“That’s what I’m talking about!” Bob hollered as more pages turned.

“They couldn’t have been satyrs,” I mumbled out loud, trying to draw my thoughts into order. My nose hurt like hell and my neck hurt like someplace in the same zip code. That kind of pain wears you down fast, even when you’re a wizard who learned his basics while being violently bombarded with baseballs. “Satyrs have human faces. These things didn’t.”

“Weregoats?” Bob suggested. He flipped another page and kept reading. Bob is a spirit of intellect, and he multitasks better than, well, pretty much anybody. “Or maybe goatweres.”

I stopped for a moment and gave the skull an exasperated look. “I can’t believe I just heard that word.”

“What?” Bob asked brightly. “Weregoats?”

“Weregoats. I’m fairly sure I could have led a perfectly rich and satisfying life even if I hadn’t heard that word or enjoyed the mental images it conjures.”

Bob chortled. “Stars and stones, you’re easy, Harry.”

“Weregoats,” I muttered, and went back to reading. After finishing the fifth book, I went back for another armload. Bob shouted at his book, cheering during what were apparently the love scenes and heckling most of the rest, as if the characters had all been live performers on a stage.

Which would probably tell me something important about Bob, if I were an astute sort of person. After all, Bob himself was, essentially, a spiritual creature created from the energy of thought. The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level—there weren’t any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader’s head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer’s work and skill and the reader’s imagination. Parents, of a sort.

Did Bob, as he read his books and imagined their events, regard those constructed beings as…siblings, of some sort? Peers? Children? Could a being like Bob develop some kind of acquired taste for a family? It was entirely possible. It might explain his constant fascination with fictional subject matter dealing with the origins of a mortal family.

Then again, he might regard the characters in the same way some men do those inflatable sex dolls. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

Good thing I’m not astute.

I found our attackers on the eighth book, about halfway through, complete with notes and sketches.

“Holy crap,” I muttered, sitting up straight.

“Find ’em?” Bob asked.

“Yeah,” I said, and held up the book so he could see the sketch. It was a better match for our goatish attackers than most police sketches of perpetrators. “If the book is right, I just got jumped by gruffs.”

Bob’s romance novel dropped to the surface of the shelf. He made a choking sound. “Um. Did you say gruffs?”

I scowled at him and he began to giggle. The skull rattled against the shelf.

“Gruffs?” He tittered.

“What?” I said, offended.

“As in ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff ’?” The skull howled with laughter. “You just got your ass handed to you by a nursery tale?”