Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (32 page)

"Rudy! Call 911! Get an ambulance here!" I grabbed the shoulder of O'Meara’s dress with my teeth, but it tore before I moved O'Meara an inch.

"You want me to call the munds?!" Rudy chittered.

"Just do it, Rudy!" I hissed back. Switching tactics, I searched for something strong enough to bite and drag. Cougar pulled prey up into trees, right? Sure, O'Meara had a hundred pounds on me, but I was a super apex predator. The tree's fingers were starting to twist into brain-hurting directions. Why hadn't I realized that O'Meara was so hurt? I could have bargained with the dragon for healing, maybe—something. I should have rushed past Cornealius and reconnected with O'Meara as soon as she had arrived! But I had been too afraid she'd try to stop me. I grabbed onto her belt and pulled. Ixey grabbed the other side.

"What is that thing going to do, Thomas?" Ixey's voice nearly wailed.

"Shussh up and pull!" I shouted around O'Meara's belt.

Together we dragged O'Meara up the slope and onto the blacktop of the parking lot. She had slipped into a sort of sleep or unconsciousness.

I glanced back at the tree and nearly vomited again. The limbs of the tree were bending around the statue in ways that hammered sharp nails into my mind. But far worse was that I could see the dragon, its claws straining against the very fabric of reality, its furious hiss the scream of tortured machinery. Ugly red runes had appeared on the general's skin, bleeding with molten granite.

Turning, I found Ixey watching beside me, the skin of her lips pale. Beyond her sat the barest outline of a gangly figure—a figure that I would not have recognized if not for the tiny cat perched on his shoulder. The tiny cat turned his head towards me and nodded slightly before the pair faded out.

Swallowing hard, I looked back to the tree just in time to watch reality pop like an overripe pimple. Orange magic gushed from a tear in the world. A giant maggot composed of eyes and tentacles wormed its way through, inch by terrible inch. Ixey buried her face into my neck and shook, reeking of terror and revulsion. Longer than the field itself, the dragon coiled onto itself like a snake, coated in the orange ichor, and watching me through thousands of eyes. Its exhaustion weighed down everything around it; the trees of the forest bent under its weight. Unseen coils slipped over my own shoulders, and O'Meara groaned in her sleep as Ixey shuddered.

It smiled. A single mouth ran along its entire length, exposing its jagged teeth, each a warped mirror of our surroundings. The sight sent my mind scrabbling for cover. I shut my eyes, but still the terrible smile waited in the blackness of my eyelids.

A massive sound, vibrating not through the air but swelling up from the ground and back down my vertebra, reached us as those teeth parted, and the dragon's great mouth yawned open. I closed my eyes and waited for the end.

The end did not come.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” I muttered irritably as I batted a charred piece of drywall aside. It splintered and kicked a cloud of ash into the air.

The squirrel clinging to my neck sneezed. “Hey, careful! I got allergies, ya know, and they ain’t to nuts!”

Rudy’s cheerfulness among the ruins of my now, admittedly, former life grated like a rusty band saw on my nerves. “Just keep looking!” I growled at him.

“You’re not going to find it, big guy.” Rudy hopped down from my neck and scanned the room, sniffing on two legs. “This has to be one of my better burns!”

We stood in the wreckage of my bedroom, the half-moon peering down at us curiously through the gaping hole in the roof. The furniture, mostly cheap IKEA chic, stood in mockery of its former durability, its surfaces blackened and wearing scales of char. Everything looked so brittle that I feared if I touched anything it would collapse into dust. My laptop still sat on the desk, the metal halves twisted away from each other as if in agony. The external hard drives next to it were singed rectangular metal boxes lying in pools of plastic.

I had to agree with the squirrel—the chances of a photo album surviving this would be slim to nil. Grimacing, I hoped for a miracle as I pawed at the drawers of my desk. The brittle wood splintered and gave way after a few tries. I felt O’Meara stir through the link. She crested into consciousness as a whale breaches the surface of the ocean.

“Thomas? Where are you? Your bed is empty.”
A mental image of the dog bed in the hospital flittered across my mind, along with a trace of fear, of vulnerability.

I had a flutter of hope in my heart; she had to turn her head to see that—definite improvement. They had just taken her off the respirator the day before.
“I’m out looking for a picture of myself, my human self to remember.”
I couldn’t help but show her the purpose of it. When she had recovered, I’d learn to walk on my hind legs and she’d pin an illusion of my human self to a hat. It would in no way be perfect, but a stroll down a street without a coffee cup over my muzzle and a leash around my neck would be worth the hip pain. Also I had given myself a panic attack that morning when it took me too long to remember what the color of my eyes had been. Brown, I think.
“Don’t worry—Tallow and Ixey are on guard. They know where I am.”

O’Meara didn’t relax much with the image of the hulking mama wolf guarding her hospital room; it summoned a recollection of Tallow’s home to the top of O’Meara’s mind on a very large pool of guilt. Injured and exhausted, O’Meara’s mindscape stood open to me, but stayed colorless and barren compared to the whirling chaos it had been before. Everything, including her demons, was slow and sluggish, rising and sinking in the murk of her painkiller-addled mind. A worry about the Council of Merlins surfaced.

As I had the last time she’d asked, I mentally shook my head. The council had its own difficulties to deal with. Two of the seven Archmagi had disappeared four nights ago. With three seats now open, the magical world had been thrown into chaos as decade-old schemes and alliances came untethered. Our little town had fallen off the radar, and if anyone thought it odd that Archibald’s house had literally disappeared from the lot before the estate sale, nobody with power had made it their business to care. Yet.

O’Meara was not reassured, but sleep claimed her anyway. Her mind sunk away from mine into a haze of disordered dreams.

A reckoning with the rest of the world hung over all our heads like an evil sword suspended from a burning rope. It could be days, months or even years. Not just the council either—Cyndi’s death was still rippling through the ranks of the TAU. She had been viewed by many as a loveable rogue. Death threats from her fans were literally piling up inside the door of O’Meara’s still decimated office. Oric’s demands that I join the TAU were getting less polite by the day.

“Hey, Thomas! Heellllooo!” A fuzzy object waved in front of my muzzle, and I sneezed.

“Sorry—O’Meara woke up.”

The squirrel tsked. “You gotta learn to multitask. Walk and talk.”

I did not want to explain the state of O’Meara’s brain to Rudy, so I simply peered at the contents of the drawers. All that remained of the photo album was flaky ash clinging to the metal spine of a three-ring binder.

Rudy chittered with amusement. “See, you’ve been
deleted
. The Veil’s been erasing all traces of awakenings for centuries.”

I pawed through the ash with a growl of disgust. “You set the fire, Rudy. Not the Veil.”

Rudy sat up on his hind legs, ears twitching. “Don’t matter now! Come on, let’s get you back to the hospital. Can’t let O’Meara pop another vessel, right?”

I tried to shoot the friendly arsonist a suspicious look, but he leapt up onto my neck, so the glare struck an innocent pile of ash.

“Come on. You’re getting your fur all sooty. Seriously, you look like a black panther. Ain’t nothing here anyway.”

Instantly every follicle on my body tensed as an itchy sensation spread up from my paws and then along my spine. I swallowed, desperately trying to keep my tongue in my mouth and not on my paws. A primal part of my brain shouted
dirty!
at the top of its lungs, while my stomach coiled at the idea of eating all the ash, probably laced with all sorts of toxic chemicals. I needed a bath and a brushing stat. At least the bath.

I had already tensed my legs to leap through the back window of the house and disappear back through the woods when I heard the pop of a car door. My left ear rounded on the sound. Quickly two muffled clacks that elongated into quiet metallic creaking followed it. The door shut.

Tiny claws pricked at my neck. “Come on, let’s go!” Rudy’s voice had pitched up another octave. “Forget about it!”

Curiosity warred with caution. I spun in a tight circle to relieve the tension as the unhurried scuff-clacking drew closer to the house. “What is that?” I asked.

“Nothing good. Let’s get out of here!”

A scent caught my nose as a breeze whistled through the house, and I stilled. Angelica. Rudy chittered at me to get moving even as I slowly padded towards the front of the house. The fire had not damaged the kitchen nearly as much as the bedroom. Blackened certainly, but not charred. The front door still stood, sans glass.

“Oh boy.” Rudy sighed.

I peeked through the left window to see Angelica with metal crutches tucked under each armpit, advancing up the walkway. Her amber eyes glowed with the light of the overhead moon as she glared directly at me. My stomach twisted so hard I sat down.

A small weight disappeared from the back of my neck. “This is all just gonna be bitter almonds from here on out. I’m outta here.” I didn’t give the departing squirrel a single glance.

Now that I thought about it, it all came back to her. She wore a Green Day t-shirt and knee-length black shorts, one of the three outfits she usually came home in. I had never noticed the tail hole in the shorts before. Her black fur still remained but had lost its smooth sheen and become a bit shaggy-looking since I had seen her last. Her imposing figure had lost nearly a foot in height, but her clothing still stretched tight over her muscular frame. Nostrils flared at the end of a muzzle that had become so short her face had gained a cat-like quality.

We stared at each other, her face twitching with warring emotions. “You.” She stopped her mouth working as if the word tasted foul. “You’re not supposed to be here. Haven’t you done enough!” Her teeth flashed, white and sharp in the pale light of the waning moon.

My ears wilted in the face of her anger. After all that had happened, she still wanted me to go away? I knew she had been controlled the last time I saw her—did she? Maybe the squirrel had the right idea after all. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to turn tail just yet. “Listen, Angelica—”

“I am
not
Angelica! And you are not the Thomas I”—she swallowed—“loved. I’m Noise—that’s who I always am.”

A tiny bit of hope burbled within my heart. “I’m still the same guy I was! And you’re still who you are!” I took a step out of the doorway and into the moonlight.

She barked with bitter laughter. “You were a marshmallow. Not a violent bone in your body. Four days ago you hurt my mother so badly we had to take her to a
vet
!”

I winced, remembering the feel of her intestines hooked on my claws. “I’d say I’m sorry, but she was trying very hard to kill me.”

Noise crossed her arms. “And she will again, Thomas.”

“But didn’t I save—”

“You disfigured her son, stole her grandpups and O’Meara burned down her cabin.” A growl rose into Noise’s voice. “You’re meat to my family.”

I blinked, frustration and amusement dancing in my head at how none of those three things were directly my fault, but all those events had probably saved my life in one way or another. I searched for something diplomatic to say as the silence grew between us. Nothing of the sort came to mind. “So what type of meat, then? I think I’ve proven to be fairly inedible. Somewhere between shoe leather and rusty iron?”

Noise guffawed and quickly covered it up with a sawtooth growl. “Damn it, Thomas. Don’t make light of this—my family wants you dead and we heal fast. They’ll hunt you down the next moon!”

Another small flicker of hope there, and I took a small step forward. “But you won’t, right?”

Her eyes closed as she squeezed out a sigh. “No, I won’t. But that doesn’t mean I can protect you.”

I crept down the stairs towards her. “Meh, I apparently have more practice being a chew toy than I knew. You always come home with those chompers?” I looked up at her bare-toothed grimace and past the teeth I saw the same expression that appeared on Angelica’s face when I made a terrible joke. Concern about her family fell away. Angelica was here in front of me—no mind control, no cage.

“Thomas . . .” she warned.

I sauntered forward and pressed the top of my head into her stomach. “Go ahead and hurt me if you want—I’m right here.”

Her hand briefly caressed my ears before she jerked away, the big bad werewolf girl emitting something like a squeak. I tried to follow her, but she warded me off with the end of her crutch.

“Thomas, think—I’m a werewolf! You’re a familiar! We’re over.”

“We’ll invest in a really good vacuum cleaner.” I gave her a little purring growl. She snorted, and I caught the flicker of a tail wag between her legs.