Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (16 page)

I lifted my head. She had been watching me, kneeling on the floor a respectful distance away. Her individual thoughts were guarded, but her own emotions floated out into the air between us. Her anger and defensiveness had faded away; now she watched me with wary hope buoying on a cushion of trepidation.

Taking a deep breath, I closed the distance between us and pressed into her arms, shelving my own resentments. I savored the flash of happiness that washed over me as her arms encircled me, her fingers raking through my fur. "It will be okay," she murmured.

"Promise?" I mumbled.

"No, but I'll do my best." With that she stood and strode towards the front door. I followed close behind.

We both swore a streak of curses into each other's heads once we saw what awaited us in Archibald's driveway.

#

An
owl and a sable sat on the hood of O'Meara's car, and they weren't sunning themselves in the morning's light. While Oric’s eyes were squinting in the bright light, Cornealius's black eyes looked down his nose at us.

"O'Meara! What do you have to say for yourself?" Cornealius shouted.

O’Meara thought to me,
"I have no time to be lectured on proper procedures by Cornealius. Sabrina hasn't found a rule she doesn't like to twist. Oric might be more trouble. Do
not
let him touch you."
She strode towards the figures perched on the Porsche’s hood. "Unless you two want a ride, I suggest you get off my car.”

"Certainly, Inquisitor O'Meara." Oric fixed his narrowed eyes on her. "Just release Thomas to the TAU custody, and we'll be on our way."

"Not happening—we've got a lot of work to do." She made to open the door, and Oric blinked on top of it, wings suddenly outstretched.

"You’re jumping on the claim of someone far more senior than you, O'Meara. That’s dangerous."

"Dangerous is that you are still blocking my car, Oric. Thomas isn't a member of the TAU, and I've got no claim on him." She pointed to her neck where her half of the collar hung. The owl's beak fell open, and his head twisted around to look at me.

"You allowed her to bond you?" he hissed. "Are you insane?"

"Nah," I replied with a smile, "I bonded her. It’s my chain. Little postmortem gift from Archibald."

Cornealius, still on the hood, snorted in laughter. "What did I tell you, Oric? He's simply the worst clinger I've ever seen. I bet she'll even be paying his rent on the place next door."

"It will be a good vantage point from which to watch the estate sale," O'Meara said as she reached for the door handle.

The owl beat his wings for balance as O'Meara jerked open his perch, his head tracking me with a laser-like focus. "You realize your bond is outside the structure of the TAU, Thomas. We won't protect a
scab
!"

"Talk to me after we figure out who ran over the Archmagus," I said, jumping into the passenger seat. I looked at Cornealius, who returned my gaze with something like disappointment. "Uh, my apologies to you and Sabrina, but I'm playing the cards I've been dealt. This will be better in the long run."

He hopped off the car. "We all make choices, young Thomas. If you’re lucky, you'll live to regret this one." He did not look back as he hurried across the street. Once he reached the yellow line, he disappeared in a bright purple flash.

Oric made an inelegant squawk and tumbled backwards as O'Meara slammed her door closed.

Oric called out something about mistakes and dark wizards before O'Meara stamped down on the accelerator and he was drowned out by the roar of the engine.

It was several blocks of distance before I shook the feeling of his eyes on my back.

O'Meara
liked to drive; whatever the outer appearance of the car, the internals were clearly in perfect working order, and the dull red light that shone through the dashboard hinted at modifications that went beyond the physicality of the engine components. As we whipped around the twisting contours of the town's roads, I had to dig my claws into the seat and hunker down. Judging from the state of the upholstery and the numerous claw marks on the dash, I was not the first to do so. At first I wondered where we could be going, but after flying through the same intersection a couple times I realized O'Meara was driving for the sake of driving, enjoying the wind teasing her long hair. Dully I felt her flipping the memory of what we had just seen, particularly my disclosure that the fey collar had been a "gift" from Archibald. Finally as we headed up the on-ramp, she posed the question,
"You were there when he died?"

"Yeah, he actually died in my arms. Called me a good kitty and told me to go find my necklace."
I spun out the memory of the moment out to her. How the Archmagus, disguised as a friendly old gent, had been brutally hit. How the car sent him spinning through the air, spraying blood like a lawn sprinkler from a horror show.

"What about the car?"
she prodded, pushing the memory aside.

"What about it? It’s just the cover of whatever hit him, right? It’s got nothing to do with what actually happened. Assuming that this side of the Veil is the sane side."

She smacked my shoulder between shifting as we screamed around a corner.
"No, the Veil presents a fiction that best fits the reality. It works with the situation at hand."

"Like the coffee cup and the cop?"

"Exactly. It made no sense that a cougar, a wild animal, would hide behind little old me. The cup gave the Veil a clue what it should present you as. If you managed to walk on your hind legs and wear a few bits of clothing you could pass for human."

"Could they understand me if I talked?"

She shook her head.
"Maybe, but you might say something completely different. The Veil actively works to keep the worlds separate. So going back to the car."

I chewed on my tongue as I concentrated. I hadn't been looking at the car much. The old man himself had been burned into my memory in vivid detail, but the car was grey and low, a sedan of some type. The front end, where it struck him, had been squarish. An older car, then more boxy than most. I tried to freeze the image of when he was struck in my mind and rewind backwards, but he had held my attention the entire time. I shook my head to clear it, trying to ignore the prickling feeling that danced along the hackles of my neck. "That’s all I got."

"That’s more than what I started with. Something, or more likely somebody, hit him. Spells tend to translate to bullet holes."

"Can we start at the beginning? Like, who do you suspect?"
My eyes fell on a stack of dictionary-sized books in the well of my seat, a police procedure manual and a psychology textbook.

"That’s the trouble. We have more suspects than I know what to do with, especially with that dragon in the picture. In town, it’s all the folks you've met and few more besides. Sabrina was one of the inquisitors that wrecked Archibald's plan to destroy the council and stayed here to make sure he didn't try and rebuild. After about forty years of damn near nothing, she retired and has gone into politics, angling for a seat on the council. Archibald’s death will open a seat. Jules has blown through a sizable inheritance pursuing technologic magic and would kill for a steady tass source. Despite appearances, Jowls is a terrible liar but good at avoiding topics he doesn’t want to speak of. Then there's Whittaker."
The shiver of fear at the name came through the link and went down my spine!
"He used to work for Archibald, and his familiar is about the size of a sedan."

"Have you seen the body?"

"No,"
she grumped.
"The body's been taken into the city for examination, where I've got absolutely no contacts. That’s where we're going now. With you I can cobble together an illusion or two to get us through the front door at least. But I know what I'm going to see."

"What?"

"Really large teeth marks."

"Ah, I see. But you'll be able to tell what sort of teeth, then?"

"No, but with both you and the body we might be able to scry back to the moment of death—depends on how his personal wards were constructed."
The tone of that thought wasn't hopeful.

O'Meara continued to lay out the facts of the Archmagus' murder as we drove up onto the interstate. To the police the case was a hit-and-run, so the body had been taken to the county coroner's office in Meadville, about thirty minutes east by highway the way I drove. The way O'Meara drove, I kept my eyes on my paws and tried not to think about it. She had contacted them, posing as a friend of Archibald's, but they had not offered her much detail.

The details of his death exhausted, my thoughts drifted back to my own predicament and the consequences. Would Archibald’s method become public?

"Look at it this way," she explained. "He'd been trying to bring you into alignment with your anchor plane for a year, and it didn't happen until his death snap lacerated the planar structure. A death snap is a big deal—mostly it’s used for a revenge strike against whoever dealt the blow. You’re lucky it didn't just slice you in half."

"Your magic makes about as much sense as jalapeño-flavored peanut butter," I muttered back. "It’s fourth-dimensional, and yet you’re talking about overlapping planes."

"If it were simple, then magic would be easy. You actually haven't seen much in terms of real magic. The key is a construction—that’s different. Even a technomagus can do basic constructions. Magic has to involve the anchors."

"And that is?"

"You'll see. We'll do a little in a moment." She pulled off the highway, and we were in a parking lot within a few more minutes of starting and stopping at overburdened traffic lights. We parked and she looked at me. "Okay, we need to do a simple spell that I've done before. We need to imbue this." She pulled a wallet from her purse and opened it with a practiced flip, smiling to herself. It contained a cheap plastic costume badge that wouldn't look out of place on a five-year-old's Halloween costume.

"Imbue it with what? Realism?"

She chuckled. "No, authority. Just a little bit, to give the Veil a bit of a hint." She placed the badge between us in the space between the armrest and the stick shift. Then she reached her arms out towards me, careful that the badge was dead center between her arms. "Now put your head between my hands and form the circle."

"That looks more rectangle-like to me."

She lightly grasped the sides of my head, and I let them bear a bit of my weight. "It’s just a circuit between you and me with the target in the center. Most magi and familiars can do this with just their bonds. Now relax."

"W—" was all I got out before O'Meara's face suddenly shot out into the distance as if she had been pulled backwards down a long tunnel that ended far out of sight. A blue tube of magic filled my vision, undulating and pulsing.
"O'Meara!"
I shouted down the void.

"Right here."
The thought had a slight echo to it, as if she were far away.
"This is anchor space. We're looking down the length of our bond from the point of our anchors. This is the first step of real magic and something that is nearly impossible without the bond. Without each other, there wouldn't be a way back to our plane. Now I want you to take a look outside."

"Outside?"
Outside what? The blueness? How? I felt disembodied, possessing nothing to reorient myself, floating in this strange tunnel. Panic rose as nothing happened when I tried to move my limbs.

"Stop that!"
O'Meara’s thought hit like the slap of an ocean wave.
"You'll break the circuit and give us both splitting headaches! Your body is fine, but out here you have to use an entirely different set of limbs. You have this bond, and it is an extension of us. Now it’s different from the bonds I'm used to. Most bonds start very narrow and grow wider over the years. Fortunately the fey chain cheats a bit, and our bond is much wider. We're looking down a bond that would have taken us twenty years to grow."

"So it limits our magical bandwidth? What’s the good of a thicker bond?"

"It is bandwidth in a way—the thicker the bond, the more energy we can bring back to our own plane. Now extend yourself along the walls and look outside the tunnel."

"Okay."
I took a deep breath and failed, lacking lungs, and clawed back another wave of panic as I looked down that tunnel. I watched the soft undulations along its length, and slowly, ever so slowly, my awareness extended along the walls of the anchor channel. The walls shifted as if in a gentle breeze, and I felt it—that nauseous sensation of an unfamiliar body rolled through, and far away I felt my stomach lurch. Somehow, I managed to swallow it down.

"Thomas?"
O’Meara was concerned.

"Working on it!"
I called back to her.
"Is all magic vomit-inducing the first time? I mean, there is a reason I became a librarian instead of an astronaut!"

"Magic is never easy, Thomas. It affects everyone differently."

"Thank you for being so very specific!"
I had curled myself into the section of the anchor tube and became aware for the first time that I was at the end of the line, with apparent infinity between O'Meara and me. Beyond the closed end of the tube I could feel something, the soft repeated thudding of a heartbeat. I reached out towards it, and my eyes opened to a vibrant forest. Trees clad in white bark thick as my torso shot from the leaf-covered ground. The sunlight streamed down through foliage in beams that danced along with the wind over the dappled brown pelt of a deer as it nibbled at a brave shoot of grass. In the periphery of the vision I caught the sight of a hand, and familiarity hit me like an alarm—it was my hand! The gaze shifted at my urging and focused on my hand, the nails caked with dirt, the knuckles scratched and scabbed, but it was connected to my arm!