Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (27 page)

I wondered if I could jump that high. If a house cat could jump to the top of a refrigerator, then I should be able to get up to that window. I actually wanted to put about half the viscera in there, so no need to jump with the whole bag in my mouth. I dropped the bag and unfolded it, getting a fresh whiff of the stuff, which set my stomach growling. How long had it been since I had eaten those sausages? It felt like a decade ago. I gulped down a mouthful of afterbirth before I realized what I was doing. The fats were so sweet and tender that I couldn't even manage a little bit of disgust at myself. My human dignity was going to be completely gone by tomorrow at this rate.

Of course, living to tomorrow was an open question.

I tore off a chunk of the bloody mass off using a paw and my teeth. Careful not to swallow, I charged towards the wall and leapt. To my surprise I sailed up to the window almost effortlessly. I just needed a little push with my back feet to get all the way in. I was pretty proud of myself. Too bad the room's occupant didn't share my joy. To be fair, I probably would be upset too if somebody jumped through my window with their mouth full of dripping meat.

Still, there was no cause to scream that loudly. It hit me like a physical blow as soon as my paws touched the carpet. Humans are so loud. I barely got a look at the figure that leapt from the bed and sprinted out of the room. The door opened to a blindingly lit hallway, and I caught a glimpse of tanned buttocks.

The stealth gig that cats are known for? We'll file that under a learned skill and not a standard feature. I worked as fast as I could, listening to the woman screaming, "
Tiger! There’s a tiger in my room!
" as I smeared the afterbirth all over the room. I wiped it on the walls, smeared it on the mirror and tossed it on the bed before I leapt out the window. The whole business had taken me maybe a minute.

I landed to sound of somebody shouting, “Holy crap!” I checked over my shoulder to see a guy staring at me through a first-floor window, his eyes round as hubcaps. A snarl sent him scrambling deeper into his room. Not waiting for him to come back with a gun or anything, I grabbed my bag of leftovers and booked it for the wall. After the second-story window, an eight-foot-high wall felt like a baby hurdle. Unfortunately I landed right in the path of square headlights. The car rocketed past me, brake lights on and tires squealing. I saw a silhouette with a long muzzle hanging out of the driver-side window and heard excited exclamations to turn around.

I popped back over that wall without a thought and broke into a sprint, dropping my bag of guts. The sound of squealing tires chased my pounding paws. Crap—I'd only spread the scent at one location so far. Would they be able to follow the scent back to Tallow? I dashed from car to car, working around the parking lot to the back. Inside I could still hear the woman screaming hysterically while the guy I had startled came out of the building through a side exit, a rifle in his hand. His head scanned the parking lot as I crept from car to car. He had both hands on his gun but wasn't aiming with it. The wolves screeched into the parking lot as I rounded the corner of the building. I paused to watch what might happen.

"Holy crap!" The guy didn't seem to have much of a vocabulary. He aimed hastily and fired as police sirens began to roar in the distance. The wolves exploded out of the car, each running for cover. I wondered if you needed silver bullets to down a werewolf. Judging by the fact that Pa and Noise weren't in this posse, I guessed that werewolves healed slower than the movies implied.

A howl went up among the group, and Mr. Holy Crap wisely ducked back inside the motel. I had to wonder what that the Veil had shown him at that point. Were the wolves all tigers? Were they rabid dogs who were driving a car? The sirens were approaching with speed. I hoped the prospect of tangling with more humans with guns would convince the pack to leave the hunt for another day.

Either way, I'd wasted too much time. Trying to be as quiet as possible, I slipped around the back of the building. Oddly, the fence here was a little higher and topped with razor wire. Coiling the muscles in my legs, I leapt over it.

An acrid stench hit my nose before my paws hit the ground. Piles of old cars were stacked four high in front of me, along with piles of junk that looked sharp and scary in the moonlight. Not the best of places to wind up, but I was reasonably sure the place was deserted until the growling started.

A dog stood in the shadows of a junk pile. A big one too, although I couldn't really make out details, other than he was large with broad shoulders and had a lot of shiny teeth in his wide mouth. His growl sounded like a saw working through a log, up and down in pitch. Probably related to Pa. I hissed at him, making sure he got a good look at my own fangs, hoping he'd think twice about taking me on. Fighting him was the absolutely last thing I wanted to do at the moment.

The question really was, how fast was he? Could I streak through the scrapyard and jump the gate before those teeth clamped down on my leg or did I have to bounce back over the wall? Either way the bastard would probably bark. I made to sidestep him, and the tension snapped like a chain. He came at me barking like a rapid-fire cannon.
Ruff! Ruff!
With my own yowling growl I slammed a paw into the side of the dog's head, spinning him in midair.

I was running away before he landed, legs bounding for the gate as the pack’s howls erupted behind me. The mutt was right on my tail, literally. Several times I felt his jaws close around it only to slip through his teeth as I zigzagged across the junkyard, doing my best Rudy imitation. A quick vault and the tin roof of the junk shack banged beneath my feet, nearly buckling under my weight. From there a quick hop over the circular razor wire deposited me onto a dark street lined with fences.

I recognized the place, Broad Street, the place in Grantsville where secrets were stored. Now I hoped it would provide a decent place to hide. My chest heaved as I trotted down the road, looking for a likely spot. I would have run, but my ears felt like they might explode from the blood pressure.

It wasn't looking good; the street was lined by high fences topped by barbed wire too high for me to jump. The gates weren't much better. The damn dog was still barking his head off. I hoped that meant the wolves hadn't followed me over the fence. Can wolves jump? I knew they could run.

A pickup truck rolled through the intersection ahead, but I saw it for what it really was—my salvation. A final sprint landed me and my bursting lungs in the back of its bed, my paw narrowly avoiding getting skewered by a fierce-looking rake. The driver didn't seem to have noticed me as I hunkered down next to a tarp-covered lawnmower. I pressed myself against the cool metal of the truck bed and listened to the thundering of my heart, which worked its way into my ears. Frantically I thought over my options. O'Meara was still an hour away. I had to keep the wolves busy and away from the office until then. Two options occurred to me. The trouble was the truck, wherever it was going, was going away from both of those options.

I peered around the lawnmower to look at the man in the cab of the vehicle. He had wide shoulders with a balding head connected via very little neck.

I thought about jumping out and doubling back towards the burbs, but the appearance of square headlights in the distance behind me made that feel like a very bad plan. The pack was barreling through the lights to catch up. At this rate they were going to catch me still a mile from my house. This wasn't going to do at all. I looked around the truck bed in desperation. There, wedged between two cans of paint, lay the brim of a ball cap.

Not wasting any time I ripped the ball cap from the cans with my teeth and carefully hooked my claws through the fabric. Then I sat it on my head, using my paw to hold it there. Carefully, I crept up to the window to look at my oblivious driver. He seemed to be in his own little world, mumbling lyrics to some pop song that didn't jibe very well with his middle-aged body. Slowly I reached a paw inside the cab and extended my claws, carefully hovering them an inch from the back of his hairy neck.

"Hey," I growled.

He startled, and I press my claws against the base of his neck. The big man squeaked.

"Ever wanted to be in an action flick?"

"What?" His eyes went to the rearview mirror and widened.

"
Don’t look at me!
" I snapped. He tore his eyes from the mirror, back to the road ahead of us. "Do you know where Maurice Road is?"

"Yeah . . ."

"Good—you are going to take me there as fast as you can, and then I won't slit your throat. Understand?" I hissed.

He nodded.

"
Now drive!
" I roared in his ear. His foot stomped on the gas, and we bolted through the intersection to the scream of angry horn. The truck's engine roared as we sped down the throughway. Behind us I heard a howl as the pack’s sedan swerved around traffic. Over the hill behind them the scenery flashed with red and blue.

Up ahead a yellow light loomed, but the street was empty. "Keep going!" I urged as my hat flapped once and lifted from my head. Needing one paw on the driver's neck and one to brace against the acceleration, there was nothing I could do to stop it. I felt the air around me shift; had that been the Veil shifting around me? No way to know. The driver's eyes strayed back to the rearview mirror. I showed him my teeth and pricked him a little harder with my claws. His eyes went back to the road. We sped through town, the Caddy's square headlights glared at me from less than two hundred feet away as we approached the turnoff. The driver seemed to dig that the Caddy would hit him if he slowed down, so he jerked back into the left lane and hit the brakes hard before the turn. The turn was so fast that it took all my strength not fall out of my perch as the other vehicle streaked by us, its tires squealing as the scent of burned rubber met my nose.

We were nearly a quarter mile away from the intersection before those square headlights reappeared behind us, the engine roaring like a mechanical lion. Luckily, I didn't have much farther to go. The truck turned the corner onto Maurice Road, my street. My territory. The truck began to slow, and I removed my paw from the driver’s neck. Feeling an impish impulse, I stuck my head into the cab and gave him a cheek lick. He tasted awful, but the look of utter bewilderment was worth it. I bounded out of the cab before he came to a complete stop, just as those headlights rounded the corner.

I waited until the little werewolf, Merlot, jumped out of the window before breaking into a sprint. I knew this neighborhood like the back of my human hand. I'd say paw, but it was a much newer acquaintance. Some of these houses had dogs in them; most of them were small, but not all of them. Dodging through the hedges, I raced into Mrs. Hildy's yard and around back, where I knew Grayson, the family's Great Dane, was probably napping in his deluxe dog house shaped like one of Paris Hilton's mansions. I jumped on top of it, purposely smashing my front paws down hard, then launched myself into the Daltons' yard as the air filled with a confused
wuff-wuff
.

I grinned as Grayson began to growl. I hoped the werewolf would at least be slowed by the territorial Great Dane as I sprinted around the Daltons’ garden and snaked myself through their maze of prize-winning rose bushes. Several growls opposed Grayson's. Guilt pulled at my chest as I tore across the street, but the wolves were probably too focused on me to injure Grayson too badly. I hoped.

Breaching the next garden, I sprinted through a backyard filled with sprinkler mist and scraped myself along the corner of the house before bolting back across the street. The wards across the Archmagus' house shone with threatening energy even before I approached it and brightened with every pounding step. Interlocking plates of runes blocked off even the walkway. I tossed my thoughts against them.
Hey, dragon! You want out?

No response—I did not have time to get into a staring contest with the wards. I veered off towards plan B as a howl shattered the night behind me, vaulted over my own fence and tore into my front yard. I could already hear my neighbors complaining about the length of the grass as I circled around to the back of the house, praying that the bathroom window had not been closed. Half of me desperately hoped that some other brilliant plan would manifest itself if it was.

The bathroom window stood open for all the world to see, and I leapt through. Cat’s grace and tile flooring led to some unfortunate skidding, resulting in my head hitting the cabinet below the sink with a crushing thud. A small grey head popped around the corner of the door, pointing the barrel of a bottle rocket in my general direction as I shook off the blow. "Thomas? Flying fur balls—what the hell!"

"
Werewolves
trying to eat me. Explain later!" I shouted at Rudy. I got up, walked past the bewildered squirrel and stopped dead when I saw the sheer amount of fireworks piled in my bedroom. The squirrel had transformed my bedroom into a miniature munitions factory for a very small but well-armed artillery. Three large firework variety packs stood against my bed, their contents sorted into like piles on the floor. On a blue minitarp about two by two feet lay fireworks in various stages of deconstruction and reassembly. My laptop lay on the edge of it, its screen open to a site entitled Pyro Club.

Rudy grinned up at me, chest puffed out, pride shining in his eyes. "So nice to have a dry space!"