Bob the Lion

Butters shot an aghast look over his shoulder at me, and stumbled away, fetching up against the northernmost of the two lion statues outside the Art Institute. He darted a look at the statue, licked his lips, and hissed something beneath his breath.
Orange light flooded out of the inner folds of his coat and promptly seeped into the bronze of the statue, confirming how he was managing all of these tricks.
Bob.
Bob the Skull was running around loose, like some kind of bloody superhero sidekick.
Bob had been the one powering the skateboard. Bob had guided the ropes that had flown from Butters’s wrist. Bob had manipulated Butters’s coat to bring him in to a safe landing.
Damn. Bob was kind of awesome.
It only stood to reason. Though Bob was a spirit, he had always been able to manipulate physical objects—and if he had mostly only done so with fairly small, fairly light things in the past, like romance novels or his own skull, there was no reason that I knew that he might not have tried something larger. I’d always assumed he simply lacked the motivation.
But I’d rarely removed Bob from my lab for a reason. To be exercising that kind of control over the spirit, Butters had to be in possession of Bob’s skull, like, right now. He was actually carrying the skull around, probably in that backpack, and that meant that Bob’s allegiance was as fragile as Butters’s ability to remain in physical possession of the skull itself. If someone like Nicodemus got hold of the skull, with Bob’s centuries of experience and knowledge, I shuddered to think what my old friend might be used to accomplish.
Of course, that concern abruptly dwindled to a secondary issue as I realized what Butters had commanded the spirit to do.
Orange firelight-sparks suddenly erupted from the eyes of the enormous bronze lion. Then, moving exactly as if it had been a living beast, the thing turned its head toward me, crouched, and let out an enormous and authentically leonine roar.
“Oh, crap,” I said.
“Hold them off!” Butters shouted.
The lion roared again.
“Dammit, Butters,” I snarled under my breath, “I’m helping!”
And then several tons of living bronze predator, guided by the intelligence and will of the most powerful spirit of intellect I had ever encountered, flung itself directly at my head.


Skin Game Chapter 27, Page 219-220