The Law (The Dresden Files #17.4)(24)

“Heebie Jeebies!” Tripp squealed, casting a terrified glance over his shoulder. “This is Heebie Jeebies! This isn’t real!”

“Come on,” I growled. There was a spot close where I might have a chance to handle the thing, if we could make it there. I took a left, sprinted diagonally across an intersection and nearly got us hit by a fancy town-SUV. Horns blared—at least for a few seconds. Then the otso came sprinting its ghostly way across the intersection in pursuit of us, blowing out lights and engines (and horns) with equal disdain.

I glanced down at the bomb in my hands and gulped. The otso was apparently as disruptive to tech as me when I was working. If it got close enough to set the thing off…

I needed open space.

The Battle of Chicago had left a lot of wreckage. The Titan’s arcane superweapon had collapsed forty-four buildings, most of them of the very tall persuasion, and dozens more had been damaged or destroyed when they collapsed. In the month that had gone by since then, they’d mostly gotten the streets cleared out where possible, but there were still entire blocks covered in rubble and wreckage, and the city had been forced to resort to simply walling off those blocks with sheets of plastic until the reclamation and salvage crews from the city’s rebuilding project could come through and start digging them free. The news estimated that it would be at least a year before all the rubble was cleaned up, and maybe another one before all the reconstruction could begin.

Come to think of it, Marcone was making them look incompetent with what he was doing. Good to know it wasn’t just me he did that to.

Two blocks away was a wall of eight-foot high orange and white plastic sheeting covered with environmental hazard warnings, and I headed for it the only way I thought could slow down the otso behind us:

I ran straight through traffic.

Headlights flared in my eyes. Cars honked and swerved. I had to stagger to one side, hauling a babbling Tripp with me to avoid a garbage truck, and I heard the thing hit the indestructible flesh of the spirit bear with a shockingly loud crunch of metal and breaking glass and exploding headlights.

“Come on!” I screamed and flung myself at the plastic sheeting with the full weight of my body and Tripp’s hitting it at a dead run.

We crashed through the plastic, and into the ruin the Titan had wrought upon my city.

It was like walking into a different world.

A forty-story building had fallen a block away from the plastic walls. Broken concrete and shattered glass and the twisted and torn ends of rebar had washed out like a tsunami over the adjacent buildings in a wave seven or eight feet deep, partially collapsing them. A gas station convenience store leaned at a forty-five degree angle near at hand. I scrambled up a slope of treacherous gravel toward its canted roof, dragging Tripp with me.

“We shouldn’t be here!” Tripp howled. “We’re trespassing! There was a sign!”

Behind us, the otso smashed its way through the plastic sheeting and crashed into a pile of rubble like a small locomotive. It hesitated for a second, head whipping around at all the urban carnage, and I felt bad for the spirit of the creature that had been trapped in the skull—it probably wasn’t having any better a time than I was. It opened its mouth and let out the ghostly echo of a bear’s roar, before its glowing eyes focused on Tripp again and it began rumbling toward us.

“Come on!” I shouted. “Get higher!”

We climbed the roof of the old gas station as the otso began slamming its way over the rubble in pursuit.

“This isn’t happening!” Tripp shrieked. “This isn’t happening!”

“Now you know how Maya feels, huh?” I panted. We got to the highest point of the roof, at its far end, and I had to grab Tripp to keep him from scrambling right over it and falling ten feet onto more rubble.

“Not yet!” I snarled. “Get ready to drop!”

“What!?”

I whirled to find the otso just reaching the lower end of the slanted roof. I planted a kiss on the bomb for luck and slung it across the forty or fifty feet between us. The spirit bear roared in fury as the object came clattering down in front of it, and slammed one enormous paw down on top of it.

“Jump!” I snarled, pulling Tripp against my chest and pitching backward, over the edge. I flung out my right hand and my will as I did, snarling, “Hexus!”

Between my hex and the otso’s, bad things were going to happen.

There was a flicker of sparks and a fraction of a second later, the bomb went off.

As explosions go, I’ve been closer to worse—but I wasn’t falling toward broken ground while I did it. The sound of it was enormous. The slope of the roof offered us some shelter, much of the blast followed its contour, carrying a cloud of shrapnel made from shattered concrete and broken glass up and away from us while we enjoyed the relative safety of being in the shadow of the blast. Even so, I picked up a few dozen minor cuts and abrasions and wounds—and that was before I hit the ground.

The spell-armored surface of my duster, at least, kept me from being impaled on a sharp end of rebar, and it likely stopped a lot of flying glass and rock—but it didn’t keep me from dislocating four ribs or from minor tearing of muscles in my lower back as Tripp Gregory landed on top of me, and the two of us bounced down the slope of rubble on the other side.

I lifted an arm to shield my eyes and threw my other arm across Tripp’s as rubble from the blast began to rain down all over us.