Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2)

by Daniel Potter

  "Thomas! Get out of the transition!" Rudy cried as the pinchers snapped open, freeing them of Noise's grip. Steam poured out of every port in in the clank's body. It emitted shrill whistles every time it moved.

  "I'll eat you too, Rodent! I'll eat EVERYTHING!" Noise swung out with a savage right hoof. Rudy stepped back, but it glanced off the head, the metal ringing like a gong. The clank staggered but warded off the next blow by slapping Noise’s fist away.

  "You and what army?" Rudy declared. "You're just gonna be another one for the photo album!" Rudy jeered as I slipped outside the remnants of the ward. Where had the swarm gone? Howls of hunger went up as soon as my paws set foot outside it.

  The last house I'd leapt from had entirely disappeared beneath a mass of bodies, furred and otherwise. The swarm had fallen onto the house itself like a colony of caffeinated termites. A strange buzzing sound stopped as several hundred eyes fell on me at once, the madness within them scrabbling at my own mind.

  I ran then.

  "NO! He's MY MEAT!" Noise cried. Followed by a—

  "Hey, no fair! Put me down!"

  Metal screeched.

  I kept my eyes on Rinoa and Tack, my finish line. Rinoa looked pale but better than a few moments ago. Behind me I could sort out the pounding of Noise, hot on my heels, and behind that the metallic clomp of Rudy's robot and then the terrifying cacophony of the rest of swarm.

  "Rinoa! Can I ask you for one more salvo?" I shouted as I ran up to but didn't step through the transition's boarder yet.

  She looked me up and down with wide eyes. "Yes. But only one more. You're going to owe me a favor at this point." She drew in a deep breath.

  "Sure, yes. One favor. Just stop the swarm from catching up to the wolf-woman and the robot."

  "Little late for the robot," Tack said.

  Aw crud. Noise was running directly toward me. Behind her the dogs had caught up with Rudy. The massive Saint Bernard latched onto his shoulders and was gnawing on the head. Not that the dog was doing much damage, but Rudy clearly couldn't see where he was going. The clank's beeline pursuit of Noise shifted to more of a waggling line as more dogs latched on.

  "I got the robot," Rinoa said, a smirking note in her voice as she stretched out her hand.

  "Wait! It’s not a—"

  Too late. The metal man flashed yellow and rang with the force of many gongs. The metal skin rippled with the vibrations. The dogs slipped from him to the ground, stunned. To my surprise the clank continued running, veering off from Noise’s vector at angle.

  Noise of course hadn't noticed. Her eyes were only fixed on one thing: me. Her jaws opened, her body tilted forward and with a final step she leapt with a snarl.

  If there's one thing I don't miss about being human, it’s gotta be the reaction time. Side-stepping Noise in an effortless motion, I watched her sail past, her body twisting, her jaws snapping in the air, the look of betrayal in her eyes.

  Her momentum carried her beyond the transition. She started screaming before she hit the ground. Black swaths of energy burst from her skin, boiling out of her eyes and ears. Clawing at the ground, she attempted to crawl back into the transition, back to where that hunger could exist. She got up on her hands and knees before I hooked her ankles with my teeth and pulled them out from under her. I slammed her back to ground, grabbing one of her wrists and forcing it behind her back. She screamed and cursed, slamming her free hand into the ground like a hammer until the last of the blackness boiled away and she sagged still.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  A laugh sounded behind me, followed by a clap. "You're pretty hardcore for a technomancer familiar," Rinoa said. She'd gotten to her feet, although she looked a bit wobbly.

  "Thank you for the assist. I guess not all the Blackwings are raging assholes," I said.

  Her grin grew wider. "Oh, I am a monstrous asshole, trust me. But I've got some karmic debt to work off. Sorry about your robot."

  "My Robot? Oh shit! Rudy!"

  When I found it the clank had run into a tree and keeled over. Yet it still continued to walk forward. I ran up and pawed at the release button on its neck. It took a few smacks to hit with the right amount of force, but the helmet hissed free, revealing a limp gray form tangled in the control sticks.

  I nearly panicked, but there, before my own heart blotted out the world around me, I caught the note of his heartbeat, which sounded like a tiny turbo charged motor. The fur below his ears was darkened with blood. I nosed him. "Rudy?"

  The rodent groaned and then coughed. "Oh nuts, get it away! It’s horrible!" He made weak pushing motions in my direction.

  I huffed directly in his nose, and the squirrel coughed. "Gross! Meat breath!" His eyes opened a hair. "You're an awful nurse, Thomas, and a terrible friend! Yuck!"

  "You okay then?" I asked.

  He groaned and tried to push himself to his feet but quickly gave up the effort. "Feels like my head's been roasted on an open fire and cracked open."

  I cursed internally. "I don't think the technomagi are big on mending spells."

  He nodded weakly. "Particularly with what I do next."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There's a knob on back of the robot, right where the ass crack would start. Open it, will ya?"

  "If this thing farts on me, I'm going to eat you."

  "That would at least stop the ringing. I think my meat ears are hamburgered." Rudy lifted his head, wobbled and set it back down.

  I pulled the knob, and the back of the clank folded open. A meshwork of gears and electronics encased a metal cylinder that pulsed with heat, much like the one in the copter, a pressure tank of sorts.

  "Open it. I promised it I'd let it go if it got me out here in time. It did."

  That proved to be a bit dicey. The tank had an emergency release, a long handle connected to a valve, but it was so crowded by spinning gears and red hot mechanisms that I didn't want to get my nose anywhere near. A human hand would have no trouble extending a finger and hooking the tip of the lever. Too bad I was fresh out of those. I carefully hooked a claw around it and pulled the lever. The first one snapped, but the second try succeeded, and the bar began to give.

  "Hey. Hey!" Rudy chittered. "Don't stand in front of the valve."

  The valve had been staring me in the face. My ears burned. That could have been bad. Contorting myself to the side, I pulled that lever upward. Fire roared out of the nozzle in an epic spray of deadly heat. I pulled back my smoking paw with a yip of pain. The flame didn't vanish. It didn't spray out into nothing. It collected and hovered as a cloud, eyeless, but I could feel the flame thing's gaze sweep over me.

  "Yup. We did it." Rudy gave the fire elemental a V for victory sign.

  The fire elemental vanished into a pinprick of green light, returning to its own plane.

  Noise coughed and sat up, blinking. Rinoa and Tack had apparently vanished. So I trotted over to Noise.

  "How you feeling?"

  "Better than those folks." Noise pointed to where three houses and all the vegetation on the lots had been devoured while I'd been mucking about with Rudy. All around were humans, dogs, cats and various other species on their backs with bulging stomachs. All moaning in pain.

  A black plane indeed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  "Good news!" Richard smiled at Noise about an hour after Rudy, Noise and I came back to Jules' shop.

  The technomagi’s meeting had concluded shortly after the hunger plane had faded. Richard pushed off all questions about the outcome and the trio eagerly applied themselves to helping Noise after I rebonded Richard. I let it pass, not sure I wanted to know what they'd decided to do.

  "You haven't gotten yourself tangled up with the hunger plane, although there is an echo, which explains..." Richard waved his hand over to the demolished pallet of foodstuffs they'd pulled from the back of the store. "Although the four stomachs account for some of the increased appetite."

  "If that’s the good news," Noise
said, her now-baritone voice rumbling like thunder, "then what's the bad news?"

  Richard deflated. "That whole mid-moon deadline you were talking about? It’s not happening."

  Noise grimaced, displaying her muzzle full of teeth that were nearly as long as Richard's arm. "Do you at least know what's going to happen to me then?"

  "And that bounces us back to good news!" I interjected.

  Noise gave me the “I am about to slap you very, very hard” look for a brief moment, then broke eye contact with a jerk of her head, ears sagging.

  I dialed down the cheer. "We can pause the transformation where it is. Just stop it from going forward. Then when you get to the opposite point in the lunar cycle we can remove the tourniquet and hopefully the cow leaves with the wolf. Come the new moon, we might be able to snap the connection entirely."

  "There were far too many If-Then statements in that sentence, Thomas. What’s the chance of all that actually working?"

  "Miss Noise, we're all technomagi here and we pride ourselves on being precise," Richard said, "but this is magic and the Lunar plane has been noted to be one that doesn't appreciate being mucked about with. So somewhere between zero and a hundred percent. You have no guarantees either way."

  Noise studied her hands and let out a low moan of distress. I rose to go over to her but forced myself back to a sitting position.

  "Do it," she said. "Not like I have a better option. I'll have to make peace with being an abomination."

  Rudy peeked over the edge of a shoebox the trio had fashioned into a recovery nest. His ears had been stuffed with cotton while the first-aid spell knitted his eardrums back together. It looked like his white matter was escaping from his head. “What they talkin’ about?” he whispered. As our voices had nothing to do with sound, I filled him in.

  "You're not an abomination! You're a Moof," Rudy called to Noise once I explained the argument.

  "What is a Moof?" Richard asked.

  Rudy waited for a translation.

  "It’s a Mooo-Wolf," I volunteered.

  Noise glared at me, again.

  "Hey, he made it up!" I pointed my nose at Rudy.

  "But you support it!"

  "It’s better than abomination!" I paused. "And it's sort of cute."

  Noise’s started to laugh and then caught herself, given forceful snort through her nostrils, ears flicking with frustration. She glared at me, and I held that gaze with my own. Anger and guilt simmered between us, I could almost see that scene in the forest replaying in her eyes. It hung between us, a barrier that neither of us wanted to address. It was no longer my place to call her cute.

  She turned away. "So what happens to me in the meantime?" she asked, looking at Richard.

  "Well, you definitely want to wear one of these." He held up a collar fitted with a transition defense focus; a real one that wouldn't burn out. "We don't know when another black transition will hit." He made to fasten it to Noise's wrist. She caught his arm, but Richard wasn't cowed. "It’s either you wear this or you leave the state."

  A moment and she relented, offering her wrist. "So in the meantime, I'm your hired muscle, is that it? Do you have a massive club for me to swing? Should I shout 'Moof Squish!' before I hit something?" Her tone was flat, but I noted a twitch in the corner of her lips.

  "Careful, Noise, they might summon you a furry bikini to wear. Complete that barbarian look," The snark slipping out before I could restrain it and I braced for the angry retort.

  Instead, she groaned and crossed her arms across her chest. "I'd go for any sort of support I can get right now. How the hell does Tallow hunt with cantaloupes on her chest?"

  To be fair, everything about Noise was larger than Tallow at mid-moon. She probably had a hundred pounds on her father. If we'd let her get the two more days to the full moon, she'd probably start breaking through the floorboards if she stood on one hoof.

  "Shall we clear the area? This is going to need a circle a bit bigger than the one on the table," Tom suggested

  We have to hurry, Richard thought at me.

  What’s the rush? I thought back as I settled myself out of the way as Noise and the trio started to move the furniture.

  Jules and Jowls want us to meet them back at the park in an hour. The solution is ready.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The solution looked a lot like a giant metal sausage. Taller than Jules by a foot, it curved up from the crater where the ruins of the dragon grinder rested. Its gunmetal gray surface was studded with doors, vents and breadboards filled with circuitry. In the interior of the structure pulsed a predominately purple nexus of power interwoven with a rainbow of other colors that spun around the interior. Notably, I saw silver motes mingling with the purple, a color of magic I'd never even seen before. Sandra sat some distance away at a card table precariously perched in the snowy field. She fiddled with a control board that seemed to have been cobbled together from several sound mixers, all dials and sliders.

  Jowls was strutting in rare form in front of the thing, his tail held high and waving. The trio, Noise and I with Rudy sprawled on my back peered down at them curiously from the hill.

  "Gentlemen! Aaaaaaand Ladies!" Jowls called out with a voice that rumbled with pride. "We welcome all to witness a historical event!" He looked off behind him. "And I welcome even House Morganna to this demonstration!" He chuckled. "Although I would advise against perching in that particular tree." He gestured to the monkey bars on the playground. "That would be far safer."

  A small murder of crows flitted to the ground beside the magic sausage, becoming a cluster of women and canines. All except one unpaired crow, who perch unsteady on Naomi's shoulder, the feathers in her tail sagging. Dorothy and Fee stood in front, their noses wrinkling as if they'd stepped in a moist cow pie. "You invited us. Do not treat us as some sort of interlopers."

  "Then do not sulk about so." Jowls voice became slightly muffled as he busied himself with a tangle of fur on his thigh.

  "So you called us out to witness a miracle in a place rotten with the stench of spoiled tass? And prowl about as if you'd found a gold mine? What happened here?" she demanded.

  Jowls sat up and curled his tail around his front paws, a sign of peace or concealing unsheathed claws digging into the ground. Possibly both at the same time. "I do believe that Thomas knows more about what this place was." Eyes flicked in my direction before Jowls continued. "But we have found an opportunity for all of us in what it is today. Through a triumph of technologic magic, we have assembled the Aligner in a mere forty-eight hours. A feat that no Archmagus could claim."

  I cocked my head to the side and marveled at how much Jowls' tune had changed in the last week. When I'd first met Jowls, Jules had to bribe him with sushi-grade tuna to get him to do anything. Yet now the cat had such ambition I'd rarely caught him doing anything but work. I briefly pondered the possibility that he'd been replaced by some sort of transition doppelganger. Or perhaps I'd fallen into a mirror zone? I stared hard at the cat but only saw the same aura I usually did.

  "You sure it won't put us out of work?" I called down to the orange feline.

  Jowls swiveled. "Thomas, this not the time to fear wet paws! We are talking about something that has not been done in modern mystical memory!"

  "Perhaps there's a reason for that," I heard Morie, the wolf, mutter.

  Jowls stared at him for a half second before turning back toward the sausage. "We begin!" Sandra adjusted knobs, and the purple stars within the object spun, slowly twisting it into the ground.

  In my head I heard the trio babbling about what the sausage was as they argued about the identification of the parts of the focus. They were excited but with an undertone of anger that rolled through them all. Interchangeable foci! That's what he's been working on all these years! The bastard! The Genius! All of them were imagining how much further they'd be on refining LAPIS if they'd access to a bin of component foci, ready-made pieces of spells.

  I didn't care to
comment as I watched the sausage sink further into the ground and out of our reality. Jules stepped forward with a grin so wide it looked like it might escape the confines of his thin face. "What we stand before is not a mere spell but a wound in the fabric of our mother plane! One that appears to be untouched by the Veil!" He looked directly at me. "Whatever Archibald built here was a grand design sporting numerous ensnarement charms, which probably held something in place. Something very large and very dangerous, but now with the entire structure open, exposed to the winds of the planes, they haven't snared creatures but planes themselves!"

  The device folded, blossoming into a many-petaled flower, turned at that stomach-curling, impossible angle and shifted out of our view, leaving irregular circles of purple disturbances rippling toward us. The ground beneath me gave a lurch, as if it had just settled into place. The ripples in reality reversed flowing not away from us but being drawn in, focusing not on the place the device had exited but on the trees the Blackwings had perched in moments before. Their outlines bent and twisted as if their image had been printed on piece of taffy that first melted then caught fire. Not just a leaf here and there, but as if you dosed the whole tree with white phosphorus and subjected them to a desert heat. The fire had no origin point. The entire tree ignited like a book of matches, twisting and blackening. Many fell, igniting their cousins, but one out of every six stood tall, gaining height, and refusing to be consumed.

  A transition, I thought at first, but then as I studied the way the space aligned and pulsed together, the sheer brightness of it. I realized that Jowls and Jules had created a shallowing! Animals nestled in burrows and hollows flung themselves out of the flaming trees, running in panicked circles as their limbs and bodies rapidly burned away, yet the flames themselves carried on, scampering about and tunneling beneath the moon-pale sand that covered the forest floor.