Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2)

by Daniel Potter

  It didn't confirm my hunch, but there were more transitions closer to the site where the Archmagus had hidden his captured dragon: Valentine Park.

  Rudy appeared to read my mind. "Aw come on, Thomas, you know that’s bad mojo there!" Rudy whispered.

  "Shallowing is fifteen percent mine if you hang onto it, right?" I looked up to Jules.

  The Technomagus looked like had a bad taste in his mouth. "Yeah. Fifteen percent."

  I tapped Valentine Park. "You can get the tass you need here. It’s not high quality, but it's tass. There's a spell there that you could break down for more."

  "What do you mean by 'low quality?'"

  "It’s like elemental essence," Rudy chimed in. "It's pain tainted. You don't want it. Anything you make with it isn't going to hold together long."

  "I'm not in the position to be picky. We're not making something that has to last the ages," Jules said.

  "What if they challenge us again?" Sandra asked.

  "Then we'll at least have one shallowing," Jules said.

  "This isn't a good idea, Thomas," Rudy said.

  "You going to stay here then?" I asked.

  “Oh hell no!”

  ***

  Valentine Park had been closed with prejudice. I've never seen that many chains on a gate before. It gave the park an extra bit of foreboding. The sky's gray had given way to a starless blackness. Even I needed the van's headlights to see.

  I didn't need to see magic to feel the wrongness of this place as we pulled into the parking lot. It prickled my whiskers and felt like something slimy was working up my spine. Six months ago I had rescued a dragon (or what magi termed a dragon; it was closer to the spawn of an elder god than a reptile) from a cage beneath the park. A cage equipped with spells that ground off pieces and purified the thing's blood into pure tass. I had literally swum though the dragon's pain and agony to make contact. I'd assumed at the time that the tree the dragon had unleashed to break it out of prison would purify the area.

  That had been wrong. I recognized the dragon's pain as soon as my paw touched down from the van. It seeped up and rang in my ears, heralding a migraine if I stayed too long. The grass pulsed with a subtle orange hue. The dragon's pain had seeped into the place like a toxic chemical. "Let’s not stay long. This may have not been my best idea," I said as I made to climb back into the van.

  "Tass is tass," Jules said, stepping out of the van and looking at me expectantly. "It's either this or I get my ass handed to me tomorrow. Losing a duel isn't good business."

  Sighing, I padded over to the edge of the parking lot and looked down into the snow-covered field. Patches of grass poked through the week-old snowfall as autumn refused to go quietly in the night. Two soccer goals marked the borders of the soccer field to the left, while a backstop indicated the baseball diamond to the right. Or what had been a baseball diamond, as it appeared to have encountered a bulldozer recently.

  In between the two structures was a pulsing blister of pain. If I stared through the glare of the magic, I could see a small depression in the ground, about a foot deep at its center. I'd assumed the statue that had stood there and been shattered by the dragon's escape had been destroyed, but the remaining magic bubbled like a nuclear boiler.

  Jowls stared at the open sore in reality. "The snack was right. That’s some bad juju there."

  "It looks worse than it is, I'm sure. What happen here, Thomas?" Jules asked.

  "You could say it’s an experiment of Archmagus Archibald. And I kinda broke it," I said.

  "Is this where Sabrina died then?" Jowls asked, scanning across the field. If they could do past scrying like O'Meara, then Jowls might be able to replay the entire scene. My own eyes drifted to the spot where O'Meara had fallen when her last ditch attack on the elder magus failed. In my ears I heard Sabrina’s screech of pain as the dragon's spell speared her familiar through the heart. Sabrina had dived into the writhing mass of murderous roots without a single thought to her own safety.

  I had killed them both, dealing with the dragon. I'd signed their lives away along with two Archmagi and their familiars. At least I knew Sabrina and Cornealius had every intention of murdering me. But the Archmagi? I doubt their hands had been clean, but how was I to know that?

  "Thomas!" Jowls sang through my memories. "You might want to get down. This might be messy." Jowls and Jules sat across from one another. Working together they had formed a circle around the awful blister. Jules opened a small black sack and placed it into the circle.

  A golden ward sprung up between them, its runes bright and ordered like lines of code. A whisper of tass floated from the bag, curling on itself, forming a long tube that led back to the bag. With a swift motion, the tube pierced the bubble of the blister. It trembled but did not burst. Then, slowly, the tainted magic flowed inside the tube. The abscess drained into the tass bag. As the thing deflated, I approached with a wary eye.

  "Was that tass?" I asked

  "You weren't kidding about this stuff not being all that useful." Jules looked up at me as Jowls stared into the ground. "It's tass but not dense. Magic gas."

  "Dragon farts, and we're not talking the types that shit rainbows," Jowls said as he peered. "However, much of that will be useable."

  I looked at the patch of ground Jowls stared at and gasped as my vision seemed to be ripped from my eyes. I fell into an abyss that hadn't been there. I recognized it, memories of pain, of awful twisting blades, spinning, biting, ripping flesh away. Drowning in the blood that filled in the chamber, the pain redoubling, echoing through my being.

  "THOMAS!" The visions shattered. And I found Jules' face inches from my own, frowning with concern. With a screech I tore away, retreated to the safety of the parking lot and cowered behind the fence, my whole body trembling and my heart pounding so hard my entire being pulsed with each beat.

  I coughed violently, and a twisted part of me surged up my throat. A space in my chest that hadn't been there before the dragon had taken me apart then put me together again. The spot where it had hidden the bomb that had ripped off the top off its prison. But the rest of the spell’s mechanism, the magical equivalent of a sausage factory, lay down that hole. In a space down and to the right of reality. Why had the dragon left it when it had made the Archmagus' entire house vanish? Why leave such a thing just sitting there?

  Jowls still stared toward the hole, his green eyes wide with wonder. I opened my mouth for him to stop looking, to walk away, but my voice only gurgled in my throat. I sat my chin on a fence post and waited for my body to stop shaking. That memory of pain had been the dragon's, not mine. I focused on my breathing and tried to push the memory out of my head. It refused to slink away into whatever corner of my mind it had been hiding in.

  Jules approached me, palms out, as if to show he carried no weapons. The questions danced on his face, warring between a demand to know and simple curiosity.

  "The Archmagus made it. He compelled me to destroy it. Sabrina wanted it. I couldn't let her use it. You should finish the job. Break it down. Destroy it." The words babbled out of me, truth and lies all mixed together. They'd see the chain soon enough. If I could frame it as Archibald's last project, then they might not realize the dragon had built Mr. Bitey, and by the same token, me. Awareness of that compartment in my chest, that empty space faded no more than that terrible memory.

  Jules knelt. "It’s okay. It’s just a complex spell. We can take it apart. Reuse some of the tass. What did he use it for?"

  I wanted to shout at him for being so dense. Could he not see? The cutting tools, the grinding wheels. The memory recycled itself and I saw it again. My stomach rolled, rebelling at the wrong angles and impossible motion. A flash, in an instant, I saw down that hole, as the memory had overwhelmed me. But I had still seen it. Still, lifeless. Not moving and from one angle. The vision showed everything all at once. I remembered the dragon's complete perception. To Jowls and Jules, it was nothing more than a collection of angles, a spell of bewil
dering complexity and inscrutable design. They would have no more idea of its purpose than ants marching along a drill bit.

  I searched for words. "Nothing good. A processor."

  "Well, you were right. There is some denser tass in there. Jowl's thinks we can extract it, but it’s not good tass. It’s almost as if its decaying somehow."

  A buzz. Jules pulled an iPhone from his pocket and answered it. "It’s about time!" He said as he placed it against his ear. "What? I'm not at the shop." He listened for a moment, then glanced around nervously. "No, there aren't any munds around but—"

  Three purple columns expanded up from the ground a few paces behind Jules. Space twisted a knot around each of column, then untwisted. Three men stood where there had been none before.

  Each of three men wore a gray suit with a blue tie, but the similarities ended there. Each carried a toolbox of some type in their left hand, and the one on the left, a guy with a reluctant afro, had a huge lump of machinery slung over his back.

  Jules whirled around. "Damn it! It's not wise to do that here!"

  The three shrugged in absolute unison and spoke as one. "You said you had a familiar here with a fey chain! We must use him to test the LAPIS. It is essential!"

  I sunk lower behind the fence. I was in no mental state to make a good first impression. The eyes of guy to the right, the more rounded of the threesome, found me as soon as I moved, while the other two fixed their gaze on Jules.

  Jules straightened. "Of course." He gestured to me. "This is Thomas. The freelance familiar I texted you about. Thomas, this is Tom, Dick and Harry." He pointed to the round one, the tall one and the dark one in sequence.

  "I much prefer Richard these days," Dick said, alone.

  "I know." The way Jules said it suggested a long familiarity with the trio.

  Seeing as I wasn't going to be able to slink off to the van, I swept my own conflicts away and put them in the bin marked 'later' while slapping my best front desk face over my muzzle. The customer service muscles were a bit rusty from disuse, but they were still there.

  "Hello, can I help you?" The customer service line slipped out like a creaky recording. Not really what I'd meant to say.

  "Yes! You can!" Harry set down his toolbox and unslung the tube of machinery from his back. It pulsed with the light of several dozen foci embedded within the patchwork of circuitry, wires and a few vacuum tubes. "Can you enter a bond with a magus without disrupting another?"

  I had no idea if I could. "I dunno. I'm willing to experiment." I smiled. "What does that do?"

  "This the first portable detection device for reality anomalies. It is the first of its kind." All of their chests swelled with pride.

  "It’s an abomination," Jowls called from his place at the crater.

  The three waved their hands dismissively in unison. "We are aware of your stance on the matter, Jowls, but please rant about how we are stealing the rightful place of familiars. Not all of us were fortunate enough to be born into a Major House and receive a stunning example of hard working dedication such as yourself."

  Jowls sniffed and held up his nose high in the air. "The universe has its reasons!" Then he looked back down in the hole.

  "Thomas, Tom, Dick and Harry were my mentors in technomagic. They're a collective of two channelers and a shaman. Together they are capable of spellcrafts that rival those of magi twice their age." Jules' voice was level and polite, although he had that slightly distracted look to his eyes that probably meant Jowls and Jules were shouting at each other in their heads. Jules and Jowls had a rep as an argumentative odd couple, but from the last few hours it was clear to me it had been at least partially an act. Or at least they could put their differences aside once the chips were down.

  I studied the trio. So if Harry was the shaman, he served as the familiar of the other two. But why two channelers? Still that meant, like Sandra, the three were blind to magic outside of a circle. Another magus could toss a spell at their heads and they'd never see it coming. "How are you all at healing?" I asked.

  "It is not our area of expertise. We have been focusing on mitigating the limits of technomagic in general as of late. Hence why we need to figure out the baseline we are aiming for. Please attempt the binding now. If it fails, we can reattempt under more controlled circumstances." Their voices combined in an eerie harmony.

  "Here?" I look around at the pulsing orange light and the blue auras of the magi. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a flicker of something moving in the trees. The Blackwings. Not Veronica, one of the others. They'd followed us. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.

  "Yes here. Once we obtain a baseline for comparison." Harry wandered over to the fence and placed the LAPIS device on a post. He twiddled with some knobs. The device's glow trebled, one golden part flaring then expanding. A ward grew out of it like bubble gum enclosing dynamite, flinching as it passed through me, and encapsulating all of us within a barely visible dome about a hundred feet in diameter.

  Harry squinted at the screen on one end of the device. His eyes lifted from the screen to where Jowls still sat. He had inched around the lip of the crater, looking at the Archmagus' device from all angles, I realized. I wanted to stop him, but there was no doubt the Blackwings would do the same thing as soon as we left. This cat was out of the bag and I wouldn't be putting it back in.

  Harry panned the device to point at me, and the ward pulsed. A part of me shifted, sidestepping the ward.

  "You have some foci in that harness?" they asked.

  "Minor protective bit and bobs," I conceded. Mostly Ixey's work. The anti-transition charm, a minor heat ward in case an accident with O'Meara and a kinetic shield that might stop a bullet or two before burning out.

  They all grinned. "Now, please bind me." Richard stepped forward, and I was glad. Binding a Tom to a Thomas would be way too confusing.

  "Okay, stand still." I glanced at the tree line where I could see the tiny aura. No sense really in hiding this. Lady Cavell had seen my "fey" chain. Veronica was about to find out she'd been tricked a bit. With a mental poke, Mr. Bitey awoke from his slumber, the chain around my neck writhed as it unspooled from the dimensions it dwelled in. Tom, Dick and Harry's mouths fell as it pulled itself from the fur of my neck. Constructed of fine jewelry chain, the hood flared behind it head. I looked at Richard. Bind him.

  "What is—" He didn't get third word out.

  Mr. Bitey struck with a shimmer of silver light, arching toward the magus' neck. The instant before impact, the snake split into a mass of chains, each encircling Richard’s neck.

  A flash of thought. The agreement Jules signed with me flicked between Richard's mind and I. Fifteen percent of all tass is mine. Termination of the bond at will. Agreement flared, not one mind, but three.

  And it was done.

  Flashes of a young man. The scent of paper and burned out electronics. Things moving through his street, unseen. Tall figures moving about, looking down but not seeing him. Isolation.

  A big man grinning down. There are crumbs in his beard. A black cat with mismatched eyes perches on his shoulder. The joy of finally being seen. Harry and Tom, both young, all of them sitting at the table with the bearded man. The table is a circle, and they're all holding hands.

  I pulled myself back. Just as I saw him, he had been seeing me. We breathed and slid away, feeling the shape of our bond. No gauzy curtain, this bond felt like a ship's porthole: big enough to look and stick a paw through but not at the same time. Wariness and a bit of fear on both sides constricted the divide. And that was fine with me. After nearly being a mental roommate with O'Meara, I could stand to work with someone a bit more distant.

  I heard the distant echo of the other two voices. Richard, you went dark for a moment.

  I know. Just finding out our familiar is a tough bastard, and I think he's dating a werewolf?

  The other two squawked in surprise. I tried to avoid thinking about the dragon. So you all want to see what magic looks like t
hrough the eyes of a familiar?

  Yes! The enthusiastic force of their thought nearly rocked me off my feet.

  I showed them. Pulling Richard behind my eyeballs was easy, but then the other two of them pressed in as well, jockeying for space within the bond’s narrow width. I had to meet them halfway, pushing my vision out to them. I directed my eyes toward them. Foci dotted their bodies like constellations.

  You see every single one! They're colored! one of them exclaimed.

  I spent a few minutes touring them around my vision, explaining the colors as far as I knew them. Richard mentally vibrated, Tom wailed at the beauty of it, and Harry had to be physically restrained by the other two from dashing the LAPIS on the asphalt of the parking lot.

  "It’s a useless piece of junk compared to this! Five years! Five full years! We have no color, no resolution. It’s been a useless endeavor!" Harry shouted, guilt rolling with his cries. LAPIS had been his idea, clearly. Richard's thoughts filled in some blanks.

  The two consoled Harry. I heard more than enough to realize the trio were very close indeed. Not wanting to intrude on that, I shut the porthole.

  They left the LAPIS itself unguarded. Curious. I drifted over and took a closer look at the complex mesh of its machinery. There was less magic involved than I'd guessed. Odd spells were scattered here and there, bound into blocks of shiny metal, as if the spells had been used in place of electronic chips.

  "That will be enough," Jules voice rung out. I turned to find him holding his tass bag out in front him. It bulged and wiggled in his hand.

  Jowls curled around his bond's legs, looking both sleepy and pleased.

  "I hope you all had a good night's sleep. Because all of House Technomagi has a lot of work to do tonight," Jules declared.