binding ethniu bla bla

“Bob!” I screamed, and seized the Spear, holding its point up above me.
The cloud of campfire sparks swirled in a helix up around the Spear, touched the blood at the tip like a hound picking up a scent. I whirled the Spear in a circle, gathering up the substance of the spirit around it along with my will, and murmured, “Ventris cyclis!”
Wind and spirit flew toward the Titan, too swiftly to be seen as more than a single blur of light that whipped thrice counterclockwise about the Titan and then settled into place, a whirling cyclone of motes of light, a solid bar of my will that encircled her.
Thrumthrumthrumthrumthrumthrum.
I sent my will into the Spear, my own power flooding out along with Bob, infusing his essence, just as my will could have infused a circle of chalk or silver.
Ethniu staggered as the lights surrounded her, shielding her eyes—and then she let out a choking sound and screamed in denial as the circle closed around her.
Wizards are the gatekeepers, the defenders of this world. Or at least we are when we’re at our best. And if some immortal thing rolls in here from Somewhere Else, we can say something about it. We can pit our will against them. We might not win, but with a proper channel and a circle of power, we can make them stop to fight us.
The circle closed on Ethniu, and suddenly I found myself pitted against the mutilated will of a Titan.
There was a horrible pressure, a whole-body crushing agony, as if I had suddenly blinked to the floor of the sea. And that was what it was like, with the force of that mind pressing against mine—like trying to hold off the weight of the tide.
But the sea had tried to wash my mind away before now, and I knew the secret of facing the will of supernatural beings. I might be nothing but a grain of sand on the shore of that ocean—but pound as it might, the ocean couldn’t destroy that grain of sand. Not if it was stubborn enough to hold together. Though the ocean might wash the sand here and there, might batter and rage at it, when the ocean’s rage is gone, and the waters once more serene, the sand will remain.
So I took the pressure. Though my head felt like someone was trying to squeeze my brains out through my nose, I kept my will on the Spear, on the circle.
The snarling rage of the furious, terrified Titan filled my head. Literally. Her voice was echoing off the surface of my skull, deafening and inescapable and really, really uncomfortable.
“Mortal,” she snarled. “Do you think you can pit your will against mine?”
“Obviously,” I muttered. “That’s why you’re in a circle, genius.” I took a slow breath and in that deep, echoing voice called, “Ethniu, daughter of Balor! I bind thee!”
The Titan wailed and shook her head violently, spittle and slime and worse spraying everywhere. She thrashed and suddenly there was a hideous power raking at the circle.
Bob screamed in agony. The sparks began to fly apart.
“No!” I said, and sent my will rushing into the Spear, out along the stream of sparks still connected to it like some kind of bizarre whirling lasso. I fed power and will to the familiar spirit, fighting the pressure from the Titan, binding together his immaterial substance and preventing her from tearing it apart.
“Insect!” Ethniu hissed, flinging herself from the edge of the circle and pacing back and forth in it like a frantic big cat. “The advantage of immortality is that one can take the time to be thorough. Do you think we did not plan for this?”
“Yeah, kinda,” I said, “or you wouldn’t be stuck in my circle. Ethniu, daughter of Balor, I bind thee!”
Ethniu didn’t scream this time.
She smiled.
And then she . . . thought at me.
The lake and everything else went away.
And I found myself standing on a quiet lawn in a darkened neighborhood I knew well.
I was in Michael Carpenter’s front yard.
The lights were out. And the sky was beginning to fill with dust and smoke and the red glare of the Eye. But I could still see the moon a little. This was earlier in the evening.
She was showing me a memory.
And I watched, as Listen and maybe thirty or forty of his turtlenecks advanced into the yard in full tactical gear. They came in, in multiple stacks, heading for Michael’s front door, the kitchen door, the garage, and the door to the backyard.
I watched as, in a handful of seconds, the men set breaching charges on the door, blew it, and went in.
Michael Carpenter, stolid in his blue plaid work shirt, was waiting for them, shotgun in hand.
He wasn’t really a gunfighter. He was retired now.
It was over quickly.
They left his body in the entry hall and walked over it. Enemies, mortal enemies, twisted people but still people, flooded into his house to the chattering thumps of suppressed weapons. I knew there were angels on guard at Michael’s house. I knew they would have burned any supernatural attacker with the fires that ravaged Sodom and Gomorrah.
But these were mortals. People.
Angels weren’t allowed to gainsay people.
Listen and his team were thorough. They must have found the safe room, because charges went off again. Then some screams.
Some very high-pitched screams.
And gunfire.
And then the Fomor squads filed out with the same silence with which they’d filed in.
Listen stopped on the front lawn, next to where I stood in the vision, lifted a radio to his mouth, and said, “Tell her the target has been cleared and confirmed. We’re moving back to the shore to meet the rest of the company.”
I pushed forward, toward the house, toward the front door, and could see blood running from the second floor, from where the safe room was, and I ran up the stairs to the hidden entrance and found it twisted and torn with the violence of the breaching charges, and behind the door . . .
I saw them.
Saw her.
Charity and the Carpenter kids all lay between Maggie and the door. Even little Harry, who was almost as young as Maggie, had stood in her defense.
It had been efficient.
And suddenly I was standing on the shore of Lake Michigan again, cold and more brutally weary than I’d ever been, struggling against Ethniu’s will.
You see, mortal? the Titan’s voice said in my head. Listen and his people scouted this target thoroughly. They planned countermeasures for all of your kind here. And they planned something in particular for you and the Winter Lady. All those targets in one place just made it too tempting. Ethniu paused, and her mental voice became poisonously sweet. Your child is dead. Your ally and his family are dead. They were destroyed hours ago.
My stomach dropped out.
This is the world I bring to you, mortal.
And then she thought at me again. She showed me the world she desired. A world of blasted cities, of smoke, of tears, of screams. Blood ran in the gutters rather than water. And columns of greasy black smoke rose from altars, from temples, from shrines decorated with skulls and crusted with the blood of sacrifices.
This is what is coming. And there is nothing you can do to stop it. Just as well that your daughter will not see it, I think. Just as well that you won’t, either.
And I felt her will gathering again, preparing to shatter mine.
Everything felt spinny. Empty.
Bob let out a wordless wail. I could feel my hold on the circle weakening. I could feel the Titan beginning to burst free of the binding.
Maggie, I thought. I’m so sorry. I should have done more. I should have been there.
“Dresden!” Marcone screamed from the water. “We’ll never get another chance at this!”
Ethniu’s will began to rip mine apart. Slowly. Almost sensually. I could feel her pressing against my mind. Pressing inside. She found my pain and my horror and she slithered inside while I gritted my teeth and held on to the Spear for simple support to keep from falling.
. . . thrumthrumthrumthrumthrumthrumthrum . . .
I couldn’t get the image of my daughter’s little shattered body out of my head.
Ethniu’s savaged face twisted into a hideous smile.
I should have done more, taken more measures to protect you than just leave you with Mou . . .
My head snapped back up.
I stared at her for a second.
And then I clenched my teeth in a sudden wolfish smile.
“Hey, Bubbles,” I said. “You forgot the dog.”
Ethniu’s smile vanished. “What?”
“The dog,” I said. “The dog was with them. Maybe your guys could take him out, maybe not. But it wouldn’t be fast. And they’d only get to my daughter over his dead body. But he’s not there. Question, where is he? Answer, with my daughter. That’s the only place it’s possible for him to be. Ergo, she wasn’t there. She was never there. In fact, none of them were, because the dog’s absence was a message, to me, from the person responsible. This girl I know had places to be this evening. Man, she really has been busy.”
Ethniu looked baffled.
I took a deep breath and said, “Honey, you’re fighting faeries. It was staged for your benefit. Wouldn’t be shocked if we went back there and found a bunch of bundles of wood where those bodies were.”
The Titan’s living eye widened.
“Listen betrayed me,” Ethniu hissed, spitting in her fury.
I stared at her for a second. For a second, I almost felt sorry for her.
Then I sighed.
“Sure, that’s the takeaway here,” I said. “Nice knowing you.” I set my jaw, kept my will on her, and cried, in a voice that echoed from the vaults of the apocalypse sky, “ETHNIU, DAUGHTER OF BALOR, I BIND THEE!”
A storm hit my mind. Even after Ethniu had expended such energies, after she had fought so many foes, after she had laid low a high school gymnasium full of supernatural heavyweights, the raw strength of the Titan’s remaining will was overwhelming. It tore at my perceptions, flooding them with random images and smells and sensations. It was like standing in a sandstorm, only instead of inflicting pain, every random grain forced you through an experience, a memory, so disjointed and intense and rapid that there was nothing to focus on, to hold on to. A flash sensation of summer-warmed grass between my toes. Plunging into a pool of chilled water in the hour before dawn. An image of watching warmly over a field worked by people with bronze tools. Another of strangling someone to death with my bare hands. And the images doubled, redoubled, multiplied into thousands of separate impressions all coming at me at once.
Memories. These were the substance of Ethniu, the pieces of her that railed against my will. She was going to hammer them into my mind as I tried to complete the binding, sandblast my psyche to pieces with an overwhelming flood of impressions.
I had to get to an image, a moment, that was mine. Me. That was strong enough to hold all the rest together.
I found one image.
Maggie, holding on to me with all four limbs, her little heart beating against my chest, while Mouse leaned against me, a solid presence of utter faithfulness and love.
And that was enough.
If the Titan shredded away everything else I had, this would be enough to build on. Friends. Family. Love. I focused on that memory, of my girl holding on to me with desperate strength, my fuzzy friend beside us, while her father’s arms held her safe.
The storm of the Titan’s will raged. But I found myself standing in the eye of the hurricane with the most quiet, defiant smile that had ever landed on my face.
The world came back to me. I could feel the Spear in my hands again, the broken rock and concrete beneath my feet.
Ethniu writhed and twisted in the center of the circle of campfire light, coming up off the ground as if gravity had suddenly stopped functioning.
“Bound, bound, bound!” I called. “Thrice said and done! Begone!”
The Titan shrieked in outrage.
My left eardrum exploded. Or maybe imploded. Whatever, it wasn’t there anymore. The world turned into one of those barrel rides where they spin so fast you stick to the wall. Only I didn’t have a wall to lean on.
I had the Spear of fucking Destiny.
THRUM THRUM THRUM THRUM THRUM THRUM THRUM
It was as if I had started some vast and momentous engine.
“Alfred!” I screamed, and kicked the crystal out into the water of the lake.
The moment the bloodied crystal hit the water, there was a sound. A deep, deep sound, like a rumbling in earth miles below us. The surface of Lake Michigan went suddenly still—and then began to jump and vibrate like the indicator bars of God’s biggest stereo.
A light appeared in the water. I don’t mean like a spotlight or a glowing aura. This thing was huge. Hundreds of yards across. And it came through the water at a speed so great that it couldn’t readily be estimated.
But it pushed a bow wave ahead of it. A huge one.
“Oh crap,” I muttered.
In the water, Marcone snapped his head toward the wave, then calmly murmured something. He abruptly zipped through the water as though being pulled by a friendly dolphin and attained the shore.
“Dresden!”
“Go!” I said. “I’ve got to hold her here!”
Marcone gave me a look and said, “Of course you do.” He eyed the incoming wave, gold and green and across the entire horizon. Then he muttered something in a language I didn’t know, answered himself in the same language and a different voice, and then said, in English, “No, I don’t have any gopher wood. No one has any gopher wood. I’m not even sure it exists anymore.” Then he shook his head, looked at the ground, and started muttering and drawing in power.
The wave loomed larger. Ethniu screamed again, but I put my shoulder up against my right ear, so that was fine.
There was a hideous smell in the air. I looked around and saw broken concrete beginning to melt into slurry while Marcone chanted in some harsh-sounding language.
The wave loomed up, millions of tons of water, coming at us fast.
And then the breadth of the wave condensed. Intensified. It built higher and higher in the last hundred yards to shore, focused, piling into a curl a city block wide and towering like a skyscraper.
For a second, the gold-green tower was poised at apogee, graceful, beautiful.
And then eyes opened at the top of the wave. Green, furious, hostile, and implacable eyes.
The wave came down.
And Demonreach came down with it, great stony hands the size of pickup trucks outstretched.
That vast wall of glowing green water crashed down over the Titan, who screamed once more.
And then that huge form, a magical servant of my will, surged through the binding of my will held around the Titan and enfolded her in its vast, implacable form. The Titan fought, but her strength was spent. It was like watching a seal get pulled down by something big and dark and unseen—a desperate struggle with a foregone conclusion. Not because the Titan was strong enough to fight something like Alfred—but because this was what Alfred did. This was the purpose of its creation. Ant lions aren’t all that much bigger or stronger than ants.
But ant lions kill ants. It is what they do.
This was what Alfred did.
I saw Demonreach drag the Titan, screaming and thrashing, into the pitiless waters of Lake Michigan. I felt it when my will prevailed.
THRUM. THRUM. THRUM. THRUM.

Battle Ground Chapter 34, Page 335-343