The whole time, I tried to keep track of the position of the enemy. It wasn’t a simple matter. I didn’t have a big map of the island in my head, with glowing dots marking their positions. I just knewwhere they were, as long as I concentrated on keeping track of them, but as the number of enemies continued to increase, it got harder to keep track.
The nearest of the hostile presences was about forty yards away when I lifted my fingers to my lips and let out a sharp whistle. “Out there, in front of me!” I shouted. “Now, Toot!”
It had been an enormous pain in the ass to wrap fireworks in plastic to waterproof them against the rain, and even more of a pain to make sure that a waterproof match was attached to each of the rockets, Roman candles, and miniature mortars. When I had Molly and Will scatter them around the woods in twenty separate positions, I’d gotten those “Is he crazy?” looks from both of them.
After all, it isn’t as if fireworks are heavy-duty weaponry, capable of inflicting grievous bodily harm and wholesale destruction. They’re just loud and bright and distracting.
Which, under the circumstances, was more or less all I needed.
Toot-toot and half a dozen members of the Guard came streaking out of nowhere, miniature comets flashing through the vertical shadows of the trees. They went zipping ahead, alighting on low branches, and then tiny lights flickered as waterproof matches were set to fuses. A second later, a tiny shrill trumpet shrieked from somewhere ahead of us, and a dozen Roman candles began shooting balls of burning chemicals out into the darkness, illuminating the crouched running forms of at least ten of Binder’s grey men in their cheap suits, not fifty feet away. They froze at the sudden appearance of the flashing pyrotechnics, attempting to assess them as threats and determine where they were coming from.
Perfect.
I dropped to one knee, lifting my blasting rod, as the human-seeming demons shrieked at the sudden appearance of the bright lights. I trained it on the nearest hesitating grey man, slammed my will down through the wooden haft, and snarled, “Fuego!”
It was more difficult to do than it would have been if it hadn’t been raining, but it was more than up to the task. A javelin of red-gold flame hissed through the rain, leaving a trail of white steam behind it. It touched the nearest of the grey men on one flank, and his cheap suit went up as readily as if it was lined with tar instead of rayon.
The grey man yawled and began thrashing furiously. The fire engulfed him, throwing out light for a good thirty yards in every direction, and illuminating his companions.
I dropped flat, and an instant later the forest behind me belched forth power and death.
Guns roared on full automatic fire. That would be the Raiths. Lara and her sisters’ sidearms had been modified submachine guns, with an enlarged ammunition clip. Given the superhuman strength, perception, and coordination the vampires had at their disposal, they didn’t suffer the same difficulties a human shooter would have faced, running at full speed in the dark, firing a weapon meant to be braced by a shooter’s entire upper body in one hand—and their left hands at that. Bullets chewed into three different grey men, ten or eleven rounds each, all of them hitting between the neck and temple, blasting the demons back to ectoplasm.
Then it was the Wardens’ turn.
Fire was the weapon of choice when it came to combat magic. Though it was taxing upon the will and physical stamina of the wizard, it got a lot of energy concentrated into a relatively small space. It illuminated darkness, something that was nearly always to a wizard’s advantage—and it hurt. Every living thing had at least a healthy respect, if not an outright fear of fire. Even more to the point, fire was a purifying force in its non-physical aspect. Dark magic could be consumed and destroyed by fire when used with that intent.
The Wardens used the zipping little fireballs from the Roman candles and my own improvised funeral pyre to target their own spells, and then the realfireworks started.
Each individual wizard has his own particular quirks when it comes to how he uses his power. There is no industrial standard for how fire is evoked into use in battle. One of the Wardens coming up behind me sent forth a stream of tiny stars that slewed through the night like machine-gun fire, effortlessly burning holes through trees, rocks, and grey men with equal disdain. Another sent a stream of fire up in a high arc, and it crashed down among several grey men, splashing and clinging to any moving thing it struck like napalm. Lances of scarlet and blue and green fire burned through the air, reminding me for a mad moment of a scene from a Star Wars movie. Steam hissed and snarled everywhere, as a swath of woodland forty yards across and half as deep vanished into light and fury.
Hell’s bells. I mean, I’d seen Wardens at work before, but it had all been fairly precise, controlled work. This was pure destruction, wholesale, industrial-strength, and the heat of it was so intense that it sucked the air out of my lungs.
The grey men, though, weren’t impressed. Either they weren’t bright enough to attempt to preserve their own existence or they just didn’t care. They scattered as they advanced, spreading out. Some of them rushed forward, low to the ground and half hidden by the brush. Others bounded into the trees and came leaping and swinging forward, branch by branch. Still more of them darted to the sides, out of the harsh glare of the fires, spreading out around us.
“Toot!” I screamed over the roaring chaos. “Go after the flankers!”
A tiny trumpet added its own notes to the din, and the Pizza Patrol zipped out into the woods, two or three of the little faeries working together to carry fresh Roman candles. They gleefully kept on with the fireworks, sending the little sulfurous balls of flame chasing the grey men trying to slip around us through the shadows, marking their positions.
Lara let out a piercing call and came up to my side, gun in hand, snapping off snarling bursts every time a target presented itself. I pointed to either side and said, “They’re getting around us! We’ve got to stop them from taking Mai and Injun Joe from behind!”
Lara’s eyes snapped left and right, and she said something to her sisters in ancient Etruscan, the tongue of the White Court. One of them went in either direction, vanishing into the dark.
A grey man came crashing out of the flame twenty feet away from me, blazing like a grease fire. He showed absolutely no concern for the flame. He just sprinted forward and leapt at me, hands spread wide. I made it up to my knees and braced one end of my quarterstaff against the ground, aiming the other at the grey man’s center of mass. The staff struck it, but not squarely. It twisted to one side at the impact, bounced off the ground, took a fraction of a second to reorient itself on me—
And erupted into a cloud of ectoplasm as rounds from Lara’s gun took its head apart.
The next attacker was already on the way, out in the darkness beyond the firelight. I came to my feet and on pure instinct snapped off another blast of fire at the empty air twenty feet beyond Lara and about ten feet up. There was nothing there as I released the blast, and I knew it, but as the fire hissed through the falling rain, it illuminated the form of a grey man in the midst of a spectacular leap that would have ended at the small of Lara’s back. The blast struck him and hammered him to one side so that he came down like a burning jet, crashing across a dozen yards of ground before dissolving into flame-licked mounds of swiftly vanishing transparent jelly.
Lara didn’t see the attacker until he’d tumbled past. “Oh,” she said, her voice conversational. “That was gentlemanly of you, Dresden.”