Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (30 page)

I padded closer to the statue, searching mentally for any hint of the dragon's presence. It had contacted me at the house. Surely it could do it here, where it had been imprisoned. Then again, magic seemed to have its own bizarre rules about space. Rules I didn't know. Knocking off the arm had done something. But had it done enough?

Cornealius turned. "Dear cat, you best get away from that." He threw himself upwards, growing even larger as he reared up on his back legs. His long snaky body towered unstably over me and the squirrel, face contorted in a grimace of both pain and determination. I hurried over the rest of the distance to the statue, hoping for some opportunity to appear.

"Damn, this thing is high-pitched! I hate stale magic!"
Rudy commented as we raced around the statue, putting it between us and Cornealius.

"It’s not that bright to me,"
I thought back.

"Dude, we are not trying to hash out the hearing versus sight thing now! What do we gotta do?"

"I need to talk to the dragon."

"How'd you do it last time?"

"I scryed through the wards at the Archmagus's place."

"Okay, so he's powering the wards, right?"

"I guess. The first time it just sort of manifested in the house."

"The house is different. If there are any wards on this statue, they'd be Archibald's. Otherwise the dragon would be imprisoning himself, and I bet that wouldn't hold."

"What can you tell me about the magic leaking out of the statue?"
I thought at Rudy.

Cornealius stomped towards us unsteadily, while behind him the magi hammered at each other with multicolor magics.

"I dunno—it’s just wrong. I've heard it before. If you go into a shop that sells elementals, and if all the elementals are sickly, it can sound like that. Just not this loud."

The sound of mistreatment and sickness. Perhaps the orange stuff was the magical equivalent of blood or pus. Maybe the prison was less of a cage and more like driving a stake through its foot. Had the Archmagus then harvested the pus dripping from the open wounds? Who knows. Still, I needed a connection to it. The decaying wards in the house had perceived the occupants of house—they were designed to. The dragon had no such eyes here.

"Step away from the statue, cat!" Cornealius looked down at me over the statue. "I'm done asking."

"Rudy, can you find the end of the chain?"
The chain had moved on its own before, but it had been totally inanimate since Tallow had given it to me.

"Yeah, I see it."

"Grab it and stick it into the stump of the statue's arm. I'll deal with Cornealius."

I felt the chain shift on my neck, and I tried to will it thinner, longer. It obeyed sluggishly. Rudy grunted.
"I love bad plans."

I looked up at Cornealius as Rudy climbed up to the back of the statue. I grinned at him and his mangled arm. "Now you know something about how the Archmagus felt after you ripped him in two."

The giant weasel huffed. "A service to society, I assure you. At this point, you have convinced me that killing you has a similar value." The chain had begun to rotate around my neck, letting out more chain length as Rudy clambered up the statue as if it were a mountain. The chain's weight in his teeth prevented his usual vertical scamper.

"So how long did it take you two to switch from watching an old criminal to coveting his power?" I crouched low, preparing to spring.

"You have—no!" Cornealius’s eyes tracked upwards as Rudy climbed up to the shoulder of the statue. With the grace of a falling tree, Cornealius fell towards us, his massive talons aiming to bisect the squirrel. I leapt at his face, and my claws missed, but blood splashed down the back of my throat as my teeth sunk through his flesh. My world became a flurry of violent motion mixed with Cornealius's roar of pain. With a mighty jerk of his head, I sailed away from the weasel, Rudy's screaming in my head as the chain jerked him off the statue.

I hit the ground on all fours. The chain around my neck thickened, reeling in Rudy, and he thudded into the middle of my back. In the back of my mind I felt a sliver of the chain’s own awareness, waiting, eager for a new connection. Cornealius had toppled like a tree, hitting the ground on his bad shoulder and screaming in pain with a new hole in his cheek. I spat his torn flesh onto the ground.

O'Meara lay on the ground in a smoldering circle. Sabrina stood on the hill above. Ixey was nowhere to be seen. Sabrina raised a hand at us, blue light gathering in it. "One more time!" I shouted and burst into a run back towards the statue. Blue light erupted in front of me, and I dodged to the side as lightening arced into the grass. I zigzagged my way towards the statue, running around spots of gathering energy. Sabrina shifted from trying to hit me to driving me backwards, away from the statue. I ran around the statue in a wide circle, trying to work my way closer.

"
Just die!
" Sabrina screamed at me, and the entire field beneath my feet turned blue.

"
Jump for it!
" Rudy cried.

Pivoting hard, I leapt for the statue, but I knew as soon as I left the ground that the statue still stood forty feet away. Tiny claws pounded up my back. Rudy ran forward and jumped, using my face for a springboard. The chain, a thin fiber, trailed behind him like a spider's line. His arms and legs stretched out like wings as he sailed in front of me. He hit the general's stump, and the world blossomed first into green, and then pain.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Pain
beyond anything I had ever known, and magnitudes beyond what I had ever wanted to know, struck through my entire body. Ripping, tearing, burning all at once. Nowhere and everywhere. Was this what electrocution felt like? No, it couldn't be this bad. I screamed. I screamed despite having lost my mouth. I screamed not with flesh, but with my very soul. The scream resonated and echoed, and then was answered, by another scream, another voice. A long, agonized moan that rumbled through the very fabric of myself. I pushed towards it, calling up every foul word my mind could recall and hurling them against the pain. It wasn't my pain at all, but the dragon's. That color, that sickly orange that surrounded me, it wasn't infection or pus. Far worse, it was a distillation of pain, and I was swimming in it.

Push. I had to push. No matter the pain. Like a pregnant woman in the final hours of her labor, like Tallow as she struggled not to howl in pain. I had to find that damn dragon. Deep in the pain, deep in the ground, it howled. It didn't matter anymore why. I had to find it. I screamed for it.

It howled back. The ether shifted, spinning blades in my flesh became rending hooks. Moments, tiny eternities of agony and then I touched it, brushed against it with my mind and screamed anew.

I had been a fool. They called it a dragon, and I had fit it into a form of a large reptile chained in a cave. It was so utterly beyond that. Even if the dragon in the cave within my mind had been as long as the Empire State Building was tall, this dwarfed it. It stretched into brain-shattering dimensions. Sabrina had been terrified of this, and she was right to be afraid.

A mouth that opened in four different directions reached through the ether of pain, and hundreds of garnet-like eyes stared at me from the roof of its open mouths.
"Ah, well. At least I saved a couple of werewolf cubs from getting sold,"
I thought to myself. I was glad to leave this fucked-up world a little better than I found it. I waited for the end, welcoming the ceasing of the pain.

The jaws closed over me and the pain stopped. It took a few more beats for me to realize that I had not died.

"You came."
The dragon's voice exploded in my head, shattering that brief respite from pain.
"Yet you fear. Why?"

I started to respond, but the thing just lifted my explanation right out of me. I can't really explain precisely what it did with words, but I can try. It took the thought and held it up to a light, like one might inspect a jewel for flaws. Then just as casually, it popped it back from where it had plucked it. The experience was extremely disconcerting.

"I do not understand."

Still disoriented, I readied a more detailed explanation, but instead of taking the single offered thought, it plunged into my mind like a child into an untended candy bowl. Memories I had not thought of in years flashed through me, along with recent events. Then the memories were gone, leaving me feeling strangely empty.

It spread the memories out in front of me, examined them with its strange eyes and huffed with frustration. This close, I could watch its thought process. The random bits of me had only confused it further. It decided that a more thorough investigation would be required. Watching its thoughts were oddly hypnotizing, and I could barely manage a note of protest as it took me apart piece by piece. Memory by memory, urge by urge, it pulled me apart and sorted everything I was into piles. Somehow it kept me vaguely aware or perhaps its memory of me kept me sane. It replayed memories, made copies of various pieces, altered them and replayed the memories again. Dozens of me's operating through the same scene in parallel but each scenario a little different.

It went through my entire life, from beginning to end, and replayed every single memory. It learned everything about me.

Yet, I learned about the dragon too. While it pondered me and explored my world and my existence through me, pieces of me circulated through it. I flowed through eddies of its memories as bits of flotsam in its circulatory system. Perhaps it chose to show me how little it knew of the world that had captured it. Or each thought it had was simply physically reenacted within it. A hundred years ago it had been recovering from a competition with another of its kind. Wounded, it had sought shelter to nurse its wounds, feeding on tangles of dimensions as its kind is wont to do. Apparently one of those tangles had been some sort of lure because it hooked and dragged him into our single plane. This pure world of agony it existed in now might have lasted an eternity for all it knew. It had hoped for death, for the pain to stop, and indeed was slowly starving from the strain of its injuries. Archibald used to feed it but had stopped decades before. Like us, time only marched in a single direction for it, although it could surf the edges.

Satisfied, the creature began to put me back together. Fear came back, and I trembled before it. Piece by piece Thomas Khatt, the cougar, came back into existence. The sheer realization of what had happened hit me as I was completed. Terror and awe and a deep raw sensation of violation flooded through me. Anger surged.
How dare it!
After all I had done to help. This is how it repaid me! I lashed out at the flesh-like stuff that held me, but my imagined claws found no purchase. I raged and gnashed my teeth, but it was no more effective than a week-old kitten's attempt to murder his mother's tail. My efforts stymied and futile, I sagged under the weight of pure despair. I was just an insect, a machine as simple as a 1970s car before the might of this great and terrible thing. And I had just released it on our world.

"I understand,"
it said. The voice was now calibrated to a more comfortable timber but still one that brimmed with power.
"Your temporary dissolution was necessary. I am not sorry. Grasping the contradictions of your thoughts is difficult. Some of your most considered courses of actions are ones you will not act on. Your world is strange and limited, but surprisingly difficult to predict. It would have been easier had you gathered more experience with this situation."

"If I had more experience I would not be in here,"
I sneered at my host. Had its pain just been an illusion to take me in?

"The pain is real. I have stilled time so the way forward is best considered. I am distracting myself from it with you. Yet this stillness is also an effort. The way forward must be decided soon."

"What's stopping you? We broke the statue."

"The statue is nothing but a marker to hide my prison; the anchor within me must be removed."

"You expect me to help you after, after you did t-that to me?"

"Yes. Unless you wish to die. You still have a very angry magus waiting for you."

I picked a nearby eye and gave it a baleful glare. The monster had me dead to rights. Goddamn it. Despite it all, I still wanted to walk away from this stupid train wreck of a rescue mission. But what was the point of living through this if I just wound up in chains again? Had Cyndi been a bit smarter or less obvious, she could have had me and I would be hopelessly in love.

The creature spoke again.
"I understand that a bargain is required. Your independence will never be threatened again. That will be my gift. You will never fear the magi's bond nor their mental manipulation. It is already done."

"But it won't help me against a lightning bolt,"
I replied. The dragon did not answer. It did not need to. It knew what to give me to earn my cooperation. It had probably run me through a dozen different scenarios to determine what I required to forgive it for its
violation
. I only needed the answer to one more question.

"I shall use restraint. Six is all that I require."
It spoke before I had voiced the question.