Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (12 page)

I sneezed and then flehmmed. Getting even more of
him
in my mouth.

He pranced, his body jiggling like an overjoyed feline Santa Claus. "Ah ha! There you are! Now you know me. Stand back up. It’s only polite."

I glanced up at O'Meara for help, but she only smirked down at me, clearly trying to restrain a chuckle. Jules seemed busy with something on the counter. Not seeing any support around, I picked myself up and, feeling my ears burn, lifted my tail to let the smaller cat have a sniff. He made a show of rubbing up against my legs as he did so.

"There, not so bad then. A first feline ‘who the hell are you.’ Trust me—it’s much easier to put a name to scent than a face!" His eyes flicked up past my eyes, and he gave a little mew of delight. "Oh, isn’t that so precious! He's an ear blusher! That’s adorable!" He turned back to Jules. "Can we keep him, boss?
Plweese
!"

The man named Jules rubbed his temples as if he had a migraine. "No, I don't have the tass for another familiar and he's claimed already."

"Tisk. Hey! I wasn't going to mention his collar. It’s hidden so well!"

"Collar?" O'Meara exclaimed, suddenly choking. "
You
chose a house already?"

I suddenly felt the weight of the hidden chain around my neck. I would have preferred to talk to O'Meara about it privately. "What's a house?"

"It’s a family of magi." She batted away my question and bored into me with her eyes. "Where did you get a collar?"

"Uh, it wasn't my idea." I wasn't quite sure whether I wanted to admit that I had been given it posthumously by Archie the Archmagus, if by given you meant attacked by.

"Mrrrowl." Jowls was staring up at my neck, eyes narrowed in concentration. "Woah, now there's a classic. I've never seen one like that. Somebody's really old-fashioned. He send a contract with it?"

My head snapped around to Jowls so fast I felt my neck twinge. "Contract?"

"Let me see this," O'Meara said, and I felt her fingers rake through my fur, tugging on the chain. A disorientation swept through me, as the chain writhed around my neck. O'Meara cried out as a wave of heat washed over me.

"Terms will be decided."
A voice exploded from everywhere and nowhere. The shop shattered into multicolor shards before being whisked away by an unfelt wind, leaving me in black nothingness. With O'Meara. I floated away from her, being pulled by an unseen hand on my neck until we both faced each other. Her eyes glittered with panic and disbelief as she tugged at the heavy chain around her own neck. The chain stretched out into the void and came back to encircle my own neck. I tried to speak, but my mouth refused to move; my body could but only feebly, as if my limbs had been drained of all strength.

"Your terms."
The voice pried into my mind and spilled my thoughts into the space between us—all the crazy things that my mind had been thinking of asking in return for bonding me. A stack of money, two hundred dollars a day, my thumbs, an alarm clock with scissors instead of a bell, a time limit on the bond, a textbook labeled magic, my human face, and sillier things, whims. The presence between us sorted them out, and they faded back in the ether.

Then it was her turn. The void cracked open her mind like an egg, and her thoughts joined mine in front of us. They were very simple. To find out who killed the Archmagus and restore her reputation. Where mine were limiting factors, the fear of commitment coloring each, hers were colored red with need, with a desperation that had not allowed her to sleep for a week.

A negotiation happened, strangely independent of either of us. The thing in the void, the chain itself, flickered between each of us. Items and our desires flickered in and out of existence, comparing what each of us believed possible.

"The terms are set,"
the collar announced as the thoughts crystallized between us. We would be partners for three months or until the killer of Archibald was brought to justice. I her familiar, she my magus. As I was inexperienced, I would follow her lead and instructions whenever possible. She would pay my rent and write my checks to maintain my human identity for as long as I worked for her. There was a possibility for renewal.

It sounded fair to me. I knew the outside world would protest. Before me, worry and happiness warred on O'Meara’s face.

"The terms are agreed."

I saw myself. I watched my large amber eyes blink in surprise. I looked towards me and saw both myself and O'Meara. Her face shone with disbelief and happiness, yet I could feel an undercurrent of fear flowing between us. I watched my own body as well; my eyes just seemed to be getter wider as the long tawny tail twitched uncertainly. It was far longer than I had realized, nearly the length of my body. That feeling of unfamiliarity came back, hovering over me. Slowly my angle lowered, and I watched as O'Meara's hand slowly extended both towards me and away at the same time. Two separate perspectives, I finally realized, as the fingers tentatively threaded through the fur on my head and curled around the base of my right ear.

The finger scratched, and my world tilted yet again. The sensation of fur being rubbed and the finger rubbing sent shivers through us both. Oh, the sensation was wonderful, the connection between us total. She was I and I was she. I leaned into her touch and let it go, a soft chirp of my own as a sigh escaped her and an overwhelming sense of sheer relief flowed through us both. With an aggressive purr I pushed my head into hands, craving that touch, a physical connection to combine with the sudden mental one. Her scent filled my lungs; burned cinnamon lost its ashy undertone. Her/my arms encircled me, and we squeezed ourselves as I felt tears flow down our smooth cheeks and dampen our fur on the top of our head.

Both our eyes closed, and that brought even more duality to the sensations. Without the distraction of the visual we slipped even closer together, our hearts synched for a brief moment like a tender kiss more intimate than anything I'd ever experienced before. It held there, one, two, three beats, and we dove into each other. Images floated to the surface: her raging disappointment at Rudy's flakiness, her true intention to follow the letter of procedure.

I pushed past me and pushed deeper within her, piercing her surface thoughts, and almost recoiled as a hurricane of rage and pain assaulted me with winds of despair. I tasted whiskey and cigarettes in my mouth as knives bit into my flesh. Still darker things wriggled below, held down beneath a mighty paw. A dog's paw. A Great Dane clad in a knight's armor towered over the poisonous memories, his eyes dead, and his muzzle a grimace of pain. Love glowed from every fiber of his being as grief and sadness burrowed through his fur like fleas. A broken collar hung from his neck, bleeding like a severed limb. The severed link. And there were others; five more dead links sprouted in O'Meara's mind like a circle of trees taken by lumberjacks. Emotions clung to each, some a little love, others hate and resentment. They were mere shadows: a cat with mad eyes, a bat with wings of flame, a glass-eyed rat, a horse who wore a top hat and a fluffy dog with an underbite. All ghosts looked up to the armored dog, two of them with dead eyes, all with envy. In the middle of them all was me, a sapling in the dead grove, a single leaf on the link's branch. Hope clung to that link, but it warred with thick dread. Her mind was in a desperate struggle against fears and anxieties that I had stirred up by binding to her. But every fear that rose into the air was cast to ground, by a blade of molten iron wielded by fiery figures. A beautiful dance of rage, pain and hope, with me in the center.

I felt a tug and a burning in my heart, like the air in my own lungs had gone missing. The pang touched us both, and like two lovers reluctantly coming up for air, we slowly began to pull back from each other. We sorted first our thoughts and then our senses back into our own bodies. Finally after what seemed like hours. I was once again a cougar in the arms of a woman I had met twenty-four hours ago. But we were no longer strangers.

"
Oooh
! That's so
adorable
!" Jowls' squee dragged me back to reality. I blinked slowly to find an orangey blob bouncing through my blurry vision, out of one field of view and into another. The other was much deeper and richer in color, making my original viewpoint washed out–looking.

"Oh," I said in a mumble. "I'm sort of color-blind."

Jowls giggled. "Wait until you see how horribly they see at night! The poor things!"

O'Meara stirred against me, her fingers finding my ears and scratching them. The sensation, sort of like a concentrated back rub, added to the hazy bliss that enfolded my head, and I leaned into it. Touch—it felt as if it had been ages since I had been touched in such a loving way. Despite the storms that raged in her, O'Meara meant safety. I could feel that, know it.

"Would you two please stop acting like a couple of bliss junkies and get off my floor?" Jules said and the scratches stopped, as a flash of embarrassment lapped at my mind like an incoming tide from O'Meara.

"This wasn't my intention to do this." O'Meara words slurred slightly as she fought to find our—no, her feet.

"But you'll take binding a highly sought-after familiar who's claimed by an elder while he is confused and scared."

"I didn't. I wouldn't," O'Meara sputtered, off balance, her fears and duty churning inside her.

Jowls came to the rescue. "He bound her! That chain he's got. It went whip! Right around her neck. You saw it!"

Jules glowered at his familiar. "It could have been that." He looked back at us. "If they get out of my store and leave me alone."

O'Meara grinned. "That’s okay. I got other leads to follow now. But don't leave town."

"We didn't do it, O'Meara. Archmagus Archibald had been starting to support technomagery. You'd be better off looking at the traditionalists." Jules’s scowl deepened. O'Meara didn't seem to make many friends.

I'm about as popular as you would expect for a cop in a town full of criminals.
O'Meara's voice rang clear in my head, so loud I winced.
Sorry.
Her voice quieted. She continued in the real world. "That would be easier if you were willing to actually help me. I'll—" She stopped herself, laying her hand on the top of my head. "We'll be back."

I nodded in agreement. "Bye, Jowls." In my own vision he was still an orangey blob, but to O'Meara’s eyes he grinned excitedly.

"Next time I'll show you how to groom yourself—your coat's all astray."

With that we turned and walked out. Well, I more stumbled out, leaning on O'Meara. The brief taste of her two legs had brought the unfamiliarity of my own body crashing back down on me, and I kept forgetting to step with my front legs as well as my hind ones. O'Meara walked us into the darkened parking lot to one of the two cars present. A beat-up old Porsche, its red paint faded where rust had not gained a foothold. Numerous dents and dings pockmarked the metal body like scars from an unknown disease. O’Meara had to push me up into the passenger’s seat, my lack of coordination combining with some doubt that the vehicle would actually support my weight. O'Meara teased me for my hesitance as she shut the door.

"Never in a million years," O'Meara said as she fell into the low seat, disbelief evident both in her voice and mind. I didn't say anything as she scratched my ears. She chuckled. "You are so hazed."

"Whaaa?" I managed to ask. All I wanted to do was curl up and sleep. I lay down on my side and put my head in her lap. The car's stick shift poked at my ribs.

"You’re kind of friendly for a strictly business familiarship, you know," she protested as she gave me the touch I craved, raking her fingers through my fur.

A thread of thought ran through my head, scolding me for acting like an overgrown housecat. I had wanted a bond that would secure my independence and now, having crossed the threshold, all I wanted was a warm body to curl up against. Not that that sort of behavior was precisely unprecedented on my part. A long day or tiring confrontation led to hours on the couch curled against Angelica.

"Sorry kid, but that’s not going to happen again."

"Whaa?" I then grimaced, realizing she had probably seen everything in my head. Curiously, all I got from her was emotional impressions.

She chuckled. "Some magi and their familiars are in each other’s heads so much they become one being with two bodies. That’s dangerous for many reasons. Most construct a sort of privacy barrier in their minds to shield their partners from every single thought." Flashes of magi and familiars supplemented the voice; an owl was engulfed by a seething darkness as a man shouted a warning, only to keel over, his eyes dead.

The image made me shudder, and I pulled away from her psychically and physically. The world around me became a little clearer, but the haze remained. I didn't realize we were moving until I felt the wind start to thread around my ears.

I started to ask where we were going, but I found the image of our destination in my head before I could give voice to the question.

It wasn't far, but I slept the rest of the way anyway.

I
woke to a hand running over my head.
"Come on, kid, we've got a lot of work to do."
O'Meara's voice slid through my mind, pulling me from the clinging tendrils of sleep. I opened my eyes, with a familiar scent in my nostrils, and knew that the blurry images of a grey something or other was indeed the house of the Archmagus.