Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,2
night. There wasn’t much to see. There was some city light against the belly of the cloud cover, south from way down past Aurora, and from the far side of the lake, but Chicagoland was wrapped in utter blackness.
Except . . . it wasn’t.
I just hadn’t been able to see the firelight from quite so far away.
The tall, dark, silent cliffs of the city’s skyline appeared against the not-quite-black overcast. There were candles in windows, hundreds of them in sight, but they were lonely little points of light in all that darkness. Fires had to have been burning on the streets, because they cast ruddy cones of light dimly over the lower levels of some of the buildings.
I cut the throttle even more. I had a pretty good idea of where I was on the lake, thanks to my mental connection to the island behind us, but I was only sure of my position to within maybe a hundred yards, and the dark made things tricky. I didn’t want to miss the channel into the harbor and gut the boat on the rocks.
The electric bow lights I would normally have used to help pilot my way in had been blown out when the Last Titan had unleashed the Eye of Balor on the roof of the nigh-indestructible castle of the Brighter Future Society. The Eye had blown a hole clean through it and simultaneously sent out a pulse of magical energy that had blown out the city’s grid completely, including the electronics on cars and airplanes and the electrical systems on the boat. The old diesel engine was still chugging away, but that was about the only thing on the boat that had survived the super-hex the Eye had thrown out. Chemical lights hung at the bow and stern, but that was just to keep someone else from running into us, as if anyone else was out on Lake Michigan that night.
I peered through the dirty glass of the wheelhouse, searching for the white painted markers of the channel, which should have been all but glowing in the gloom. The harbor’s lights were out, of course, and eighteenth-century lighting was not highly conducive to proper boat-handling safety.
Abruptly there was a crunching sound, squeals of protest from the Water Beetle’s hull and superstructure, and the boat went from moving slowly to not moving at all in the space of several seconds. I staggered and had to grab at the ship’s console to keep my balance, and the wheel spun suddenly in my hands, the grips smacking my fingers hard enough to leave bruises before I could whip them away.
I lurched out of the wheelhouse as the boat began to pitch sharply to the left and front, timbers groaning.
Murphy appeared from belowdecks, a chemical light hanging from her harness, her little rifle at her shoulder. She staggered into the bulkhead with her bad shoulder and hissed in discomfort, then made it out onto the deck and braced her feet, holding on to the rail with one hand. “Harry?” she called.
“I don’t know!” I called back. I reached into my shirt and pulled out my mother’s old silver pentacle necklace with the red stone in the center of the five-pointed star. I held it up, murmured a word, and let out a whisper of will, and the silver of the amulet and the chain began to glow with soft blue wizard light. I made my way quickly forward as the ship rocked back the other way, groaning and squealing, holding up the light so that I could see a little ahead of me. “We must have run aground!”
But when I stepped over a thick clump of lines and got to the ship’s bow, I could see only dark water in front of me. In fact, the light from my amulet picked out strips of reflective tape and plastic reflectors on the docks, ahead of me and slightly to the left. Which was to port, on a ship, I think.
We were still in deep, clear water.
What the hell?
The ship moaned and rocked the other way, and that was when the smell hit me.
It was an overwhelming odor of dead fish.
Oh crap.
I turned and held my amulet out over the clump of “lines” I had stepped over.
It was a thick, rubbery, pulsing, living limb, a tentacle, deep red-purple in color, covered in leathery, wart-shaped nodules and lined with toothed suckers—and it was maybe half again as thick as a telephone pole.