Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (31 page)

"Six? Why six? Archibald is dead."

"Six."

Six lives. I could see each of their faces in the dragon's mind. I knew three. I would be trading their lives for mine. Cornealius, Sabrina and Scrags. Then a wizened man, an ancient woman and a tiger. The reasons were written there as well. All were involved in the dragon's capture and torment in some way, and Sabrina and Cornealius for plotting to extend it. The list could be far larger. The entire magical world seemed to be a place that acted with no consideration for those outside it. They considered the less powerful mere resources to be traded. What had been done to this terrifying creature would never even be considered wrong. Even O'Meara had barely blinked an eye.

What could I do? A parade of men stood up in my mind and declared they would never trade the lives of others for their own, no matter what their crimes. But all those men were fictional. In this world, there was only power. And I didn't even have thumbs to call my own.

"How do I destroy the anchor?"
I asked.

"Take this."
And I felt something fold into my mind, fitting neatly into a space that had not been there before.
"Now go."

The mouth opened, and a deluge of pain swept me away before I could ask another question. I shot through it like a ball tied to the end of a bungee cord, the miasma turning into a sea of hooks and needles.

I
slammed into my body with a scream, only to choke on black smoke that invaded my lungs whenever I took a breath. My eyes saw only shiny green before a fit of coughing drove them closed.

"Thomas!" Rudy cried as I felt him impact between my shoulder blades. "Did it work? Did the dragon get out?"

I could only cough in reply as something inside my chest started to rip free. "How long?" I managed to croak out after a brief respite between coughs.

"Thirty seconds. Somebody summoned up a cage around us and grounded the lightening. O'Meara might have come to—I heard an explosion." I could feel Rudy vibrate with energy on my back. "We gotta go."

I heard a wet ripping sound deep in my chest, and with a final
hurk
felt something the size of a baseball force its way up my throat and onto the ground.

"What the hell?"

I looked down. The thing appeared to be a frog's egg, roughly the size of a softball, except its yolk looked to be a fusion reaction. It didn't take a genius to figure out how the dragon planned to destroy the anchor. "Now we run!" I declared and booked it.

The green metallic plant stuff around us parted like any other shrubbery, and I dashed back into the moonlit field. I glanced at Sabrina, her black staff raised as if it were a javelin towards the top of the hill. Ixey had fallen against the fence like a fighter on the ropes, her hands gripping the top of the posts on either side of her. The little metal gecko was perched on her head and its little body sheathed in green magic.

Sabrina’s head snapped towards me, and our eyes met for a moment. I don't know what she saw in my face, but she didn't like it. With a twist of her hips she leveled the black hole rod directly at me. I zigged but needn't have bothered as the world blew up before she got the chance to blast or skewer me, or worse.

Not for the first time that night, gravity fled the scene, and I was tumbling through an undefined space, the white intensity of magic burning straight through my skull and baking my brain. The ground found me before gravity, and my feet completely failed to land first. I bounced and rolled like a sausage fallen out of a speeding hot dog cart. The white light blinked out as soon I came to a bruising stop. A sort of dull roar met my ears, and they quickly found the source of the sound.

A tree sprouted directly from the place I horked up the dragon’s egg. It was growing at over a foot a second, its bark twisting around the trunk like waves. Eye-breaking runes appeared and then sunk back into the tree over and over. The roar I heard deepened into a heavy groan as the tree continued to grow. The top of the tree sprouted thick branches with only a few token leaves.

"Where do I get one of those?" Rudy asked. I glanced over to find Rudy, apparently none the worse for wear, looking at the tree with wide eyes. "Oh, Sabrina is pissed!" He pointed and my gaze followed. Sabrina was charging down the hill, her black staff held over her head like a claymore sword. Her target was clear. Cornealius, now normal-sized, desperately struggled to free himself from a snarl of roots that had wrapped around him like a pack of pythons. The roots rose to meet Sabrina, rearing up like cobras, and she sliced through them with her black staff like a light saber through human flesh, trying to hack a path to Cornealius.

"Hang on, baby! Hang on, Cornealius!" Sabrina shouted as she cut her way through, but it would be far too late. Cornealius uttered a high-pitched wail that hit me right in the gut. I couldn't look away. I didn't know how the dragon would claim the lives it desired, but I hadn't imagined the sudden pop and crunch of Cornealius's spine, nor the spray of blood from his mouth.

With Cornealius's death, the light went out in Sabrina's eyes. There was no explosion of rage, no death curse; she simply fell to her knees. When a rearing root drove itself through her chest and out her back, she gave no recognition of the wound. She merely shuddered and went limp.

Yet the tree had not finished with them.

I had assumed that Cornealius and Sabrina had more to do with Archibald and the dragon than I knew, but their inclusion on the list apparently had a more practical purpose. As they had sought to use the dragon for fuel, the tree used them. Their auras had not dimmed with their deaths, and I watched the roots pull the energy from their still bodies, the cool light flowing along the roots like a child drinking juice through a straw. My stomach churned with guilt.

On the hill, Ixey watched with open-mouthed horror as the two were drained. The tree seemed content to enjoy its meal for the moment and had stopped its roaring growth. I cautiously pushed up to a standing position. The now distant ringing in my ears hinted at perhaps a minor degradation of my hearing.

"What's going on?" Rudy stood on his hind legs like a meerkat, his ears twitching. "What is it doing to them?"

I wondered how Rudy perceived the sound of what I saw. Ixey's gecko must be a visual familiar, although she could have just been reacting to what the roots had done physically. "Nothing good," I told Rudy as I began to trot back into the field. The weight of him impacting my back was beginning to become a familiar sensation.

"Why didn't it go after O'Meara?" His question was whispered.

I didn't answer it as I slowly wound my way towards O'Meara, giving the now still roots a wide berth. She lay facedown on a patch of blackened earth. Ixey stood at the fence on the hill above, chewing her lip as her green eyes flicked between her mentor and the bed of roots.

For a moment I feared that O'Meara had been killed too, but I saw the faintest shimmer of her aura as I got closer. There was a twitch of movement as my paw crunched onto the seared earth, not from her but a slither of silver from around her neck. The chain, thin and delicate, unwound itself from her neck and S-lined towards me. I felt my own chain shift, and Rudy gave a bark of surprise before scrabbling backwards along my spine.

"
Holy crap! Snake!
"

I chuckled, watching the chain make its way towards us. "Rudy, it’s okay—it’s just my ch—" Something flashed into my vision from below my muzzle, striking the “head” of the chain.

Instinct reared and I jumped back. But the silver thing came with me, dragging the chain along. It turned to give me a cool glare with crystal eyes. I recognized the folded hood of a cobra behind the head of a snake, composed of tiny interlocking chain links. O'Meara’s half of the original fey chain hung limply from its jaws.

"The hell are you?" I asked it.

With an air of casual distain it slurped up the fey chain like a long noodle and then sunk from sight. I felt it curled against my neck, exactly where my own chain had been. The dragon's words came into my mind like an echo.
" Your independence will never be threatened again."

Good gravy. Now that I thought about it, I could feel the entire length of snake around my neck. There was even a mind there, a small mind to be sure, but a mind nonetheless. Other things nestled near that mind, things that radiated a dangerous sort of warmth. The mind clearly wasn't the conversational type, but I could see its few thoughts readily enough and they made me shiver.

I felt the pinpricks of Rudy's claws on my rump. "It’s just my fey chain, Rudy. I don't think it will hurt you."

"The hell! It’s a snake!" His claws dug in deeper.

"Ow! Get off my ass, Rudy—I don't have time to explain." I shook my butt a bit, but it failed to dislodge the squirrel.

Growling, I stalked towards O'Meara, and I felt the snake wriggle. "O'Meara!" I barked, "Come on! Get up, we’ve got to go." She didn't stir. "Rudy, wake her up!"

"What? Why me?"

"‘Cause I don't want to get any closer with a cobra thing around my neck!" I did not add that the snake really thought O'Meara looked nearly cooked to perfection. It seemed willing to listen to my instructions, but I didn't trust something that hungry.

"Well, of course, I can protect her from your freaky friend there by waking up someone who could make crispy squirrel fritters with her mind." Despite the grumbling, he sprang from my rump, scurried over to O'Meara, grabbed her ear and shouted at the top of his deceptively powerful lungs, "Hey, O'Meara!
Wakey, wakey!
" She didn't stir. Rudy looked at me and held up his paws. “Gee, that was supereffective!”

"That won't work!" Ixey shouted. With a worried glance at the roots, she picked her way down the hill. "She burned herself out." I looked up at her; she was still watching us with that same horrified expression on her face.

"Come on, then! Help get her back to the car." I cursed myself and my own optimism. I had figured O'Meara had just worn herself out. The way Ixey had said it, this would take a bit more than a good nap to fix.

"What is that thing going to do, Thomas?"

I opened my mouth to answer when a sharp crackling reached my ears. A glance back revealed the roots starting to twitch and squirm around the white desiccated corpses of Sabrina and Cornealius. There was no more time. O'Meara hadn't been part of the deal, but I didn't want to take any chances. Regardless of the viper around my neck, I went to O'Meara. I pushed my nose to her cheek and found it cool, a coldness that reached up and clutched my heart. She wasn't burned. God, she was dying!

I looked up to Ixey, who stared down at me uselessly; now closer, I could see the shine of wetness in her eyes. "Don't just stand there!
Help me!
"

"I can't help her! Nobody can help her. She's burned herself out. You don't come back from that without the council, and they're not coming."

"Did you tell them that a dragon's about to break loose?"

"W-What? You mean that's—?" Realization struck her with physical force. "That’s what Sabrina had been—" She crumpled to the ground. "Oh, gods, you didn't!" The lizard on her head glared daggers at me as Ixey fell to her knees.

"I did. Tell you why later." I looked down at O'Meara and thought at the snake.
"My contract is still valid."

It gave a flicker of irritation but did as I requested. The snake's head unwound itself into a continuous metal chain and slipped around O'Meara’s neck. I felt it thread through the seeping wounds on the surface of her mind and find the smallest stump of a link, which it curled around. The world turned sideways as the dead space in my head thrummed into a sudden life.

Yet, there was barely a stir on the other side. O'Meara's mind rippled as if made of molasses.
"Thomas?"
The thought moaned into my head. Then a spark within the mind flared.
"Missed you."

"Come on, O'Meara—we've got to get moving. I released the dragon."

"Good. Glad I bought you the time. I hope it burns the magi world to ash."

My mental processes piled up behind the thought. I had expected her to express surprise or at least a tsking, but not that she had knowingly bought me time.

"Listen, take care of Ixey for me."

That also threw me.
"O'Meara, you are not going to die!"

"Thomas, I'm holding together by a thread. I'm borrowing a part of your brain to think. I'm done. After you got ambushed, I freaked. I might have killed Whittaker. Sabrina had every right to demand I step down. When the inquisitors come, you tell them it was my plan. Play dumb. Join the TAU. Blame me for leading you astray."

"Not going to do that. Sabrina and Cornealius are dead. I let the dragon eat them. If you need my brain for a bit, then that’s fine, but don't blame me if you start licking your privates."

That brought a tired chuckle, and her flickering mind steadied.

I looked up to see the tree come back life, writhing and roaring as if in pain. Five thick limbs were forcing their way from the top of the tree, looking almost like the fingers of a giant. How long had I just been standing there, wasting time?