senses spirit bear

He was staring down the dark shadows of a nearby alley. And he was breathing hard and fast, making high, whimpering sounds in his throat.
The cloying, greasy feel of black magic washed over my wizard’s senses a second later, emanating from the alley in a wave of nauseating psychic bile.
Maybe a hundred feet down the alley, something was coming toward us.
At first, I saw a couple of gleaming eyes—pretty standard, really. There was pretty much always something with gleaming eyes out in the dark. But as it passed beneath a light over a doorway, the light bulb exploded in a shower of sparks that came cascading down for several seconds.
The sparks seemed to delineate the faint shape of a massive body, passing through it entirely, but showing a translucent outline—quadruped, hunched shoulders, ponderously moving limbs. A bear? A freaking bear. Its gait shifted as it passed through the sparks, changing to a bear’s galumphing run.
The next light exploded in more sparks, this time crashing down over the bear’s massive head—and they physically bounced off the thing’s skull, clearly visible through the silvery, translucent flesh.
I recognized the skull—the one from the bookshelf in Talvi Inverno’s office.
And its glowing eyes were focused solely upon Tripp Gregory.
“Oh crap,” I muttered. “An otso.”


The Law: A Dresden Files Novella Chapter 13, Page 82-83