A/N
Hey. Been a hell of a year.
I lost track of one editor and haven't been able to sit down with the second. I've about found myself in the hospital a few times over, and have honestly wondered if I would have to just... give the story up.
Instead, I've finished this chapter, and made significant progress on a few of the endings that have been stumping me.
While my original intent was to release all the endings together, or at least the first three, this is going to have to do for now. Until I cry 'Uncle,' there's still more yet to come. May the new year bring about something far, far less drastic than this plague-ridden year has been.
Stay safe out there, all.
Every once in a while, a hurricane cuts up through the Southeastern coast of the US and causes millions of dollars in property damage and kills hundreds or even thousands of people. The real death count can get much worse, because there are all kinds of supernatural beings waiting in the wings to swoop in after a natural disaster when fear and confusion are at their worst. In spite of that, people will still stay in their homes and weather the storms long after the news agencies have called for an evacuation.
Normally, I don't have the kind of authority necessary to call for a city-wide state of emergency, so it never really occurred to me that a huge chunk of Chicago would try to outright ignore the sirens and military telling them to get out while the getting is good.
So I was more than a little surprised to find that not only were the roads awful from the zombie attacks and the exodus of Chicago's saner denizens fleeing for greener pastures, but also that there were people out trying to buy milk in the wake of the power outage.
That was what I was telling myself, because the thought that there were folks who were literally face to face with Monsters fighting zombies and still didn't believe in anything supernatural made me itch.
I was currently being driven around toward the museum in a military jeep. The conversation that had led to this scenario was short, but mildly entertaining.
I'll try to summarize it for you.
"Hey guys," I'd told the guys with the military.
"Grunt grunt," they'd grunt grunted.
"I know you want to arrest me on account of some kind of treason or another, but I need a ride to the field museum."
"Grunt," they'd threated to throw me in the deepest, darkest parts of Guantanamo Bay. As per usual.
"Now, I understand that you're upset, but the bad guys have a city-destroying necromancy bomb, and I need help getting to the Field Museum to raise the dinosaur there so I can use her like a radiation suit, or else I'll die before I can get close enough to stop it from killing us all."
"Are you sure you're not just out of your goddamned mind?" the driver asked me. Not in the past, the military guys I'd spoken with had basically thrown their hands up at me and told me they were just going to actually try me for treason or something when this finally blew over. Granted, if we lived that long, I honestly might not mind the vacation.
I'd offer a hundred dollars against a steak sandwich they'd need me to design my cell to be anti-magic, so I'd literally be responsible for building my own cage.
"You know, you're like the fifth person to ask me that today?" I smiled wanly back. I was doing my best to ignore the fighting outside the windows whenever we bypassed a skirmish of any kind. Part of me wanted to jump out of the old WWII jeep they'd apparently dragged out just in case they needed to transport a magical VIP (as the last vehicle I'd been in was suffering from some undescribed "issues," whatever that meant), but another knew that I couldn't do a damned thing for the war effort if I just jumped in willy nilly. I had a mission to complete, and come hell or high water, I was going to make sure it was done.
The soldier was focused on the road, and I held onto my seat while we dodged around another unbound zombie. At this point I had no idea where the bad guys had gotten all the bodies from. Maybe part of me didn't want to know.
"What's your name, soldier?" I asked him in my best gruff voice. I hadn't taken the time to give him a nickname yet. I was having trouble differentiating all the soldiers at this point, even just the one ordered to guard me. At least until we got there, anyway.
"Balvin Griggs," He told me, giving it a strange western twang. His voice returned to the no-nonsense tone from before when he continued, "Only the first name is spelled with a Cee, and the last without a Gee."
"Uh, Calvin G- I mean, Riggs?" I clarified. "Why didn't you just say that?"
He didn't even glance at me, sounding off something that he must have repeated a hundred times. "New regulations state that you are no longer to provide your name, rank and serial number when captured, just your rank and number. Under the Geneva Conventions, you must provide the spelling for your name. Do not, under any circumstances, offer your full name when asked, or you may forfeit your soul." His delivery became less clipped as he clarified. "When your mind and soul are on the line, you tend to follow orders to protect them," he informed me.
I just blinked. "I don't know why I never thought of that," I admitted. "Except that it'd be really rude to a lot of creatures to not even offer one name. I have to say, you military guys work fast with this stuff."
I bounced in my seat as we jumped the curb, clenching my butt as we missed a street lamp by inches, going around an abandoned wreck in the middle of the road.
"Like I said," he gritted out, focusing on the road. "We learn quick when we have to."
The rest of the drive was like that. We did manage to run over a zombie that was in the middle of the road, but nothing else really stood out. When we finally arrived, I wasn't all that surprised to see that a number of zombies were getting gunned down by the military, though I was surprised to see that they were apparently using some kind of semi-automatic weapons that looked like they could go full auto. The way in was clear, so the soldier ordered me to "hold on," then tore through to the little blockade they'd set at the vehicle entrance. The heavy wooden barricades they'd set out were moved in an instant, then replaced behind us.
"Jam!" Somebody shouted, and I watched as the gun the kneeling soldier was holding was held up and back. Somebody ran up with another rifle, swapping the two, and the soldier set it against his shoulder and got back to shooting, the gunfire so even you could use it as a metronome.
"Hells bells," I muttered to myself. "You guys don't screw around."
"We're here, Sir," he quickly unbuckled his seatbelt. "Let's get what you need and get out. The faster we get this bomb defused, the better."
I frowned at him as I fought with my own seatbelt, doing my best to ignore the puddle of sweat I totally wasn't sitting in. I mean, I can drive crazy with the best of them, I just usually feel better about it when I'm in the driver's seat.
"You really don't know what's about to happen," I chuckled. "Do you?"
"No, and frankly I don't-" He cut himself off with a grunt. "Sir, we should probably get moving."
"Lay on, MacDuff," I ordered him, grabbing my staff out of the back seat as I went.
The field museum had been turned fully into a command post, and my arrival was heralded by the shutdown of a bunch of military hardware, computers and things. With the lines of soldiers outside needing resupply and what have you, there was a lot of movement in the building. I guess the General had taken my warning about this little slice of Chicago seriously. I don't know how upset they were that I was going to use it instead, and with some of the looks I was getting, I didn't know how many of them not-so-secretly thought I was the bad guy, pulling off a terrorist action right under the general's nose.
It was almost comforting, having people look at me like a loon again.
It was almost comforting, seeing the faces of those people who looked at me with awe, too.
Almost.
"Dresden!" a voice greeted me, and I played the part of a meerkat to find it. Lo and behold, it was Lieutenant Admiral Tarkin. "We've been waiting for you. Would you kindly tell us how to purge this site, so we can move our soldiers somewhere more useful?"
"Admiral!" I returned, striding toward him like I was ten years and a hundred injuries younger. I glanced around again. "Will the General be appearing from nowhere to yell at me again, by chance?"
"General Chase is elsewhere," the tall officer waved my question off. "My question stands."
I shrugged with a wry grin. "We've verified they aren't hitting this place as their ritual site already, so it shouldn't need defenses anymore. If a huge, spinning cloud of death appears overhead, then you'll know you need to defend it again."
He looks peeved, but otherwise keeps his calm. "Soldiers!" he calls out, far louder than I'd have expected out of him, "Pack it up! We move in ten! If we don't need it, we'll collect it later!"
And then the room practically exploded into activity around me. Given how I'd already been dodging the occasional runner, now I almost needed to brace my staff against the ground like Gandalf holding off the Balrog, just to avoid getting bowled over. Computers were getting unhooked and boxes were being snatched up almost faster than I could see.
Jesus, but they could move when they wanted to. It actually made me feel incompetent.
More so than usual, even.
"Right," I had to raise my voice over the dull roar of sound around us. "So, do you know what I need to do before we can ship out?"
He twitched, and I could see him restraining himself from countermanding the order he'd just given. "I dearly hope it can be done quickly. We're needed out there."
I pointed my staff at the dinosaur, still headless.
"I'm waking her up."
Behind his glasses, I watched Tarkin blink.
He turned to look at the dinosaur, where I'd pointed.
He turned back to look at me.
I nodded.
"Well, shit."
With the help of an improvised crane made out of a ton of snatch hook pulleys, Sue's skull was lifted out of her case on the second floor and dropped into place, then held there.
I'm not sure how to describe how the military pulled it off, except that it simultaneously looked hypercompetent and completely jury-rigged at the same time. If you've ever seen that picture of two guys being lifted up in a 50 gallon drum by crane at Woodstock… it was kind of like that, only with a dinosaur's skull.
Once the skull was in place, I considered what I'd read in those books, courtesy of Lasciel's memories from beyond time.
There are a lot of ways to bring the dead to life. According to Kemmler, it's even possible to actually resurrect somebody, it's just normally a fight with a god or God if you're really making the attempt. Unless you're Jesus, chances are pretty good you'll lose that fight, and how. Short of trying to raise Lazarus, though, I had a couple of options on how I could pull this off.
Before I even list them, it's probably useful to know that calling up the dead, anything dead, gets harder the more human it is, and the older it is.
Spirits don't usually want to be called up. Human spirits are best able to resist the call, for various reasons Kemmler speculated on, including the above Lazarus example. In that same vein, older spirits have been resting for longer, and like in physics, once a soul or spirit is at rest, it wants to stay at rest.
There's a passage Kemmler included on spirits that are locked into the afterlife, and methods of unlocking their prisons, but I skimmed it; it wasn't relevant here.
Like I was saying, there were a few ways I could try to pull this off.
The first method, which I tossed out almost immediately, was raising the spirit without a host. It's more intensive for the bits you need in your ritual (or the bits you need to hold in your mind in place of the implements), and has a stronger requirement on where it can be done, but it's less intensive in the magic component. Your soldiers would also be more vulnerable to incorporeal weapons and magic, but would be pretty strong against mortals.
I could also just raise a bunch of clay or something in the form of a dinosaur, and have any old spirit inhabit that, but it didn't actually impart the strength of a dinosaur unless you were an expert with death magic or knew a creature's True Name. In other words, it'd be useless here. Kemmler referenced something in another book he'd written I didn't have, too, so I skipped over it. Maybe if I ever got into making golems, I'd put it to use; while the theory was focused on building something like Frankenstein's monster, it could be adapted to other mediums without using a human spirit, like mordite or fire, which would let the caster obey the laws.
Useful if I ever wanted another lab assistant, not useful now.
The animated skeleton bit I skipped over when I read it was much weaker than the sum of its parts, even if it didn't need a drum to maintain control over the raised creature. The direct-control corpse I likewise ignored because it required either true multitasking or the sacrifice of a piece of yourself, which I didn't like the sound of. There was a short section on "open source" body manipulation, but the heavy warnings in the margins from the same guy who treated the Laws as less than guidelines turned me away in spite of the potential power.
Finally, there was the technique I was going to use: the raising of a zombie.
If you have a body, Kemmler claimed this is the best technique to use in general. As I'd seen outside, Grevane apparently agreed. In order to control the being or beast, instead of just cutting it loose like the aforementioned necromancer was doing, you needed a strong beat in the air to represent the dead being's missing heartbeat. That was why Grevane panicked when I'd trashed his car, and why that special drum was being passed back between him and the corpsetaker in this very museum earlier, too, they'd been using it to control the undead in the museum, or even to try to raise Sue herself.
When I asked the military to provide me with a drum, somebody had looted a replica of an ancient artifact that was well-suited to the roll, a huge ceremonial drum from the tribes of some South American tribe centuries or something ago. I wasn't listening, I was just ecstatic that we'd, uh, 'found' one. It was designed to hang like a snare drum in front of the drummer's body, and two large sticks could be brought down upon it with a bit of effort. An older guy with a cleft lip scar was helped into the straps they'd used in the exhibit, and with a few testing beats, it was ready to go.
I'd been worried I'd need the soldiers to loot a music store or something, but they'd provided when I needed one. Ask and ye shall receive.
I had one of the soldiers pounding away at the drum, and told him never to stop.
With the heartbeat taken care of, I needed to draw in flesh for the beast. Either I could do it Frankenstein style, making it part golem, or I could man up and provide the mass as converted ectoplasm from the NeverNever. As I didn't happen to have a bunch of corpses around (and using human corpses was just asking for trouble, nevermind where I'd get them), I decided that manning up was the only option.
From there, it wasn't complicated; if you choose to just run the thing raw, using your own magic and will, you could skip somewhere between five or ten steps out of the ritual right off the bat. With that handled, I only needed to prepare the vessel, and then call up a sixty five million year old dinosaur.
First, the ectoplasm. With Sue's skull in place, the Field museum had the most intact dinosaur body in existence. With that as a base, it was easier to ignore little details like where the lungs would go, because I could just overpower the spell and shove magic in until the body formed the way it was supposed to be around that skeleton.
"Muerte de vida," I chanted. "Muerte de vida, muerte de vida…"
The ether-goo melted out of the bones of the beast and started to fill in the chest area, forming a facsimile of the dino's internal organ structure. Though the DNA or whatever had probably long since been worn away by time, the bones themselves still remembered, magic still remembered what they were supposed to look like. A heart, lungs, other organs that were presumably internal, ectoplasm formed into all of them. Lines for the blood to follow formed alongside muscle structures, and the brain case started filling with nerves and things.
The whole thing seemed to stutter when it prepared to form skin. I poured ever more magic in and focused on thick, leathery skin, harder than an elephant's, than a rhino's skin- I'd seen Jurassic Park, I knew what a dinosaur looked like.
By my will, the spell continued, and a thick skin surged out over the newly-formed muscles and sinew. With all the pieces in place, all that was left was the controlling intelligence. For that, I could provide a Name, offer a description, or just let the magic resonate while a suitable spirit was drawn in. As the third was the least complicated, and I didn't want to risk mixing anything in at the last moment, I simply kept up the magic muttering and waited for something to answer.
Something did.
My chanting hit a fever pitch, and Sue's form glowed white as her body finished coming together. Her muscles bulged, and little black stripes formed down her back. With that, she stepped forward, breaking whatever had been holding her skeleton together and in place.
She screamed, a throat-tearing sound that jarred me down to my bones.
She was beautiful, and her teeth were somehow even more terrifying now that she had a fleshy mouth for them to fill.
Silence filled the air as the ancient predator looked around the room, eyeing her potential prey.
"...I should be hearing a drum beat," I said firmly, not taking my eyes off the massive reptile.
Just a little too quickly, the beat started back up and then evened out. I reached for the sound with my left hand, holding my right out toward Sue. It wasn't fun by any stretch of the imagination, but I managed to force the beat to connect to her massive heart through me, the connection making my teeth buzz.
It was done. So long as the drum continued to beat, she would be under my control.
"Alright people, that's our ride!" I called out, finally looking around at the rest of the room. Several soldiers' mouths were hanging open. "So long as you hang close to the giant dinosaur, you'll be capable of getting closer to the ritual site we're going to rip to pieces. So let's saddle her up and then let's get moving!"
There was a pregnant pause while I walked confidently up to Sue. She turned her head to focus one beady little dino eye down on me, but remained still while I reached up to her massive leg and felt her out. It wasn't quite like she was an extension of my being, but it was pretty obvious from even the single touch that she'd know and understand my orders through my will. It'd be tough to give her specific orders without physical contact, something I'd read would have developed over time. Not that I had or really wanted to develop that kind of skill set, mind you.
Somebody stole a saddle from some other historical exhibit while I stood by Sue, Willing her to lean down so that it could be strapped into place by several surprisingly eager young soldiers.
"This is everything I've ever wanted out of life," one of them whispered to me, stars in his eyes. "A real live dinosaur!"
"Yeah," I half agreed, a little torn between wanting to claim that magic was beautiful and reminding myself that necromancy wasn't really supposed to be pretty. I finally settled on, "Glad you're enjoying yourself."
With the saddle in place, I hoisted myself up and glanced around.
"Whoever has the drum, I need you up here with me so you can keep the beat where Sue can hear it!"
I glanced around and spotted the drummer with the cleft lip.
His face had gone completely white, and he stopped drumming for a second or two, staring at Sue's teeth. It was enough that somebody else actually took the drumsticks from him and beat on the large drum themselves, and then the starry-eyed guy was quick to run over and to whisper something in the previous drummer's ear. Without hesitation, the pale soldier took the drum off and practically shoved it onto the kid, making the third guy who was still holding the beat cuss at the both of them. The sticks were handed over and the kid marched over to Sue's side.
"I wouldn't miss this for the world!" The kid informed me as soon as I'd gotten Sue to lean down again. "Thanks for letting me do this."
"Yeah, sure," I told him. "You got a name, kid?"
"Greg," he told me. "Er, I mean-"
"Yeah, I know," I cut him off. "The other guys told me. Just be sure not to offer anybody any more than your first name from now on, then, OK?"
He kept banging on the drum with one stick while two other guys made a stirrup with their hands, swinging him up and behind me.
He fell off the other side, nearly busting the drum.
It took another minute for another saddle to be brought in so he wouldn't have to try to hold on with no hands, and he was strapped into it. He assured us he could handle it, hammering away at the top of his base drum. I had my doubts, but we were already late.
"Onward!" I shouted. "To adventure!"
And then I pointed Sue toward the front entrance, which revealed that no, there wasn't any way we were escaping from there without blowing the front doors off their hinges. I pulled Sue back up and then glanced around.
"...Alright, who knows where the large service entrance is?"
Several minutes after that little mess, and my little military entourage was on its way.
The downside to having a military escort on something like this was that I could almost feel the property damage racking up every time Sue stepped on a sports car. It slowed us down on our journey to the center of the horrifying vortex of death hanging over the city.
I'd told the military to head over to the college, based on my map.
Somehow, they had set up at the wrong college.
For as much as I had been praising them, they really, really dropped the ball on that one.
With the vortex of magic actually forming, however, it no longer mattered where else the military had set up. There wasn't a soul in the city (who knew what was going on) who could fail to see the effects of the black magic in the air. While there were definitely some soldiers left behind, everyone else was hauling ass toward the confirmed site.
Given how this level of magic was killing tech all over the city, only a couple of the most robust (read: oldest) tanks were managing to power through, the Wardens' own protections notwithstanding. A couple old cars and military vehicles the brass were undoubtedly delighted hadn't been mothballed were also on the warpath, and I, Harry Dresden, was leading the charge.
Mostly.
Lasciel's memories implied that moving Sue through the waves of power might help get the military closer before everything broke down, but honestly I had to admit to myself that I was doing it because it was really, really cool.
Whatever time of day it was supposed to be, I'd honestly lost track of by then. The spinning cloud cover made it more or less irrelevant by that point, and the rain that was starting to come down in sheets dulled even the floodlights the military had set up at critical locations.
I don't know how many vehicles that were following me were lost to engine failure and the like, because I had to keep moving forward, military escort or no.
Sue cornered just a little too slowly, again, and a police car mysteriously pancaked itself nearby. Like, right outta nowhere, it just turned into a pancake for no discernable reason. There were no working cameras nearby, and any claims of dinosaur-shaped footprints were, I'm sure, entirely coincidental.
"You need to stop doing that, man," Greg told me from his own seat in back.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," I told him flatly.
Sue did manage to avoid stepping on any cars for, as far as anyone knows, the entire trip… but certainly after that cop car, too.
The final stretch opened up before us, and I got a good look at the battlefield we were about to enter as Sue powered on, taking the straightaway at near top speed.
Let's take stock.
Of the necromancer threats we had to deal with, they died in the following ways:
The Corpsetaker died by way of falling debris, I'm pretty sure.
Liverspots had an unfortunate encounter with some upset Monsters in a graveyard, having turned himself into some kind of giant creature.
And… for the life of me, I couldn't recall meeting with any other necromancers who didn't make it.
I think it says something that the past few days have been so hectic that I was losing track of warlocks.
Cowl, meanwhile, was standing on a stage that looked like it belonged at a political rally, right smack dab in the middle of a field that college kids probably liked to make out on, and there were some truly massive drums set up with zombies using what looked like stair-climbing exercise machines to lift and drop huge drumstick things down on them using pulleys, apparently making the beat self sufficient. There was no canopy over Cowl's stage, the man's hidden face bent down while his gloved hands gesticulated wildly. The rain pouring down on the scene made it hard to see clearly, but that was where I knew I would need to be.
I couldn't be sure, but the blue glowing skull that floated in front of him didn't look as friendly as Sans was. It probably didn't help that it looked to be on fire.
The blue fire drew my attention that way, but the sporadic gunfire into the crowd in front of that stage was where the undercard fight was taking place.
There was a menagerie of different creatures from the NeverNever holding the line against the soldiers and Wardens fighting against them. Bird-faced men with clawed wings for arms tore into the soldiers whenever they swooped down from above, giant dogs with spiked collars and sets of teeth that extended beyond their mouths tore into the front lines even against their bodies were torn to shreds by the sheer volume of fire poured out against them, furred and horned demons from some Hell or another threw fire that lit up the battlefield and caused the rain that touched it to turn to steam, and there were dozens more creatures that I didn't have the time to register. The last time I'd seen a fight like this, albeit on a larger scale, the Summer and Winter Courts had been at war.
There were more combatants slithering between the forces Cowl had apparently called, too, ones I would have missed if not for the way they stood out against my senses.
My skin crawled at the masses of tentacles, teeth and too many eyes and mouths on far, far too many of the combatants, however few of them there actually were.
The army wasn't fighting zombies, nor was it only fighting creatures of the NeverNever.
They were also fighting outsiders.
What was Cowl thinking?
Beneath me, Sue slowed down a touch, and I steadied her with a hand, then bit back a swear when I realized what was happening:
Those massive drums weren't focused on controlling the remaining zombies in the city, or that wasn't their only purpose.
Cowl was trying to wrest control of all the remaining undead and lost spirits that could hear his drums from any of the necromancers that might remain, and he was trying to draw them here. He was trying to snatch Sue out from under me.
This… this was wrong.
Everything about this was wrong.
"What are we going to do?" Greg shouted from behind me, still pounding away at the war drum he held.
It broke me out of trying to analyze the battlefield, and I knew the answer down in my bones.
"We're going to smash those drums," I informed him with a nasty smile. I kept one hand on the dinosaur's side and leaned forward. "High ho Sue, away!"
There's a lot to be said about quantity having a quality all its own. Cowl had, apparently by himself, prepared his little ritual with all the spirits and favors he could call on, and each of his specialist threats out in that crowd could probably tear me limb from limb if they got in close. They could not, however, hold a candle to a pissed off dinosaur getting told in no uncertain terms to "SMASH!"
The army Cowl had called up surrounded his stage, preventing the military from getting in close, and he probably had some kick ass wards preventing little things like mortar shells or missiles from taking out his absurdly large drums. The explosions just in front of his stage certainly made it seem that way, at least. He had pulled out all the stops and called in all kinds of favors.
His numbers were as nothing before the might of Sue.
Sue didn't bother to pay much attention to the crunching bloodied goop beneath her claws as she tore through the battlefield, and her roar split the night and, for a moment, overpowered every other sound it competed with. In ten great strides, we were at the drums, and all Sue had to do was turn her head sideways and take a bite out of one to crunch it in half.
Cowl's cowl turned my way, but he didn't stop waving his arms about, not even when Sue ate his second drum for good measure, then squared up in front of him, opening her massive maw to eat him whole. It became apparent why when I realized I was flying off the back of my dinosaur, who had just been clocked so hard under her massive chin, she was about to flip over and crush me and Greg.
The blue flaming skull apparently had him covered.
I crashed on top of something soft, and I could hear the crack of bones breaking beneath me. I didn't have time to verify who or what I'd landed on before I scrambled to my feet and ran over to where Greg had landed, his drum surprisingly intact. By fate or dumb luck, the soldier had landed in the path Sue had taken to reach the stage, and the army around us was a bit busy avoiding the zombie dinosaur crashing to the ground to take advantage of our fall.
Sue did manage to fall somewhat sideways, right where I would have been if I hadn't moved; apparently I'd landed on (and pre-crushed) a bird person, who was now most assuredly dead.
I glanced around at the monsters, absently helping Greg to his feet, and the sound of his war drum picked back up. With all the various creatures around us, there was only really one way to retreat.
I pulled Greg toward the stage, closer to the center of the ritual, and the eye of the proverbial and literal storm. Anywhere else, and the energies in the air would probably kill us mortals outright, now that we didn't have the luxury of Sue's bulk protecting us, drum and necromantic working aside. Whatever shields Cowl had prepared, Sue and I (and Greg) walked right through them.
"Does this kind of thing happen to you a lot?" Greg asked me, turning his head back and forth quickly at all the death and danger around us.
"A couple times a year, at least," I told him, and then my back hit something. A glance told me it was the stage, and I clambered on, then yanked Greg up after me. I also tried sending Sue more orders, but whatever mess we were dealing with wasn't quite conducive to ordering around the undead.
So she just went berserk, killing and eating as many creatures around her as she could sink her teeth into.
Good for her.
"Hello again, Dresden," a disembodied voice greeted me. "Lovely day we're having, isn't it?"
I put the danger of 'rampaging dinosaur' a little further down on my list and turned to focus on the voice, which apparently came from the floating flaming blue skull.
To be honest, you'd think I would remember where this grudge came from, but with the fall from the dinosaur probably only not really hitting me because of adrenaline, I honestly didn't recognize it.
Apparently heedless of our arrival, Cowl's ritualistic chanting continued.
Greg continued playing the drum, but at this point, I didn't know if that mattered or not.
"...Bob?" I guessed, eyeing the skull. It was the wrong color, and the voice sounded way too flat and cruel for him, but I didn't know any other disembodied skulls, as far as I knew.
The flaming eyes burned brighter, and the skull chuckled. "Not anymore, Harry. Not since this new vessel was prepared for me."
Something was wrong, obviously, but it wasn't obvious what it was. I tried to keep him talking.
"Where's your old skull?" I asked, looking Blue Bob over. I couldn't recognize any of the symbols adorning it, nor whatever blue metal had been etched in on the teeth.
Something was very wrong with me. I couldn't be sure what.
"Smashed," he said it like a trifling thing, and not a countdown on how long he had to find a new vessel to hide from the forces of Winter in.
"What'll happen to you if that skull is smashed, too?" I asked, and that was when I realized I couldn't move my legs. Or arms.
The lack of terror I felt on realizing that was another clue as to what was wrong with me.
Greg's beating of the drum continued.
"Oh, perhaps I might even fall back into your camp, wizard," his skull face projected a grin. "For as long as this vessel survives, I am bound to my new owner, and can finally enjoy the task of killing you, you incompetent-"
Gunfire erupted from directly behind me, and Bob's new skull imploded from the shot to its forehead, the jawbone falling to the ground below.
Thank you, Greg from the military.
Just like that, I could breathe again, and I started gasping and fell to one knee.
I never realized I couldn't breathe, and didn't want to know when it had started.
The blue flaming spirit screamed, then flew off into the night, some of his energies sucked into the sky as he fled, apparently bound no more.
I turned to Cowl, who finally dropped his arms and considered me.
"Dresden," he greeted me, standing up straight and folding his hands in front of me.
"Cowl," I greeted him back, pushing myself to my feet and preparing for, if I was being honest, another ass whooping.
Not that I would care if it broke the ritual and I survived, mind you.
I might have flinched a little when Greg tried to shoot Cowl, too, but then the necromancer just waved his hand in the man's direction and launched him from the stage before I could so much as bring my arm up. I forced myself not to look over in the soldier's direction, not even sure what gun he'd used to shoot with, just kept my arm up in case Cowl tried that on me.
"You've still failed here, tonight," Cowl informed me blandly. "The ritual has not yet ended."
I just offered the man a shit-eating grin. "It won't matter. With your drums of doom destroyed, there isn't enough power in the city for you to draw in for your little ascension, friends from the NeverNever or not. I saw to that myself."
"Oh?" Cowl asked. "And here I thought Kumori's efforts would have answered your own failure to call up the Wild Hunt this evening."
I shrug. "Yeah, that isn't happening." I pause. "Who's Kumori, again?"
"Part of the key focus of this ritual these guys are going to do," I look around the room at the other wardens, "is eating tons of energy. Spiritual energy, life energy, death energy, whatever. And I know these guys plan to boost it up to the level of godhood by eating some really powerful forces from the NeverNever. We've got to put a stop to that."
"How?" Morgan asked, focusing on the task at hand over his hatred of me.
"Well, I'm pretty sure they plan to call up the Wild Hunt. That's not all they might call up, though, and we can't rely on stopping them from using everything, but I think there's a couple ways around what they're planning."
I take a deep breath.
"We're going to have to ask Winter, and maybe Summer, to lock down the borders of the NeverNever around Chicago for a couple critical moments during this ritual."
Morgan scowled, but nobody overrode me just yet, so I continued.
"We also probably want to ensure that the biggest option they have to gather power, the Wild Hunt, is not available for their ritual to eat."
"How do we do that? What is the Wild Hunt?" Ramirez cuts in.
I shrug. "It's the Erlking's, the god of the wild fey's, yearly Hunt against all the living things of the world. Think like the Headless Horseman. It's a way for the Fey to gain or lose power, tons of it. He sends his hounds out and allows the worthy to join in his Hunt, or else be chased and killed by it. And I've got the ritual to summon the Hunt memorized. So we just need to call up our guys in another part of the world and tell them to unleash the Hunt out somewhere else. If somebody has some paper, I can write the calling spell down."
"Are you insane?" Morgan asked me, not for the first time, and he nearly jumps from his chair when Sans reaches past him to offer me a pen and paper; I quickly jot down the words and slide them to the Captain before answering, and she slides them to Ramirez, who's already grinning.
"Probably," I shrug. "But hey, if we can lock these guys down by telling the Wild Hunt to go chase rabbits over in Edinburgh, then not only do we win this fight, but the council might just give me a medal for ruining their day."
It wasn't my best joke, but apparently Ramirez thought it was hilarious.
Cowl paused, taking in my apparent nonchalance at his declaration, then sighed. "You know, I truly expected that soul poison to kill you, now and forever more. May I ask how you beat it, before we return to trying to kill one another?"
I shrug, still keeping my shield arm at the ready. "Only if you explain something to me first."
He tilts his head in askance.
"Were you seriously going to eat outsiders as part of this ritual? Like, intentionally?"
I can imagine him smiling beneath his Cowl, and the chill of the October rain makes me shiver. "Not quite. We have ways of drawing out that evil, if we truly need them. Now then, my own answer?"
I take a deep, shuddering breath, drawing in what magic I can. "I just took the advice of one of my heroes."
"Oh?" He feigned interest, but from the way he slid a foot out slightly, rearranging his own stance in preparation for our next bout, his mind was probably elsewhere. "Who might that be?"
"Wile E. Coyote, super genius," I informed him seriously. "If you run off a cliff, don't look down. Gravity doesn't remember that it should drop you until you look down."
"I'll be very sure to remember that," he nodded.
Then he looked up.
It's the oldest trick in the book, and I still fell for it.
The sky vortex above was spinning faster and faster, and it was starting to draw down on us.
Cowl magically sucker punched me without a word, the same way he'd done to Greg, faster than I could pop my shield. I flew off the stage and into the crowd.
Not that the crowd was there to catch me.
I bounced out in the mud, rolling along with my limbs tucked in, wondering how I'd avoided hitting anything, when finally I realized something I should have known had been missing.
Sound.
The action going on around us had been muted on the stage, and it had prevented me from hearing the sounds of combat, let alone the storm of rain. I had just had a conversation at a reasonable volume beneath the eye of the storm, and because of that, I'd missed the entrance of a new faction on the battlefield.
The Monsters of the Underground had arrived, standing shoulder to shoulder with the human military against the forces Cowl had called up.
I pushed myself to my feet, unable to tear my eyes away from the fires that warred over the battlefield, lighting up the night; King Asgore, clad in combat regalia, and Queen Toriel, still in her robe, both unleashed torrents of controlled flames against the hellfire of the bound demons, beating out their efforts. Undyne's spears flew in a never ending volley against the flying and grounded birdmen, holding them off while the human soldiers got their guns back in play. Sans and Papyrus were weaving waves of bones across the outsiders, trapping them in place long enough for those blue- and orange-eyed cow skulls to form. I knew Sans had access to those, but didn't know Papyrus could also conjure them. When they fired in tandem, making me feel the energy of their white laser fire even from here, the one outsider I saw get hit by them was disintegrated.
More Monsters, far, far more Monsters helped out the fight in a thousand little ways, and a strange happy barking melting amalgamation of dogs and cats had even climbed aboard Sue and was riding her around the battlefield, somehow directing her fury at Cowl's forces alone.
It would have been beautiful, except that it was the most horrifying thing I'd seen today.
The Ring of Doom that the military had lost from Bock's Bookstore flashed before my eyes, the memory of far too many Monsters being consumed by it burned into my soul by my Wizard's Sight.
The necromancers never needed the Wild Hunt for their ascension ritual.
Cowl already had proof that the Monsters would serve as the fuel for his ritual from their earlier experiments.
I turned back to the stage, pushing myself to my feet, but I was too late.
Cowl was already rising into the air, and the funnel of energies was almost all the way to his mouth.
Desperate, I called up my magic and shouted, my voice lost to the cacophony of noise, but even my empowered blast of fire did nothing, drawn up and consumed by the vortex.
I could feel my soul pulling against my chest, and forced my hands to clutch at it, fighting the same sensation Undyne had made me experience when she had pulled my soul from my body.
I was too late.
Cowl was going to win.
A small figure in a striped shirt sprinted across the stage, holding the spine of a floating mass of skulls that twisted and writhed as the figure moved.
Just before the vortex reached Cowl's mouth, Frisk reached him. The kid was holding a kitchen knife, dripping with blood, and jumped up to stab Cowl under his chin, forcing his mouth shut.
The vortex crashed against Cowl's face, launching him from the stage and through the wall of a nearby building, the knife still lodged in his throat. As the ritual broke down, the energies feeling like the sun unleashed on the surface of the Earth, Frisk turned to me and jumped off the stage, dragging the mass of skulls along for the ride like a balloon. The kid grabbed me around the middle as the sky started to explode with energy, the skull-head floating above us, and I held on as the kid dragged us both to the ground.
The world shook, and there was nothing we could do but wait for it to stop.