Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (10 page)

Popping out the bathroom window, I found my neighborhood huddled in silence, a single upstairs light on in a house way down the street. It occurred to me that it had become Tuesday while I had been struggling to write those emails. In a few hours I would be missing a job interview. A job interview I had been attempting to land for months with a job that could have turned things around for me.

Daring fate a little, I wandered down the road to find myself sitting in front of the Archmagus's house. Its white walls glimmered in the moonlight. In fact, the entire house seemed illuminated compared to the others on the block. The more I looked at it, the brighter it appeared to be. Its light crept into the ground and spread into the neighboring yards, mine and the Wilsons’, who had three kids. Had their life been affected by the house as well? Another layer peeled away before my eyes, as if the house were an onion, and it glowed even brighter; veins of energy pulsed the walls and exuded a heat that penetrated my fur. Golden runes danced and flowed.

Dozens of magical tendrils reached towards the house, seemingly from nowhere. The runes slashed out from the house and shredded any of the tendrils that dared come too close, like a swarm of angry piranha/goldfish hybrids.

I see you.
A blinding white light flashed in my vision as the thought exploded in my brain. Bright as Sabrina's arc but focused on me with intent. It didn't just shine—it probed, dug into me and pulled at my thoughts.
You.
An image flashed in my head of myself, pushing carefully through a doggy door. I recognized this thing, the presence; I had felt it on my back in that very room and seen its eyes in the jar. This force was the same but so much more powerful. Why was it so much more now?

You know nothing.
I felt it brush against my mind, showing me a glimpse of something large, something I could not see but that threatened to drown me in itself. I may have whimpered out loud—I certainly did mentally. Sabrina had some interesting moves but she was human, so very human. This thing was far beyond my understanding, larger than any single human's comprehension.

Still I couldn't help but try. "What are you?"

A series of images flickered: a cage, a collar, a yoke, all strained to the point of shattering. Then it flashed me being led on a leash.
Kindred.
The sheer desperation of it clawed at my thoughts. It showed me its bottomless rage at the bars that restrained it, compressed it. Pain as pieces of itself were constantly being torn from its body and dissolved. It shared the pain, just a taste of it.
Help me!
it pleaded, screaming in my head.

Then it was gone.

"Stupid kitten!" something hissed in my ear. Slowly I became aware of something soft tickling my nose, and I sneezed. Instantly light came back into the world. "
Gross!
"

I blinked and found the pretty white cat, Cyndi, glaring down at me, glowing blue faintly.

I recoiled so fast that my mind caught up to my body in midair. I came down with a hiss, every hair on end. "Turn it off!" I growled.

The blue died as she scrambled backwards, hissing and puffing up into an angry fluff ball, the black ring of singed fur on her back snapped back into focus. We both stood there, bearing our fangs at the other. "Ungrateful cub. I just stopped your eyeballs from getting burned out of your head!" she spat.

"Thank you. Now don't muck with my head!" I replied through clenched teeth.

She opened her mouth, closed it and then sighed. "It was only a little bit. Think of it like human makeup."

"No." My tail lashing. "You want to talk, fine—but no blue or . . ." I didn't finish the threat because saying I'd run away as fast as my legs could carry me sounded lame in my head. Had Rudy not intervened I'd be on my way to TAU boot camp by now.

"Oh, fine." Instantly she relaxed and began cleaning a paw. "You better be polite, though. I did just save you. And here's another free tip: don't deep scry the ward made by an Archmagus. They'll scry right back."

"Apparently." That didn't jibe with what happened. It had been more of a conversation. I put my own pointy bits away, but my muscles remained coiled. "What do you want? I thought Oric and you went back to TAU, wherever that is."

She smiled. "Oric can't go far with a passenger, and I'm not without transportation options." She started to slink towards me but stopped with a slight hiss of pain. "We have tiffs every once in a while, but Oric and I always patch it up in the end."

"Your point?" I showed her the points of my claws.

Cyndi scooted backwards. "Jeez, you must be fun at parties. Look, so you’re not quite the marshmallow I took you for. There doesn't need to be hard feelings."

"I'll say this real slow: What. Do. You. Want."

"My cut of your auction. You were born on my turf. We can even go around the TAU. Not everybody is a member of the Merlins."

"Not interested unless you have a way that lets me stay here and resume my old life." Which would be awkward since I had just sent everyone rather curt and vague “good-bye forever” notes.

The white cat rolled her eyes. "I’m so glad I was never human. The thumb fetish you all have is so undignified. Look, Thomas, magic makes almost everything possible. You want to stand on two legs again? It can be done. You want to mutilate those fine paws of yours? It can be done. But it takes work and you can't do it on your own. You need a magus."

"I need my life back.”

She smirked. "I swear you are the most stubborn changeling I have ever encountered. Most changelings jump at the chance for a new life with a fresh start. The Veil typically only allows those who have been totally isolated to transition to the truth. But then you are proving to be anything but typical." She looked back at Archie's house. "Perhaps there are reasons for that. You can feel it, can't you?"

"What?" Did she know about the thing in the wards?

"Archibald founded this little town. There was nothing here before he came; there are no leylines, no tass deposits and no natural crossing points."

"I have no idea what you just said."

"He brought something here—he had a source of magical energy. Nobody has any idea how he did it. Every magus in this cursed town was brought here in some way by him, and all of them hunger for his power."

"The tendrils?"

"Probing spells, trying to get an image of what's inside. Cheaters. It’s futile, though. Any probe strong enough to get through those wards will be traced to the caster. Even half senile Archibald knew how to defend his secrets, even if he forgot to defend himself."

"When’s the auction?"

"You'll be long gone."

"When."

"The new moon. Without an anchor, a magus and a familiar together, those wards will be washed away like sand. And daylight will show what Archibald has been hiding from us."

In my mind it wasn't so much what as who. I looked at the house, careful not to
really
look at it. The memory of bits being ripped away fresh in my mind, I knew exactly where the Archmagus had gotten his power. If the auction happened, whatever was in there would just have a new master and would go on suffering. Maybe Cyndi was right—there was nothing I could do to cling to my old life. But perhaps, just perhaps, there was something I was supposed to do before I started a new one.

I needed to know what was around my neck, what Archie had saddled me with and why. Everyone I talked to wanted me out of here, either out of harm’s way or just because I was a profit in their eyes. Maybe it was time to get some answers.

I stood and started to pad away from Cyndi and the house.

"Where the hell you heading off to?" she called after me.

"Going hunting," I mumbled, and broke into a sprint.

Moving
forward under my own power felt good. If I wanted a different deal I had to find it. Only one person I had met so far might give me a chance. Scrags had said bonds made with the fey collar were easy to break. I could treat that as a feature. O'Meara might be desperate enough to try.

Step one, find her. I knew her scent, a mixture of burned cinnamon and smoke, but there was no hint of it in the night air. Lacking any better plan, I headed for downtown by bushwhacking my way through backyards and woodlots. Suburban houses gave way to the blocky-looking stores and parking lots of what amounted to the town's urban center: mostly a couple of four-lane roads with a scattering of strip malls of various sizes and occupancy rates.

There was also far less cover. Where a road or building wasn't, there was either a metal barrier, cut grass or a drainage ditch. Here cars were on the road, not many but enough to make getting spotted a real possibility. My first thought was to approach the obstacle as if I were playing a stealth game. The second thought was just how many times I tended to get my character killed while playing those games. While in a town like this one folks are more likely to reach for a camera than a gun, if I had any chance of staying here long-term, I probably didn't need to show up in a local wildlife enthusiast blog. I sheltered on the forest's edge and considered. I knew O'Meara’s scent but I also knew her aura. I had actually seen it
through
Sabrina. Could I see it through walls as well? At several points I had been able to "dig" into the structure of wards, both Archibald's and Sabrina's. Would it be possible to look for faint sources of magic by looking more broadly?

The thought appealed. Still, Sabrina's arc had been less bright with a wall or two in between me and it, so solid objects seemed to have some blocking effect on the "light" of magic. I’d have to get up higher.

sville didn't exactly have much in the way of vistas, though. The highest thing in our "downtown" was the plaza's big old sign, which was designed to be visible from the nearby highway. Really it was meant to be looked at rather than from, but I doubted any residents even looked at the sign any more.

According to Angelica, whose family had lived here longer than the dirt beneath my paws apparently, the plaza was the oldest thing in the town. The structure was a short, squat rectangle of stores surrounding a cracked and pitted parking lot. The newest box store, a Kmart, had ripped out its original facade and put in its own bright white and red design, but the rest of the plaza still sported the original wooden pillars supporting a tiled roof over a dimly lit walkway. All the rotting wood paneling was painted the same poop brown. The plaza itself was on top of a rather steep slope, and to enter it your car had to climb a thirty-degree incline. That hill, combined with the three-story tall sign, made it the tallest structure in my suburban town.

And I wanted to climb it. The tip of my tail twitched with the very idea. A pox on the witches and the magi, and screw animal control. I was going to climb up on the top of that sign, perch myself right over that giant red K and find O'Meara, one way or another. Sabrina and Cornealius could be as displeased as they'd like. Maybe ultimately I would be a familiar, but that would happen when I was ready, not as soon as Sabrina and Cornealius could cram me into a crate. I blew a raspberry in their general direction.

I made my way to the plaza through the drainage ditches, grimacing not so much at the sensation of mud clinging to my paws but at the anticipation that if I wasn't vigilant I would find out what that mud tasted like. I recalled reading somewhere that cats have a very poor sense of taste. I really hoped that would prove true. Where the ditches wouldn't conceal me I waited for the coast to clear and dashed. There weren't many cars but there were enough to prove a bit of a challenge.

By the time I reached the plaza, it had become a game despite my earlier misgivings. I crouched down next to the town's busiest intersection, my chest heaving as I sucked in the cool night air. The cars, only about one or two at a time, sat at the intersection like unaware sheep, their shiny windows reflecting the harsh glare of the flickering street lamps. I looked up at my quarry. The sign stood on a sparsely vegetated island, its two timber legs stuck into the ground, hazy in the waning gibbous moonlight. A pair of halogen lights on either side of the sign illuminated its twin faces. They gave off a constant hum like a pair of huge mosquitoes.

I counted the seconds with the twitch of my tail as I waited for the intersection to clear. One car, two, one, zero. My coiled muscles exploded, launching my body up the hill. My feet touched the ground only for minute course corrections as the wind whistled through my whiskers. I impacted the cedar mulch of the planter for a brief moment before ricocheting upwards. Gravity let me go briefly as the side of the sign approached. I slammed my paws into either side of the timber, and a wave of euphoria swept over me as my claws bit deep into the wood. Getting to the top of the sign from there was as easy as walking down the street.

It took a few moments to notice the purr in my throat over the heavy breaths, but it matched my mood. There had been no disconnect this time, no letting the meat in my head handle the details. I had just scaled a three-story sign! Top that, world!

I drew myself up to a sitting position, enjoying the breeze ruffling through my fur, and looked out onto my little town. The streetlights craned over Main Street, illuminating it with alternating dots of light. To either side of the streetlights signs illuminated a myriad of businesses. Some buildings were built in the same drab style as the plaza itself. Nestled among them were newer, brighter rectangular buildings with signs that were lit from within instead of by spotlights trained on them from the ground. Beyond Main Street the darkness swallowed the rest of the town. Only the movement of an occasional car on the road illuminated people straggling home from friends or bars.