Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2)

by Daniel Potter

  Looking at that portal, though, my world narrowed to only one thing: meat. On the other side of that portal would be something I could sink my teeth into that wasn't a person, nor a tasteless wet banana. There would be deer. I didn't wait for the Blackwings to organize themselves. I charged through.

  And straight into the middle of a firefight.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Bullets are not food. In fact, they're about the farthest thing from it.. As my paws hit the blessedly damp earth, the air exploded in the thunder of automatic weapons fire. The world smelled of gunpowder and tree sap. My vision was a purple haze.

  The portal had opened directly into a shallowing. A very contested shallowing. I flung myself onto the ground and tried make sense of the bright world. An engine roared and coughed, like a sports car that had ripped off its muffler. Gunfire echoed along with the sharp pings of metal striking metal.

  Voices.

  "It’s not working!"

  "Keep moving!" a deep voice bellowed: Noise.

  "I got a better idea."

  My vision clearing, I crept forward to poke my head over a fallen tree, its bark speckled with fiery red blisters that didn't look friendly. I saw the source of the engine, a machine that appeared to be the love child between a VW camper van, a tank and spider. At first I thought it was a product of the shallowing, but it had no mixing of reality in its structure. Within it, Jules and Jowls' auras sat. Sparks flew from a roof-mounted, cannon-like focus as the bullets ricocheted off it, golden flashes of light indicating that a ward, not armor, protected the delicate machinery. Two long, three-jointed limbs extended from the roof, their pinchers ripping chunks of rocky growths of sparkling tass from the trees and depositing them into a hopper on the roof.

  I felt Veronica enter reality, the bond flooding with a panic of thoughts.

  Get DOWN! I roared at her even as the contraption's arms paused. The cannon jerked in the direction of the portal with an alert vrrrt!

  A man burst from a bush 200 feet away clad in green camo. He bowed his goat-horned head and charged.

  "COVERING FIRE!" somebody shouted. "AIM FOR THE TURRET!"

  The forest lit with the flashes of gunfire. Dirt churned as the van-tank’s treads clawed up the earth below it. It lurched backward, the turret wheeling toward the goat-man. Something gray flew from the man’s hand. The turret shot out a neon bolt that arced into the runner. He disappeared, but the gray tube flew true, twirling over the turret and thunking onto the roof. I ducked down beneath the log. A pregnant second later, it exploded with the sound of screaming metal. The wards flared, turning the van-tank into a golden egg in my vision, an egg that the arms had been way outside of. When the rain of sizzling woodchips stopped, the van-tank was in full backpedal mode, the engine roar punctuated by the sharp beeps of a backup alarm. I ducked again as a ricochet whistled right by my ear.

  This... is not what I was expecting, Veronica noted.

  Did I forget to mention the Veil doesn't work here anymore? I thought back.

  Peeking through her eyes, I got a literal bird's eye view of myself, and the dozens of individuals in camouflage stalking toward the retreating vehicle. Only one carried no gun. She carried a sledgehammer in a single two-fingered fist.

  Friends of yours? Veronica thought.

  The gang stopped firing. One of the men lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. "All yours, road block."

  "Roger," the box crackled back.

  A distant boom vibrated the ground beneath me.

  "Amateurs," Rudy muttered from somewhere overhead before the walkie-talkie crackled back to life.

  "Negative, Green One. Fucker plowed right through."

  The entire group sagged and several cursed.

  "We stopped the harvest and damaged that damn thing," Noise said. "That’s enough for today."

  Figuring that was a good a cue as any, I stood and said, "You'll do better tomorrow."

  The whole damn unit swung around as if they were all synchronized swimmers. Let me tell ya, eleven barrels are a lot of guns to stare down at once. I recognized several of the cops I'd run into on their way to becoming hunger nibbles. Every one of them sported echoes of reality collisions. May's skin had turned green and her eyes seemed to be composed of ice crystals. The guy next to her had only one boot; the other foot ended in a cloven hoof. Noise stood surrounded by the squad of mongrel people, unchanged since she'd shoved me into that log, her amber eyes large and round.

  "Thomas!" she bellowed, then she was on me like a two-ton puppy. Gravity went on vacation as I was snatched, tossed in the air and hugged. Then she repeated the cycle again. "I thought you'd gone and offed your stupid self," she finally said as she ended a brutal cow-wolf hug.

  Rudy's chittering laugh rained on down.

  "You want a round too, Rodent?" Noise grinned up into the tree as I attempted to get my lungs working again.

  "Nope! I'm fine with the show! You got any cashews?"

  "Did you find them?" Noise asked me.

  In answer, Veronica cawed, and the other Blackwings fluttered down from the branches. Veronica informed me that she'd stay feathered until we could get her some proper clothes.

  Dorothy sprang into her human form within Noise's personal space. "What the hell is going on? You worked with technomagi before! And where did all these Blended come from?"

  Noise gave Dorothy the look of a Great Dane being charged by a teacup Terrier. "It’s a war. And nobody's winning."

  "We can change that,” I said, “but we need food, Noise. Nobody here's had anything substantial for weeks now. It took all we had to get back."

  Noise grimaced. "You’re welcome to what we have, but it’s not much. There's surprisingly little food in Grantsville. I don't know if the technomagi know it, but they're starving us out, and the Cannibal Zone is growing every day."

  "Cannibal Zone?" Rudy said, beating me to the punch.

  "That’s just the start of it. We'll explain later. Follow me. We gotta move." Her companions were starting to look nervously up at the sky.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Noise led us out of the warm jungle with the blistering trees and back into a forest with fresh snowfall. I didn't recognize the area, but it was northeast of town, the least developed corner where the evergreens grew. Clustered beneath them was a small camp full of old canvas tents. A few brighter modern tents were there too, but they were all nestled near the trunks of the largest trees. People were there, but I didn't notice them, as my nose detected something warm and meaty drifting through the air. I zeroed in on the source of the scent, a large pot in the center of the camp.

  Without a word, a bowl was ladled out of the pot and placed in front of me. Or attempted to be. The bowl made the journey to the ground while the gruel, or stew or as far as I was concerned hot ambrosia with a few chunks of heaven, were inhaled into my stomach faster than the velocity of a laden sparrow. I could have consumed the entire pot myself, but I was driven back by sheer velocity of three canine tails.

  "Oh my! Oh my!" croaked the woman serving up the gruel. "You brought friends. Do they all talk?" I recognized her despite the icicles protruding from her bald head, the same woman I'd pinned to the counter back at Grover’s while attempting to avoid being shot.

  She had no time for small talk, as four crows became a murder of skeletally thin women among the canines, dressed in scraps of fabric that had once been dresses.

  Not a single thought, Veronica warned me when I recalled her desire to find clothing. She forced everyone into an orderly line with herself at the back, all despite the fantasies playing in her head about seizing the pot and plunging her face into it. Her stomach howled for the stew even louder than mine and the bowl had been the barest of appetizers for me. In my starved state I could easily pack away twenty pounds of meat.

  The old woman served everyone and brandished a stout wooden spoon at me and anyone else who went for seconds. Tack attempted puppy eyes and SMACK! went the spoon on his nose.

/>   "Told ya." Rinoa chuckled as Tack came back to hid behind her legs, whimpering.

  "I assume these are friends of yours?" The old lady directed her gaze behind me.

  I found Noise standing there, arms crossed. Rudy sat on her shoulder, his arm shoved into a foil bag of Planters peanuts, which spoke volumes of his own desperation for food. Noise's eyes were on the magi, her head shaking in disbelief as they licked the last bits out of their bowls. "This here is the Cavalry."

  The old woman only snorted. Polite, that one was.

  Noise gestured to one of the men that had been on the raid, a tall man I didn't recognize, and told him to dig up some clothing. Ill-fitting jeans and overly large t-shirts were quickly distributed to the Blackwings. All but Rinoa looked uncomfortable. Veronica had started devising a spell to transmute the clothes into a dress as soon she had been handed the package but reveled in the feeling of clean underwear.

  The camp had at least two to three-hundred staying in the shadow of the evergreen canopy. Almost everyone had some obvious feature that had been gained from transitions. Moof-hood and her band of merry mutants. Nobody tried to make conversation. They just stared like they weren't sure what to make of us. Only Noise offered a smile, which we followed into a meeting tent.

  In that tent hung a map of Grantsville, and then I understood. A full third of the map was been covered in black outline.

  I wasn't the only one either. Rinoa and Veronica stopped and stared at the map, and then Noise. Noise settled herself cross-legged at the head of a long table down in the center of the tent.

  "The Black Plane?" Rinoa said as Veronica pawed through my mind about the zombie-cannibal-spewing Shallowing.

  "We call it Hunger," Noise started. "Given its rate of spread, it will reach this camp in two days."

  "Is everyone within it..."

  "Mostly evacuated, to what we're calling Moo-town. A shallowing with the... mildest of side effects."

  "You put them in a shallowing?" I said.

  Veronica studied the map. The center of the town, the most populated areas, had been carved into colored sections. "Are all these outlines shallowings? Moo-Town? Iceville, The Jungle, Melting Pot?" Only the heavily forested and sparsely populated areas near the edges of the map were free of some color. "They really did it then. They've doomed themselves."

  "They certainly did something," Noise grumbled. "Hours after Thomas and Rudy left, we lost all internet, power and nearly everyone found themselves a resident of a shallowing. The lucky ones, the ones who already had an echo, changed slowly. The others are part of the shallowings. I gathered up everyone I could find who wasn't screaming or rooted to the ground and brought them here. That was about a week ago."

  "And you're trying to prevent them from harvesting tass?" Veronica observed. It made sense. The technomagi only had one familiar now, Jowls. They could probably use the tass they had to crush the townsfolk, but every bit they used was less they had to buy their way out of the Inquisition.

  "It's all we can do. They've warded off the park. We can't get near it."

  "And both of the town’s grocery stores are no longer grocery stores," I said.

  Noise nodded. "We're scavenging food from any house we find, but I have three hundred people. Even a well-stocked house doesn't go far, and if the residents are there, they don't always want to share."

  "So you're starving each other out," Dorothy said. "That’s so stupid! Why don't you just sell them the tass?"

  "Because Jules and his cronies are going to get everyone killed!" Rinoa snapped. "Black plane, remember? There is no tass there. It’s eating tass!"

  "They're not stupid. Not stupid at all." Veronica still stared at the map. "They're maximizing their yield. What's the Melting Pot? Is it navigable?"

  "No, everything there is melted into splotches. It’s all this lake of shifting multicolored wax," Noise answered.

  Veronica stared hard at the Melting Pot. It was the shallowing first in line to be swallowed by the black. The Jungle surrounded Valentine Park. "These shallowings were laid out in order of ease of harvest. A shallowing like Melting Pot will take years of study to figure out a safe way to harvest and forms a temporary barrier to the Hunger. How often do they attempt to harvest? And how long does it take for you to shut them down?"

  "We managed to wound a few of them early as they exited the park. Now they just appear. I have scouts with keen ears posted. Takes a good hour after detection to disrupt them. And I still lose people," Noise said.

  "They are gathering tass. But they shifted everything to shallowings so they didn't have to be punctual," Veronica thought out loud. "With shallowings, unlike transitions, the tass will grow over time. In fact, it’s best to wait till the last minute. We're in a bubble of space."

  "If Jules could have cut the Black plane out, he would have," I said.

  "But he can't because?" Veronica asked.

  "All the planes are tied together, snared on a machine left here by the Archmagus. He used that machine to twist space around the town itself." I showed her what I knew of the machine that Jules had built.

  Veronica frowned in thought. "Moving planes like that would take tass."

  "They had tass," I said. "A lot of it. Nearly three hundred groat."

  "Yet they needed more," she said. "A lot more. So they invested it. They used it to align all the planes to create shallowings."

  "But it’s all going to get eaten by the black. Can they harvest enough tass to make it worthwhile?" Naomi said.

  A dark thought flickered through Veronica's mind. "Not in the amount of time they have, and not with our friends here harassing them. Unless..." She stopped and stared at the map.

  "Unless what?" Noise asked. I winced as as Veronica's thoughts crystalized.

  "You destroy them," Dorothy cut in. "You rip them apart."

  Naomi covered her mouth in shock. "When the grove died..."

  Veronica pointed a finger in her direction. "The great trees produced a great bounty of tass as they died. Their wood was laced with it. Nearly everything within a shallowing becomes tass when the realities are forcibly separated."

  "You just gather everything within the area! It would be easy to sort out after the fact," Rinoa said.

  "What happens to all the people inside them?" I asked.

  "They die,” Rinoa said. "But Jules won't care, because everything in this entire bubble is going to die because of the Black Plane. It will consume everything without the Veil to stop it."

  "So Jules is going to beat it to the punch." My ears wilted. "We have to get everyone out. Can we... pull the people who're part of a shallowing out of it?"

  "I'm afraid they're lost, Thomas." Rinoa looked down at her fingers.

  Veronica shook her head. "No, because in order for a true shallowing to occur you need the Veil. It knits realities together. No Veil, so they're not real shallowings. They're more like long-term transitions. If you pull someone out, they should revert. At least somewhat."

  "Nothing changes if someone leaves one of the shallowings," Noise interjected.

  "Because reality here is putty!" Veronica replied. "For example, that cannon on the top of that tank-van abomination? It’s not killing people."

  "It’s not?" Noise sat bolt-straight.

  "It's a space-bending spell, not an energy spell. It probably shuffles the victim sideways out of this plane slightly. Here that’s more efficient than blasting them with kinetic or photonic energy."

  "You mean all the dozen people that I've seen disappear with that thing could be alive?" Noise asked.

  Veronica winced. "I don't know. Unless the designer intended it to be nonlethal, they could be survived the bolt only to suffocate in the void. I'd need to have it in my hands and undamaged. But if that’s the case, we might be able to modify it and link it to the grand portal in Las Vegas. We could zap them all out of the shallowings. As I said, space in here is like putty. That's why we had to come back here. We didn't have the tass to pierce a more
solid reality.”

  I inhaled. "So the plan is simple. We break into Valentine Park, possibly beat up the technomagi, steal their tass and use it to evac all the people we can save before this reality pocket consumes itself and implodes.”

  "Couldn't we just harvest some of the tass for ourselves and get a message to the Matrons?" Naomi asked.

  Veronica shook her head. "The technomagi must know we're back. We do anything major and they're likely to figure out where we are. Right now the main thing we need is proper food."

  A man barged into the tent, panting as if he'd been running. "Excuse me, ladies! Sorry to interrupt!" He saluted Noise. "Captain, we have a development."

  Fear flashed through Noise's amber eyes and her hackles rose. "What is it, Alfred?"

  "Robots!"

  "Robots?" Rudy spoke first but everyone echoed the word.

  "Yes sir. An entire army of them just marched out of the park gate ten minutes ago."

  So much for planning.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Noise and her crew drove us to the edge of Moo-town, where it bordered Main Street. It'd been a strip mall, but now a sea of grass waved from what had been black pavement. The buildings were now a collection of barns and silos, their stylings from a storybook farm instead the industrial wheat factories to the south off Grantsville. We climbed to the top of a four-story tall silo that had burst up between barns that read JCPenny and Office Depot in white painted letters above their doors.

  Across the street, a winter wasteland howled. Ice glinted in the dull light that streamed through gray clouds where buildings protruded through the snow. Frozen people still stood in line to Grover's Grocery despite the shattered exterior.

  Main Street stood untouched as a hundred robots clanked down it. Sandra had been busy. In the middle of the army three dump trucks rolled like floats in a bizarre parade.

  "We are out of time." Veronica perched on a rail in front of me with the rest of the Blackwings. That is definitely a harvest crew. She directed my attention to the mass of spells contained in the bed of each truck. Those are probably tass purification foci.