Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (34 page)

“I ain't old,” I hissed back, clutching the captured needle out in front of my body while using my other legs to spin around, surveying the circle of second-rate striped mice surrounding me. Several stood on hind legs, needles clutched in one paw, and the rest hugged the ground, needles clenched in their mouths. Those were the experienced fighters-they'd grip the needle only when they were in poking range. The spade pulled back into the air as if attached to a fishing line.

“Just consider this your retirement party, Rudy.”

“Don't make me laugh, Simon. I dance with cats for fun. You'll need more than an aerial garden toy if you wanna crack me.” I continued to spin. The rodents were creeping closer while the shovel hung in the air, quivering minutely like the head of a snake. I didn't have much time to deal with this, and the pain of the leg wound began to creep into my mind.

When facing a cobra, you had to strike for the head. I feinted right towards the wall and then leapt directly towards Simon. The shovel flashed in the wrong direction, and I heard a squeak of surprise and pain. I landed about a foot away from Simon. The grey-muzzled chipmunk cursed, raising his paws in the air. I leapt, not at him but straight up, and the spade shot beneath me and over its controller's head. Two chipmunks closed ranks with him as I landed, their needles held in defensive positions, promising much pain when I pounced on their leader. I charged, and then bounded through the gap in their circle to Simon's right.

“Fools!” Simon shouted behind me. I heard the whistle of the spade as I booked it for the backyard. Dodge, feint right, and the spade thunked into a charred root. A curse followed. I considered breaking for my nest, but it would be too risky and would take too much time. I continued to zigzag though the yard, the spade chasing after me like a large drunken hornet. Simon switched tactics, from attempting to bisect me to trying to smash me with the flat of the blade. I felt the wind of the blade on my tail fur a few times before I scrabbled over the wall and poured on the speed.

#

My head had begun to spin by the time I reached the foot of a gnarled oak tree where I had stashed a med kit years ago. I flopped myself over a root and tried to think through the screeching scent of blood in my nose. I had to do something about that or I'd run out of thoughts to think in short order. The fur on my leg had become so soaked with blood that you could wring it out like a towel. It showed no sign of drying, either. I licked a forepaw clean and pressed it to the wound. Normally a wound like that would barely slow me down, but I could feel myself on the edge of shock from blood loss. The bleeding would do me in soon unless I stopped it. There had to be some sort of anticoagulant on the needles. Unusual-rodents generally didn't use poisoned weapons since half the time we carry them in our mouths. Simon either found a poison that was safe to ingest or stopped caring about the well-being of his troops. Knowing that bastard, it would probably be the latter.

Still holding the wound, I looked back in the direction of my nest. Either the chipmunks had ransacked it before I got home or were in the process of doing it now, undoing all that work setting it up. The concealed roof to keep all my electronics dry had been my best yet. I barked in their general direction, daring them to come swarming out of the foliage. They didn't come, which meant one thing. Simon was on a tight schedule.

And to stop him, whatever he was up to, I'd need help. The world had steadied, and my tongue felt dry. I peeled my paw from my leg and swore as more redness welled up from the hole in my leg. Blighted walnuts! I turned and looked for the root I had stashed the first aid kit under.

“Go away!” A bark came from above. A squirrel on a branch clutched an acorn in his paws, ready to chuck. His tail waved furiously. “Away!”

My heart tripped and rolled around in my stomach. Bug-speckled cashews on a rocket! The last think I needed to deal with was a feral. I let my tail droop, submissively, and smiled. “Hey, now, neighbor! I'm just passing through. I buried a nut here.” I winced, trying to remember to speak feral after so many years with a human speech spell. Letting the meat brain talk feels all sorts of wrong.

“My nuts! All nuts mine! Have this!” With an impressive accuracy he hurled the acorn down at my head, forcing me to duck. “Go!”

I gave the feral a hard glare. He made no move to come after me. With all my blood scent everywhere, it wouldn't be too long before a coyote came by. However, the branches were laden with additional ammunition.

I searched for an alternate solution. I needed to get mobile without bleeding out. Superglue would be perfect. The Band-Aids and gauze in the med kit might not even help me now-the blood would just seep around the bandage. My eyes fell on the acorn that had narrowly missed my noggin. What I needed was pressure.

“That mine!” the squirrel above barked as I lifted it. I paused to flip the fella off and then bit through the skin to make a surface clean of dirt and pressed into the wound. I squeezed the acorn with my thighs and held it there. Not exactly comfortable but with pressure applied, it stopped the bleeding. Smiling, I turned to the feral. “See? I'm a genius!”

The friggin' feral beaned me on the head with another acorn in reply.

#

Continuing beyond the feral and his tree, I found a house that stank of little girls and a woman overly fond of perfume. Where there were little girls, there would be craft projects and glue. More importantly, it did not reek of cats or dogs. But at that point, with my hind legs tingling so fierce from the nut clamped between them, I might have risked it. Clambering over the fence that guarded against the forest, I found the house to be an elderly colonial with a screened-in porch. A young human with pigtails sat on the steps in a dress that was a veteran of some great finger paint war. She held a tiny Boeing miniature in her chubby little hand, making vroom-vroom noises with her mouth.

Pity she was so young-had the kid been a tad older, I could have just asked her for help. The Veil didn't always cut off communication with the younger ones, but they have to be old enough to understand what the heck you're saying. It's a narrow window. I could see a shape hovering in the windows on the first floor, probably a mother just itching to hit me with shovel if I ventured anywhere near her drooling bundle of joy.

On the second story one of the windows had been left open. That sounded like a less annoying means of entry to me. A quick trot along the aging fence and a climb up the drainpipe brought me to the window of a very pink room. The sheer pinkness of the room-the bed, the dresser, the walls, all different shades of the eye-searing color-combined with posters of vacantly staring Disney princesses gave me the willies so bad my tail fluffed up. I had been wrong about the mother being the source of the perfume too. The floral scents were so thick that the taste of them coated my tongue as if I'd shoved a hard candy into my cheek pouch.

Scanning the room, I didn't see much in the way of art supplies, but scattered on the vanity were a variety of nail polish bottles. The shine of the bottles pulled Scarlett into my mind, the way she'd paint her claws and color her tail after raiding the bedrooms of little girls. She preferred her claws red and her tail purple. Sent her down the river in a matchbox that way. I shook myself before the memory of her started to berate me, continuing to pine over her. It had been how many years? I cut off the thought before I started counting them. I'd grump like a cat if I allowed myself to do that. I focused instead on the relevant part of the memory, the time when Scarlett and I had tussled and knocked over a full bottle of the clear nail polish and rolled in that tacky stuff. It had dried hard in our fur when we woke up later. Much slower than superglue, but I didn't have a better option.

Aiming for speed, I ditched the nut between my legs and hobbled across the hot pink carpeting, striking a blow against the searing color with each bloody footprint I left on it. A quick hop and I confronted myself in the vanity's mirror. I couldn't help but glare at the grey fur that had started appearing on my muzzle last winter. Maybe several winters ago-that don't matter. Despite the fact that now even dark cultists were calling me ancient, I'm not tired of seeing the spring, so I turned my addition to the arrangement of bottles in front of me. I grabbed a pink one-they were all pink-and muscled it open.

I nearly passed out then and there! Holy hazelnuts in heaven, the scent of this stuff burned! I nearly sneezed a lung out of my iron-shod nostrils. When that didn't happen and I recovered minus the small amount of material that did come out of my nose, I poured the polish right onto my leg. I had to sort of mash it into the fur. Bleh. It burned like a hot poker when it went into the wound, although I could practically hear my smell receptors sizzling. Not sure which was worse-my nose or my leg. Either way I had to sit there, holding the wound closed while the nasty stuff dried.

Time passed, at least a minute, maybe thirty seconds. I had been thinking about how many places I needed to stash a tube of superglue and how to buy them. Thomas still owed me big time-he could probably order me a, like, Costco-sized pack of the things. So that's easy-peasey. Stashing them all around the town would be the work part. All good plans have boring work parts unless you want them to go spectrally wrong. My planning was interrupted-my schemes usually are-this time by a tiny repetitive wumping sound. There, right next to the window, sat a small desk and on it sat a marvelous cage, with a wheel, tubes circling around, a tower to climb up, and a full maze to explore, all pink and white. Directly next to that was a small aquarium that contained a desperate-looking hamster, who was beating on the glass with a dried corn kernel. The cage bore the name Coraline in stenciled glitter letters. The big fancy cage had no bedding in it, looking pristine.

I attempted to slap my head, but my forepaws remained firmly glued to my leg. Reminding myself to focus on the task at hand, I continued to hold the wound closed while I watched the hamster. Like most hamsters I've met, she had the build of an extra fuzzy tennis ball, dark beady eyes with long tan fur. The black-rimmed aquarium with the stacks engineering of textbooks securing the mesh top looked absurdly out of place in the sea of pink stuff that made up the rest of the room. She watched me back and paced the length of the cage.

“Yeah, yeah, hold your fuzzy tail a moment. I'd really rather not lose any more blood, ya know.” My tongue had gone all dry, and my stomach gurgled as she nibbled on a nut, waiting. What I really needed, though, was the water bottle hanging in the corner of the cage.

The hamster squeaked in reply-probably something like okay, but I don't speak hamster. My mind drifted back to Simon while I waited. Tangled with him before, madder than a rabbit who wore hats. Liked nothing more than inviting monsters over for a snack, usually consisting of few human neighborhoods before the magi noticed.

The hamster squeaked again.

“Yeah, yeah. I'll be right there! This stuff takes twenty minutes to dry. Then I'll get ya out, I promise.”

“Squeak!”

“Patience!” The clock on the nightstand told me it had been ten veeeeery long minutes since I slathered the stuff on my leg. Distantly I heard a door slam. A high-pitched voice called, “Mooom! I'm home!”

I burst to my feet and smacked my head into the desk, due to my paws being glued to my leg and all. Swearing to all my lucky nuts, I started to carefully nibble around the attached paws. I was not gonna open that wound again if at all possible. If I did, then my tombstone would read RIP Uncle Rudy, killed by chipmunk, and if anybody made a zombie outta me I'd die again from the embarrassment.

Damn lucky nuts must have been in a bad mood 'cause I had gotten only two digits free when the sound of feet pounding up the chairs shook the room like a tiny earthquake. Inventing a novel way of movement with my tail as a lever, I rolled down the length the vanity and off it just as the door swung open.

I couldn't have been any more like a ninja without a couple of smoke bombs. I managed not to even squeak when I smacked onto the carpet. Green shoes attached to blue jeans strode through the door and propelled yet another human girl onto the bed with that angsty sound that young humans emit whenever the universe slights them. She stared up at the ceiling, glaring as if daring it to fall down on her. I couldn't tell ya how old she was-humans age weirdly. Still a child but starting to not be a child anymore. You know, the really, really whiney stage.

I wiggled myself under her dresser as she sat up with a huff of indignation. “My stuff!” She turned to glare at the hamster, who immediately dived under a pile of bedding. “Did you?!” She trailed off, her brown eyes studying the undisturbed pile of textbooks on the hamster's cage. The young human cast about, her freckled face blotching with red rage, a bomb looking for a target. “Mom! Kelly's been in my room again!” she called, storming out of the room like a thunder elemental I knew once.

I got back to nibbling my paws free as fast as I could before the pink tornado came back. The nail polish had formed a hard mass over the wound and seemed fixed in place by fur. If I kept it still and didn't rip it open again, then the chipmunk poison wouldn't be any more trouble.

Crawling out from the dresser, I surveyed the room for the next objective. No, not the hamster-a computer. And the room didn't have one! What sort of child didn't have their own computer? Sheer madness, right? I figured maybe the hamster could tell me. The trouble with hamsters was once you taught them how to talk, they didn't really shut up. Still, she was obviously a smart one. Couldn't leave her under the textbooks to go mad from boredom. After all, it's a RATS member's duty to free all the smart rodents from captivity so we can get eaten by cats and interdimensional anomalies.

Careful to use my wounded leg as little as rodently possible, I clambered over to Miss Coraline's cage. Her head popped up from the cedar or whatever shavings when I tapped on the glass, her little eyes brimming with hope. She followed me to the top of her aquarium, clambering up her water bottle and clinging to the screen mesh, squeaking impatiently. There was no sense putting off the talkinating, so I poked her paw with a claw. Instantly, a shrill note exploded in my head and pain ripped through my foreleg. I got blown backwards and nearly off the aquarium. A crunch of bedding followed, and scream of pain of rippled far louder than the magic note.