High Steaks (Freelance Familiars Book 3)

by Daniel Potter

  Rudy looked directly at me. I had to suppress a laugh, but I'm sure the smirk showed on my face regardless. "I think I know a certain little birdy that might be interested in helping us out."

  "Good! Now that's step one." He swiped a photo onto the screen. "Then we gotta get through the processing plant undetected and into the vault. And let me tell ya, that's where the real fun begins."

  34

  Hit 'Em Where It Hurts

  Naomi looked through my eyes and at the hole in the concrete, studying the concentric rings of magic around it. You sure this will work? Because I have no idea what I'm looking at here.

  If you had let me go with them, I could sniff at it, Morie's thought-voice whined distantly.

  Trust me, that ward there is triggered already. I pointed my nose to the outermost ring of magic surrounding the hole, a dim circle of gold. The ward itself was nearly exhausted. Nobody had bothered reinforcing it for a good long time. Now, bird me up, and try not to make it hurt so badly this time.

  No promises on that one, Naomi thought. It had been over six months since I’d had the bird magus in my head. One of the four members of Veronica's cabal, the Blackwings, she and her familiar Morie sat miles away in House Morganna's sanctuary on the hidden Vegas strip. The other Blackwings were positioned near Lansky's vault in case the operation went from nutty to fruit basket-shaped. We had bonded a mere half hour ago. Tied to the concept of birds, Naomi could transform herself or her familiar in to any bird she could imagine. It was she who had outfitted herself and the Blackwings with foci that allowed them to shift instantaneously into crows. Otherwise, the process was much more painful, and slower. Had I made a slightly smaller crow, we could have just borrowed one of those.

  But, like most things in my life, we had to do it the hard way. I stood naked of any harnesses and the magical defenses woven into them. Rudy stood at the base of the wall. He wore his harness with all the pockets emptied of gear, that gear tied into a bundle on a string so he could drag it behind him. He kept reaching back at the empty place on his back where his phone usually resided. "Ready, mission impossible?" he asked.

  "Let's do this," I said, taking a deep, calming breath.

  Naomi's strange fluttery power flooded down into me and spread through my body. I opened the link wide with effort, like a patient waiting for the dentist's drill. First, it itched. I failed to keep my eyes closed and watched the tawny fur of my paws blossom into bright-green feathers. Then the changes sank deeper than skin, rippling through my muscles and digging into my bones. Crackling filled my ears as though my entire bloodstream had been replaced with Pop Rocks. My flesh did not so much twist as wither, something biting off tiny pieces of me from everywhere at once. The world pressed down on me, crushing me as the wall in front of my nose swelled. A scream got stuck in my throat, pressing against vocal cords that no longer existed. My vision blurred as the world widened. My limbs twisted, pulling to my sides. I tried to pull away from the pain.

  Don't. Don't pull away, Thomas. Almost there, Naomi's voice urged. There's a reason for this. A reason for the pain. I know it hurts.

  A reason? A reason for this? What was it? I couldn't remember. It had all been pushed out by the pain. Fly away! something in me screamed. Yet the voice seemed nice. Gentle, no ill will. But why the pain? My wings tried to buzz, muscles fired, and the pain shot through, jagged and harsh.

  Not yet! Almost there. Hang on!

  It stopped, and I felt that alien sensation of breathing through a throat that wasn't right. Not my chest, not my nose. I tried to paw at my nose - which felt heavy - and found my arms moving into a flurry that blew me sideways.

  Stop moving, Thomas! Let me show you how first.

  I clutched myself tight, trying not to twitch, and found the world spinning until I tumbled to a stop. Slowly, memories were bubbling up. Thomas. That was my name.

  Other memories came, but not mine. Memories of this body, how to move, how to dance among the branches.

  "Hee hee heee!" a voice boomed in my ears, and a gray figure towered over me. I remembered this creature. Rudy. "Yooou're smaaaller than a walnuuut!" His voice was slow, his speech stretching out.

  "And you you you big as I'm is!" I countered, grabbing words and tossing them at him. Speech seemed distant.

  You're used to relying on your meat brain more. It will take a bit of time to sort out. Try flying.

  A memory occurred to me. I was supposed to fly down the hole. I buzzed up into the air, my wings flapping fast as I could follow them, wavering slightly over Rudy's head, which he tilted in my direction somewhat belatedly. The body was not quite the same as the memories, but it was close. Then I knew. Zip left, zip right. Up. Down. Zoom around the squirrel! Wheeee! I poked his tail, and he grabbed at me but way too slow!

  "Heeeey! Little gnat!" Rudy shook his huge fist.

  Remember what we're doing, Thomas. Can't have too much fun. Naomi beamed warmth into my tiny brain. I did a little loop of joy.

  Right. Mission. Tass. I zipped up to the hole we were supposed to travel through. The opening yawned wide like a snake's mouth. I zoomed back from the darkness. The tunnel was pretty dark, too. I could barely see. Only the glow of magic shined in the hole, and that did nothing to tell me where the walls of the tunnel were.

  That we can fix, Naomi said. She and Morie shifted beyond the link, and a different sort of power trickled to me. The darkness shrank away.

  "Oooh, now you look like Tinkerbell," Rudy said as he climbed up toward the hole.

  I nodded, but it didn't work, so I bobbed up and down. "Ready?!" This would be so much fun!

  "Just remember to turn the fairy dust off when we get to the end of the pipe," Rudy said.

  I bobbed again and threw in a little loop. It was easier than talking. Talking made my brain itch. Had to get the tass! Get tass, whomp Death. Certainly clearer than with that cat brain.

  Naomi chuckled mentally. To a hummingbird, it's all fun and nectar until the hawks come to play. Remember you're a cat.

  Yes. I'm a cat, I thought as I flung my little body down through the pipe. Tass tasted like sugar, right?

  Rudy moved so slowly down the tunnel that I quickly abandoned him to wait by the end of the pipe. I had been worried that there might be leftover phantasm goop in the tunnel, but the pipe way proved to be free of any blockages.

  I stopped flying as soon as I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Not because I personally noticed. Naomi shouting THOMAS, STOP! into my mindscape had a more direct effect. With her guidance, I did my best to creep up to the end of the pipe. Creeping isn't easy when you're a hummingbird the size of a bumble bee. Walking isn't something hummingbirds' legs are intended to do. Still, Naomi insisted that my tiny wing-buzz might give me away, so I fought every instinct of my body to put one foot in front of the other.

  Finally, after walking what seemed to be a mile, I peeked my tiny, shiny head out of the end of the pipe.

  The processing plant was not what I expected - not that I could remember precisely what Rudy had told me it looked like. A lake of bubbling black tar stretched out before me, surrounded by a circle of iron walls. Every three or four feet was a small circular spout like the one I perched in. Black liquid dribbled into the larger pool from each.

  In the center of the tar pit was a small square platform about ten feet by ten feet wide. Two men stood back to back, staring out at the blackness. They wore dark combat uniforms, and each carried a submachine gun at his hip. A small walkway led to the door to a room that blazed with wards. On the fourth side of the square, opposite the door, lay a German Shepherd with his head between his paws. All eyes - the guards', the dog’s - were focused on the black, not the faucets. Our target lay in between all of them: a small hole in the middle of the platform that none of them could see, warded with a "do not notice me" ward. From it extended a webwork of magic that entangled the entire room. When one of the bubbles burst, a minuscule bit of tass was caught by the web and slowly shuttled into the cen
ter, where it fell down into the chute.

  That was where we had to get to, without any of those guards noticing and hitting the alarm buttons on their chests. At the end of that tunnel lay Lansky's original vault. The main access was blocked by guards and wards and everything else. But there, any sort of ward might decrease the tass yield, so only one ward remained on that route. One that kept out all unauthorized magi and their familiars.

  So all I had to do was to get Rudy and my feathery tail into that hole, break my bond with Naomi before I hit that last ward, and we should be in. Oh, and hope I didn't change back so fast that I got stuck.

  My tiny tummy rumbled as I waited for Rudy. Don't move. Conserve your calories, Naomi advised.

  Trying, I whined back at her. The memory of shoving my long tongue down into a savory flower kept floating to the top of my one-track brain. I couldn't keep myself from mentally pecking at it.

  Would the guards have candy on them? I stared at them, imagining their pockets stuffed with red and white swirled peppermints.

  A gun cracked, startling me into the air briefly before Naomi coaxed me back down.

  "Hell's biscuits," somebody declared. I crept to the end of the spigot and squinted at the guards. They stood braced, their guns at the ready. The dog was on his feet, sniffing at the boiling activity around them. Something had spooked them. It appeared to be the tar itself. The lazy bubbling had grown into a full boil. The bubbles themselves were colored strangely; a two-tone swirl was clearly visible on the largest of them.

  A gunshot popped the largest bubble and made a tiny shiver run up my spine.

  "What's going on?" one man said to the other.

  "Don't know, don't care. Stick to protocol. Shut it down if you have to," the other said.

  Delicious flowers were reaching up out of the inky blackness now, their bright colors shouting out that they were filled to the brim with sweet, sweet nectar.

  My wings buzzed.

  Thomas! Hold on! Get a hold of yourself! Don't lose everything for your stomach! Naomi coached.

  Think of what happens to folk who encounter a phantasm and imagine what that one will do to you, Morie added helpfully as he blasted me with images of men and women with glassy eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to push food out of my brain, which, while very small, was predominantly occupied with food.

  If only Rudy would hurry up!

  "I'm here! I'm here! I'm here!" Echoes of Rudy's voice rang through the tunnel, but from the wrong direction.

  I heard a guard curse.

  "Steady," the older one advised.

  I crept forward and peeked. The black tar was completely obscured by a bed of luscious wildflowers. Among them all bounded Rudy, hundreds of Rudys. All chanting, "Nearly there! I'm here!"

  The guards stood, the young one with his hand poised over his alarm badge while restraining the dog with the other. The elder had his gun ready. The dog barked at the Rudys.

  The Rudys and the flowers were all slowly drifting in my direction. I had to back up. Get out of range of the pool. Yet I turned and found Rudy - the real one - huffing and puffing not ten feet down the tunnel.

  "Sounds like you got it all stirred up already! Take out the dog!" He shoved a tiny syringe into my talons.

  Now or never, Naomi observed. GO! Naomi and Morie channeled another spell, and the beating of my wings faded as the light passed through my body.

  "Good luck!" I told Rudy. I zipped out into the room, invisible to the human guards but not to the writhing mass of flowers and squirrels. Vines of plant and squirrel tails leapt out of the mass of greenery as I jigged and zigged, left, right, up, down, and corkscrewed among them. Hunger roared in my belly as I narrowly avoided a cluster of forget-me-nots.

  Then I dived with all the ferocity a bumble bee-sized hummingbird could muster - buzz! - driving the needle right into the nose of the German Shepherd.

  It yelped and sneezed as the non-magical Novocain took effect. Guaranteed to dull a magic-detecting nose. I looked back to see Rudy standing on top of the spout. The room was a storm of squirrels as my panic pushed away my hunger.

  "Is this still within protocol?" the younger guard shouted as the elder began to fire into the squirrelicane. Squirrels exploded into black goo as they got too close to the platform for comfort.

  "It's getting close! Dog's not howling!" the older man said back. Finished with one section, he whirled and raised his gun towards the real Rudy, who was sailing towards the platform on a squirrel-sized hang glider. I darted forward, jabbing him right in the temple with my needle-like beak.

  The shot went wide, blowing a hole in the wing as Rudy shouted "Geronimo!"

  I didn't see the old man's hand coming for me until it was too late. I twisted, moving my body out of the way, and heard a SNAP! through my little bones as my wing smashed into his passing thumb.

  Pain exploded as instinct snapped the wing back to my side. My one wing buzzed intermittently as I spiraled down towards the chute.

  Hang on, Thomas! We'll switch to a healing spell! Naomi hollered into my head. I stopped flapping and fell into the chute as an alarm bellowed behind me.

  I landed on a conveyer belt on my good side and bounced. When you weigh less than a gram, falls don't hurt much.

  Rudy hit the belt behind me as I heard the hatch slam closed. "Switch to plan B! Smash and grab!" Rudy scooped me up and began to run full bore down the tunnel we were in, which was about the width of a toaster.

  I need a moment to set that wing! It will heal wrong if we break the bond now!

  No time! I'll have O'Meara fix the leg on the other side. Rudy's moving really fast for being on three legs!

  "Rudy!" I tweeted. "My wing's busted."

  "No time! We've gotta get inside before they realize it's a security breach instead of an overactive goo pot."

  I broke my bond over Naomi's protests and coiled Mr. Bitey back around my neck as we approached Lansky's masterwork ward. The key piece in his defense, it detected the bond between the magus and her familiar and overloaded those bonds with lethal levels of magic when they passed through. His employees - spell dogs - didn't have one of those and passed through unharmed. In order for a magus, including Lansky, to visit the vault, the ward had to be physically disabled at a heavily guarded location.

  Pain surged as soon as I broke the connection. The energy she had been flooding me with to force me into the hummingbird form dried up. Reality began to reassert itself, and I forgot all about the wing.

  "Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!" Rudy swore as I tumbled out of his grip. "The conveyor's supposed to be moving!" I felt a tingle as I passed through the barrier; I didn't die, but I was vaguely aware of the passage rapidly getting smaller. A sharp pain jolted along my spine as Rudy pulled me down the corridor by my tail.

  We stopped. "Crushed candied bitter almonds! That's new! Hang on! Fire-in-the-hole time."

  I stretched and lifted my head to peer at what Rudy was swearing at. It appeared to be a pair of rollers in the way of the conveyer. Rudy pulled a small firecracker from his vest and lit it with his Zippo before I could protest. It exploded into a brilliant flash of magic. The machine was just gone, along with the rock in a two-foot radius. "Come on! I can't carry you the rest of the way! You're too big!"

  I rolled up on to my feet and tried to remind myself that I was not nearly as on fire as I felt. The Pop Rocks were back in my veins. I stumbled after Rudy, trying to be quick enough so as not to reenact a very unfortunate episode of Winnie the Pooh where he got stuck in a doorway for months.

  First my head hit the ceiling, then my shoulders. By the time I pushed myself out of the tunnel, I had been reduced to crawling on my belly. I felt as if I had been extruded from a machine as I fell into a basket of gray, glowing tass.

  An entire basket of tass.

  We had made it. However, by the sound of the alarms blaring, making it out was going to require a hell of a second act.

  35

  So That Beeping Sound Is a Bad Th
ing, Right?

  I allowed myself the small luxury of not moving again until my bones stopped crackling, so I had a moment to observe the ceiling of the vault.

  It was not what I expected. No shiny steel. No high-tech panels, no cameras that I could see. A lot of concrete. There was magic, sure, but it wasn't in the vault. It was protecting the vault.

  "Dude! This is no time for a nap! Get on with the hurking!" Rudy chittered.

  Groaning, I got my feet under me as the last of the Pop Rocks faded from my bones. "Gimme a moment." I stood and arched my back, making sure everything was back where it was supposed to be. My left foreleg felt off, shorter and with a slight crookedness to it, but it held my weight. I was sitting in a cloth laundry basket, like the ones you usually see being wheeled about by housekeeping. This one had the added bonus of being lined with about fifty groat of tass in the form of circular disks, about half a groat each. I stood, mentally prepared to see riches beyond my wildest imaginings.

  I opened my eyes, and my ears went flat against my head. No endless piles of gold and tass greeted me. In the center stood a chair from the realm of dentist-induced nightmares. Thick steel and adorned with leather restraints, it sat beneath a magical monstrosity that hung down from the ceiling. A bewildering interconnection of wards, spells, and black magic focused down into a skull that had the bulbous brain casing of a human welded to a rounded muzzle sporting huge tusks the color of cast iron. The rest of the teeth had been replaced with gems that blazed so brightly with magic that I couldn't see their actual hue. The jaw was positioned right over where the heart of a victim would be. Between the gems and the tusks, chains of black and silver runes were strung.

  Jet had died in that chair, as had Trevor. No sense, magical or otherwise, directly informed that fact, but I knew with the same certainty that it would not snow in Vegas tomorrow. I had been wrong. Totally wrong. Whatever the nature of Doug's tricks, he had not murdered my friends.