cases out Demonreach

"The islands are dangerous," I said. "Long way from any help, and the lake can be awfully mean in the winter. There are stone reefs out there, too, that could gut a boat that came too close. Maybe someone down at city hall figured that the islands would prove less of a temptation to people if everyone thought they were just stories, and invested some effort in removing them from the public record."
"That wouldn't be possible," Molly said.
"It might be," Luccio responded. "The energies concentrated around those islands would tend to make people unconsciously avoid them. If one did not have a firm destination fixed in mind, the vast majority of people in the area would swing around the islands without ever realizing what they were doing."
I grunted. "And if there's that much bad mojo spinning around out there, it would play merry hell with navigational gear. Twenty bucks says that the major flight lanes don't come within five miles of the place." I thumped my finger on the spot and nodded. "It feels right. She's there."
"If she is," Molly asked, "then what do we do about it?"
Luccio tilted her head at me, frowning.
"Captain, I assume you already contacted the Council about getting reinforcements?"
"Yes," she said. "They'll be here as soon as possible-which is about nine hours from now."
"Not fast enough," I said, and narrowed my eyes in thought. "So we call in some favors."
"Favors?" Luccio asked.
"Yeah," I said. "I know a guy with a boat."

Small Favor Chapter 39, Page 326-327


I rushed around setting up details for the next half an hour. Everyone left to get into position except for me, Molly, and Kincaid. And Mouse.
My dog was clearly upset that I wasn't going to be bringing him along, and though he dutifully settled down on the floor near Molly's feet, he looked absolutely miserable.

Small Favor Chapter 40, Page 328


"Lock the door," I told her again, and trudged out into the snow. The lock clicked shut behind me, and Molly watched me slog through the snow to the street. Thomas's military moving van came rumbling through the snow, tires crunching, and I got in.
He turned the heater up a little while I stomped snow off of my shoes.
"So," he said, starting down the street. "What's the plan?"
I told him.
"That is a bad plan," he said.
"There wasn't time for a good one."
He grunted. "November is not a good time to be sailing on Lake Michigan, Harry."
"The aftermath of a nuclear holocaust isn't a good time to be sailing there, either."
Thomas frowned. "You aren't just running your mouth, here, are you? You're serious?"
"It's a worst-case scenario," I said. "But Nicodemus could do it, so we've got to proceed under the presumption that his intentions are in that category. The Denarians want to disrupt civilization, and with the Archive under their control, they could do it. Maybe they'd use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they'd crash the world economy. Maybe they'd turn every program on television into one of those reality shows."
"That's mostly done already, Harry."
"Oh. Well. I've got to believe that the world is worth saving anyway." We traded forced grins. "Regardless of what they do, the potential for Really Bad Things is just too damned high to ignore, and we need all the help we can get."
"Even help from one of those dastardly White Court fiends?" Thomas asked.
"Exactly."
"Good. I was getting tired of dodging Luccio. There's a limited amount of help I can give you if I have to stay out of sight all the time."
"It's necessary. If the Council knew that you and I were related..."
"I know, I know," Thomas said, scowling. "Outcast leper unclean."
I sighed and shook my head. Given that the White Court's modus operandi generally consisted of twisting people's minds around in one of several ways, I didn't dare let anyone on the Council know that Thomas was my friend, let alone my half brother. Everyone would immediately assume the worst-that the White Court had gotten to me and was controlling my head through Thomas. And even if I convinced them that it wasn't the case, it would look suspicious as hell. The Council would demand I demonstrate loyalty, attempt to use Thomas as a spy against the White Court, and in general behave like the pompous, overbearing assholes that they are.
It wasn't easy for either of us to live with-but it wasn't going to change, either.
We got to my apartment and I rushed inside. It was cold. The fire had burned down to nothing in the time I'd been gone. I lifted my hand and murmured under my breath, the spell lighting half a dozen candles at the same time. I grabbed everything I was going to need, waved the candles out again, and hurried back out to Thomas's car.
"You've got Mom's pentacle with you, right?" I asked him. I had a matching pendant on a silver chain around my own neck-which, other than Thomas, was my mother's only tangible legacy.
"Of course," he said. "I'll find you. Where now?"

Small Favor Chapter 40, Page 329-330


I didn't stop to see what happened to the sword I'd just thrown toward Michael. I plunged my hand into my duster and came out with the sawed-off shotgun. I dropped my staff, lifted the gun in both hands, turned my face away, and shouted, "Fire in the hole!" a second before I pulled the trigger.
Once upon a time I'd seen Kincaid use Dragon's Breath rounds against Red Court vampires in a fight at Wrigley Field. It had been impressive as hell watching those shotgun rounds belch out jets of flame forty feet long. Since then I'd done a bit of research on fun things you can fire out of a shotgun, and as it turns out, there's all kinds of interesting stuff you can shoot at people. It's astonishing, really, the creativity that goes into the design of all the different specialized ammunition available on the market today.
My personal favorite: a round known as the Fireball.
It fires out a spray of superheated particles of metal-tiny, tiny bits of metal blazing away at a temperature of over three thousand degrees. They spread out into an enormous cone of fire and light more than two hundred and fifty feet long, brighter and hotter than any fireworks you've ever seen. Forestry services use them to start backfires, and special weapons units use them to create enormous, eye-catching diversions.
I unleashed two Fireball rounds simultaneously, straight up into the air, and for an instant turned that weirdly firelit hilltop as bright as a midsummer noon.
Even with my eyes closed and my face turned away, the world turned bright pink through my eyelids. I heard gunfire from the direction of the cottage, and more from the tree line off to the left, but whatever gunmen Nicodemus had positioned there had been blinded by the flash, and it would take time for their night vision to recover.
That had been half the point of using the Fireball rounds, there in the dark. It wouldn't give us much time to act, no more than a handful of seconds-but a lot can happen in a handful of seconds, if you're willing to use them well.
I dropped the shotgun, grabbed my staff, and charged forward, screaming like a madman.

Small Favor Chapter 43, Page 355


"We both know what my word is worth," Nicodemus said, his voice dry. "Really, Dresden. If we can't trust each other, what's the point in talking at all?"
Heh. Gaining enough time to await the second half of what those Fireballs were supposed to accomplish, that's what.
The twin two-hundred-fifty-foot jets of fire had briefly blinded our enemies, true.
But they'd done something else, too.
Marcone tilted his head to one side for a moment and then murmured, "Does anyone else hear...strings?"
"Ah," I said, and pumped my fist in the air. "Ah-hahahah! Have you ever heard anything so magnificently pompous and overblown in your life?"
Deep, ringing French horns joined the string sections, echoing over the hilltop.
"What is that?" Sanya murmured.
"That," I crowed, "is Wagner, baby!"
Never let it be said that a Chooser of the Slain can't make an entrance.
Miss Gard brought the reconditioned Huey up from the eastern side of the island, flying about a quarter of an inch over the treetops, blasting "The Ride of the Valkyries" from loudspeakers mounted on the chopper's underside. Wind, sleet, and all, still she flew flawlessly through the night, having used the twin jets of the Fireball rounds, visible for miles over the pitch-black lake, to orient herself as to where to arrive. The Huey turned broadside as it rose over the hilltop, music blaring loud enough to shake snow from the treetops. The side door of the chopper was open, revealing Mister Hendricks manning a rotating-barreled minigun fixed to the deck of the helicopter-completely illegally, of course.
But then, I suppose that's really one major advantage to working with criminals. They just don't care about that sort of thing.
The barrels began to spin, and a tongue of flame licked out from the front of the gun. Snow and earth erupted into the air in a long trench in front of the cannon. I risked a peek and saw men clad in dark fatigues leaping for cover as a swath of devastation slewed back and forth across the open hilltop and pounded the mound of stones into a mound of gravel.
"There's our ride!" I said. "Let's go!"
Sanya led the way, firing off more or less random shots at anyone who wasn't already lying flat in an effort to avoid fire from the gun on the helicopter. Some of Nicodemus's troops were crazier than others. Several of them jumped up and tried to come after us. That minigun had been designed to shoot down airplanes. What the rounds left of human bodies was barely recognizable as such.
There was no place for the chopper to land, but a line came down from the other side, lowered by a winch while the aircraft hovered above us. I looked up to see Luccio operating the winch, her face pale, but her eyes glittering with excitement. She was how Gard had been able to know where to look for the signal-I'd given Anastasia a couple of my hairs to use in a tracking spell, and she'd been following me ever since I left to meet Rosanna for the trade.
The line came down with a lift harness attached to it. "Marcone," I shouted over the sound of the rotors and the minigun-which is to say, I was more or less mouthing it exaggeratedly. "You first. That was the deal."

Small Favor Chapter 43, Page 362-364


I screamed my way into it, finding places to stand with my frozen feet, being careful of the leg that Nicodemus had rendered gimpy for me. Then I held up my mother's amulet in my right hand and focused on it, forcing energy into it carefully and slowly. It happened sluggishly, the way everything was happening in the mounting cold, but I was able to draw power up through the stone beneath my feet, and to call silver-blue wizard light from the amulet-brighter and brighter, light that spread out over the waters in a literal beacon that read, clear as day, Here I am.
"T-T-Thomas," I muttered to myself, shivering so hard I could barely stand. "Y-y-you'd b-better b-be c-c-close."
Because Deirdre's men were.
The searchlights oriented on me instantly, and the boats-rubber raft things that would skim right over the reefs-came bouncing toward me over the waves.
It wouldn't have been impossible to sink one of the rafts. But it would have killed every man inside. And those weren't people collaborating with demons for their own dark gain. They were just people, most of whom had been brought up from childhood to serve Nicodemus and company, and who probably thought that they were genuinely doing the right thing. I could kill someone like Nicodemus and sleep peacefully afterward. But I wasn't sure I could live with myself if I sent those rafts down into the lake and condemned the men in them to die. That isn't what magic is for.
More to the point, killing them wouldn't save me. Even if I managed to sink every other raft out there, send every man in them into the water, it wouldn't stop me from freezing to death and drowning. It would just mean that I had a lot of company.
I'm not a Knight. But that doesn't mean I don't draw the line somewhere.
They started shooting from about a hundred yards away, and I raised a shield. It was hard to do in the icy waters, but I raised it and held it, a shimmering quarter-dome of silver light. Bullets smashed against it and skipped off it, sending out little concentric rings of spreading energy as their force was distributed over the shield. Most of the shots never really came anywhere close. Shooting from a moving rubber raft at a hundred yards isn't exactly a recipe for precision marksmanship.
They got closer, and I got colder.
I held the light and the shield.
Please, brother. Don't let me down.
I never heard anything until a wave of cold water hit my shoulder blades and all but knocked me over. Then the heavy chug-chug-chug of the Water Beetle's engines shook the water around me as my brother's battered old ship bellied up dangerously close to the reef, and I turned to find the ship wallowing broadside behind me.
I liked to give Thomas a hard time about the Water Beetle, teasing him that he'd stolen it from the prop room of Jaws. But the fact of the matter was that I didn't know a damned thing about boats, and that I was secretly impressed that he could sail the thing around the lake so blithely.
"Harry!" Murphy called. She came hurrying down the frozen deck, slipping here and there on patches of ice as she did. She slapped a line attached to a harness she wore to the ship's safety railing, and threw the other end of the line to me. "Come on!"
"It's about time you got outside the reef," Thomas complained from the top of the wheelhouse. As I watched, he drew his heavy Desert Eagle from his side, aimed, and loosed a round. A dark form on one of the oncoming rafts let out a cry and fell into the water with a splash.

Small Favor Chapter 45, Page 385-387