Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (17 page)

A growl and I was forcefully shoved back, the vision dissipating instantly.
"No! That's my body!"
But the end remained opaque, closed off.

"Did you find yourself?
” O'Meara called to me, the anchor space seeming to shake with her amusement.

"He's got my body!"

"Well, you probably have his, so it’s only fair. And no, you can't trade it back. You'd have to induce another planar alignment, and that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

"What if he dies?"

"He's on a spiritual plane of existence; he can't die until you do. It’s complex, and I might have forgotten how it works."
A brief flash of images revealed a grizzled old man standing in front of a chalkboard with brain-bending diagrams flitting over its surface.
"Now this is what you need to do. Between the plane where your anchor is and mine lie an infinite number of other planes. At my end is a plane of elemental fire; you've got a spiritual plane that looks a bit similar to some sort of North America. This is the very basic foundation of magic, finding something in a plane and bringing it back to our world. In fact I can do this instinctively with fire; if you were a magus, you could practice enough to invite entities from your anchor plane back to this one. With a lot of work you could even bring them physically. What the bond allows us to do is serve as an anchor point for each other as we search through other planes and pull from those as well. We are looking for a very specific plane, the plane that embodies the concept of authority."

As she explained, I slid myself further up the tunnel, feeling the winds around it shift. These walls were more solid. While the anchor point had invited me in, the intermediate planes clearly resented my intrusion. I had to force my way through a wall of clay, easy initially but harder the deeper you go. Slowly, through the haze of blue energy, shapes started to come into focus. Trees, thinner and willowy, insect-like shapes darting among them. I reeled back when something fluttered in front of my viewpoint.
"Yack! What the hell."

"The planes are infinite and their occupants are variable."

"And I gotta find one single plane? A needle in an infinite haystack?"

"No, you'll act as my anchor once I find the plane I'm looking for. Honestly this is a part where being a cat isn't preferable. Cats are slow searchers since it takes you time to peer through the anchor space."

"How do you do it, then? I thought humans were blind to magic."

"Here we can see as well as you can, but I prefer to use scent."

"Scent? How the hell do you do that?"

"You’ve seen that familiars pick up little talents from their masters?"

"Like Oric's teleport?"

"Yeah. It works both ways. I can smell magic. In our reality it’s very minor, just enough to sniff out strong magics, and I can't really tell what type. But here, beyond biology and the Veil, I can smell the worlds beyond these walls. Aaannndd found it!"

"Congratulations."

"Hold onto where you are."

"Uh, okay?"
Tentatively I reached into the blue around me, pulling on the walls with experimental tugs of my mind. It held.

"I'm going to start pulling."

I gave a mental meep.

Ever
wonder what a mouse would feel if you sucked him up with a vacuum cleaner? I don't—it’s as if you stepped out into a hurricane completely naked. The force ripped me away from the wall and sent me careening down the tube. Instinctively, I flailed at the sides, trying to find purchase but the walls felt slick, composed of Jell-O that parted beneath my tendrils of thought as they whipped by faster and faster. A whiteness grew below me, a light that I knew would be an oncoming locomotive if I hit it at this speed. My panic grew as it loomed closer and closer. I screamed as something in my mind twisted and tore free. With a sudden jolt, I stopped dead. Claws—that was the only way to describe them—stuck into the walls around me. Before I had imagined reaching out to the tube with hands, but now the sensations returning to me were those of thick pads pressed against the hollow trunk of a tree, claws biting into the wood as I felt O'Meara’s weight on me, trying to drag me downward.
"Took you long enough,"
she sniggered.

I mentally sputtered, looking at the brightness. It suddenly seemed much farther away.

"Oh, don't bother—you weren't in any real danger. You just would have slammed into your body. Why do you think I had you start all the way back at your anchor?"

I growled,
"I think some more advanced warning is in order before trying to kill me, O'Meara!"
The pull was intensifying, and I sunk my claws in harder to compensate.

"I've got no time to teach you gently, Thomas. This is a very easy cast as I knew exactly where I was going. A good pair can do a spell like this in less than a second."

"That doesn't seem very likely."

A dull impact reverberated through the walls, and the force pulling at my guts ceased.
"Done—come back,"
O'Meara called.

With an inner sigh, I unhooked myself and willed myself back into that distant light. My eyes blinked open to O'Meara’s smirk. She cut off any complaint by scratching the tender muscles at the base of my left ear. "Good job," she said, backing the praise with a warm current of emotions, her hand rhythmically moving down my neck.

"Damn it, I'm not a dog,"
I protested, even as my body shifted to push my head into her lap, allowing her hand to travel further down my spine. "I'm trying to keep this professional. I don't work for praise."

"I happen to believe that reducing a two-hundred-pound monster like you to a purring mass of tawny pudding is just something that has to be done every once in a while." Her hands changed from petting to scratching, first behind my ears and then slowly chasing the tension down my neck. My resistance crumbled as a purr rose from my throat like the growl of a hot rod.

"There we are!"
O'Meara mentally cheered.
"Is that so bad?"

It was not bad at all. Rather it felt like the deepest, most pleasurable massage of my entire life. And I really didn't want it stopped as I twisted myself to let her fingers to get a good angle on my ears.

Sleep came and went, like the passing of an ocean tide. I woke to the sound of tweeting from below and a heartbeat above. No, that was backwards, I determined after a few moments, gravity making itself known by pressing something hard into my left kidney. The heart beat pulsed beneath me, pushing through the pillow of her soft breast on which my head rested, one of her hands settled on my chest, her fingers curled into the thick fur there. My mind prodded hers and felt a kiss of peace from her quiet mind. The howling of her demons that I had not realized I had been able to hear before now was silent.

A vague feeling of guilt crept over me as my thoughts drifted to the last time I had woken up against another heart. I had woken to find myself cradled in Angelica's lap in the dead of night, the TV buzzing softly, its screen empty of the movie that we had been watching. I found her watching me with that weary sad smile that she always got a few days before she left. If she was part of this crazy world, well, I couldn't blame her for not wanting to tell me. And now there I was curled up with a woman I still didn't entirely trust or really know, even though we shared a telepathic connection. Despite that, my entire body felt more relaxed than it had been since that moment, a week and a half ago.

I stretched the best I could without moving my contoured body much. Extending my front legs and displaying my claws sent the birds in the overhanging tree into a spate of furious chirping. O'Meara stirred beneath me and muttered a curse as I felt her mind burst to frantic consciousness with a flare of heat and fear. Her hand tensed on my chest and then relaxed as her mind placed and catalogued her surroundings along with vague memories of what brought us to this situation.

"If this were a movie from the eighties, which of us would be smoking the cigarette?" I asked as she slid that barrier across her thought processes, damping my awareness of her thoughts to mere echoes of annoyance and a deep satisfaction.

She made a half disgusted noise. "It’s nothing like that! You fell asleep and pinned me to my seat," she protested as she scratched the underside of my chin affectionately. "Come on—get off me, mister overgrown house cat. We still have work to do. We're just lucky that the do-not-notice charm on this car is still working or we'd be surrounded by animal control, desperate to save me from such a fierce monster."

A spark of intuition leapt at me. "You haven't slept since Archie died, have you?"

"No. I probably needed the nap."

Reluctantly I curled up off her, wincing as my muscles twitched and my spine crackled. It took a few more moments to get ourselves sorted out. O'Meara had me look at the badge to make sure the spell on it was still there. It emitted a faint white glow to my eyes. I refused to use a coffee cup that smelled like a breeding pit for fuzzy ooze as a "muzzle extender," so we made a quick trip detour to McDicks for a breakfast of ten sausage McMuffins. Biscuits tasted awful, but meat and cheese I still found guiltily delicious. The nice lady at the takeout window saw me as we departed, and her eyeballs nearly ejected from her face when I smiled at her.

Nobody gave me a second glance when I walked into the police station with O'Meara, but I sure felt silly with that coffee cup over my nose. At least this one smelled fresher. The desk sergeant buzzed us through with barely a glance, and I followed O'Meara’s confident footsteps through the hallways and down into the basement. It was as if witches in red dresses with a sword on their hips and apex predators at their sides were an everyday thing.

In the basement the polished hardwood floors of the old police station gave way to cracked checkered tile that greedily sucked at my body heat through my paws. The walls of whitewashed cinder block construction framed heavy metal doors all equipped with smooth round doorknobs—doorknobs I couldn't open unless I covered my paws in peanut butter first. They all had rectangular signs declaring what lay beyond them in faded red lettering: storage, custodial closet, boiler room and then, right next to an elevator, County Coroner Office. Across the hall the door read “Morgue.”

O'Meara knocked, waited and knocked again. No one answered. Neither of us was surprised. Ducsbury wasn't the nicest of cities, but it didn't have enough population to result in a particularly busy coroner. O'Meara turned to the morgue, knocked three times and then started to fish for something in her purse.

We both gave a bit of a start when a muffled voice called through the door. "Come in, Sergeant!"

O'Meara swore mentally as she slapped a friendly smile on her face.
"Should have done this last night!"

I didn't disagree as I shifted to stand closer to her, trying to look as dog-like as possible. Nobody had given me a glance on the way in, but the potential for discovery still left me feeling naked. Maybe furless.

"You'll have to stay here in the hallway, Thomas. Whatever dog people think you are, it’s probably not allowed in the morgue. I'll see if I can get rid of him for a bit."
O'Meara stepped forward and pressed the door open as she opened her eyes to me.

A grey-haired man looked up from a corpse lying on a stainless steel table. His fuzzy brow furrowed as his eyes flicked up and down O'Meara before settling on her face. "Sorry, I was expecting someone else. I'm afraid I've got my hands a bit full at the moment.” He gestured with his hands, the purple nitrile gloves smeared with blood from the young man in front of him.

O'Meara flashed him her fake badge. "Lieutenant O'Meara. Sorry, I should have called. I'm from the agency. I just need to ID a hit-and-run victim from two days ago. Name is Archibald Frances."

The man scowled at the badge and glanced down at his patient and back at the badge. "Fine, let me drag him out of the freezer. Do you need me to lay him out?" He gestured at the second steel table in the room; the metal shined like a mirror.

O'Meara drew a cell phone from her purse. "No, just need a quick picture to try to find next of kin and a sample for DNA tests."

The man's scowl deepened, but he left his post at the end of the corpse and walked to the back of the room, where a half dozen square doors stood on a mat steel wall. He jerked the handle of one of the doors and swung it open. Grabbing the drawer within, he pulled it so hard that it reached the extent of its travel with a loud bang and scooted the corpse on its surface forward several inches. Then he fixed O'Meara with a baleful glare. "Anything else, Lieutenant?"

O'Meara eyed him warily. "Did I do something wrong?"

"Course not. You can't do anything wrong with that badge. Excuse me, I could use some coffee." He strode for the door so fast that O'Meara had to hurry to step out of the way. He crossed the hallway and disappeared into his office across the way without seeing me.

O'Meara inspected her badge.
"I've never gotten a reaction like that before! Is he seeing me as some sort of national security agency?"

"Maybe he got in trouble the last time you did this?"