“Git,” he confirmed.

“Don’t be such a whiny little git, Dresden,” Ascher said. “I’m hungry.”

The more I could force Nicodemus to bend, the more of his authority would drain away from him. The more someone else defended him, the more he would stockpile. Time to try another angle. “And you aren’t the only thing in here that is,” I said to Ascher, and pointed at the goat pen. “Before I go anywhere else, I want to know what’s been picking off the livestock.”

“Ah,” Nicodemus said. “That.”

“Yeah, that.”

“Does it matter?”

I glowered at him. “It kind of does,” I said. Then, thoughtfully, I raised my voice to carry a little farther. “Whatever big, ugly, stinking, stupid thing you’ve got hanging around in here with us probably doesn’t deserve to be in this company. Given our goal, I don’t see the point in taking along a mindless mound of muscle.”

Grey winced.

I felt it almost at once. The hairs on the back of my neck suddenly started trying to crawl up onto my scalp. Part of me kicked into a genuine watery-bellied fear reaction, something purely instinctive, a message from my primitive hindbrain: A large predator was staring at me with intent.

“Yeah, got your attention now,” I muttered under my breath. I raised my voice to address Nicodemus. “Point is, Grey’s right. It’s time to share some details. So who is the last guy on the crew?”

“I certainly never meant to frighten anyone,” Nicodemus said. “But I suppose I don’t have the same point of view as you children. I can understand your apprehension.”

Bull. He’d known exactly what he was doing, setting out the goats and letting us get the idea in our heads. From the start, he wanted us to know that he had something big and bad and dangerous hiding in reserve.

“If you don’t mind,” Nicodemus said to the room at large, “I think introductions are in order.”

The nape of my neck was trying to slither away and find a good place to hide when the smell hit me first. It was thick and pungent, bestial—the smell of a large animal in the immediate proximity. A few seconds later, the goats started panicking in their pen, running back and forth and bleating to one another in terror.

“What the hell,” Valmont breathed, looking around uneasily.

I didn’t join her in rubbernecking. I was extending my awareness, my wizard’s senses, searching for the subtle vibration of magical energies at work in the air. I’d never been able to throw up a magical veil so good that it could mask odor, but just because I couldn’t do it didn’t mean that it was impossible. The one huge weakness of veiling magic was that it was still magic. If your senses were sharp, and you were reasonably sure a veil was present, you could find that source of magical energy if you looked hard enough.

I found it after a moment’s intense concentration—about ten feet directly behind me.

Iturned kind of casually in my chair, folded my arms, fixed my gaze on the empty space where I’d felt the energy coming from and waited, trying to look bored.

It faded into sight, slowly, an utterly motionless figure. It was human in general shape, but only generally. Muscle covered it in ropy layers and in densities that were too oddly proportioned to be human—so much muscle that you could see its outlines through a thick layer of greyish, straggly hair that covered its body. It was well over nine feet tall. Massive shoulders sloped up to a tree-trunk-sized neck, and its head was shaped strangely as well, sloping up more sharply than a human skull, with a wide forehead and a brow ridge like a mountain crag. Eyes glittered way back in the shadows beneath that brow, glinting like an assassin’s knives from a cave’s mouth. Its features were heavy and brutish, its hands and feet absolutely enormous—and I had met the creature’s like before.

“Stars and stones,” I breathed.

That massive brow gathered, lowered. For a second, I thought there had been distant thunder outside, and then I realized that the nearly subsonic rumbling sound was coming from the thing’s chest.

It was growling.

At me.

I swallowed.

“This,” Nicodemus said into the startled silence, “is the Genoskwa. He, of course, knows you all, having been the first to arrive.”

“Big one, isn’t he,” Binder said, in a very mild voice. “What’s his job?”

“I share Dresden’s concerns about the availability of our target’s vault,” Nicodemus said. “There have, in the past, been rather epic guardians protecting the ways in and out of this particular domain. The Genoskwa has consented to join us in order to serve as a counterweight, should any such protection arise.”

“An ogre?” Ascher asked.

“Not an ogre,” I replied immediately. “He’s one of the Forest People.”

The Genoskwa’s growl might have gotten a little louder. It was so deep that I had a hard time knowing for sure.

“What’s the difference?” Ascher asked.

“I once saw one of the Forest People take on about twenty ghouls in a fair fight,” I said. “It wasn’t even close. If he’d been playing for keeps, none of them would have survived.”

The Genoskwa snorted a breath out through his nose. The sound was . . . simply vile with rage, with broiled, congealed hate.

I held out both of my hands palms up. I’d rarely seen the kind of power that River Shoulders, the Forest Person I’d met several times before, had displayed, physically and otherwise, and it seemed like a really fantastic idea to mend some fences if possible. “Sorry about what I said earlier. I figured Nicodemus had a troll stashed around here or something. Didn’t realize it was one of the Forest People. I’ve done a little business with River Shoulders in the past. Maybe you’ve heard of—”