Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (28 page)

Two grey shadows shot into the backyard, and suddenly there was no more time for quips. Cursing myself for not turning off the lights, I dove out the door to the bedroom, kicking it closed behind me. The kitchen would the best place to spring an ambush. The fridge stood right by the entrance, and I jumped on top of it as I heard the sharp crack of glass.

"Hey, isn't this—" the mother’s wolf’s voice growled.

"Doesn’t matter." Eagle cut her off. "I'm getting me a new rug tonight."

My eyes caught a shadow over the window beside the front door. Thin curtains blocked me from seeing Merlot directly and he from seeing me on my perch, but I knew he was there. The big bay window across from me in the dining nook had no such curtain, and the moonlight streamed in through it. Of course, they would pick this moment, when I really needed them to be stupid, to be smart enough to get me in a pincher Merlot was the weak link—the only werewolf I outweighed, but I didn't like my odds in the experience dimension.

"What the hell is all this? Gunpowder?" The voice of the wolf mama—Tallow had said her name was Kia—came from the other room.

"Who cares . . ." A long sniff. "He's here," Eagle replied, his voice a pure animal growl. I hoped none of Tallow's pups would inherit their father's brainpower as I jumped from the fridge to crouch behind the kitchen island. My new location was far from ideal for ambushing monsters coming from the hallway, but at least Captain Runt wouldn't be able to see me.

The bedroom door slammed open, and I winced at the thought of the crack the door knob probably made in the sheetrock wall. My lips peeled from my fangs as I hunkered down, panic fluttering up into my stomach. This wasn't working. Damn wolves were being far too cautious. I had hoped to be able to fight them on my own turf, but now I was just trapped. "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty," Eagle taunted.

I was as good as treed. A sharp pop came from my right as Merlot punched through the glass next to the door. No good options. I ran through the least bad options, and they all came back to the runt. The omega had no backup. If I got through him, then . . . Well, at least I'd have a bit more room to maneuver. I heard the deadbolt slide open on the front door. No more time for planning. I threw myself over the counter, my body launching towards the door like a rocket. I'm sure Merlot felt an explosion of pain as my teeth punctured his hand. He gave a sharp yip of pain before I tugged downwards, impaling his arm on the breaking glass. The little were-mutt filled my ears with a blood-curdling scream. The ground below me pulsed. Instinctively I turned, only to see white teeth streak past my vision before Eagle slammed into me, jaws clamping down on my neck. A sliding sensation and my neck popped free, thanks to loose skin. A twist and my mouth found something meaty, a leg or arm—either way it had hot blood in it.

Gravity left me, the world whirled as something white zoomed large and I slapped into it, paws first. The fridge. Gravity found me and slammed me, back first, into the floor. A mass of black fur hurled herself on top of me, teeth snapping in my face, her breath stinking of rotten meat. My hind claw found her belly flesh and dug in, but it didn't deter her. She bore down on me with all her weight, and it took all my strength to keep her monstrous muzzle off my face. I felt my claws catch as her hands closed around my throat. Something tore beneath my claws, and my foot found soft wetness, but pain didn't even flicker into those murderous eyes.

Just as my vision began to darken, something ripped her off my claws. Those narrowed eyes widened in shock as she flew backward into my living room and crashed onto the back edge of my sofa. A loop of intestines streamed after her like a bloody streamer. Eagle stepped in front of her, his muzzle a grin with far too many teeth. I stayed on my back and made sure that he saw the gauntlet of claws he'd have to go through to get to my throat. Dogs rolling on their backs might be submission, but for us cats, it’s more a statement of “I will fuck you up.” Kia hadn't counted on the damage they could do.

Eagle did not look like he was about to make the same mistake. He pulled Angelica's meat cleaver from the rack by the door. Once again I realized that I had miscalculated Eagle’s intelligence. He'd just saved his mum's life and wasn't about to make her mistake. He stood there, growling loudly, but I could still hear the click of claws on the other side of the island. Merlot was coming around the other side. Still pinchered.

"Oh, by the way, there were three pups." The words came out more of a hiss than the casual tone I had intended. It’s tough to talk while baring your fangs at the same time.

Eagle flinched and then his growl deepened; the handle on the knife made a cracking sound as it snapped in his fist. "Where is she? Tell me!" he barked.

"Heeeeyaa moonbag!!" a high-pitched voice screamed from down the hallway. Eagle's eyes flicked to the side and did a double take as a battery of bottle rockets whistled out of the bedroom towards his head. He almost ducked them but was a fraction of a second too late. One of the rockets caught on his pointed ear and buried itself in the ear canal, fire spurting from the shaft, making the tip of the ear sizzle. Eagle’s hand had wrapped around the stick jutting from his ear when the firework exploded into a flash of brilliant green.

Moments later, my third eyelids flicked back from my vision and revealed the aftermath. Eagle stood there, but all outward signs of his ear had disappeared. The other had been chopped down to half-mast. His hand opened, and the fur crackled as he touched the gory hole that had been his ear. Pain, shock, fear, panic, anger and finally rage flash through his eyes, focused not on me, I assumed, but on the tiny grey figure I imagined standing in the middle of the hallway, holding a bottle-like bazooka. A small "Oh, crap," drifted from the hallway as Eagle lowered himself into a linebacker's charge stance, growling dangerously.

A shadow stole over me, and I found Merlot standing not a foot from me, peeking out from around the corner of the kitchen island, his mouth hanging open. He was completely focused on his pack brother, not looking at me at all. I couldn't see his eyes through the angle of his muzzle. A BBQ fork hung limply in his left hand, the other arm dangled useless as blood dripped down his fingertips.

Eagle charged into a cacophony of snapping cracks before the entire house exploded with ear-deafening pops. A swarm of bottle rockets screamed out of the hallway in his wake. I upgraded my mental assumption of what Eagle had seen of Rudy. Not a lone shoulder-mounted bottle rocket, but an entire battery of homemade fireworks. Twin howls of pain and panic went up as multicolored flames filled the air within my home. I found myself on my feet without remembering getting up as a grey blur streaked out of the doorway and towards me.

"
GO, GO, GO, GO!
" Rudy screamed at me as he impacted my side. Dumbly, I obeyed, trotting out the front door and into the now very awake neighborhood.

Every light on the street was on. People's silhouettes stood in the windows facing my house. I could feel the pressure of those eyes on us, a physical force. My ears were beyond ringing. They were screaming so loud that I felt rather than heard the rapid series of dull thuds that indicated even more fireworks igniting behind me. In
my
house! The house I had been fighting so hard to keep, that I had deliberately gone to, knowing that Rudy had rigged it to blow.

Something shifted on my neck.
"Run! They're not dead yet! Get those legs of yours moving!"
Rudy's voice rang through my head, clear as crystal.
"Can't you hear them?"

"No,"
I thought back,my brain starting to whir back to life. How Rudy was talking through the broken collar gnawed but other thoughts pressed it out. I was still in danger, and the battle wasn't over yet. I still had part two to accomplish. The werewolves' car idled at the end of the street, about five houses distant. Actually I realized it hadn’t been their car at all, but Cyndi’s. I started towards it at a trot. Then slowed to a staggering shuffle as the seeds of injuries blossomed into pain. The fight replayed in my head, identifying the source of each individual pain as I hobbled to the car. The ribs had a fridge handle–shaped pain, Rudy's foot claws dug into scruff and my skin had been ravaged by Kia's teeth. My forelegs hurt up and down their length, along with my spine from the sheer impact with refrigerator and then the ground. A growing headache, triggered by the ringing in my ears, threatened to blot everything out. Yet it was all nothing compared to the initial agony of my broken bond.

"Uh, Thomas, you might want to move a little faster, wherever you’re going. That guy really doesn't look all that happy with us."

I should not have looked back, but I did. Eagle stood in my front yard, fur smoldering and red ichor dripping from the wound in his head, as he clutched the white picket fence in my front yard for support. One of his eyes had swollen shut, but his other was clear, and it broadcast pure hate. Unlike the animal hate that I had seen in Kia, there was plenty of intelligence behind this look. Regardless of the circumstances, whether or not he ever realized how he and his pack had been manipulated, this wolf would never forgive me. That was all right.

Behind him, smoke poured from the windows of my house and an orange glow pulsed from the bedroom. Because of him and his instinctual need for vengeance, everything I had been fighting to preserve, to hold onto, would be nothing more than a smoldering ruin by morning. It turned out that I had been willing to pay that price to survive and keep his children alive.

His mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear it over the ringing. Maybe it was some oath of vengeance or praise for fighting him to a standstill. I didn’t care. Behind him Kia, leaning heavily on Merlot for support, limped out of the house. Kia clutched at her stomach. She'd survive—that was good. At least this bunch wouldn't be going after Tallow tonight.

I looked back to Eagle; his eye seemed to be searching me for something. "Go home," I said, barely hearing my own voice. "Go home and stay there. This town is mine." His eye still searched, giving no indication that he had heard me, but behind him, Merlot nodded. Then I looked up sharply when Rudy vibrated on the back of my neck.

"Rudy, shut up,"
I sent via the collar, and he did.

"Hey, I kicked his ass and saved yours. You owe me!"

"You've also burned down my house."

"You're welcome! Buildings are so much prettier when they’re on fire."

Our thoughts were like bits of electricity leaping over a gap. As long as he touched the collar, we could exchange mental text messages. I growled somewhat halfheartedly. I wondered where Rudy learned that trick as I took one last look at my burning house and the wolves before walking back towards the wolves' car. It probably wasn't the wisest plan to take the wounded wolves’ transportation but . . . I laughed at the thought. No, the entire plan couldn't be classified as wise. What I had planned probably bordered on insane.

"What's so funny, Tommy?"
Rudy asked we reached the car. Cops and maybe animal control would be here soon. Not much time left.

"Just thinking about an old cartoon show where a family of raccoons drive a car."

"Oh, it ain't that bad. I've gnome-styled cars plenty of times before. Don't worry about it. Wide one's the brake, tall one is the gas."
With that he leapt from my head into through the window.

Gnome style?
I both wondered what the name referred to and worried that a bunch of animals drove cars often enough that the magical world had a name for it. I followed after him much more clumsily, jarring more than a few developing bruises as I pulled myself through the window.

Rudy
proved to be far better at the pedals than I was at steering. The ringing of my ears had dulled from the obliteration of everything to the point where I could dimly hear the sirens of the cop cars that raced by us on their way to my house. I still couldn't hear Rudy at all, but he did a pretty good job at translating my barked "Stop!" and "Go, go" into movement of the car. By the time we arrived at the park that contained Archie's dragon, I could hear faint sounds of Rudy's confused chittering. We stopped in the parking lot next to the park's playground, and while I looked for the best spot to drive the car down onto the grassy field, Rudy climbed up from the pedal well.

I had been here before with Angelica when she had been on a fitness kick. The landscaping here gently sloped down towards a river that lay beyond a thick band of secondary growth forest. Due to the incline, the park had been constructed on several terraces. The parking lot raised up about three feet from a grass field that contained a well-weathered baseball diamond and two small soccer goals. The playground had been raised higher and sported a small stairway to reach. Beyond the playground, the hill crested with a covered panic area on the top. Down on the field, a stone general rode a horse in his eternal charge into the soccer field from the baseball diamond's backstop. It was a very odd place for a civil war memorial. Now we just had to get this hammer of a car down there.

There was a gap in the low wooden fence that surrounded the parking lot, but a thick chain was strung across it. The heavy Caddy could probably bust through the chain, but I had to hit the chain at some speed and the posts were a stout three-by-three inches thick. I needed to get the Caddy in operational condition down the hill and then point it at the statue if this was going to work.