Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(37)

Being the Winter Knight isn’t much fun. Having that mantle in my life on a daily basis meant that I had to fight and work, every day, to keep being more or less me. The damned thing made me think things I would rather not think, and want things I would rather not want. Being the Winter Knight doesn’t help you be a good dad, or make better pancakes. It doesn’t help you understand philosophy, create beauty, or garner knowledge.

What it does do is make you hell on wheels in a fight.

I seized the truck by its frame, used the hem of my spell-armored leather duster to protect my hands, tensed my back and my legs, and stood up.

It was hard. It hurt like hell as the edges of the frame and the mass behind them bit at my hands, even through the duster. My muscles screamed in protest—but the absolute cold of Winter ice filled my thoughts and my limbs, a counteragony that either dulled the physical pain or gave me so much additional pain that the mere physical torment seemed irrelevant by comparison.

The pickup truck quivered and creaked in my hands, and with a surge of my shoulders and legs I got my grip reversed and pushed the vehicle up onto its side.

Staggering under the assault of the ongoing “Dino Serenade,” I clenched my right hand into a fist and peered at the truck until I found the plastic of the gas tank. Then I drove my fist into it and right through the tank’s wall.

I ripped my fist out and brought the bucket up with the other hand at the same time. Gasoline flooded onto my shirt and then into the bucket. Five gallons fills up pretty damned quick from a fist-sized hole. Once it was sloshing over the brim, I turned and staggered back toward the circle.

And my “Dino Serenade” ended.

The silence hit me like a club. I staggered to a knee, barely able to hold on to the bucket, and gasped.

As I did, I became aware of the cornerhounds. Most of them were gathered around Ebenezar, who was protected by so many layers of energy that his actual bodily shape was distorted to my sight—but one of the hideous creatures wasn’t three feet to my left.

Another was less than six inches to my right.

There was a stunned, frozen instant where none of us moved and the world was one big after-tone from a chime the size of a skyscraper. And then my own sadly unremarkable singing voice added, into the silence at the spell’s finale, “And many moooooooooore!”

Tendrils flailed in excitement.

Tentacles flared in angry aggression.

I broke into a sprint, sloshing gasoline from my bucket.

“Sir!” I screamed.

A cornerhound leapt at me, a thousand pounds of tentacles and talons and muscle.

I ducked, reflexes as sharp and fast as the report of a gunshot on a clear winter evening.

Claws raked at my back.

My duster’s protective spells held, and all the night’s sweat and discomfort became worthwhile.

Ebenezar, meanwhile, had survived the blast of infrasound that the pack had begun to deliver just before my spell went off, and he hadn’t wasted his time since. With a single word, he pointed at the concrete floor of the parking garage, and a cloud of fine chips of rubble flew upward in a perfect circle as the old man’s will dug a trench two inches deep and four across in the obdurate flooring.

Three of the hounds hit him, one second motionless, the next moving like serpents guided by some singular, terrible will. The old man swatted one of them away with an upward blow of his staff and a detonation of kinetic energy that slammed the Outsider into the concrete ceiling and brought it back down in a shower of rubble from the impact. The second hit him square in the chest with outstretched talons, and there was a humming snap of expanding energy that sounded like a bug zapper the size of a Tesla coil. It recoiled from the old man, claws burned black. But the third cornerhound hit him in one leg, and while the old man’s shield protected him from the impact, the natural consequences of Newton’s First Law and having one leg slammed out abruptly from beneath him were harder on the old man. He went down with a gasp as another trio of cornerhounds blurred to within striking range at the base of the column.

The Outsiders closed on my grandfather, talons and tentacles tearing. Flashes of light, humming howls of electricity, the stench of charred flesh, and basso moans filled the air as the old man fought them, his body encased in armor of pure will that made my own defensive spells seem crude and primitive by comparison.

I sprinted to help him, and as I did, I felt the plummeting tone of a subsonic roar hit my back, a sensation weirdly like that of a low-pressure stream of water.

One second I was moving fine. The next I was staggering, the entire garage a sudden blur. My guts had turned to water, my knees to jelly. It was everything I could do to get a hand on the ground and shift to a modified three-point gait, in order to keep from simply falling over and spilling the bucket and its contents everywhere. As I moved forward, the ground kept rotating counterclockwise, no matter how much my rational brain insisted that couldn’t be happening—my inner ears weren’t having it.

Behind me, the hounds came forward in sudden streaks of oily speed.

I gollumed across the lower end of the circle the old man had cut in the floor around him, with the hounds in full pursuit—and two more flying toward me from the circle’s upper end. They were already in midleap.

From the floor, from beneath a mound of foes, the old man shouted and a burst of wind suddenly swept up from the floor. It caught the two hounds with exactly enough force to lift them over my head and past me, sending them crashing into the pack pursuing me, briefly disrupting their advance.