Familiar Territory

by Sam Cheever

  My life was falling back into place and going forward suddenly seemed much more exciting than ever before.

  I decided it was a good time to be a magical Familiar.

  A very good time.

  The End

  I hope you enjoyed Familiar Territory. Have you read the other books in the series?

  Book 1: Familiar Territory

  Book 2: A Familiar Problem

  Book 3: Familiar Hijinks, currently part

  of the Sleigh Bells & Sleuthing, multi-author collection

  Book 4: Nothing Familiar

  Check out the entire series here: https://samcheever.com/books/#Reluctant

  A Familiar Problem

  Please enjoy Chapter One, Book 2: A Familiar Problem as my gift to you:

  LOYALTIES QUESTIONED...worlds shaken...nothing is what it seems. LA will have to look beyond her own perceptions to see what’s before her very eyes. Or risk losing everything.

  When the barrier between worlds is threatened, LA and her friends are sent into the terrifying realm of Axismundi on a super-secret mission to discover who’s behind the breaches. LA believes she’s going to battle against one of her own...an aunt who’s rumored to want multi-dimensional domination.

  What she finds once she gets there is nothing like what she expects.

  Intrigues swirl. Loyalties change in the blink of an eye. And loss beyond anything she can imagine waits just over the next horizon. Someone is pulling the strings of it all and LA is fighting against the clock to discover who it is.

  Can LA get to the bottom of the mystery and save the worlds? Or will she lose what she loves...one friend or family member at a time...and face the crushing end of all she holds dear?

  CHAPTER ONE

  A WHITE-HOT BLAST OF pure energy sizzled through the air, so close the tips of my ears burned from the heat. The smell of burning hair and flop sweat filled the air.

  Unfortunately, both smells emanated from me.

  I tried to see through the haze of smoke to where Deg was huddled. He crouched behind an enormous tree that was newly scored by energy bolts, yellow smoke rising off its wounds and leaving behind a sulfurous stench that burned the eyes and throat.

  He straightened, his arm coming up and fingers splayed to emit a golden flash of quelling magic. It would hopefully lock the red-eyed monster across from us into place but leave it alive.

  Leaving it alive was imperative. We had to find out what it was and where it had come from.

  “Deg!”

  He turned to me, frowning. That was when I realized my mistake. We’d been practicing communicating through mental channels but I kept reverting to good old shrieking through the din. It was my comfort zone.

  Sorry, I told him through our mental pathway. I’m going to try to get around behind it.

  He nodded, stepping sideways to send dual sprays of spitting silver energy into the air to obscure my movement.

  I crouched down and ran, not daring to look toward the line of trees hiding the enormous creature with skin like a rhino and teeth and claws that could sever a limb with a single swipe.

  The thing wasn’t fooled by Deg’s cover for long. As I threw myself behind a large rock, an oily stream of dirty-gray energy sent pieces of the rock into the air and scraped across my calf, dragging a scream from my throat as it burrowed under the skin. The energy hissed happily while it chewed on my flesh.

  “Abortee.” I murmured as I slapped quelling magic over the wound, extinguishing the evil energy before it could really take hold.

  I crawled to my knees and risked a quick glance over the rock.

  The thing wasn’t where it had been when I’d moved. Panic flared. Deg?

  I’m moving to you.

  Where’d it go?

  What do you mean? It’s behind that tree line.

  No, it’s not.... A wave of rancid air swept over me. I stilled, my fingers flaring with the energy throbbing just beneath my skin.

  The atmosphere was sizzling hot, dense with the putrid stench of sulfur. I felt something at my back and, when the low rumble started I didn’t need to turn around to know what was there.

  “Deg, run!” I whipped around and threw everything I had into the small mountain with the pulsing red eyes. My energy hit the thing and spun, creating a whirlwind of power that seemed unable to breach the monster’s protective bubble.

  A second strand of magic hit the whirlwind, twining with mine to double the strength.

  The creature before me opened its massive jaws. Nasty curved teeth as long as my fingers gleamed in the backlight of our power. The thing looked like it was laughing at us.

  That just made me mad.

  I screamed as I gave the whirling energy more juice. Slowly the magic made inroads, burning off his dirty-gray magic and sending black sparks that stunk of death into the air.

  My knees started to buckle. Flame burst near my cheek and I realized my hair was on fire.

  I tried not to panic as agony sizzled over my head and skated down to my shoulders.

  The stench of burning hair made my stomach twist with disgust.

  My knees hit the ground and the flames slipped down my arms, riding the air above me by such an infinitesimal distance I could feel the heat but wasn’t getting burned. I wondered if Deg was experiencing the same phenomena but didn’t dare risk a look.

  I was quickly losing power. I knew within seconds I’d be flat on my face, helpless against the thing standing before me.

  The magical battle had filled the air near the monster with a snowy haze, obscuring everything around it. The haze shimmered as if it were alive. Pulsing toward the monster and then away. I blinked as a small, pale face with pretty blue eyes appeared in its midst and thought I was losing my mind. It looked like a little girl. She wore a shimmering white gown and something that looked like wings danced above her narrow shoulders. Her placid expression seeped into me, calming the frantic beating of my heart.

  My magic stuttered and I had to force myself to concentrate or risk losing it.

  Smiling calmly, the figure in the mist lifted her small hands, her gaze locked on mine. The haze bulged outward around the monster and, after a heartbeat of hesitation, wrapped around him and sucked him away, leaving behind only an outraged bellow.

  I dropped to the ground as if I’d been shot. A soft grunt nearby told me Deg had hit the ground too. I lay there, panting and so weak I could barely move.

  “Are you all right?” Deg’s voice was scratchy with weariness.

  I took a moment to decide. “No. I don’t think I am. What in the name of all my ancestors was that thing?”

  Deg crawled over and dropped to his butt, leaning his back against the rock I’d been hiding behind. “I have no idea. But the more important question is, what was that thing that took it away?”

  Forcing myself off the ground, I leaned against the rock next to him. I lay my head back, my chest heaving. I didn’t even want to tell him what I thought I’d seen. I was either crazy or I had an issue I had to deal with that wasn’t going to take me to my happy place. “What did it look like to you?”

  “Like a cloudy window with nothing behind it.”

  “Nothing?” I gave him a tired smile. “How do you see nothing?”

  “Easy, just look for the absence of something.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, trying to garner enough energy to climb to our feet. Finally, Deg touched my arm. “We need to go talk to the council. They’re going to have to come up with a plan.”

  I nodded and let him draw me to my feet. But as we stumbled wearily to my elderly MG, I couldn’t help wondering if the council members were going to do any better than Deg and I had. It seemed the harder we tried, the more sub-world cockroaches spilled through the cracks.

  I was starting to lose hope we’d ever get it under control. And I didn’t like the outlook for the world if we didn’t.

  I JUST WASN’T USED to seeing my mother sitting in the center chair at the council table. It g
ave me a start every time I walked into the enormous room. The twelve people sitting behind the long, black table wore crimson robes with stiff, white collars and identical pinched looks on their faces.

  Except, of course, for my mother. She looked stunning as usual. Mother fixed a concerned look on me as I approached the table. The room was empty except for the council members, the decision had been made to keep the current problem as quiet as possible until we could figure out what was going on.

  It was a need to know situation.

  Deg and I stopped before the table and bowed our heads.

  After the appropriate moment, mother nodded. “Speak please.”

  The ‘please’ was a modern addition. In a time when most of us bristled at the idea of royal-like behavior, even the leaders of our many magical groups were sensitive to being over dictatorial.

  “We ran the thing to ground in Illusory Park,” I told the table. I did my best to ignore the shocked expressions around the table. I really wished they were shocked because of the monster making its way into the park that anchors and protects the magic world around Illusion City, but I knew better.

  They were appalled that I’d spoken before “my” Witch spoke.

  I tipped my chin up and met them in the eye, one by one. Deg and I were ushering in a new era of Witch-Familiar relations. We were a partnership.

  “It nearly overcame us,” Deg added, frowning.

  “Even our combined powers did nothing to stop it,” I said.

  “Perhaps that’s because you aren’t properly joined,” offered the snotty Witch at my mother’s side.

  Serena. The High Priestess of the coven for the human realm didn’t like me or my family. She thought Familiars should know their place, which was of course beneath their Witch. Not literally, of course, but if that happened Serena was okay with it. Especially if it suppressed our independence.

  Serena had been after Deg to force the joining ritual every Witch and Familiar throughout time had submitted to. Except for us.

  The ceremony was heavy on obey and follow rhetoric. I was having none of that. Despite the fact that most modern Witch-Familiar couples basically worked side by side as equals, ignoring the dictates of the ritual.

  I felt like even saying the words took too much away from my identity and I just couldn’t suck it down.

  Deg understood. He didn’t care about the ritual either. But his High Priestess was doing her best to make him miserable in an attempt to cow him.

  She fixed me with a sour look, her narrow, cadaverous face made even more haggard by the disgusted puckering of her thin lips. “You haven’t realized your full potential yet. You won’t until you succumb to the blood-letting ritual.”

  Yeah, that was the other reason I didn’t want to do it. I don’t go for unnecessary blood-letting. So pre-historic.

  I gave her a too-sweet smile. “Deg and I share a very strong bond, Serena. There was no magical malfunction. That...thing was just too strong.”

  Deg nodded thoughtfully. “It was like its energy came from somewhere else. Not of this world.”

  Silence fell around the table. Eyes widened and several of the council members shared looks. My mother’s gaze stayed fixed on mine. Too fixed.

  She wasn’t even blinking.

  They knew something Deg and I didn’t. That irritated the pants off me. Good thing I was wearing a skirt. “Is there something we should know?” My voice was determinedly sweet, like the smile I spread around the table, but I was met with pinched lips and stern gazes.

  I really hate these people, I told Deg.

  He threw me a look. “Madam Queen,” he addressed my mother. “We’d like your permission to perform some tracking magics in the park.”

  That surprised my mother’s gaze, finally, from mine. “Tracking magics? Why?”

  The answer to that seemed obvious to me but Deg was more political than I was.

  “The creature was enveloped by some sort of haze. It felt almost like a barrier of some kind.”

  Mother blinked. “Explain.”

  “It was like there was a barrier within the barrier,” I said brusquely. I wanted to see their reactions.

  Illusory Park had two areas. The area non-magics saw, which looked just like a regular park, made up of grass, trees and even a pretty lake in the center. Then there was the side the human population would never see. The side that served as both protection and escape for magical beings in the area.

  The barrier that kept the two areas separate was fed by all of us, the combined magics interwoven to be a million times stronger than any single magic user’s power could be.

  “You’re saying this creature breached our barrier?” Mother asked on a frown.

  “No.” I shook my head. “We’re saying it breached a secondary barrier within the forest.”

  Someone gasped and general murmuring ensued. Deg and I waited it out, reading their expressions and posture. What I saw was fear and shock, but not surprise.

  The ruling council had known that internal barrier was there.

  Interesting.

  Are you seeing what I’m seeing, Deg asked.

  Yeah, I answered. They knew. Aloud I said, “So, why don’t you tell us what this internal barrier is, and why this creature lives behind it, so Deg and I can do the job you asked us to do?”

  The room went unnaturally still.

  Every gaze burned over me, filled with hostility and just a tiny bit of fear.

  The hostility I was used to. The fear unsettled me. What did this magical barrier represent?

  My mother skimmed a look down the table, probably trying to assess the general mood. I could have saved her the trouble. The general mood was stinky, bordering on cranky and downright irritable.

  She glanced at me and quickly away, choosing to focus her response on Deg instead. I bristled, thinking it was a hierarchy thing...then I realized it was even more despicable than that.

  It was a mother-daughter thing.

  “It’s not a barrier,” she told Deg.

  I opened my mouth and she stabbed a finger into the air to stop me.

  “It’s a dimensional wall.”

  My mouth closed with an audible snap. I heard Deg swallow. He cleared his throat and I realized he didn’t know how to respond.

  Holy crap! Probably wasn’t an appropriate response to a room filled with cantankerous and uber-powerful magical beings.

  “What’s a dimensional barrier doing in Illusory Park?”

  All eyes sifted to me and I fought the urge to shift nervously. “It’s a fair question. I’ve never heard of one opening up there before. Don’t they usually only open when there’s a breach in the magic – non-magic balance?”

  The response came to me in a much deeper voice than I’d expected. My gaze slid down the table, where a hole in the line of crabby faces made me almost smile. Slowly, Alabast, the Demon King, eased his weight forward, fixing a dark and amused gaze on me. He actually smiled then, and I saw a brief flash of his nephew Brock in his handsome features. “LA.”

  I inclined my head, “King Alabast.”

  “As usual you’ve managed to cut right to the heart of the matter.” His black gaze scanned to my mother and hung there. “Queen Katherine believes that if we ignore the problem it will go away.”

  My mother’s shoulders stiffened and she clenched her hand around the pen lying on the table in front of her. “That’s not true, Al and you know it. I’ve put out feelers...”

  The demon laughed. “Feelers? How many of them came back alive?”

  Mother frowned. “I’m handling it.”

  But the demon king was every bit as determined as his nephew, and probably just as annoying too. He rested muscular arms on the table and bent his head to glance down the long line of silent council members. “This isn’t just a Familiar problem, Katherine. If the afterlife dimension has descended on Illusion City, it’s a problem for all of us.”

  I felt my eyes go wide. “After...”

&nb
sp; My mother cut me off. “I said...!” she screamed, her pretty face darkening with rage. “I’m handling it.”

  “Let’s be civil, Katherine,” said an elderly woman whose head barely cleared the table, even though I knew from prior experience that she was sitting on a child’s booster seat. The Queen of the Sprites was tiny even for a Sprite, but nothing about her demeanor revealed it.

  Only the dangling feet beneath the table brought it brutally home.

  “We know you’re dealing with the problem. But we all have a right to participate in the delegation. She’ll expect to see a representative from each of the magical houses.”

  My mother frowned. She was clearly not happy, but I could tell she knew the others were right. “Let’s discuss it later.” She turned to Deg and me. “Thank you for your report. I’ll be in touch.”

  I started to argue but Deg grabbed my arm, giving it a gentle tug. They’re not going to tell us anything. We’ll need to figure out what’s going on for ourselves.

  He was right. Besides, I knew from experience that we couldn’t trust what the council members told us anyway. More than half the time they told us what they thought we expected to hear, instead of the truth.

  I followed Deg out of the room, suddenly eager to get out of that place and back to my own little sanctuary.

  A cat rescue might not be exciting or adventurous, but I loved my work and all the critters I was able to help.

  It was a good life.

  I had a momentary spurt of happiness that carried me outside to the street.

  Then I remembered that Axismundi, the afterlife dimension, was hovering around Illusory Park.

  And I couldn’t help wondering if the afterlife had come to pick up anybody I knew and loved.

  Check out the entire series here: https://samcheever.com/books/#Reluctant

  WHAT’S NEXT?

  READ MORE OF SAM’S Work: Did you enjoy Familiar Territory? If you’d like to read more books like this from Sam Cheever, check out her other bestselling books: