Dresden 11 - funkplanet

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were in bloom, and their scent filled the air. Bees buzzed busily about the bushy plants, and as I stepped
closer to them, the corner of the building cut off the traffic sounds.
It was the only place on the property’s exterior that was not readily visible from most of the rest of the
buildings on the street.
I pressed past the outer branches of the lilacs and found a small and relatively open space in the middle.
Then I waited. Within seconds, there was a buzzing sound, like the wings of a particularly large dragonfly,
and then a tiny winged faerie darted through the lilacs to come to a halt in front of me.
He was simply enormous for a pixie, one of the Wee Folk, and stood no less than a towering twelve
inches high. He looked like an athletically built youth dressed in an odd assortment of armor made from
discarded objects and loose ends. He’d replaced his plastic bottle-cap helmet with one made of most of
the shell of a hollowed-out golf ball. It was too large for his head, but that didn’t seem to concern him.
His cuirass had first seen service as a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and hanging at his hip was what looked like
the blade to a jigsaw, with one end wrapped in string to serve as a grip. Wings like those of a dragonfly
buzzed in a translucent cloud of motion at his back.
The little faerie came to attention in midair, snapped off a crisp salute, and said, “Mission accomplished,
my lord of pizza!”
“That fast?” I asked. It hadn’t been twenty minutes since I’d first summoned him, after we’d gotten
donuts and before we’d gotten into the cab. “Quick work, Toot-toot, even for you.”
The praise seemed to please the little guy immensely. He beamed and buzzed in a couple of quick
circles. “He’s in the building across the street from this one, two buildings toward the lake.”
I grunted, thinking. If I was remembering right, that was another boardinghouse converted into
apartments, like mine. “The white one with green shutters?”
“Yes, that’s where the rapscallion has made his lair!” His hand flashed to his waist and he drew his
saw-toothed sword from its transparent plastic scabbard, scowling fiercely. “Shall I slay him for you, my
lord?”
I very carefully kept the smile off of my face. “I don’t know if things have escalated to that level just yet,”
I said. “How do you know this guy is watching my apartment?”
“Oh, oh! Don’t tell me this one!” Toot jittered back and forth in place, bobbing in excitement. “Because
he has curtains on the windows so you can’t see in, and then there’s a big black plastic box with a really
long nose poking through them and a glass eye on the end of the nose! And he looks at the back of it all
the time, and when he sees someone going into your house, he pushes a button and the box beeps!”
“Camera, huh?” I asked. “Yeah, that probably makes him our snoop.” I squinted up at the summer
sunshine and adjusted the uncomfortably warm leather duster. I wasn’t taking it off, though. There was
too much hostility flying around for that. “How many of your kin are about, Toot?”
“Hundreds!” Toot-toot declared, brandishing his sword. “Thousands!”
I arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been splitting the pizza a thousand ways?”
“Well, lord,” he amended. “Several dozen, at any rate.”
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