High Steaks

by Daniel Potter

  "Yes, I heard about that! You keep fighting for me. Yet you're not my familiar! You've avoided me until I'm sure some crisis has come up and magic would be handy. As if I'm your personal toolbox, to put away and forget about until needed." She released my muzzle to wipe tears from her eyes.

  I stayed silent, fighting for words. It would be so much easier to bind her and then explain. My excuse that I was conflict averse seemed laughable, insulting, and false. In the end, all I had was truth. "I'm scared of you."

  She sat back and drained her glass before looking back at me with a tiny hint of a smile. "Scared of me?" In the tone of one blindsided by a compliment.

  "O'Meara, you know what I want to do with my life." My eyes stole to regard the few remains of society that still lingered at the bar. All the patrons were politely turned away, but if they had been cats, their ears would be staring. "That ambition is terrified of you. I'm afraid being bonded to you will make me lose it, and I want to rebind you." I closed my eyes. "I miss you, but I—" Mr. Bitey twitched around my neck as a longing ache manifested in the tender muscles of my ears. "I can't be exclusively yours."

  Guilt reached up into my internal organs and attempted to swallow me. This was a stupid, selfish request; the familiar-magus relationship is one akin to a marriage, and here I was, the heel, requesting an open one. Worse, I knew every time I broke the bond to work with a client, it would hurt her.

  I waited for her to tell me to go drown myself in a pool.

  The table scraped against the floor as it was violently thrust aside. A hand seized a fistful of my scruff and hauled me upwards. I mentally prepared myself to be flung bodily from the bar. Instinct managed to pry my eyes open, and I found myself nose to nose with her. Flames burned behind her irises.

  "Stupid cat," O'Meara snarled. "You think I can't take it? Do I look fragile to you?" She gave me a little shake, emphasizing how strong her arm was and how far she'd come from being wheelchair bound eight months ago. "Seven familiars, Thomas, and I'm still standing. You won't break me."

  "Rex said don't come back unless it's for good." The excuse rolled off my tongue before I could catch it. It only fed the flames in O'Meara's eyes.

  "Even if a piece of him was twisted around in my mind by the Archmagus, that doesn't mean he gets a vote. He's dead, Thomas. Killed by his pride and my cowardice. If I let my ghosts rule my life, I wouldn't be able to get up in the morning." Her accent thickened with each syllable, adding weight to every word that slammed against my heart.

  My tongue licked my nose. "I'm not scared I'll break you, O'Meara. I'm afraid I'll not be able to leave."

  The anger turned sly, and she chuckled. She kicked the table aside and slid herself beneath me. I found my head cradled in her lap. "You? Thomas, did it occur to you that while you were so busy peering into my soul, I was looking at yours?" Her voice dropped. "I know the size of your ambition, cat." There was a soft pop of plastic and my harness was gone, allowing her hand to rake through my thick fur unimpeded. "I know that I'm a tool to it, but if that's what I am, then I insist on being polished and shined when I'm not in use. Texting me once in a while, or stopping by. Understand?"

  "Yes, O'Meara," I said, offering my ears.

  "Don't you 'yes, O'Meara' me," she said, her fingers digging into my aching ear muscles. "Now, do what you came to do, and after we finish proving to this bar that you're nothing but an overgrown cuddle-cat, we'll get to work."

  I bound her. Memories swarmed between us like overexcited fireflies as we tumbled into each other's heads, the warmth of each enveloping the other. Relief flooded both of us as we revealed that each had missed the other. Here in the moment, we could no more deny our love than ignore the sun in the desert. Life, power, and responsibility all complicated it, made it hard, made it hurt, but in the blissful moment of the bond, we basked in our mutual admiration, treasuring the shared sensations that rippled through us as her hands flowed over my fur. She sipped the memory of what had earned Rex's wrath and laughed. I have plenty more death wishes if you wish to feast on them.

  The last eight months of her life blossomed among the swarm. The sensation of being chained to a slab. The agony of one's soul being slit open. Pain. Joy quickly followed as the sun-hot flows of magic pooled in her hands and feet, allowing her to dance with flames once again. Yet the joy cooled in the face of the price. The Inquisition stripped away the final shreds of their association and enfolded Ixey, sending her away. It had been an expected cost. O'Meara would follow the steps of many a disgraced inquisitor and hire out her skills to the houses. Missing persons, uncollected debts. Yet those jobs never manifested; only nasty whispers, leaving her with a handful of fire and a bottle of whiskey in the other. Jobs would come in time, she believed, or more likely I would. In the meantime, she had gone behind the bar to wait.

  Veronica and you had an interesting time, O'Meara mindspoke as we pulled back into our respective heads. I found myself sprawled across her legs, belly up, purring like an ill-tuned motorcycle. As I had been sampling her memories, she had been sampling mine.

  Uh huh was about as coherent a thought as I could manage, my mind unspooling beneath the feel of her hands. I had missed this so much, the way our sensations mixed like two oceans suddenly finding the land between them had disappeared. We felt both sides of the moment; her fingers were my fingers and my fur was hers. I had never allowed myself an unguarded moment with Veronica. Neither of us could trust the other this deeply.

  Dimly, we watched the remaining resident drift out into the street. No one attempted to rouse us. Together, both of us could feel a storm coming, sweeping from the feudal desert of magus society. So we took this moment for ourselves and watched the dawn creep into the bar together.

  8

  Real Tass Money?

  "You nutter! Where have you been?"

  I had barely taken a half step through the door to the office before two pounds of squirrel adhered itself to my nose.

  "Talking to O'Meara. Like you've been wanting me to do for weeks," I said, attempting to dislodge the squirrel from my face with a paw. He dodged and sprinted down my spine before leaping down to the floor, where he proceeded to zigzag among my feet. I hadn't seen him this hyped up since Alice had dared him to eat an espresso bean. "Rudy, stop moving and talk to me," I growled as I slowly made my way toward my bed, trying not to step on the squirrel.

  Rudy zipped up to the desk and flung his forelimbs up into the air. "We got a job! A paying job! Real tass money!"

  "Is that so?" I said. Two hearts - mine and O'Meara's - sank simultaneously. Well, it was a nice few hours, O'Meara thought as she attempted to slip through the door behind me. Her not being a cougar or a squirrel, a ward on it binged - unnecessarily, as a woman of her bulk wearing a bright red T-shirt and combat boots was not going to go unnoticed no matter what your primary sense was.

  That said, Rudy gave no indication O'Meara existed. "You bet your nuts on it! This is the big time! Pull this one off, and we'll have enough tass to retire!"

  "So what's the job?" I asked.

  The squirrel froze, his tail stopping mid-twitch. "Uh... I have no idea." Rudy immediately reanimated. "But it's with Ceres, the mistress of the Luxor! Big-time muckety-muck for house Picatrix. Dude, I hear she's got so much tass she bathes in it!"

  "Well, that won't cause any sort of disfiguring mutations at all," O'Meara snorted. She had taken a position beside the door, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall.

  Rudy finally noticed her. "Oh, hi, O'Meara! You're on board with the Freelance Familiars? That's awesome!" He sobered a little and clasped his front paws together. "Could we borrow your car?"

  "Rudy!" I exclaimed.

  "Dude! This is high class! We can't just walk to the Luxor! You gotta pull up with style, in a limo or something."

  O'Meara chuckled. "My little beat-up Porsche is hardly a limo, Rudy."

  "It is certainly a something, though," I quipped.

  "It barely has four wheels at the
moment. The Inquisition stripped out all the spells from it when they confiscated my equipment." I'm lucky it made it to Vegas at all.

  "I suppose we could just rent a limo, then? This is Vegas, and it's not even that short notice," I said as I pondered how much work it would take to get O'Meara's car back into shape. I remembered how the flames of its fiery jets had lit the neighborhood as O'Meara came to my rescue.

  More than five hours, O'Meara thought.

  If this is a long-term assignment, we can try to get it done before I leave.

  I'd rather we get some wards up on my house first. Ixey did her best before she left... O'Meara's thoughts trailed off into a half-dozen examples of Ixey's wards not working as intended.

  CLONK! The sound of something hitting the glass door to the office interrupted our conversation. Alice stood outside the door, one side of her face pressed up against the glass, squinting in an attempt to see through its tint. Her horns, clad in silver covers, gleamed in the morning sun.

  "Over-boiled peanuts," Rudy cursed as he hopped over to the button on the desk and stomped on it. A loud buzzer sounded, and Alice stumbled into the office. Her body was draped in colorful scarves, and multiple strings of plastic jewelry hung around her neck - an outfit inspired by pictures of Hindu sacred cows found on the Internet. She'd taken it further and added makeup; rosy cheeks had been painted on her face, and there was a failed experiment with lipstick on her muzzle.

  "Thomas! Did you find him? Did you find Trevor?" The words burst from her before she even recovered her footing.

  Confusion fluttered briefly from O'Meara until she found the right memory. Meanwhile, I realized that any hope of a morning nap had died. Not that I needed one after the muzzy sunrise with O'Meara, but still... morning naps are important things in the desert. There were no naps in Alice's bright eyes, which glowed with the perkiness of liquid nitrogen in the sunshine. "Uh, no, Alice," I said and watched her expression fall.

  "He's dead. I know it," she moo-moaned.

  "Alice! We don't even know he's missing." A new voice intruded from the doorway. I looked up to find a middle-aged woman standing behind the cow's dangerous end. Deep worry had cut canyons in the folds of her face, and dark sunglasses concealed her eyes, which I knew were no longer human. Mary, Alice's mother, had gotten out of Grantsville with a comparatively minor mutation that had left her eyeballs solid orbs of ice. I was unsure if getting tangled in another reality had altered her demeanor as well or if she had been born frosty. "He might have just left. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. I warned you about him."

  O'Meara cut in. "I assume he's not answering calls?"

  Both cow and mother rounded on her as she pushed off the wall. Both recognized her.

  "No, it goes straight to voicemail!" Alice replied.

  "That is more often due to being accidentally dropped in a toilet than to being dead, Alice." O'Meara allowed herself a small smirk as the well-oiled wheels of an inquisitor's habits turned. "Do you have any other reason you believe him to be dead?"

  Alice's head drooped. "I felt him die."

  Her mother's frown deepened. "I'm terribly sorry for bothering the both of you. Alice has just had a bad dream, maybe. I'm sure the young man will turn up sooner or later." She reached for the collar around her daughter's neck, but Alice shied away from the questing hand.

  Instead, O'Meara caught it. "Mary, why don't you wait outside for a moment? Let me talk to Alice for a bit."

  Mary's cheeks seemed to catch fire. "Y—You don't b—believe her, do you? She just had a nightmare. The poor boy couldn't be—" She swallowed, withering under O'Meara's neutral gaze. "That wouldn't happen, would it?"

  "Wait outside, please, ma'am," O'Meara said with the implacability of stone. The woman cast a glance at Alice before retreating from the office. We all watched her go as O'Meara mentally berated me and Rudy for not having a wall in the entire space. Making people wait outside was less than ideal in the scorching heat of Vegas.

  O'Meara had Alice run through the events of last night, adding little we didn't know already. The grief-pain had consumed her entire consciousness and had faded at approximately the same time as my own.

  "He's dead, Mistress O'Meara." Alice stamped a hoof for emphasis. "I'm certain." Her eyes sought mine. "You felt it too, Thomas. You know."

  "Something happened, Alice," I conceded. "Magic, no doubt. But I'm going to hope he's still alive, and you should too."

  "He didn't 'get out,' Thomas, he wouldn't do that. Not without telling me."

  "Were you two more than friends?" O'Meara asked.

  Alice flicked her ears and turned away. "No! That couldn't work! I'm a cow!"

  "Your mother can't hear you, Alice," O'Meara urged.

  Alice gave the door a wary look.

  "The office is warded against eavesdropping," I added.

  Thus assured, Alice let out a sigh. "We were dating when things got all twisted... Trevor was the only person who could see the horns. He promised to stick by me no matter what." She paused. "I mean, we stopped dating - who'd want to kiss a cow, right? - but he kept his promise. Kept coming to the Stables to see me after everybody else on two legs stopped. I was the girlfriend who got terminal cancer but didn't quite die. It's both over and not." Alice lay down.

  "You're not dead, Alice," I said in a firm voice.

  "I might as well be! Nobody wants a cow as a familiar! I'm too big to spy like all the mice camped out across the street. You training Trevor was my one shot." She sniffled, her big eyes blinking away tears.

  "Mice camped across the street?" Rudy chittered disapproval. "Be right back!" He leapt up into Coraline and bound up to a vent that led to the roof.

  "What is he—" Alice followed Rudy with a worried expression.

  "We'll try to find out what happened to Trevor, Alice," I said, not wanting to be drawn into an argument about how being stuck underground was different from deadness. That, and by the time that conversation finished, Mary might be a withered husk outside.

  The statement did the trick, at least. Alice lit up brighter than the bottle rockets I could hear being fired from the roof and detonating across the street. Alice bounced up onto her hooves. "You'll find him!"

  "Of course we will." O'Meara stepped back in, a list of questions waiting in her head. "Do you know what his schedule was and where he hung out?"

  "He worked crazy amounts. Came to the Stables to see me every Saturday, plus his lessons with Thomas. He likes routines. He'd tell me how he was going to find a mentor and get out of here. Tell me about the crazy sunside stuff and, like, how the full moons were always super busy because so much of suits are busy being wolves. I mean, it's always a one-sided conversation, but what have I got to say? I chewed cud today and practiced with my mouth stick? Again?" She gave a low moo. "Sorry."

  "No, don't be sorry," O'Meara soothed. "You know some details? Who he worked with?"

  "A little," Alice said.

  O'Meara gave her an encouraging smile. "Let's go over those."

  Seeing O'Meara had the data extraction well in hand, I set about relieving a bit of my own guilt by fetching a glass of water. We had exactly two human glasses, and I carried it using my magic thumb.

  I found Mary leaning against the building, frowning across the street, where a cardboard box had been blown open and was on fire. Small fuzzy forms were darting down the street carrying smartphones and other electronics.

  "And don'tcha all come back! I got bigger rockets!" Rudy shouted from the rooftops.

  Mary let a smile momentarily distort her sweat-channeling worry lines. "Your waiting room's AC needs fixing, Mr. Khatt, but I can't complain about the entertainment. Alice done explaining her torrid high school romances?" She took the offered floating water without a second glance.

  "Almost," I said.

  She took a grateful draw from the glass. "I wish I hadn't been so strict with her." She had taken off her sunglasses, and her featureless eyes studied the empty air in front of her as if
that would produce a clue as to where life had taken a non-Euclidean turn.

  "Sometimes the world allows you to plan. Sometimes the best you can do is hang on and scream," I said.

  The worried frown came back. "I worry that there isn't enough down there to hang on to."

  I gave her a grin. "They're a tight herd down in the Stables. If life is a roller coaster, then friends and family are lap bars. Alice will find her stride again. She's a tough—" I almost said slab of beef "—uh, cookie."

  "If you find Trevor and he's actually alive, make sure you slap him once for me," she said.

  "It would be my pleasure to find him alive and well," I said and led Mary back inside.

  9

  Breaking and Investigating

  There's nothing like a little breaking and entering before lunch.

  Alice gave us three things to check out: the location of Trevor's apartment, the name of his boss at the Luxor, and that he believed that becoming a “runner” would be his shortcut to becoming a true magus. My own appointment at the Luxor for the job wasn't until noon, and since it would probably be impolite to snoop directly before a job interview, we decided that Trevor's apartment would be a better place to start. Maybe we'd find him hiding out there.

  Rudy stayed at the office to ward off any more rodents with surveillance gear and to acquire us “proper” transportation to our meeting. I just hoped it had air conditioning.

  How do you spot a fire magus in Las Vegas? Easy: only fire magi are crazy enough to walk places while the sun is shining. Fortunately, some heat protection is extended through the bond, otherwise I'd have to worry about fricasseeing my feet on the brisk walk.

  Trevor had resided in an apartment building constructed so cheaply that the bargain-rate drywall had a certain odor to it. It's kind of like new-car smell, but grosser. A young man with leafy green hair dozed in a folding chair near the entrance under a hand-painted sign that read New Grantsville.