"Joshua Oswald," said the judge, "you have been found guilty of sixteen counts of murder and cooking without a license. I hereby sentence you to death by fructifixion."
"What does that mean?" asked Joshua, his voice strangely unconcerned.
"He doesn't know!" crowed the judge, and the entire court burst into laughter.
"It's a bit like being crucified," he said. "But it also involves..." he hesitated.
"Fruit," added one of the clerks helpfully.
But before Joshua could find out exactly what his execution would consist of, the doors burst open and a grey, winged canine skipped happily into the room.
With a look of pure delight, he drew out an assault rifle and as the husky watched in astonishment, proceeded to mow down the entire court - men, women, children and nuns. Nuns? I didn't order any nuns, he thought.
The canine aimed the gun at Joshua for a moment, before blinking at him with a shocked expression. "Oh! I'm sorry," he said, and at that moment Joshua knew the true meaning of terror.
His death sentence, seeing the court slaughtered before his eyes and being threatened at gunpoint had not frightened him in the least, but the wings on top of the other canid's head chilled him to the bone. Incubus!
"Please don't kill me," he begged, but the 'cubi had already darted away and was now doing a strange dance in the middle of the room. Taking out the assault rifle again, he inscribed an occult glyph upon the ceiling in bullet holes.
"Ta for the dream, mate!" he said and made his out of the court door, clutching a cane and performing a dance routine as he left.
Joshua woke a short while later, still frightened.
Had it only been a dream? He hoped so, but such a dire threat to his soul was not something to take chances with.
Gingerly, he peered under his bed, half-expecting to see the demon lurking in wait for him. Fortunately it was empty, but with a sinking feeling, Joshua realised it hadn't been a dream. On the floor there were some shards of plastic where something had been trodden on, and he was pretty sure he would have remembered doing it if it was him.
Under the bed was a grey primary feather.
"An incubus?" said Kris, slightly puzzled. "Are you sure you weren't dreaming it?"
"Quite sure," Josh replied. "I found one of his feathers."
Kris looked dismayed, and touched his watch twice. "Nilson, Oskar," he said in a rather irritable voice, "You haven't seen an incubus anywhere, have you?"
"No!" they replied, not quite in unison.
"Never mind." he signed off. "Anyway, Joshua. Can you describe him? And exactly what happened?"
"He was a grey canine. A wolf, I think, maybe some kind of fox. He murdered everyone else in my dream and shot some mystical symbol in the ceiling."
"Ah. Well, it sounds like he was just having a laugh. I wouldn't worry about it too much."
"You're joking, right? He's an incubus! He'll have my soul out before you can say 'Uh'!"
"I doubt it," replied Kris, eyeing him curiously. "Did the symbol look like this, by any chance?" He sketched an intricate glyph upon some paper.
"That's the one."
"Good. He's an old friend of mine. What he's doing here I don't know, but he should be pretty harmless unless you attack him. Weird, but harmless.
"Let me know if you see him again."
"But... but how did he get in? You said the security was top-notch!"
"Well, he probably teleported. The base is protected by anti-teleportation wards, but I gave some of my more trustworthy associates a charm to allow them to enter anyway. Now, are you up to meeting Farlane?"
"I think so," said Joshua. He had almost met the aircraft a week or so ago, but he had been forced to take off to investigate after one of the other pack members had reported a UFO.
Since then, Joshua had caught a cold. His reduced metabolism had made him considerably less resistant to disease and Nilson had spent a long time helping him recover, often resorting to magic to augment the husky's crippled immune system.
It was fortunate that Kris had performed surgery upon his nose while they were rebuilding him. A side-effect of this surgery prevented it from being able to run, which would not have been good considering his rather unconventional mode of breathing.
"Greetings Cap'n," said Farlane, saluting with a thin arm that retracted from his belly. The way in which his cockpit had been redesigned gave him two large yellow eyes on the front, lit from the back and with a small black pupil in each that tracked Joshua's movements. They were probably cameras.
This, along with the gloss black paint on the nosecone, gave his face an appearance not dissimilar to that of a cartoon dog.
The eyes were mostly to give the aircraft a face to talk to and expressions to read. In flight, their primary senses were radar and a few other external cameras. Speed, positioning and various other flight parameters were mapped directly into their short-term memory systems.
"Any updates on the intruders?" asked Kris, getting straight to the point. Even if Joshua hadn't been able to make it, he was still due for the report.
"We got a decent look at one," he replied. "Light aircraft. Primitive stuff... propellors, internal combustion engines and meat pilots. No offence intended," he added quickly.
"There are several of them, and my guess is they're making a sweep."
"Oh dear," said Kris, his voice hardening. "That might mean they're looking for us. Or Joshua," he mused, glancing at the husky with an expression of concern. He began pacing.
"Still. They shouldn't be able to find us quite that easily by air, not with the wards I've got."
Farlane had taken something of an interest in Joshua, not least because he had helped design the husky's body. Nonetheless, their meeting was rather brief as the security situation was still rather tense.
"They're rather like wolves," Kris said afterwards. "Apparently their designer used the mental patterns from a labrador retriever - feral canines, I mean. They tend to form packs, and I'm their Alpha."
As they left, Nilson appeared courtesy of Kirian, the latter eating a large pastry. She had not even bothered to defrost it beforehand.
"Dad, I have found another one," he said, with a sombre, yet determined expression upon his face. "I've got to attend it to it very soon. Can you manage without me for a few days?"
"It will be inconvenient. The big day is likely to be next week, assuming the intruders don't force us to reschedule, but I think I can manage. Joshua will have to take over some of your duties for the time being. How soon must you leave?"
"By tonight at the latest. Much longer and it will be too late."
"Okay. Stick around until ten if you can, after that, go for it."
"Thanks Dad," he replied and vanished a few seconds later, leaving a small pile of crumbs in the shape of a smiley face.
"I've got to do something about Kirian," muttered Kris. "I wonder where you can go to get Warp-Aci house-trained?"
"What was all that about?" asked Joshua, staring at the crumb-laden spot where the pair of them had stood.
"Oh, Nilson is a very driven kid," said Kris, ignoring for the moment that his son was over five hundred years old. "He intends to save someone's life. Like me, he believes that life is too precious a thing to waste, so he is off on what you might call a mercy-mission."
Kristofer didn't seem too willing to discuss Nilson's mission in detail, but the husky was still curious about the difference in species between him and his father.
"If Nilson is your son, how come he's a fox?" he asked.
"His mother was a vixen," the wolf replied. "A Being, though. She passed on many centuries ago. As you may know, if a Being and a Creature have a child, the child will usually take the appearance of the Being side of the family."
Kristofer was about to elaborate on the wiles of his youth and the way in which he had fallen for a Being, when he was suddenly interrupted by several things.
Firstly, the lights changed colour to red, followed swiftly by the sound of an alarm. Then a small yet penetrating voice spoke urgently from Kris' wrist.
"Captain, we have a perimeter breach!" barked Farlane.
"What?!?" he yelped, bringing the communicator to his face as someone would glance at a watch. Upon it, the aircraft's face bore a strange expression. It wasn't real - the face was actually rendered by one of the creature's processing cores.
"How many, and how did you miss him?" Kris barked.
"At least one confirmed. He's got some kind of heat shield because he didn't show up at all on the THIALDs! We didn't even know he was there until he entered the building itself. Probably a lone agent, though."
"Right. Alert all units. Bring him in alive if possible, but use all necessary force if he does turn out to be hostile - which I suspect will be the case. And keep your sensors peeled for any more intruders."
"Aye aye, Cap'n!" said the aircraft and signed out.
Suddenly there was a crash and the figure of a ram entered the room. He moved like lightning, most likely with demon reflexes - the horns and leathery wings upon his back were something of a giveaway.
There was an interesting discrepancy though. Most demons would favour magical weapons or attack spells, but this one carried a small yet deadly firearm.
Without saying a word he took aim at Kris, who made a strange gesture with his hands, which seemed to be either cowardice or a pathetic attempt at covering his head.
"No!" shouted Joshua, and pushed the doctor aside. The ram hesitated for only a moment before turning the gun on him instead.
From behind a dark shape sped on all fours, leaping and tearing into the assassin's flesh with razor-sharp talons. But just as the red-eyed creature's steel fangs had closed around the demon's throat, he made one last desperate bid to complete his mission. The trigger clicked home, punching a hole clean through Joshua's doggy skull and ending his life with a sound like a car backfiring.