Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2)

by Daniel Potter

"Is that so?"

  We haggled in a manner that my father would be proud of; fifteen percent would be my cut. Unfortunately, I did agree to take a ride in the helicopter. I really need to find someone who makes cougar-sized helmets.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The damn copter was noisy, rickety and generally an unsafe contraption once Sandra overhauled it to accommodate my bulk. Yet once we lifted off, I didn't care about any of that. The damn wind cut through my fur like dozens of icicle-laden buzzsaws. I actually started to shiver, which hadn't happened since I'd become a cougar. When you have as much fur as I do, you don't generally notice little things like the difference between sixty and thirty degrees. I mean, you're aware of the temperature change. I can see my breath just as well as anybody and stepping onto snow is cold, but I can't say I care unless I get wet. By the time we'd reached the extent of our 500-foot-long tether, I was resolving to add a four-legged flight suit to my contract.

  I sat in the metal basket with a propeller on the top while Rudy perched on the edge. He seemed as impervious to the cold as he was to common sense, his paws on the twin joysticks of an expensive looking RC remote, minus the radio controlled part. Instead, Sandra had wired it into the copter. A plastic garbage bin lid was the only thing separating my tender ears from the whirling blade above us. The little quadcopter on the tail whined and wheezed trying to keep us steady.

  I said I wasn't afraid of heights, but I might be afraid of heights from the inside of homemade helicopters. Besides the roaring wind and the quadcopter, the helicopter itself was quiet. There didn't appear to be anything resembling an engine in the craft. The propeller shaft instead extended from an industrial gas canister. To fit, I had to curl myself around it but did so without much prompting, as the tank radiated a pleasant heat.

  "You see anything?" Rudy shouted over the wind.

  "Not yet! Hold it steady!" I hadn't really been looking since I was too busy pondering if a fall from this height would kill me or whether or not the spinning blades less than a foot above my head would get me first.

  A gust rocked us to the side, and Rudy banked the craft almost expertly. I bit back a question about how the hell a squirrel learns how to fly. I didn't want to know. Instead I closed my eyes and concentrated, searching for purple.

  There, a flare of it. I opened my eyes and squinted to the east. The gray light of the day had grown dim, and it was difficult to pinpoint the source of the purple other than over there, in some trees. "Bring us a little higher!"

  Rudy brought us up, and the floor moaned from the strain on the rope. A group of birds chattered at us overhead. "That’s as far as she goes!"

  It was enough. The white blotch near the purple had resolved into the peak of an old church, a wooden cross on it. I wasn't sure which one it was, but I'd bet Noise would ID it if I asked nicely.

  The purple grew dim.

  "Got one! East! Near a church. Maybe five miles?" I needed to have the technomagus rig me up a head-mounted camera. And a helmet. Definitely a helmet.

  "Okay! East, near church." Rudy turned to his left where his iPhone had been zip tied to the frame of the copter, typing this into the touch screen.

  "Okay, they're on their way!"

  "Won't be much left by the time they get there."

  "Better than—"

  The world went sideways as a wall of cold slammed into us, howling through my ears and whistling over the metal of our cage. I twisted, managing to get my forelegs around the central cylinder of the copter. Something within it screamed as the rotor shook under the force of the wind.

  "EEEEEEEE!" Rudy cried into the wind. He clung to his phone with two paws, the rest of his body flapping like a manic windsock. Craning my neck, I reach up and bit down on his tail. He screamed, and then I felt needle-like teeth pierce my ear. Tiny claws dug at my scalp.

  "OW! Rudy! Stop!"

  He bit me again!

  "Never touch my tail!" he hissed in my ear as he pulled his tail out of my mouth.

  The copter bucked. No time to argue about tails and lifesaving.

  "Rotting walnuts! The tether's gunna snap. Get me to the controls. We gotta get above the wind!" Rudy shouted.

  He crawled onto the underside of my jaw, and I shifted around the central cylinder. I stretched toward the controls, ignoring the two paws clinging to my lips. He let go with one paw and stretched it out beyond the tip of my nose to grab at a stick. We angled into the wind as the rope gave way. The ground shot out from under the helicopter as the wind carried us away like a barrel down a river. Distantly I saw a blaze of purple blossom.

  I felt Rudy fumble, and two spots of sharp pain spiked my chin.

  "I need two hands!"

  I understood. "Get in my mouth!"

  "What? You nuts!"

  "Just remember that you taste terrible." I opened my mouth as if I was at a dentist's. "GUT IN!"

  Rudy hesitated only a moment before I tasted him on my tongue. And everywhere he'd been today. I stilled a powerful urge to bite down hard on his squirmy, meaty body and carefully held him there, lifting him in-reach of the controls. He pushed both sticks up, and the heat from the tank grew to an uncomfortable level as the craft started to climb.

  The wind subsided.

  Rudy pulled himself from between my jaws, only a little soggy. His little body shook from head to tail. "I-I Never w-want to do that again! Everevereverever!"

  "Yeah." My eyes were on something else entirely. "Hey Rudy, what's about ten times brighter than a transition?"

  "I dunno. You’re the one who sees ma—" He stopped, cocking his head to listen. "Holy caramel roasted nutbags! That’s a shallowing!"

  There, nearly obliterating my entire vision, was a bloom of purple so bright it could have been an alien sun shining from the plaza hill.

  Rudy's hands were on the controls, and the copter tilted forward as we zoomed toward the Shallowing.

  Closing my eyes made it worse. I discovered early on that my eyes had little to do with seeing magic. It was a function of my soul. Various folks had said that with training I could learn to shut it off. I'd yet to find that particular button in my brain. What I could do was look deeper, block out the real world and dive into the details of the magic. It cut down on the searing brightness of it.

  In that star of purple we hurtled toward, I found its center. A pulsating glob where everything around it swirled like a river: rapid, churning and frothing. Two realities not phasing through each other, but mixing. Beneath it all long shadows dived at the glob. They were like tentacles beneath the fabric of reality. I'd read about these. Shallowings were one of the few events when you could see that the Veil wasn't a sort of barrier or filter that prevented mundanes from seeing magic, but a creature that clung to our reality. Munds saw the results of magic perfectly fine until something changed their minds. I wondered how many time one of those tentacles had reached into my head and changed something before I had awakened. The moments where I thought I saw something but it turned out to be a leave blowing across the road? What had it actually been? In the six months I had known Noise as a human, I had never noticed her slow shift into a wolf. But I'd wondered about before. How often had my life been touched by magic before my transformation?

  According to those history books in O'Meara house, the Veil had been put there by something that magi as a whole were forced to forget. For lack of a better term, they called them the Fey. And the Veil was one of them. I could see it, its arms knitting the hole in our world back together as we shook and vibrated our way toward it. There'd be tass there. A steady supply of it.

  The hole closed as we crossed over the last intersection between us and the plaza. It had been a messy patch. Realties still flowed together. I tried to picture it all as shadows of fourth-dimensional space the way the books and O'Meara had urged, imagining the shapes beyond this reality.

  A tangle, a knot. The veil had patched the hole by tying the two realities together, and now they were bleeding into each other.

&nbs
p; Someone was screaming far louder than either wind or the blades.

  I opened my eyes and saw that in our reality, people were in deep doo-doo.

  A man, or what had been a man, stood not a foot from where the rip had been. His entire body had been turned to ice so clear I could see the outline of the curb through him, and yet he still screamed. Jagged crystals a foot long pushed up from the ground around the portal, a carpet of icy spikes spread outward. The man clutched at his head, bowing in pain, his crystalline body swelling then becoming smoky white as the ice cracked.

  A car, whose driver was totally oblivious to what was happening, pulled into a space across the parking island where the ice-man screamed. Its tires crunched on the ice then popped with a bang as they were pierced. The munds couldn't see it. They had no idea. The sun was setting. People were doing their shopping after work. The Veil would probably keep more people from stumbling into the plaza, but for the hundreds who were already here? It wouldn't give a damn.

  "Bring us down, Rudy!" I said as a woman stepped out of her car and skewered her foot with an ice spike. She didn't even get the chance to scream as purple light surged through her body. She frosted over as if she'd just been injected with liquid nitrogen.

  "Where? I don't wanna be a popsicle!" Rudy stared at the frozen people below.

  I squinted, looking for the border of the shallowing and trying to figure out how big an area the crystals could claim. Rudy could hear magic, but it wasn't enough at the moment.

  I gestured. “There. No traces of purple in the first half of the parking lot.”

  "By the sign?" he asked.

  The plaza sign was the highest thing in town, designed to be seen from the highway that ran behind the plaza. It had a huge Kmart logo on it but was built in an era before the proliferation of lit signs. Small spotlights below it provided visibility. "That will work."

  As I'd found out months ago, the four-story tall sign was about my fall limit. So as Rudy brought the copter level with it, I leapt out. "Text Ixey!" I called to him as I vaulted over the edge of the basket.

  I hit the hood of an unfortunate Ford with all four paws, the pain of four simultaneous high-fives shooting up my legs. A little girl and a mother pushing her in a red shopping cart stared at me in shock. I let loose an angry hiss. If the pedestrians couldn't see the ice-man yet, then I'd give them a mad dog falling from the sky to worry about.

  "Excuse me! Sir!" came a new voice. "Could you please stop that moaning? Do you need an ambulance?"

  I looked over to find that first frozen man now towered over the rapidly frosting cars. He peeled his club-like hands away from his head to reveal a featureless face with two black holes for eyes and a round pit for a mouth. Those holes focused on a security officer who smartly stood some distance away from the ice giant and had parked his car so it stood between him the new monster. I jumped up onto the hood of a SUV for a better view. The circle of ice spikes hadn't extended past the trunks of the parked cars, so the rent-a-cop wasn't about to be given a fatal cold foot.

  The ice giant took a step forward, reaching for the man. The guard reached for his Taser. No time to think, I launched forward. I bounded onto the hood of some cheap car and stumbled as it gave beneath me with a POP! The guard swiveled and met my eyes as I crouched in preparation to tackle him out of the way. The ice giant's fingers were a foot from his head as I surged through the air. The Taser came up. My ears registered a discharge of air. Pain exploded through my chest, becoming my world. I couldn't see anything. My limbs disappeared.

  A scream pierced my awareness and the pain stopped. I opened my eyes to see an ice statue of the rent-a-cop standing over me, the plastic of his Taser now nothing but ice. On his shoulder, like a father's hand on his son's shoulder, rested the ice giant’s hand. It stared hungrily at me with two black eyes. Shit. Panic propelled me to my feet, and I ran before I knew what I was doing. The ice giant howled, and a blast of wind hit me so hard that I briefly ran on my front legs. I dashed around the side of a car as two more screams burst through the air and were cut short. That was five people. Five people dead or permanently changed. I poked my head around the corner. The giant had turned and now stalked toward a parked car with an older woman behind the wheel watching death approach with saucer-shaped eyes. Jagged crystals sprouted in the wake of his footfalls.

  "NO!" A feral scream tore from my own throat, and my muscles tensed. I don’t remember jumping, but my teeth were sinking into the back of his neck. Despite his appearances, the frozen flesh yielded like still-thawing meat. The cold bit back, sending root canal levels of icy pain rocketing along my teeth and jaws. I held on, my claws tearing at his back, ripping out chunks of slushy flesh. He reached a hand over his shoulder and clutched my back, wrenching me upward. Gravity fled as the world spun. Some sadistic part of my brain counted three rows of cars before I crashed onto the roof of another SUV.

  The momentum tumbled me off the vehicle, and I fell to the asphalt with all the grace of a rag doll. My head spun as the worst ice cream headache I'd ever experienced lanced through my brain. Wind howled across the space between the two cars.

  Oh good, I thought. I pissed it off.

  I got to my feet and the world slanted. I had to use the door of the SUV for support as my tongue worked to massage some feeling back into my lips and gums.

  Metal squealed and the sky went dark. I looked up to see the H symbol of a Honda coming down on me like a budget meteor. I hit the deck as a Honda Fit crashed into the much larger cars on either side of me. Glass rained down like bladed hail, and I covered my eyes with my paws. I backed out of the tunnel formed by the three cars, my adrenaline so amped that my third eyelids refused to retract. I could see the monster well enough as I poked my head over the trunk of a hatchback. "You gotta do better than that, you walking popsicle!" I shouted.

  His response was to grab another compact, this one partially frozen. A chorus of screams were starting to swell as shoppers realized that a live action Donkey Kong was being reenacted in the parking lot. The giant hurled a green VW bug into the air, but with my wits finally about me, I dodged it easily. The frozen bug crashed into the pavement and shattered like glass.

  I had his focus, but the ice garden was still spreading. It had consumed eight hopefully-empty cars, but who knew how many people were cowering nearby. I had to—

  "BANZAAAIII" a tiny voice screamed from overhead. I looked up to see the copter beelining at the giant. Rudy leapt out the back a moment before impact.

  Searing heat blasted into my nose as a column of flame tore into the air as the copter exploded. The flame spiraled up and spread huge wings across the sky. A green shimmer rolled off it with the superheated air. An elemental, a colossal wrym of fire. It bellowed hot rage into the sky as the green intensified. In a blink, the creature disappeared.

  So had most of the ice giant. Just two legs stood, steam rising from where they had been attach to his hips before toppling over.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, and then worry seized my heart. Rudy didn't have a transition charm, so if he'd touched a frozen shard, I'd have to store him in a freezer. "Rudy?"

  "Yeah?" His tone was sullen. My ears zeroed in on the sound of his voice.

  "Where are ya?" I asked.

  "Down here. He got me, Thomas. He got me good."

  Panicked, I poked my head beneath several cars before I found a shape crouched beneath the right one. Rudy sat, shoulders slumped as he clutched at something in his paws. He didn't look frozen, nor did I see any ice crystals near him. Instead I caught the strong odor of burned fur.

  "Frigging fire elementals. My beautiful tail!" Rudy lamented. My third eyelids drew back, and I saw details again. Rudy cradled his tail in his paws, brushing the remains of his blackened fur from its pink skin.

  "Don't worry about it now. You need to get out of here. I don't want you getting iced," I said.

  Rudy crossed his arms. "What, no thanks for blowing up the guy hucking cars at you? Literally sacrific
ing my beauty for the life of my friend!"

  I growled.

  The squirrel chuckled, and I knew the little bastard was just fine.

  "Get on," I grumped, and he scrambled onto his usual spot as I padded cautiously toward the epicenter of the shallowing. Trying to get Rudy to leave the area would be more energy than I had, and with Mr. Frosty Freeze gone the squirrel should be safe enough. The harness' protective aura must extend a little bit around me, right?

  I first checked the car that had contained the saucer-eyed woman. She appeared to have exited the car at some point. In the one next to it, with ice crystals starting to puncture its tires, I found a woman with horns and too-large ears staring at me from the back seat. Her arms clutched around two toddlers huddled to her chest. She flinched when I tried to open the door. It was locked, which would be wise except the ice would kill her and her kids anyway. I wished I still had my bond to O'Meara. We could have burned through the door or something. "Come on. Let me in, lady! Can't you see I'm a service animal?" Who knew what she saw in place of my face. I peered into the front seat. The car, an automatic, was in park. That made sense. Terrible sense. "Ideas?" I asked my companion.

  "Well, if the fire hydrants stored fire instead of water, we'd be all set," Rudy said.

  Groaning, I went around the side of the sedan. Ice crystals were rapidly colonizing the car's bumper. I tried knocking them off with a paw, but as they snapped off at the base, new ones formed without a care. I hopped up on the trunk. If I could shatter the window, maybe she'd run.

  But how the hell was I gonna do that? I clawed at it futilely. The woman shrank deeper into the car, pulling her kids into the space behind the seat.

  "NO! DRIVE DAMMIT! GET IN THE FRONT SEAT AND DRIVE! DRIVE AWAY!" I screamed, but she just stared at me with animalistic panic. Despite the horns, she was still on the mundane side of the Veil. "COME ON, VEIL! LET HER HEAR ME! LET HER UNDERSTAND!"

  "Hey Thomas. Don't look now, but you might have to get ready for round two," Rudy said.

  "What?" I looked up from the stupid woman. The ice folks weren't where I'd left them. The woman who'd stepped out of her car and onto the ice, the second person claimed, was less than four feet away. The crystal clear ice of her body had clouded around her joints as she staggered toward us, which emitted a symphony of pops as if you'd dumped a truckful of ice cubes into a pool. "ARRRGH!" I threw up my paws in frustration. "Stop right there! I've had enough of this. Go away! Shoo!"