Les Dossiers Dresden, Tome 17 : Battle Ground

Apocalypses always kick off at the witching hour.

That’s something you know now.

It makes sense, if you think about it. An apocalypse, by its nature, is kind of doomy and gloomy. The best time for gathering energy for that kind of working is when you’re in the deepest, darkest, coldest part of the night. That time of stillness between, oh, two in the morning and dawn. There’re a lot of names for that time of night. The witching hour. The hour of the wolf. The dead of night. I could go on and on, because we all have names for it.

But they’re all talking about the same time. The hour when you sit up in bed, sweating from nightmares. The hour when you awaken for no reason but to fear the future. The hour when you stare at the clock, willing yourself to sleep, knowing it isn’t going to happen, and weariness and despair beat upon the doors to the vaults of your mind with leaden clubs.

That’s when an apocalypse begins: the witching hour.

And I was charging straight into one as fast as I could.

My brother’s old boat, the Water Beetle, a seedy, beat-up twin to the Orca in Jaws, was too dumpy to skip over the waves of Lake Michigan as we headed for the blacked-out city of Chicago, but it bulldogged its way through them nonetheless.

An Enemy, capital E, was coming for my city, and the small portion of forces that the Accorded nations could gather in time was all that stood between the unknown power of the Fomor nation, led by a mad goddess bearing a supernatural superweapon, and about eight million powerless people with very little means of defending themselves.

I tried to give the boat’s old engine a little more gas, and it started making a weird moaning noise. I gritted my teeth and eased off. I wouldn’t protect anybody if the engine blew up on me and left us bobbing in the lake like a Styrofoam cup.

Murphy came limping up the stairway from belowdecks and eased into the wheelhouse with me. I was about six eight or six nine, depending on my shoes, and Murph had to wear thick socks to break five feet even, so I took up a little more space than she did.

But even so, she slipped up next to me and pressed herself against my side.

I put my arm around her and closed my eyes for a second and focused on nothing but the feel of her against me. Granted, the battle harness and the P90 she carried (illegally, if that mattered at this point) made her a little lumpier and pointier than the dictates of romance typically mandated for a love interest, but all things considered, I didn’t mind. She was also warm and soft and tense and alert beside me.