Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2)

by Daniel Potter

  "Convenient," Noise growled. Even when fully human the sound was deep and threatening. I rolled my eyes. The two women's dislike for each other was a constant reminder that roses have thorns. To be fair, O'Meara did burn down her parent's home, and Noise's pack snapped our bond while doing their level best to kill me. So there were some acceptable reasons for their grudges. But still, my life would be a bit easier if the two of them would get along. "The waiter's horns didn't appear to be going anywhere," she noted.

  He hadn't been the only one either. As we exited there were more than a few patrons and staff of the Stockyard sporting mementos of their transition to the barnyard side. At least to my nose Noise smelled completely human. "All those echoes should fade in a few days. We can get Ixey to check you out if you'd want to be sure."

  "I'd rather not have your magi friends looking inside my head. Pa will have a fit if he catches their scents on me." The car turned onto the street that O'Meara lived on. The long wooded path cut through a thick secondary growth forest, with plenty of trees growing between each home. I decided not point out that it would probably be just as bad for him to catch MY scent on her, and my scent got much deeper in her fur.

  We lapsed into silence.

  Noise broke it as the car made its final approach to O'Meara's. "I guess I'm fine. Sorry about your birthday."

  "It was fun!" My tail tip twitched happily as I remembered actually speaking to a mundane without him asking if I was good boy. "We have to do that again."

  "Well that tux isn't a rental," she said as we pulled into O'Meara’s driveway. It was a perfectly normal two-story white colonial that looked to my eyes like it was decorated with Christmas lights powered with halogen bulbs. Those lights would be the wards. O'Meara had mostly lived in her office before she got injured. The house had been a fallback position, a safe house so heavily warded that even an Archmagus would lose more than his eyebrows burrowing through its protections.

  The car stopped and Noise handed back the white bag that contained our dinners. "You sure you don't want one?" I asked.

  She shuddered. " No. You enjoy them."

  The scent of the meat drifted up and made my stomach growl. Reawakened and ravenous after the adrenaline of the transition had cold-cocked it, my appetite insisted on making up for lost time.

  "Good night, Thomas," Noise said, leaning the driver seat way back, allowing me to rub my muzzle against her cheek. She pulled me into an embrace, wrapping her arms around my neck and squeezing me to her chest. A hand found my ear, and we lay there for a long moment, enjoying each other’s warmth.

  The moment passed and I pulled away. "Night Noise," I replied, taking the bag in my teeth. When I popped the back door open, her hand gently caught my tail on the way out and let it run through her fingers as I exited. I gave her a smile before trotting up the walkway to the front door and pawing the doorbell.

  The door had scarcely opened an inch when Tallow's voice greeted me. "Thomas, what the hell did you do this time?" She stood in my way, glaring down at me with steel eyes and thick arms crossed. Her dark brown, not-quite-black hair curled onto itself in a way that made one wonder if it was resentful of the person beneath it and if the feeling was mutual.

  I flattened my ears and placed the doggy bag at my feet, readying for the storm.

  "She passed out mid-sentence. You made her channel again, didn't you? She was doing so well this week!" Tallow boomed. I'd really hoped she hadn’t noticed, but the werewolf matron missed nothing, not even with the new moon clouding her normally supernatural senses.

  "Sorry. I got caught in the middle of a transition! I panicked and we did some sort of shield spell. It wasn't a big one. I thought she could handle it," I replied trying to keep the whine out of my voice. It was always my fault when O'Meara channeled.

  Ixey chimed in from somewhere behind Tallow, high and slightly halting. "But she assembled it very quickly, no doubt."

  "We didn't have much time." I glanced over my shoulder at the woods and the road; Noise's SUV was long gone. I felt exposed. "Could you guys yell at me inside?"

  "You’re doing nothing for her recovery," Tallow growled. "You do want her to get better, don't you? Because you've done nothing but hurt her lately!" The words closed around my heart like a vice. Tallow was a tower of muscle, particularly during the half moon, but her tongue tended to be even sharper than her teeth, and she wielded truths like morning stars. My ears drooped so low that I'm fairly sure they tried to hide under my chin.

  "Let him in, Tallow," Ixey said.

  With a grunt she moved aside to reveal Ixey, tiny as Tallow was large and with more than a foot of height difference between them. While the werewolf matron wore gray sweat pants and an oversized t-shirt, Ixey's tailored suit shimmered with silver and gold sequins, and her razor-cut hair was dyed bands of pink, green and red. On her shoulder sat her familiar, Garn, a golden gecko with glimmering gemstones festooning his tiny body. I kept my eyes on him as I padded into the foyer with my meal. He possessed the only eyeballs in the room that weren't casting disapproval in my direction.

  The door swung shut, and I felt like a kid who'd broken his curfew under their combined gazes. I could have stopped her, sure. Perhaps I should have, but in that moment I'd been scared and hadn't thought about what it would cost O'Meara. I never think about costs in the heat of the moment and neither did my magus. Or worse, she knew the costs but paid them anyway. Not being able to channel ate at her as if a hungry hyena had been trapped in her rib cage. She seized on any danger I found myself in as a chance to do something, anything. That note of pride in her thoughts before she collapsed into sleep echoed in my head. "Like you would just stand there and not ask for help as the world melts around you," I said.

  "Transitions are opportunities for tass, Thomas, not something to be afraid of. You did get some tass, right?” Ixey asked.

  "Some," I conceded.

  "Give it here then." She held out her hand. "I'll send it up the chain to the Inquisition office."

  "Funny," I laughed, taking that for a joke despite knowing she wasn’t. O’Meara, as an inquisitor, had to send found tass up the line to her headquarters.

  Ixey’s hand closed into a fist as her body gave a tremble that I knew to be a sign of frustration. "Thomas, it's not like we can hire someone like Lady Cavell to come and fix the problem! Which means we have to wait for headquarters to care about us again. Any tass up the chain will help."

  "O’Meara and I aren't one and the same, Ixey. We’ve been over that. It's my day off and therefore my tass." I only had to surrender tass O’Meara and I found on official business. Besides, no amount of tass would buy O’Meara and therefore her assistant, Ixey, into the Inquisition’s good graces after the incident with her former familiar.

  Still, I saw no sympathy in the eyes of the magus nor the werewolf, so I took my doggy bag in my mouth and pushed past the pair. If I was going to endure this, I wasn't going to do it on an empty stomach.

  Ixey sighed. "I know it’s hard, Thomas, but you and O'Meara need to get used to living without her magic."

  Tallow’s triplets bounced and giggled in their playpen as I passed by on my way to the kitchen. At least they were happy to see me. To my relief neither magus nor werewolf followed. I ate both steaks while chewing over a single question: who the hell was Lady Cavell?

  Right off the kitchen was the recovery room. It'd been the dining room, but they'd found settling O'Meara in the first floor much easier than a room upstairs. It stank of sweat, mostly O'Meara's, and a bit of Tallow's. The scent of wolves permeated everything and nibbled at my brain whenever my thoughts drifted. A tiny part of me, even after six months of living with Tallow and her cubs, still hollered about the danger of living in close proximity to wolves. I had nothing to fear from Tallow's cubs other than the really disturbing way they made my stomach growl. Tallow herself, well, she used to respect me. After all, I had sorta helped her deliver the triplets.

  O'Meara lay in a hospital bed in the
center of the room where the dining table had been. The china cabinet and other furniture had been repurposed to hold her things. Her breaths came easy with a slight whistle as she inhaled. She'd been huge when I'd first met her, but the months of bed rest had withered her body, and the brain injury she'd sustained had destroyed her balance. A wheelchair parked in the corner was her only means of transport. Her bright red hair had grown back in an unruly mop that spilled around her pillow. One hand dangled over the railing, and I padded over to her, took her wrist in my mouth and placed the hand on her heart. I rubbed her cheek with mine.

  It hurt every time I entered that room. I could still imagine her as that brash and passionate woman who'd from the moment I met her addressed me as a person and not some intelligent pet. Her injury was my fault. If I'd trusted her more, then perhaps together we could have defeated Sabrina without O'Meara burning herself from the inside out. And now I wasn't doing anything to help her get better.

  She did not stir in response to my touch, but her mind flickered in recognition. I felt the presence of an eye on my back. Tallow stood in the doorway, a babe held to her breast. With a nod she moved into the house to tend the rest of her litter. I went to my bed: a supersized deluxe dog bed at in the corner. I hated the thing, it reminded me of my dependence on all these people around me. Yet I pulled it alongside O'Meara's bed, like I did every night.

  I'd wanted to maintain my own apartment. O'Meara paid me in both mundane money and a little tass, unlike any other familiar. But all the money in the world wouldn't give me back the hands I needed to live independently of my bond. That had to be earned in the magical world. And before I could do that, my conscience demanded I fix what I'd broken. Ixey and Tallow were right. I had to start being the solution to healing O'Meara and stop being an excuse for her to channel.

  I lay down in my bed and watched O'Meara dreams, the rise and fall of memories playing in slow motion across the ocean of her mind.

  Sleep didn't come for me, but a certain squirrel did.

  "Pssst. Thomas! You up?"

  I'd actually watched the rodent peak his head around the doorway, pull a cashew that he'd probably nicked out of the kitchen from his cheek pouch and eat it before crossing the threshold. Despite that, my voice was still heavy with my own exhaustion. "Not up. But not sleeping. Isn't it a bit late for squirrels?"

  Rudy shrugged. He was wearing what he called his travel suit, which was a tube of nylon mesh that held an iPhone to his back and a mini-zippo lighter, along with a few firecrackers, to his front. "Had a horror movie marathon and sleep ain't in the cards tonight. Whatacha up to? I texted ya."

  My eyes drifted over to my iPad in the corner propped against wall. I hadn't turned the thing on in a week. The most effective way to use the device was to prod the screen with my nose, which got tedious real fast. "I, uh, missed it."

  "No kidding." He scampered over to the iPad, swiped at the dark screen and then rubbed the dust off his paws. "You know if you use it more, you'll get better at it."

  "Hmpf." Easy for the squirrel to say. His paws didn't take up half the screen. "Hey Rudy, you ever hear of a magus named Lady Cavell?"

  The squirrel paused, his hands reaching for the pad's power cord. "Cavell? Yeah, she's House Morganna. Pretty high on the rankings but generally not considered political enough to go anywhere else. She's almost local. Might even be part of O'Meara's protectorate." Rudy pulled the phone off his back, a motion that could have been awkward if it hadn't been so practiced. After a moment of dithering on it, he said, "Yeah, she's about two hours out of town. Why you—" He glanced up at O'Meara's slumbering form. "Oh oh-oh-oh! Dude, she's like way out of our league. Even if she can fix her, she'll want your first dozen sons, or something worse, like enough tass to swim in."

  I hrrmed, "So she's a healer."

  "Well yeah, but she doesn't do charity, and there’s no Magus health insurance."

  "The Inquisitors should cover it," I grumped.

  The squirrel shrugged. "Should but won't. O'Meara got placed here in bumbletown for a reason."

  "Maybe she's the sort that will take a down payment and a favor. You got her number?" I asked.

  Rudy cocked his head. "You think I've got major magi on speed dial?"

  "You've named dropped Archmagi before."

  "Well she's just not important enough to make that list. Seriously, I've never met the gal, but she probably didn't get where she is by being warm and welcoming." His tail twitched behind him.

  I stood. "Then we'll have to invite her for tea."

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rudy chittered with amusement when he understood my plan.

  I shushed him as I nosed open the door to Ixey's room, which was the only room in the house that didn't stink of werewolf. Instead, pungent incense made my nose itch. On first impression, the room beyond was dark even to my eyes, the heavy curtains closed to a moonless night. Yet as I continued to stare, globes of colored light winked into existence. The light of magic did not illuminate so much as they formed constellations of objects in the blackness of the room. A small circle of green lights to the left would be the bracelet that Ixey housed her spirit friends within. Nearby, I found the soft blue glow of Garn's aura, composed of thousands of tiny bits that combined into a shape of a gecko.

  I thanked the vast unknowns that the pair were soundly asleep and turned my eyes to the other end of the room where a single green LED cast its feeble light and transformed the piles of books and equipment on the desk into monstrous forms. To the left of that sat a roughly rectangular constellation of shifting purple lights, our target and the most complex magical item in the entire house: a transdimensional fax machine of sorts. It teleported letters to wherever its fellows were. But first I needed to find the address.

  I felt Rudy's weight shift as he hunkered down between my shoulder blades as I crept into the room, carefully testing the floor board in front of me for give before I applied my full weight. The tip of my tail twitched with every completely silent step. Some humans talk about getting a runner's high; we cats get a sneaky high. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of being somewhere but not perceived as being there. I made it all the way to the desk without the slightest change in the pace of Ixey's heartbeat.

  The click of Rudy's penlight sounded like thunder in the still room, and the light it cast burned like lightening on my straining eyes. "Alrighty! There's the ledger!" Rudy's whisper seemed to boom.

  I shook my head to clear my vision, and Rudy hit the floor with a soft thump.

  "What was that for?" he said, his voice a harsh whisper.

  I hadn't really meant to dump him off my head, but I decided to own it. "Stop making noise," I said, unable to prevent the grin from spreading.

  The glow of the LED from Ixey’s desktop computer allowed me to see Rudy’s tail waggle indignantly. He gave a small hrmpf. "Damn cats and their sense of humor," he grumbled before jumping onto the desk. The penlight’s beam fell on Ixey’s massive ledger. The golden symbol of the Inquisition glimmered as the narrow beam of light crossed its surface. The book itself was more than half Ixey's height, as wide as it was tall and as thick as a human arm. It stood in the center of Ixey's doublewide cubical desk on a wooden stand to hold it at a forty-five degree angle. It contained everything O'Meara and Ixey deemed official business, such as tass accounting, visitor logs and official reports. Most importantly, it had a directory of all North American magi in the back.

  As O'Meara was the local inquisitor, there should have been no trouble with me accessing the ledger and I was sneaking into Ixey's room unnecessarily. In the six months I'd lived with Ixey, I'd learned that when it came to mucking with her desk, forgiveness was far easier than permission. Besides, she'd tell O'Meara about the letter and O’Meara would certainly forbid me from sending it.

  Rudy carefully set the white envelope he carried onto the desk and hopped onto the ledger. He undid the latch that held the book closed, and I pawed it open, careful not to tear the pages. The
paper crinkled beneath my paws as I paged through accounting lists, official reports and a very empty appointment calendar. I kept an ear trained on Ixey, but her heartbeat never changed. I slowed as I leafed through the reports in particular; the history of both Grantsville and O'Meara lay in those pages. I'd seen fragments of her memories from those times, but it would be interesting to see how she viewed the events as they were happening without years of distortions. Alas, they were in Latin and therefore Greek to me.

  Finally, we reached the back of the book, a list of names accompanied by their personal sigil. Several entries looked recently crossed out. Maddeningly, the names weren't in alphabetical order and listed only the magus' common name. As a rule, magi avoided addressing each other with anything other than a single name. O'Meara was Mistress O'Meara, not Samantha O'Meara. Most seemed to use their first name. Perhaps there had been a Samantha at the time O'Meara finished her apprenticeship? I mused over names as I randomly flipped between pages, trying to find some hint of organization to the list.

  "There!" Rudy called out, triggering a spike of panic to race down my spine. "No! Back one!"

  "Why don't you do your alarm clock impression while you're at it," I mumbled as I flipped back to the page. There in the middle of the page sat Lady Cavell of House Morganna. A detailed sigil composed of three snakes wrapped around a rod next to the name; similar to the caduceus logo of my old medical insurance company but with an additional snake. I'd always thought snakes were fitting for an insurance company, and the fact that her sigil incorporated more didn't exactly fill me with hope.