Dead Beat(81)

"Ugh," Ramirez said. "Nasty. Anyone who knows their way around a kusari is a tough customer."
"Yeah. So we shoot him."
"Damn right, we shoot him," Ramirez said. "This is why so many of the younger members of the Council like the way you do things, Dresden."
I blinked. "They do?"
"Oh, hell, yes," Ramirez said. "A lot of them were apprentices when you were first tried after Justin DuMorne's death, like me. A lot of them are still apprentices. But there are people who think a lot of what you've done."
"Like you?"
"I would have done a lot of those things," he said. "Only with a lot more style than you."
I snorted. "Second one we'll hit calls himself Cowl. He's good. I've never seen a wizard stronger than he is, and that includes Ebenezar McCoy."
"A lot of guys who hit hard have a glass jaw. Bet he's all offense."
I shook my head. "No. He's just as good at protecting himself. I nipped a car over on top of him and it barely slowed him down."
Ramirez frowned and nodded. "How do we take him down then?"
I shook my head. "Haven't thought of anything good. Hit him with everything and hope something gets through. And if that wasn't enough, he's got an apprentice with him, called Kumori, who seems personally loyal. She's probably strong enough to be on the Council herself."
"Damn," Ramirez said quietly. "She pretty?"
"She keeps her face covered," I said. "No idea."
"If she was pretty, I'd just turn on the Ramirez charm and have her eating out of my hand," he said. "But I can't take chances with that kind of power if I'm not sure she's pretty. Used recklessly, it could endanger innocent bystanders or land me in bed with an ugly girl."
"Can't have that," I said, turning Sue around another corner. I checked the vortex. The slender, spinning psuedo-tornado was more than halfway to the ground.
"All right then," Ramirez said. "Once we're past Grevane, I'll take on the apprentice. You go for Cowl."
I glanced back at him with an arched eyebrow.
"If we ignore Kumori she'll be free to take us both out. One of us has to counter her. You're stronger than me," he said, his tone matter-of-fact. "Don't get me wrong. I'm so damned good that I make it look easy, but I'm not stupid. You have the best shot at taking Cowl down. If I can drop the apprentice, I'll help. Sound like a plan?"
"Sounds like a plan," I said. "I just wish it sounded like a winning plan."
"You got a better idea?" Ramirez asked me cheerfully.
"No," I said, and I turned Sue down the street that would hopefully let us attack the necromancers from the rear.
"Well, then," he said, his smile ferocious. "Shut up and dance."

     
 

      Chapter Forty-two
The campus of the college consisted of only a few buildings-a couple of dorms, a couple of buildings with classrooms, the Mitchell Museum, and an administrative office. The area between them was a nicely kept lawn, too small to look like a park, but larger than you'd want to mow every week. At the center of the area, directly in front of the museum, picnic tables had been overturned onto their sides around a large circle open to the skies above. I slowed Sue's steps for a moment, to try to get some kind of idea of what we had to contend with.
Standing in silent ranks around that circle were Grevane's style of undead-very solid, very physical, though there were relatively few of them in the half-rotted or desiccated condition of the corpses that had attacked my place. These undead looked like they might still have been saved by a snappy EMT. They all looked like Native American tribesmen, just as Corpsetaker's specters had, though the styles of clothing and weaponry were slightly different.
One other thing was different, too: These undead radiated a kind of hideous, ephemeral cold, and their skin almost seemed to glow with its own pale, horrible light. I could sense the raw power that lay within them, even from a hundred yards away. These undead were different from those that had attacked the Wardens, as different as an old pickup truck was from a modern battle tank. These zombies would not be so easily destroyed as those others, and were likely to be far stronger, far faster.
They stood in ranks around the inner circle, facing outward, but they ranked thicker between the circle and the last location of the Wardens than on the side nearest us. I had managed to outflank the thinking of whoever had those undead in position, and the thought cheered me somewhat. Spirits and specters and formless masses of luminescent light darted and flowed around the circle like strands of kelp and bits of algae caught in a whirlpool. They were all the same unpleasant colors as the lightning in the storm, and even as I watched their numbers visibly grew. Sue paced a restless step forward, and I felt a horrible sensation of cold on the skin of my face and forehead, as if the hovering vortex above was casting out some kind of perverted inversion of sunlight. I crouched a little lower on Sue's back and the feeling faded.
Lightning flashes from different directions cast a web of shadows over the whole place, trees and buildings collaborating with the storm to conceal much of the open circle continually clothed in shifting blocks and threads of darkness. I could see that there was someone within the circle of picnic tables, but not who, and I couldn't even be sure of how many.
"That," I said in a low voice, "is a lot of badass zombies."
"And ghosts," Ramirez said.
"And ghosts."
"Look at it this way," he said. "With that many of them, how can we miss?"
"Yeah," I said. "Cool."
I didn't want to do it. I wanted to go find myself a hole and crawl into it. But instead I put my hand on Sue's neck, drew her attention to the zombies, and willed her forward into battle.
Sue leapt forward and hit the nearest rank of zombies before any of them had the chance to notice her. She tore one apart with her vast jaws, smashed several others flat, crushed some with her flailing tail, and generally went to town. After her devastating initial charge, I heard a frantic man's voice shout from within the circle, and the zombies turned to attack.
The zombies whipped out bows and spears and clubs, or else tore at Sue with their bare hands. It wasn't pretty. Arrows streaked through the air with unnatural speed, and when they struck the Tyrannosaur's hide they sounded almost like gunshots. One zombie rammed a spear cleanly through the massive muscle of Sue's right thigh. A swinging club shattered several of her teeth, and even as I watched, an unarmed zombie leapt up onto her flank, got a hold of the heavy extension cord that held the saddles in place, then drove his fist into her flesh up to the elbow, and started raking out gobbets of tissue by the handful.
I brought up the sparkling blue cloud of my shield bracelet in time to intercept an arrow, and others smashed against it with the force of bullets even as I held it in place. Without being told, I felt Ramirez turn to our right, his own left hand extended, and a concave disk of green light expanded weblike from his outstretched fingertips, covering that flank from still more of them.
But as vicious and as strong and as swift and deadly as the zombies were, they couldn't hold a candle to Sue.
The injuries that might have terrified a living beast only infuriated her, and as that rage swelled, her own grey-and-black hide gained a silvery sheen of power. She roared so loudly that my chest and belly shook and my ears screamed with pain. She caught one zombie in her jaws and flung it away. It sailed up over the nearest five-story building and out of sight in the darkness and rain. When she stomped down with her foot, she shattered the concrete of a walkway and drove a footprint more than a foot deep into the earth around it. The zombie assault turned into one enormous exercise in suicidal tactics, for whenever one of the undead warriors managed to get through to harm Sue, the Tyrannosaur not only crushed the unlife out of them, but grew that much more angry and powerful and unstoppable.
It was like riding a carnivorous earthquake.
"Look!" Ramirez screamed. "Look there!"
I followed his nod and spotted Grevane in the circle in his trench coat and fedora. The necromancer was keeping a steady beat on a drum hung from his belt, and he gripped a staff of gnarled, twisted black wood with the other. He stared at us, his face twisted in hatred, and his eyes glittered with insane malice.
I willed Sue to head for the circle, but the Tyrannosaur's will was suddenly no longer pliable or easily led. The blood rage and fury of battle had overloaded what little mind she actually possessed, and now she was nothing but several rampaging tons of killing machine.
"Hurry!" Ramirez shouted.
"She's not listening!" I told him. I applied my will even more forcefully, but it was like one man struggling to hold back a bulldozer. I gritted my teeth, desperately trying to figure a way to get Sue where I wanted her, and hit on one idea. Instead of trying to stop her battle rage, I encouraged it, and then I pointed her at the zombies nearer to the circle.
Sue responded with bloodlust and glee, swerving to charge toward the zombies nearest the circle, crushing and rekilling them as she went.
"We have to jump!" I shouted.
"Wahoo!" Ramirez cried, his smile blazing white.
Sue pursued a dodging zombie to within ten feet of one of the fallen picnic tables, and I let out a scream of fear and excitement as I jumped. It was like falling from a little bit higher than a second-story window, but I managed to land feet-first and well enough to absorb most of the shock of impact, though the flash of pain told me that my knees and ankles were going to be sore for days.