my forearm, which had impaled her through the belly and come out the back, bursting the blood reservoir of the creature beneath Arianna’s flesh mask. The pure, crystalline-clear ice showed a glimpse of her insides, as if seen through a prism.

She gasped a word I didn’t recognize, again and again. I didn’t know what language it was, but I knew what it meant:
No, no, no, no.

I stood over her for a moment. She struggled to bring some other form of magic to bear against me, but the cruel torment of those frozen spears was a pain she had never experienced and did not know how to fight. I stared down at the creature that had taken my daughter and felt . . .

I felt only a cold, calm satisfaction, whirling like a blizzard of snow and sleet in the storm of my wrath.

She stared up at me with uncomprehending eyes, black blood staining her mouth. “Cattle. You are c-cattle.”

“Moo,” I said. And I lifted my right hand.

Her eyes widened further. She gasped a word I didn’t know.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the Red King rise from his distant throne.

I poured all that was left of my fury into my hand and snarled, “No one touches my little girl.”

The explosion of force and fire tore a crater in the ground seven feet across and half as deep.

Arianna’s broken, headless corpse lay sprawled within it.

Silence fell over the ruined city.

I turned toward the Red King and started walking that way. I stopped on what would have been the ten-yard line in a football stadium and faced him. “Now give me my daughter,” I said.

He stared at me, bleak and remote as a far mountain. And then he smiled and said, in perfect English, “I think not.”

I clenched my teeth. “We had a deal.”

He looked at me with uncaring eyes and said, “I never spoke a word to you. A god does not converse or bargain with cattle. He uses and dispenses with them as he sees fit. You have served your purpose, and I have no further use for you—or the mewling child.”

I snarled. “You promised that she would not be harmed.”

“Until after the duel,” he said, and sycophantic chuckles ran through the vampires all around me. “It is after the duel.” He turned his head to one side and said to one of the jaguar warrior vampires in his retinue, “Go. Kill the child.”

I almost got the Red King while his head was turned, but some instinct seemed to warn him at the last instant, and he ducked. The bolt of flame I’d hurled at him blew the jaguar warrior vamp’s jaw off of his head and set him on fire. He fell back, stumbling and screaming, his monstrous form tearing free of his mask of flesh.

The Red King whirled toward me in a fury, and those black eyes pressed down upon me with all the crushing weight of the ages. I was driven to my knees by a blanket of pure will—and not just will, but horrible pain, pain that originated not in my body but in the nerves themselves—pain I was helpless to resist.

I heard someone shout, “Harry!” and saw the masked figures upon the temple with the Red King step forward. A gun went off, and then someone screamed. I heard a bellow, and looked up to see my friends and my godmother facing the masked Lords of Outer Night. Sanya was on his feet but motionless, grimly clutching
Esperacchius
in both hands. Murphy was on one knee and had dropped her P-90. One hand was moving slowly, determinedly toward the sword on her back. Martin was on the ground.

I couldn’t see any of the others. I couldn’t turn my head far enough. But nobody was up to fighting. None of us could move beneath the horrible pressure of will of the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night.

“Insolent beast,” snarled the Red King. “Die in agony.” He seized another guard by his jaguar skin and jerked him close, as if the brawny vampire had been a child. “Need I repeat myself?” he seethed, and shoved his bloodstained ritual knife into the warrior’s hands.
“Place that child upon the altar and kill her.”

46

Guys like the Red King just don’t know when to shut up.

I fought to raise my hand, and it was more effort than anything I’d done that night. My hand shook and shook harder, but finally moved six inches, to touch the surface of the skull in the cloth bag on my hips.

Bob!
I screamed, purely in my head, as I would have using Ebenezar’s sending stone.

Hell’s bells
, he replied.
You don’t have to scream. I’m right here.

I need a shield. Something to ward off his will. I figure this is a spiritual attack. A spirit should be able to counter it.

Oh, sure. But no can do from in here, boss,
Bob said.

You have my permission to leave the skull for this purpose!
I thought desperately.

The skull’s eye sockets flared with orange-red light, and then a cloud of glowing energy flooded out of the eyes and rose, gathering above my head and casting warm light down around me.

Seconds later, I heard Bob thinking,
Take this, shorty!

And suddenly the Red King’s will was not enough to keep me down. The pain receded, smothered and numbed by an exhilarating, icy chill that left my nerves tingling with energy. I clenched my teeth, freed from the burden of pain, and thrust my own will against his. I was a child arm wrestling a weight lifter—but his last remark gave me some extra measure of strength, and suddenly I drove myself to my feet.

The Red King turned to face me fully again, and extended both hands toward me, his face twisting with rage and contempt. The horrible pressure began to swell and redouble. I heard his voice quite clearly when he said, “Bow. Down. Mortal.”

I took one dragging step toward my friends. Then another. And another. And another, moving forward with increasing steadiness. Then I snarled through clenched teeth and said, “Bite. Me. Asshole.”

And I put my hand on Murphy’s left shoulder.

She’d already moved her hand halfway to the sword. As I touched her, touched our auras together, spreading my own defenses over hers, and felt the direct and violent strength of her own will to defy the immortal power brought against us, her hand flashed up to the hilt of
Fidelacchius
and drew the katana from its plain scabbard.

White light like nothing that ancient stadium had ever seen erupted from the sword’s blade, a bright agony that reminded me intensely of the crystalline plain. Howls of pain rose from around us, but were drowned by Murphy’s sudden, silvery cry, her voice swelling throughout the stadium and ringing off the vaults of the sky:

“False gods!” she cried, her blue eyes blazing as she stared at the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night. “Pretenders! Usurpers of truth! Destroyers of faith, of families, of lives, of children! For your crimes against the Mayans, against the peoples of the world, now will you answer! Your time has come! Face judgment Almighty!”

I think I was the only one close enough to see the shock in her eyes, and I realized that it wasn’t Murphy speaking the words—but someone else speaking them through her.

Then she swept her sword in an arc, slashing the very air in front of us in a single, whistling stroke.

And the will of the Red King vanished. Gone.

The Red King let out a scream and clutched at his eyes. He screamed something, pointing in Murphy’s direction, and in the same instant the rest of my friends gasped and rocked in place, suddenly free.

Every golden mask turned toward my friend.

Bob!
I cried.
Go with her! Keep her free!

Wahoo!
the skull said, and gold-orange light fell from my head toward Murphy and gathered about her blond hair, even as the joined wills of the Lords of Outer Night fell upon her, so thick and heavy that I was knocked away from her as if by a physical force. The very air around her warped with its intensity.

White light from the sword flowed down and over her, and her garments literally transformed, as if that light had flowed into them, become a part of them, turning night to day, black to white. She staggered to one knee and looked up, her jaw set in stubborn determination, her teeth bared, her blue eyes, through the distortion, blazing like fire in defiance of thirteen dark gods—and with one of the most powerful spirits I’d ever met gathered around her head in a glowing golden halo.

Murphy came to her feet with a shout and a smooth stroke of the sword. The Lords of Outer Night all reacted, jerking back as if they’d been struck a blow in the face. Several golden masks were ripped from their faces, as if the blow had physically touched them—and the molten presence of their joined wills was suddenly gone.

With a scream, the jaguar warriors, half-breed and vampire alike, surged toward Murphy.

She ducked the swing of a modern katana, shattered a traditional obsidian sword with a contemptuous sweep of
Fidelacchius
, and struck down the warrior wielding it with a precise horizontal cut.

But she was outnumbered. Not by dozens or scores, but by the hundreds, and the jaguar warriors immediately fanned out to come at her from several directions. They knew how to work together.

But then, so did Sanya and I.

Sanya came forward with
Esperacchius
, and as it joined the fray, it too kindled into blazing white light that seemed to lick out at the vampires, forcing them to duck, to slap at white sparks that danced in their eyes. His booted foot caught one jaguar warrior in the small of the back, and the raw power of the kick snapped the warrior’s head back with force enough to break his neck.

I followed Sanya in, unleashing a burst of freezing wind that took two warriors from their feet when they tried to flank Murphy from the other side.

She and Sanya went back-to-back, cutting down jaguar warriors with methodical efficiency for several seconds, as more and more of the enemy swarmed toward them. I kept slapping them away—not able to do any real harm, but preventing them from focusing overwhelming numbers on Murph and Sanya—but I could feel the fatigue setting in now. I couldn’t keep this up forever.

There were quick footsteps beside me, and then Molly pressed her back to mine. “You take that side!” she said. “I’ll take this one!”

DJ Molly C lifted both of her wands and turned the battle chaos to eleven.

Color and light and screaming sound erupted from those two little wands. Bands of light and darkness flowed around and over the oncoming jaguar warriors, fluttering images of bright sunshine intertwining with other images of yawning pits suddenly gaping before the feet of the attackers. Bursts of sound, shrieks and clashes and booms, and high-pitched noises like feedback on steroids sent the hyperkeen senses of full vampires into overload, literally forcing them back onto the weapons of those coming behind them.

Vampires staggered through the handiwork of the One-woman Rave, not stopped but slowed and stunned by the incredible field of sound and light.

“I love a good party,” Thomas shouted merrily, and he began to dance along the edges of Molly’s dance floor, his falcata whipping into the limbs and necks of the jaguar warriors as they wobbled forward, struck down before they could recover. I didn’t think anyone could have moved fast enough to catch them, but my brother evidently didn’t agree. He struck down the foe as they came for us, and he threw in a few dance moves along the way. The part he borrowed from break dancing, where a wave traveled up one arm and down the other, was particularly effective, aesthetically, when it was bracketed by his falcata beheading one vamp and his automatic blowing apart the skull of another.

The pressure of numbers increased, and Thomas started moving more swiftly, more desperately—until Mouse leapt in to help plug the leak in the dam of confusion that held the full power of the Red Court at bay.

I had my own side of the store to mind. Again I reached into the well of cold, ready power, and with a word blanketed the field before me in smooth, slick ice. Howling wind rose to greet any foe who stepped out onto the ice, forcing them to work around to the killing machine that was Sanya and Murphy, or else circle around to attempt an approach through Molly’s murderous light and sound show.

Someone touched my arm and I nearly roasted him without looking.

Martin flinched, as though he’d had a dodge ready to go if I had something for him. “Dresden!” he called. “Look!”

I looked. Up on the little temple at the end of the ball court, the Lords of Outer Night and the Red King were standing in a circle, and they were all gathering magical power—probably from one of the bloody ley lines, to boot. Whatever they were going to do, I had a bad feeling that I was reaching the very end of my bag of tricks.

I heard booted feet and saw the mortal security guards lining up along the sides of the stadium, rifles at the ready. When they were in position they would open fire, and the simple fact was that if they piled enough rounds into us, we would go down.

Who was I kidding?

I couldn’t keep the field of ice and wind together for very long. And I knew Molly couldn’t maintain her Rave at that intensity for long, either. Dozens of jaguar warriors had fallen, but that meant little. Their numbers had not been diminished by any significant measure.

We could fight as hard as we wanted—but despite everything, in the end it was going to be futile. We were never getting out of that stadium.

But we had to try.

“Lea!” I screamed.

“Yes, child?” she asked, her tone pleasant and conversational. I could still hear her perfectly clearly. Neat trick.

“The king and his jokers are about to hit us with something big.”

“Oh, my, yes,” the Leanansidhe said, looking skyward dreamily.

“So
do something
!” I howled at her.

“I already am,” she assured me.

She removed a small emerald from a pocket of her gown and flung it skyward. It sparkled and flashed, and flew up out of the light of torches and swords, and vanished into the night. A few seconds later, it exploded in a cloud of merry green sparks.

“There. That place will do,” she said, clapping her hands and bouncing up and down on her toes. “Now we shall see a
real
dance.”

Green lightning split the sky, erupting with such a burst of thunder that the ground shook. Instead of fading, though, the thunder grew louder as more and more strokes of lightning flared out from the area of sky where Lea’s gem had exploded into light.

Then a sheet of a dozen separate green bolts of lightning fell all at the same time onto the ground of the ball court twenty yards away, blowing smoking craters in the ground.

It took my dazzled eyes a few seconds to recover from that, and when they did, my heart almost stopped.

Standing on the ball court were twelve figures.

Twelve people in shapeless grey robes. Grey cloaks. Grey hoods.

And every single one of them held a wizard’s staff in one hand.

The Grey Council.

The Grey Council!

The nearest figure was considerably shorter than me and stout, but he stood with his feet planted as if he intended to move the world. He lifted his staff, smote it on the ground, then boomed, “Remember Archangel!” He spoke a single, resonating word as he thrust the tip of the implement at the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night.

The second floor of the stadium-temple where they stood . . . simply exploded. A force hit the ancient structure like an enormous bulldozer blade rushing forward at Mach 2. It smashed into the temple. Stone screamed. The Red King, the Lords of Outer Night, and several thousand tons of the temple’s structure went flying back through the air with enough violent energy to send a shock wave rebounding from the point of impact.

The massive display of force brought a second of stunned silence to the field—and I was just as slack-jawed as anyone.

Then I threw back my head and let out a primal scream of triumph and glee. The Grey Council had come.

We were not alone.

The echo of my scream seemed to be a signal, sending the rest of us back to fighting for our lives. I blew a few more vampires away from my friends, and then sensed a rush of supernatural energy coming at me. I turned and caught a tide of ruinous Red power upon my shield, and hurled a blast of flame back at a Red Court noble in massive amounts of jewelry. Others in their ranks began to open up on the newly arrived Grey Council, who responded in kind, and the air was filled with a savage crisscross of exchanged energies.

The stocky figure in grey stumped up to me and said casually, “How you doing, Hoss?”

I felt my face stretch into a fierce grin, but I answered him just as casually. “Sort of wish I’d brought a staff with me. Other than that . . . can’t complain.”

From within his hood, Ebenezar grunted. “Nice outfit.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I liked your ride. Good mileage?”

“As long as there’s some carpet to scuff your feet on,” he said, and tossed me his staff. “Here.”

I felt the energies moving through the implement at once. It was a better-made staff than mine, but Ebenezar had been the one to teach me how they were made, and both staves I had used over the years had been carved from branches of the lightning-struck oak in the front yard of his little farm in the Ozarks. I could make use of this staff almost as well as if it were my own.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Don’t you want it?”

He batted a precisely aimed thrown ax from the air with a flick of his hand and a word of power, and drawled, “I got another one.”

Ebenezar McCoy extended his left hand and spoke another word, and darkness swirled from the shadows and condensed into a staff of dark, twisted wood, unmarked by any kind of carving whatsoever.

The Blackstaff.

“Fuego!”
shouted someone on the walls—and for a second I was hit with a little sting of insult. Someone was shouting “
fuego
” and it wasn’t me.

While I was feeling irrational pique, guns started barking, and they aimed at me first. Bullets rang sharply as they hit my armor, rebounding from it and barely leaving a mark. It was like getting hit with small hailstones: uncomfortable but not really dangerous—unless one of them managed a head shot.