Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (14 page)

I didn't feel fine. Nausea coiled around my chest as a crawling sensation crept over my skin, like ants swarming through my fur. A whimper escaped me as the infernal cube continued to fold into an impossible shape. Through one pair of eyes I wouldn't see enough of it to matter, but through two angles the hideous geometry invaded my mind. There I could see it extend in these new, impossible directions as it folded into its final place. A key to a fourth-dimensional lock. O'Meara thrust it into the doorway and twisted it in that gut-wrenching new direction. The key caught dozens of the golden threads and passed through others. The structure of the ward bowed inwards, resulting in a click of the lock opening.

As the door swung open I vomited on the floor with a very catlike
hurk
!

"Oh, Lord! Forgot about that," O'Meara exclaimed as my empty stomach pushed vile-tasting acid up through my throat. Then she was at my side, stroking me as my body, desperate to cleanse itself of the wrongness, voided itself of everything else. "Oh, shit, oh, shit!" O'Meara cried in horror as my body continued to rebel.

"And you got a clue why TAU training is pretty damn important!" Scrags's voice called down to us.

Apparently
my misery was enough to rouse Scrags from his depression. The tiny cat grinned at me with a sadistic glint to his eye as O'Meara bathed my quaking body in the pink tub she had dragged me to. I felt like a helpless invalid as she washed my own mess out of my fur. Apparently the TAU taught their new members several mental exercises to cope with the sight of their first spell. As an actual familiar, they would have to endure peering into complex spells for hours on end. O'Meara was all praise as she rinsed me, but I could feel her worry underneath. Sooner or later I'd need to endure a much longer session, probably sooner if I tasted O'Meara's worry right.

"Wait until she asks you to search between the anchors," Scrags taunted. "If you thought a quick key assembly was disorienting, then pulling your awareness up through the planes should break your mind in half."

"He'll be fine, Scrags. First time gets to almost everyone. And he's been tossed into the deep end of the pool," O'Meara said, preventing me from attempting a retort of my own by dumping a bucket of water over my head. "There—that's better," I heard her say after I shook myself out. Wetness in my fur wasn't precisely a pleasant feeling; already I felt the water cooling on my back. But considering the alternative method of cleaning all that filth off myself, I would have endured ten more baths to get myself clean. At a gesture from O'Meara I hopped out of the tub and looked around for a towel. My soggy fur hung on my skin like a lead vest from the dental office. Oddly, O'Meara seemed to have forgotten the towels. I was about to ask when she flared with the orange red of her aura, dazzling bright.

"O'Meara?" was all I got out before a wave of intense heat hit me, followed by the hiss of steam. The heat lifted before I could protest. I felt her smile before I made it out in the steam.

"There! All dry! Now back to work." She ruffled my head. I looked down at myself and found what she said to be true. All the moisture had been blasted from my fur, violently.

I heard Scrags snicker behind me. "You look like you've been hit by lightning!" It was true, and it was going to take an awful lot of grooming to fix. At least I didn't have to worry about what I had stepped in.

Once we got to the Archmagus’ office, it turned out to be a good thing I had something to do because I quickly gave up trying to help O'Meara sort through the mess. It consisted of old file cabinets stuffed with parchments, along with crystalline boxes that hummed like radios, all apparently organized like the aging magus's mind. The old man wrote most of his correspondences in a Latinate scrawl that made reading it impossible. Through us both O'Meara had two sets of eyes, but she'd never mastered reading two things at once and I couldn’t help with the Latin. So as she meticulously searched for and cataloged all the Archmagus's correspondences, I let my instinct guide my fur back into place while my mind pondered the implications that some "magic" apparently worked with fourth-dimensional space. Why hadn't anybody told me that? That was interesting, despite the mere memory of that twisted key making the bile rise in my throat.

I tried sleeping but quickly got bored with that. I could see a picture of the Archimagus' life slowly coming together in O'Meara's head, but it was still fuzzy and incomplete. Many questions itched the tip of my tongue now. One part was clear: the Archmagus had alluded to something he called his last journey and had been amassing a very large amount of tass for something. I peered over O’Meara’s mental do-not-disturb sign and watched her refine that picture detail by excruciating detail. Overall I felt useless and bored, a feeling that I had grown accustomed to before the tail. Six months of job searching will do that. But here, watching O'Meara work, there was little to distract myself with.

I found myself pacing around the office like a big cat in a small zoo, noting that compared to the hallway, the office seemed far more solid. O'Meara’s memory of the shattering hallway still echoed. It was a reminder that despite seeing into her mind, she remained a stranger.

I wandered into the hallway and looked down it. It stretched out into the distance, disappearing into a sort of hazy golden light. A haze that hadn't been there before. I stared at the haze, and something within shifted and I felt a presence brush my mind that beckoned me closer. Checking over my shoulder revealed nothing—no eyes on me. Scrags had apparently gone back to the old man's chair to mope angrily. I mentally glanced down my link, but O'Meara’s total concentration remained on the notes. Nobody paid me any attention. Cautiously I crept down the hallway, slinking against the left wall. As I approached the mist swirled through the closest door, paying no mind to the solidity of the barrier. I peered at the door itself. No glow surfaced within the wood grain this time. Besides which, it was open just a smidge.

A tentative push of my paw and the door swung open. The golden mist dissipated as the door stirred the air, revealing a room a bit bigger than the office and almost entirely bare of furniture. A single wooden chair sat in front of a window with what appeared to be a pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod. A faint purplish glow surrounded them. A laptop cushion was propped against the legs of the chair. Those three things were the sum total of the furniture in the room, making it feel huge and empty by comparison. If the room had existed as part of the actual house, it had probably been intended as a bedroom.

Something rustled. My gaze jerked to the sound, and the fluttering of paper met my eyes. It took a moment to realize that the room was not, as I first assumed, painted white. Nearly the entire surface of the wall had been covered with sheets of papers held in place with shiny metal thumbtacks.

Squinting in the dim light, I took a closer look at some of the papers near the doorway. There were drawings there, sketched out in faint pencil marks. Arcane symbols and notes littered the double-wide pages. Then, clear as day, in the middle of it all and rendered with an artistic clarity that knocked my breath away, was my human face looking up at me.

Disbelieving, I looked at the pages above it, and to the sides. I forced myself up onto my hind legs to examine more even further out of reach. A cold feeling crept along my spine as I looked. I was featured on every single page, dead center. A multitude of poses, expressions and poses. Some naked, some clothed. While central to each page, my image was not the only one recognizable. Animals shared the page with me, drawn in the exact same expressions and poses as me. Their portraits were connected to mine via branching lines, symbols sprouting from them like the leaves of a tree. I couldn't read the Latin, but in the top left-hand corner of each page sat a date. Without hands I couldn't rip the pages down and reorganize them, so instead I cast about the room, trying to follow the sheets in chronological order, assembling a picture in my head.

The very earliest pages were dated to about a year ago, six months after I had moved in next door. Everything had been going well. My face smiled from those pages, surrounded by a web of symbols and no animals. I had been working as a librarian at the fledgling community college in town for about a year at that point. Though not the greatest job in the world, it was what I had come to this town to do. I had finally started meeting friends at that point, finding bars I had liked hanging out in and setting down some roots away from my family. The largest symbol that loomed near my portrait was a stylized L. A month later, on the date I met Angelica, a large W appeared in the grid of symbols, surrounded by a phalanx of V's. It hung off my smiling portrait like a weight, the other symbols pushing away from it. As we dated the W drew closer and some of the smaller symbols disappeared, replaced by animals: a donkey, a cat and an armadillo. The day she moved in with me, the big W was touching my portrait and everything else had drifted away.

I remembered that first wild week. I called in sick, citing a feverish flu, and it was certainly fevered the way we spent our time together. To this day I can hardly imagine a more perfect way to spend time. Whether we were playing video games, eating, making love or simply talking, we did it full-contact style. The laughter of that week still echoed every time I thought of Angelica.

The symbols continued to chart my life. The W moved closer or further away with the tide of our relationship. With her frequent mysterious absences, we had some epic fights. Eventually I accepted it because she was all I had. And by that time it had become true. Jobless, depressed and withdrawn, feuding with my parents over petty stuff—it was all there in the symbols. At times they seemed to predict turns well before they happened. A cross was drawn over the L five days before I got laid off. On the day I did, it disappeared. Had the Archmagus simply seen it coming somehow? Or had he caused it? The animals bubbled up from the bottom of the pages again: cats, a badger, an armadillo, a donkey. Any animal that had a reputation for being stubborn rotated out among the bottom of the page.

When the cougar appeared after two months of grinding through the job search, it was accompanied by several lines of excitedly scrawled text, marked by two exclamation points. The cross-outs became more aggressive after that, but also less predictable. The hairs on my neck prickled as if feeling an invisible hand tugging at my life. New L symbols appeared on the days I had managed to score interviews and were slashed out of existence. Angelica's strange V's started to stick to my portrait, crowding out the few connections besides her as the cougar swelled into dominance among the animals. It was the only one not drawn with a sort of cage around it. My happy face became more and more despondent, and the features of the cougar crept in and out within the last month. The symbol of my parents finally disappeared after a huge fight we had over the phone. They had wanted me to come back home, but that would have meant leaving Angelica and this town. Her W hung on me like anchor, the V's engulfing me like an amoeba.

My entire body itched with the feeling of insects crawling through my fur. My body was suddenly unfamiliar and alien once again.

This had not been chance. This had not been a simple case of unfortunate geography, as everyone had said. This had been a direct manipulation of my life. And somehow, some way, Angelica had been the anchor that had pulled me into this fucked-up world, where everything I had achieved in mine, as meager as it was, had been lost. Had I been on a path before he had taken an interest? And where had Angelica disappeared to for two weeks out of every month? She had told me work, but what if it was something else? Was she also a part of this world? If so, where the hell was she?

I peered through the binoculars, and a growl tumbled around my throat. Unsurprisingly I saw into my own bedroom. With a flash of anger I swatted the tripod and the binoculars hit the ground with an unsatisfying soft thud on the ancient wall-to-wall carpet. Worse, this man, the seemingly friendly old gentleman, had pulled my life apart.

And he was beyond justice. Dead in an attack that suddenly seemed deserved. How much had Angelica known about this? Nobody had mentioned her.

I sat there, fuming, so lost in futile rage that I didn't notice the return of the golden haze around me until it spoke.

Cat.
The voice exploded in my head. Instantly familiar, powerful and full of pain.
Help me. Before they find me again.

"Stay back!" I told it, remembering the pain it had inflicted the last time I had encountered it. "You hurt me." Thousands of eyes opened around me, swirling, all composed of golden light, flitting in and out of sight.

Did not mean! Did not mean to!
The force of the creature's mind sent a crack of pain across the landscape of my mind.
We are same, both wronged, both trapped in this hate hate HATED world. It hurts. He grinds, he chops off pieces. I scream in darkness! So long so long.

"Calm down!"
I mentally shouted back, struggling for room to think.
"How can I help you? And how do I know you won't just hurt me afterwards?"

Promise, won't stay, won't stay a moment, won't hurt, will love, please.
An image formed of a statue, a man on a horse in a civil war uniform. I recognized it. I knew where it was. The presence raced around my head like an excited baby elephant.
Destroy, break, please!

"Thomas? Who—"
O'Meara's thought called across the link.