Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (18 page)

"You never know with mortals,"
she thought at me, waving her hand dismissively as she walked towards the freezer.
"The Veil keeps us separate. He won't even remember me by this afternoon."

She turned her attention to Archibald on the drawer. There were no claw marks on his withered body. There were no wounds at all. The knees that I had remembered being bent in a way that made you wince were fine—knobby and covered with liver spots but functionally intact.
“I think somebody beat us here, Thomas,”
O’Meara thought.

From where I sat in the hallway, the door to the coroner's office squealed open and the man stepped back out of it. His features contorted into a mask of red rage, and his eyes were filled with an eerie blue light. In his hand, he clutched a black gun.

"Uhhh, O'Meara? This looks like trouble,"
I thought, sending her the image as I backpedaled away from the door as he advanced.

Instantly O'Meara filled with a rush of heat. Deadly intent filled her mind, reacting to the threat with an almost machine-like precision. I could see the spell on the man snap into focus, a twisted knot embedded in his brain, pulsing and swollen. As he took his second step towards the door to the morgue, O'Meara gathered the heat of a tiny sun into her hand. In her mind I saw what it would do to this man when it struck, paired with the barest flicker of remorse his death would trigger.

My backpedaling ceased by his third step, my decision crystallizing by the fourth, and as he raised his leg to kick open the door I leapt. His eyes finally saw me as my jaws clamped down hard on his gun arm. Too hard. I felt his bones snap between my jaws with two distinct
crack
sounds that reverberated through my skull. We hit the floor, and the gun clattered across the tile. The man looked at me, blinking as if he had just woken up from a dream. The blue of the spell was gone from his eyes.

Somewhat sheepishly I let his arm go. It dangled in the middle, and the man looked at it. Staring at it in shock, he raised it up to get a better look. He took a deep breath and started screaming.

"Damn it, Thomas! Why did you do that? I had it in hand!"

"Just get your pictures and let’s get out of here,"
I snapped at her. Her method would have involved a three-inch hole burned through the man's skull.

The mental response to that was something similar to a Charlie Brown
augh!
, mixed with several sexual depictions that I will not repeat.
"Fuck it. Get the coffee cup and run! If you get back to the car without anyone seeing you, the charm on it should protect you. I'll bullshit my way out."
A mental image of several cops shooting a rabid dog made it clear to me what would happen if I didn't skedaddle.

The elevator dinged, indicating it was descending; the guy screamed louder, clutching at his arm. I snatched my coffee cup and bounded back to the stairway we had taken down, only to hear the pounding of footsteps. There was nowhere to hide. Those round doorknobs stared at me like unhelpful eyeballs. I looked back at the screaming man, his gun forgotten as he hunkered next to the wall. No cover, no place to hide. I had to look as nonthreatening as possible.

"Play dead,"
a deep voice suggested.

It was the only idea that I had. I flopped down next to the stairs, held my breath and unfocused my eyes.

Two men pounded from the stairway, and two pairs of worn leather shoes and khaki pants entered my vision.

"Jebus, that’s a big dog!"

"Holy crap! Harvey!" One of the men pounded down the hallway. The other pair of shoes turned away.

"Now!"
O'Meara shouted in my head. I rolled onto my feet and launched myself up the stairway, hit the landing and raced up the rest of the stairs before the cop gave more than a squawk of alarm. An emergency exit at the top of stairwell provided no dilemma, and I slammed into the “EMERGENCY EXIT: ALARM WILL SOUND” sign with both paws. The tinny alarm didn't hit my ears until I was ten feet from the door. I crouched between cars for a moment, and when I heard nobody screaming, jumped back into O'Meara's car.

I collapsed into the back and squeezed myself into the space between the front and back seats, hunkering as low as I could.

"Happy with yourself?"
O'Meara snapped at me, her thought jabbing into my mind like a needle.

I pondered for a moment, licking my chops. A sweet taste clung to my tongue, and I didn't want to think about what that meant.
"If you get back to the car without getting shot at, I'll be happy."
I couldn't see what she was doing; the link was stuffed with angry fog.

"There was no need for you to do that. I had the situation well in hand."

"You were going to kill him."

"And he me."

"He was under a spell or something. He didn't know what he was doing."

"Do you know that, Thomas? Do you know the difference between a spell that enhances his mind and one that controls it? If he had died, then we would not be separated and exposed. Someone is trying to kill us, Thomas, and the best way to do that is to separate a familiar from their magus. We better hope he's the only one."

She sounded reasonable, but something in her statement sat wrong. A sudden desire to be alone seized me, and the link shut with a snap. It was like an involuntary reflex, a muscle that I hadn't known I possessed. But now I knew I could do it again. The closure wasn't total. Her shock and surprise leaked through easily enough, as did mental bangs on the door, which I ignored.

I needed to think. I'd never been someone who'd been able to make up my mind in an instant, and when I did I had tended to avoid conflict and go with the flow. This world, though, this world had turned me on my head, changed my life so drastically that all I could do was dig my heels in and shout “
No!
” at the top of my lungs. Now, I began to see the realities of the world on this side. I idly wondered if perhaps Archibald's attempt to murder the council hadn't been quite as misguided as it sounded. This was no fantasy kingdom of wonder from a children's book full of oddly flavored jellybeans. O'Meara, the most moral magus I had encountered, had been about to kill that man with the barest tinge of guilt and now wanted to lecture me for interfering with that murder.

They all had so much power, but where was the sense of responsibility? O'Meara could have blasted her way out of that police station, turning it into an inferno. I had seen that option in her head along with many others. Killing that man had been her holding back. In her mind, munds were to be protected in abstract; the moment one became a tiny threat she’d put them down like rabid dogs.

I didn't know the history of this world or how it interacted with the history of mine. Oric, Sabrina, all of them had tried to tell me that my rules didn't apply here, that my laws of decency meant nothing. The culture was medieval or perhaps an “enlightened” plutocracy. The wars of Napoleon could be a living memory for their elders. Their social system could be traced back to Genghis Khan for all I knew.

It brought me up against a hard question as I stared at the ripped upholstery of the back of O'Meara's car seat, one I had never had to ask in my old life. Sure I knew there was plenty of injustice in the world, but being who I had been, I had never been forced to stare it in the face before. Now in this new life I could smell the stink of decay on its breath.

A choice needed to be made. I could ignore that stink, swallow it down, make my bed and live a long life. Or I could spit in the face of injustice whenever I had the opportunity and accept the fact that my life was likely to be nasty, brutish and short.

I could see the air shimmer around O'Meara as she came out of the police station and stalked towards the car. I watched her from the front seat of the car. She unleashed a verbal torrent as soon as she popped open the driver-side door. Something about tactics and cops and bullshit. I let it all wash over me. I could hear the worry and fear underneath it all. I can't say it was water off a duck's back either—my back muscles cranked up an unbelievable amount of tension.

After she exhausted herself she looked at me sternly. "Do you understand?" Her eyes bored down on me, mimicking the eyes of a hurt and betrayed parent.

Steeling myself, I took a deep breath and pulled myself up to my full sitting height. Then I looked directly into O'Meara's fiery orbs. "O'Meara"—I paused, gathering my words—"if I ever have to save someone from you again, I'm leaving." As the words left my muzzle, my certainty in them solidified. Crazy as this place was, I found it comforting to find a line I wouldn't cross.

She blinked several times before the she slapped the angry mask over her face again. "Thomas! Don't be stupid! You’re—"

I opened the link and she fell inside my mind. A flash of recognition washed over her face, followed by a flood of terror. Her ruddy skin lost its color as her eyes grew large and watery. "No. Please. You don't know what you’re walking into."

"Tell me I’m unreasonable. That man didn't pose much danger to you at all. You could have disabled him just as easily as you were going to kill him." Doubt flailed around in my head as her eyes lost focus. This had not been what I expected.

"Stop sounding like Rex—you're not him. Nobody else can be him. He's gone for a reason," she said through gritted teeth.

I started to ask who Rex was, but I realized I knew already. Rex was not his name. His name was Sir Rex, never just Rex. The dead dog in armor who loomed large in O'Meara mindscape, presiding over the graveyard of severed links. In a flash I saw him standing in front of a gallery of wizened men and women. A larger man sat in a balcony above the rest, eyes filled with thunder as he stared down at Sir Rex. "Thrice!" he boomed. "Thrice you have made a mockery of the authority of this council! Your actions have stained the record of your magus and have allowed the escape of a dangerous fugitive by your refusal to pursue! There will not be a fourth time!" The gavel came down, and the vision disappeared as the howls of grief rolled across O'Meara’s mind.

"They executed him, Thomas. He refused a direct order from the council because he thought it was wrong. You can't just throw down the gauntlet of principle, Thomas. That isn't how this world works."

I laughed and confusion washed over her. "Look, O'Meara, I’m not charging into the council to declare that I'm imposing a new world order. I’ll have to cross that bridge later. I'm telling you to not kill folk you could disable, all right?"

O'Meara’s hands seized the sides of my head and pulled me up to look into her eyes, which had regained their fire. "Don't try to lie to me! You just showed me the insides of your head! You can't change the magi and their view of mundanes because you want to!"

I smiled slyly and pushed into her. Her arms folded around me as I pressed my face against her chest, releasing a conciliatory purr from my throat. She slumped back into the seat and let her hand play across my neck and shoulders.
"I don't care about the council,”
I thought to her.
“You are the only one I've got over the barrel. I'll just start with you."

She tensed, and for a moment I thought she would push me away but a sigh escaped her instead. "Damn cats. They'll always take advantage of every inch you got." She hugged me tighter.

"I win?" That earned me a noogie.

We
drove back to town. O'Meara made a beeline for our own podunk police station but turned into a small strip mall across the street at the last moment. After parking in back, she held out the coffee cup to me to take. I looked at it and then at the unmarked door we had just parked in front of, less than seven feet from the bumper.

"I've got a more comfortable rig inside, but in daylight you've got to have a muzzle extender. We are not on good terms with the Veil around here."

Had I still possessed eyebrows they would have been raised. "The Veil doesn't like you? How does a wall not like you?"

"Same way it knows when you put a coffee cup on your nose that you’re pretending to be a dog. It’s intelligent, and thanks to a bunch of out-of-towners that made it work really hard a few years ago, it’s been grouchy ever since." She cut off my retort by shoving the coffee cup between my teeth and jumping out of the car. She waited impatiently at the door for me.

I chuffed in annoyance and climbed out over the passenger-side door. And then I paused as a strange scent reached through the cup and hit me in the nose. It had a bit of a maple flavor, coupled with a bitter musk that seemed to dance on the roof of my mouth. Flehmming yielded no more information on the scent, but made it stronger. My brain tongued at it, a familiarity poking at me like a rock in my shoe. Regardless, I saw no source of the scent; nothing in the parking lot stirred besides O'Meara.

"Something wrong?"

"Strange scent around here."

O'Meara joined me in scanning the area with our eyes, but neither of us saw anything.
"I'm an inquisitor. Lots of people come to me when they can't solve their own problems. Strange scents are bound to happen."

I nodded, and then turned and padded up to the door.