Guess they really don’t make them like they used to.
“Avaunt, varlet!” Toot-Toot shrilled, and drew his sword from his side. “Avaunt and begone!”
“Toot,” I said calmly. “Go get Bear. Now.”
Toot flicked a glance around and down at me. “But, my lord!”
I raised my shield bracelet, ready to snap a shield to life or throw a quick strike from the rings as needed. “Now, Major General. That’s an order.”
Toot made a frustrated sound but suddenly turned into a blur, zipping over the back side of the castle and down, leaving a streak of glowing motes of light in his wake.
I squared off on the intruder and said, “All right, then. Who the hell are you?”
The winged being slowly lifted…his, I was somehow sure, head. He had a face like a lion’s, if it had been sculpted by someone who had only a messy drawing and a brief description to go on—it was balanced and attractive and more human-looking than it should have been and not at all correct. A mane of dark grey hair grizzled with strands of metallic silver curled wildly down past his shoulders. He was vaguely humanoid, but his arms were longer than human proportions, and he bent forward at the waist like a gorilla, his weight resting on lion-paw feet and upon the knuckles of his close-fisted hands. He might have been made of warm grey granite, if it had been a fluid, living substance.
His eyes were golden brown and very, very human.
The being rose, rolling his broad, heavily muscled shoulders. He carefully, almost fastidiously, tucked his wings back behind him and against his back, until they hung like a long pack down his spine. He straightened his back and fetched me a bow straight out of the Renaissance, sweeping and overblown, one leg forward.
When he spoke, his voice was deep, resonant, melodic. “Wizard Dresden. I bid you good evening.”
I stared at the heavily muscled, armored creature warily. “Uh-huh. You couldn’t have called ahead?”
The creature tilted his head and blinked its eyes at me. “You invited me, did you not?”
“Hah,” I said. I totally had, when I’d told him to come down. The outer defenses of the castle were based upon the foundation of its threshold, the magical energy field around any home. Given all thepeople living under my roof at the moment, that threshold had been a very, very solid one—and I’d invited the thing right past it. “Hah, heh, hah. I…actually did, didn’t I?”
Dozens of tiny pinpoints of light had risen around the battlements, the Little Folk, pixies and their like, rising from all around the castle in response to the wardlights being lit. Seconds later, there was a flicker of blue light deep in the stone, and it whirled around the roof as if a child had been waving a laser pointer until it settled on the ground to my left.
“Boss!” Bob the Skull cried. “Intruder! Somehow it got through the outer perimeter!”
I glanced down at the light by my feet.
“Yeah,” I said, a bit embarrassed. “I, uh…kind of invited it to come down.”
Bob made a sputtering, flabbergasted sound.
“You,” rumbled the creature, staring hard at Bob. “What is a failed experiment doing here?”
“You!” spat Bob, zipping back and forth in anxious little movements. “Who ordered the uptight anal-retentive burger?”
I frowned down at Bob and then at the creature. “You two have met, I take it.”
“Some small number of years ago,” rumbled the creature.
“It’s been a thousand years at least!” Bob protested. “You’re just jealous ’cause Etienne the Enchanter spent more time on me than you!”
“We were not faulty,” the creature said. Perhaps very, very slightly smug about it.
“Oh, bite me, Basil!” Bob snapped. “Air spirits rule, gargoyles drool!”
Basil lifted a hand toward his leonine mouth, frowning. He had sharp-looking, thorn-shaped claws on the tips of his fingers. “That is not possible.”
“It’s anexpression, you dolt!”
Basil frowned, perplexed. “You do not even have a face.”
“Augh!” Bob cried. “It’s figurative! Not everything is literal!”
