Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (20 page)

The heat of the chain around my neck intensified to uncomfortable levels, and in the darkness between us the length of the chain materialized, each link glowing the dull red of hot iron. It floated in the air between us, spiraling on itself like an oddly constructed DNA molecule made of knots of chain. Spindle-thin arms reached out from the smaller pillars and teased at the seething knot with limitless precision. Within a minute the links unraveled and spun the chain into a web around the pillars. The entire system pulsed once and disappeared, leaving just O'Meara and me. The various barriers we had constructed against each other, hers expert and entrenched and my instinctual efforts, both became tiny garden fences against the twin tsunamis that were our minds.

Her shock and surprise crashed over me like a wave. This had never happened before—the connection so wide, so total, that we risked falling into each other and not being able to pull ourselves back. In mutual agreement we held ourselves back from each other, but still each little thought bloomed between us. Neither of us was quite sure whom it came from. The fey chain, normally a smaller mental bandwidth than a long familiarship, had synched perfectly with the ancient apparatus.

"We have to focus on the task,"
we thought. Yet temptation floated beside that thought. Here, like this, she could pour the knowledge of the magi, their history and culture right into me. Or I could watch them unfold in her own mind. Yet bright red dots of “no” flashed over that temptation. Risks were many when learning that way, especially if this bond was to be temporary. Any memories and knowledge shared with me might not be copied from hers, but instead might be links to her own memories and then would be lost when the link was severed. Her shudder became mine, and for a moment recollections of her times being familiarless overwhelmed us.

It took both of our combined wills to claw out of the maelstrom of memories and herd them back into O'Meara’s head.

"To the work,"
we both thought; no temptations fluttered this time. In the physical space O'Meara took the bag she had brought into the circle and upturned it. Dozens of metal trinkets clattered on the pillar before her. She picked up one, a flat copper disk with a hole in the center, and tossed it into the center. Runes bloomed around it, catching it and aligning it so it floated precisely between our planes of vision. At a silent urging from O'Meara's mind we opened our eyes to each other.

The disk had magic of a color I had not seen before; dull green runes interlaced its surface and then beyond it, into those stomach-churning directions that should not be. My unease overflowed and was followed by her assurances, chasing the unease away. O’Meara began,
"Okay, Thomas, this is what I call a static spell. A specific bit of magic that does one thing. This is a scryer; when it’s charged, looking through the hole will reveal what had happened in a place in the past. Were you trained, we could do a similar spell in about ten seconds. Most magi don't bother with statics for such minor spells, but my history is a bit irregular so I have foci that run the gamut of simple to complex. And I've used up nearly all of them in the last year. We need to recharge them. It will be just like the badge back in the police station."

It was so, except not. The energies compared to that simple spell were massive, and the pressures that pulled on me as I served as O'Meara’s anchor as she shuttled essence into the trinkets were an order of magnitude greater. Yet the circle had provided the tools to handle it all. There were now mental handholds to cling to in the tunnel, with slots that perfectly fitted my claws. We refueled three talismans, the scrying ring, a cloaking charm and sword that seemed to consist of at least six separate talismans woven into its parts. O'Meara did not explain the purposes of each, only that they were not something she hoped she had to activate. As we finished stuffing one side of the blade with the essence of the absence of heat, a crack appeared in the side of our universe.

"O'Meara, I've got it all ready for you." A voice bounced out of the brightness.

We gave a deep mental wince and then twisted something somehow that I had not even perceived before. The expansive feeling, the scaffolding that supported the new existence between us, fell away in a single instant. Everything about our unseen bodies snapped back to their former constraints. It was as if someone had snapped rubber bands into both my eardrums as I heard a savage popping sound. I swore mentally and vocally. There had to be a less painful way to unplug.

O'Meara herself groaned, "No . . ." Her voice was a rasp. "Well, depends, do you prefer to rip a Band-Aid off or peel it off slowly?" Her own body lay sprawled out across the dark void of the circle across from me, hands clutching at her head. Our headaches soon began to ease as the blur of light slowly resolved into a worried-looking Ixey.

"That . . . looks worse than usual for circle break, Mistress," she observed as O'Meara pulled herself to her feet, waving her off.

"It will pass. Turns out the thing is designed for fey chains, so we got a double whammy."

Ixey winced in sympathy. "I'm sorry I interrupted. The paperwork is ready."

O'Meara nodded as she braced herself against the cubical wall. "We . . . actually finished. We'll look at it in the office. Come on, Thomas." She gestured towards me as she lurched towards the entryway.

I followed, a bit steadier on my feet, mostly because I had four instead of two.

#

O'Meara's office had about as much charm as a dive bar and smelled similarly. A windowless room lit by a single overhead fluorescent bulb that whined as it dimly illuminated the dull metal sheen of a bank of fourteen file cabinets across from the door. The furniture had been placed irrespective of actually being able to open most of the cabinets. I assumed many of them had not been opened in years. A rather worn-looking deluxe-sized pet bed sat at the foot of the cabinets, and a massive desk that would not have been out of place in front of a bank CEO, had it been in better condition, rounded out the small space. It left only about a foot of space for O'Meara to squeeze her large frame around to get to the plush office chair on the far side of the desk. In front of the desk were two mismatched chairs, a wooden swivel chair from the same era as the desk and a more modern plastic and metal stacking job in the vein of the cubicles outside.

I wondered if O'Meara had trained in a similar manner to Archibald because a staggering assortment of papers were pinned to the wall. Maps were in the majority, but that might have been because they were the largest. Second were the handwritten notes, and third were small photographs of odd-looking people. It appeared that if you could decipher the handwriting, a tight cursive scrawl, one might be able to determine O'Meara’s entire case history. I could clearly see the areas of the office she used; the rest lay under a carpet of thick dust that made my fur itch.

"Yep," O'Meara said after I had taken it all in, projecting a mental shrug at my assessment. "It’s a hole but it’s my hole, and therefore it’s your hole too."

"Would it kill you to make it less of a hole?" I said, eyeing a dust bunny that had been uprooted by the closing of the door.

"Probably not," she said noncommittally as she dug around in her desk. "Aha!" From the depth of a drawer she pulled out a metal T-shaped bar about three-quarters of a foot long with the T-bit rubberized. The stem had a tennis ball stuck on the bottom of it. She slammed it on the table and grinned at me. "Now here's a good muzzle extender for you. Will keep the coffee out of your snout and your drool off the cup.” I remained unmoved, images of bacteria dancing on the rubber gripped in my brain. O'Meara rolled her eyes. "Gods, you’re prissy, Thomas. I can wash it before we leave. It’s just a bit of dust. It won't kill you.”

The door flew open before I could ready a retort. Ixey rode into the office on what appeared to be a Chinese dragon entirely composed of paper. Its head was folded from variety of white and yellow paper, with a spiral of Post-it notes as horns. The body was composed of single stack of paper that had to be nine feet long. Ixey sat on its back cross-legged, with her metal gecko riding on top of her own head. The whole thing glowed faintly with a greenish tint. She rode straight up to O'Meara's desk. "I had to call in a few favors, but here we go. Ready?"

O'Meara gave the briefest of nods.

"Alrighty then!" Ixey touched the head of the dragon, and it unfolded into a stack of papers about an inch thick. "These are formal requests for information regarding the killing of Archmagus Archibald." O'Meara pointed at the inbox on her desk, and the paper floated into it. A much taller stack of papers drew itself from the body of the dragon. "These are formal requests for your resignation from various parties."

"Are any signed by the Grand Inquisitor?"

The stack briefly separated into a fan of papers stretching across the room. They circled around Ixey, and she scanned each through narrowed eyes. "No." The papers immediately reformed into their stack.

"Well, then." O'Meara grabbed the stack with both hands, and, after a burst of light, nothing but ash settled on her desk. In this manner Ixey and O'Meara went through the paper work over the next hour. Ixey presented a stack of papers, which O'Meara would either burn, put into her inbox for later or sign with the tip of a flaming fingernail. The show entranced me for the first five minutes, but the novelty soon wore off. Signing paper work with fireworks was still signing paper work. Had I the hands or telekinetic powers that Ixey apparently possessed, I could have helped. Well, helped in the same manner of a five-year-old helping his mother, but at least that would have been more interesting. Not knowing Latin or whatever language the magi used for official communication would make it even more difficult. That would be something else I had to learn. Bored, I snuck back out into the main office, wondering if the TAU gave crash courses in Latin, and had a mental image of a motley collection of animals sitting at desks while Rudy attempted to set everyone's tails on fire.

The sea of paper in the main room had disappeared, and I popped my head into Ixey's double-wide and into a collision of two worlds. On the right sat a computer workstation with no less than four wide-screen monitors hovering over the workspace, held up by spindly metal arms. Next to them, a bank of police scanners clung to the wall, emitting bursts of chatter. The lot was hooked up to a monolith-sized computer tower that had been detailed with a cascading set of pink and blue neon lights. I had to admire that for a bit. It had been a long time since I had been able to afford a custom rig like that. The other side of the cubicle, within a push of the rolling chair, was a workstation several centuries out of date. The surface was covered with quills, and scrolls were scattered about. In the center of it was a huge open book, twice the size of ye olde Khatt family bible, although not nearly as thick—a ledger of some sort, as the pages consisted of tiny writing, organized in columns. As I padded closer a small box next to the book lit up bright purple and silently produced a sheet of paper, which floated down into a waiting basket placed on the floor below it. A magic fax?

I stared at it for a moment, and slowly a myriad array of interlocking
patterns began to come into focus; a complex weave of runes bustled beneath the rock's surface amid a constantly changing web of purple links. Blinking the vision away, I sighed. Magic appeared to be nothing like what I had encountered in novels and movies, no words of power or memorization of spells from a spell book. Magic appeared to be as complex as electronics paired with interdimensional physics. O'Meara had a talent of fire and Sabrina electricity, and that’s great if you need to kill somebody, but apparently doing something constructive with magic required a PhD. Score one for the wizened image of Tolkien's Gandalf bent over stacks of books and equipment. Even if I had been awakened as a human instead of a cougar, I doubted that I might make it out of apprenticeship. Magic smelled a lot like math, which had never been my strong suit.

After about an hour O'Meara and Ixey emerged from the office, both looking a bit drained, and I feeling both rested and hungry after a quick nap on a spare desk. Ixey's lizard, the bejeweled gecko, watched me stretch and yawn with his expressionless eyes. The yawn had caused both women to pause.

"Thomas, that’s really not polite to do that!"
O'Meara scolded me mentally.

It took me a moment to figure out what she was talking about. She followed up with a rather exaggerated mental picture of my large and pointy chompers. I finished my yawn and licked my chops, keeping my thoughts noncommittal.

"Cats," O'Meara muttered and gave her head a quick shake. "Thomas, get your muzzle extender—we’re going to see an old . . .
friend
of mine."

At
the top of the hill sat a worn-looking two-story house. It bore a rainbow of brown. The stained wooden siding had a sort of amber hue to it, the chipped paint of the trim around the windows more a deep chocolate. The little brick walkway leading around the side of the double garage ended at a rickety, faded brown porch. The door on the porch sported an island of metallic grey in the middle of it, where a huge patch of paint had peeled off.

O'Meara let the engine idle for moment, her eyes scanning first the various windows of the house and then the woods that encircled the lot. The house sat in the middle of said lot, on the very tippy top of the hill, and seemed content to be glumly silent as we sat in the driveway. I started to sit up from my hiding place, but O'Meara urged me to stay where I was, despite my protesting muscles.