High Steaks
Book 3 of the Freelance Familiars Series
Daniel Potter
To Amanda Potter
My Love who shares, celebrates and enjoys the worlds in my head. Without her, men in white coats would have taken me away along time ago.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Afterword
Also by Daniel Potter
1
Lessons
Las Vegas! City of bright neon lights, golden glamor, and the clink of coins falling into my outstretched paws.
That's what I believed. Silly, I know, yet no matter how many wallops with reality that little hope took, my triangular ears kept straining to hear that clink of success. Vegas does that; feeds you small bits of shine to keep you pulling at that lever.
Six months into truly being a freelance familiar and I was wondering if my personal lever had busted off. I sat in a concrete flood tunnel beneath the city, staring at a candle-sized flame. It flickered, illuminating the sweat-slick palm it danced over. The hand trembled from the mental effort it took to sustain. See! It's bigger than last week. I’m sure of it! My bond-for-the-moment very nearly believed me as well. He strained to draw more and more energy from the plane of elemental heat to which his soul had attached itself. Every muscle in his body clenched - with futile effort since they had nothing to do with summoning that flame into his hand.
Every magical being has a soul that is attached to its own dimension, or 'anchor'. Depending on the plane, this gives each of us certain innate powers. My own anchor gives me intelligence far beyond what a puma’s brain is capable of on its own. Without it, I’d be a very large cat with confusing memories of walking on two legs.
Trevor got the short end of the infinite lottery, tied to a plane of flame so weak you can’t even boil water with it.
Using his anchor wouldn’t get my student anywhere. And the way he continued to believe that his anchor would get more powerful if he simply focused harder - as if he were some sort of anime hero - gnawed at me worse than the damn fleas I kept picking up in the tunnels.
The effort it took to contain my frustrated growl risked spraining the muscles of my muzzle. Very carefully, I snuffed out the tiny flame with the pad of a paw; a considerable show of restraint, as I had half a mind to smack the youth upside the head with it. I closed the mental link to prevent him from seeing my exact thoughts.
“Trevor,” I began, in a very carefully leveled voice, “did you do the exercises I asked you to do?” I knew the answer perfectly well with or without our current telepathic connection, but I wanted to make the kid squirm. Which probably wasn’t very nice, or even a good instruction technique, but then again, most teachers are not two-hundred-pound mountain lions. If my students aren't a tiny bit afraid that I’ll eat them then I’m doing something very wrong.
Trevor sucked on his cheeks so hard he risked his entire head imploding. Blue eyes flicked away from me, flashing momentarily in the dim glow of the camping lantern. “I did… a bit.”
“Good. Now show me.” I spoke without a whit of compassion.
A grimace wrinkled his smooth, youthful features. “I don’t want to.”
“Then why am I wasting my time here?” A trace of a growl entered my voice as the remainder of my patience circled the drain.
“Come on, Thomas! I don’t want all this fourth-dimensional stuff. Just show me how to make the flame bigger, like you did when we started! I can be a channeler!” the boy whined.
“You can’t. That little flame is all you can manage. But you can learn spell-work! That's how I made the flame,” I retorted.
“But you can do it again! I’ll pay attention this time.”
“No. I’m teaching you fundamentals so you can learn to do it yourself. That’s how you do it. Now stop arguing and do it, Trevor.”
Finally, his obstinate bravado fell away and fear rolled out of him - the real objection to the exercises. His hands shook slightly as he placed them on his knees and drew a deep, reluctant breath. The mental link between us opened, and I was greeted by his chaotic mindscape. Controlling my own breathing, I resisted the urge to examine the swarming memories and anxieties that surrounded us, instead projecting calm. Eventually, Trevor’s breathing matched mine, and his mind quieted. Are you ready? I asked.
Yes, he answered, the sentiment layered with an image of a quivering mouse trapped by a cat.
Begin, I commanded.
A configuration of boxes appeared between us in the shape of a 'T'.
Now, fold them together.
Much like a similar two-dimensional shape would fold into a cube, these boxes would fold into a hypercube, a cube with four axes instead of the usual three.
I can’t! It's not possible! Trevor's thoughts shook.
Yes, it is. We did this before. Now focus. Slowly, I began to ease the shapes together, bending the structure in an impossible direction. A year ago, I couldn’t even comprehend a fourth axis of space; now, my brain barely burbled a note of discomfort.
'Course, a year ago I had no tail and no idea what the space between my toes tasted like.
Trevor’s mind wailed like a cornered rabbit. It can’t do that! It can’t! Pain shot through the mindscape like cracks through glass. I urged him to keep looking at the shape, projecting wordless warmth, but his pain and fear slapped back at me, harder than it ever had before, feeding on the dread of the moment. The link started to close.
Stop it! I roared into his mind. Do you want to be a mage? Because if you run now, we’re done here, and you can fetch casino chips for the rest of your life.
The link stabilized. The kid hated pain, but he hated his day job more.
His attention centered as I finished folding the hypercube, displaying all four of its mind-shattering axes. Finally! My tail began to lash with pride as Trevor stared at it. He could do this! The primitive regions of his brain were screaming of a primal heresy, but he hadn’t run away. There. Good job. You see it?
Y-yes. It hurts, Thomas. It's like a stick stirring through my brain. He held up a hand toward me as if it could shield him from our thoughts.
But it exists. It's possible. And if the hypercube is possible, what does it mean, Trevor? I prodded.
Memories churned, dim remembrances of lectures I had given sorted through and fragmentary information dragged up. I batted away a few wrong notions and eased the flow of thoughts toward the revelation, which began to swell like an angry pimple in his brain. I stopped hoping that the revelation would come to him while I was gone and inste
ad watched as the damn thing continued to grow, to swell toward the conclusion. Threads I'd spun and hints I had dropped were knotted together, no longer within my control. But if… then... what if...? Questions and answers came together before they could be fully formed.
I steeled myself. This was going to be messy.
It burst. Trevor’s mind screamed along with his body as the magnitude of the universe flooded through his being. The planets, the stars, the galaxies - all layered with infinite realities. He hadn’t been stupid; he’d known of the three-dimensional universe. But the sky was a barrier to those realities existing alongside our own, seething together, mixing, touchable, and totally uncaring to the fate of an infinitesimal speck such as himself —
Nononono!
The link shut like a door to my nose. I slammed back into my own head so hard that stars sparked in the dark of my eyelids.
Blinking, I found the space in front of me empty. The sound of hard shoes slapping against harder concrete echoed down the tunnel, which stretched in only two directions: back toward the Grantsville refugee camp and the wrong direction. Where the phantoms lurked.
Expelling a cloud of curses, I snapped up the lantern and ran after Trevor.
Even my feline eyes cannot penetrate the total blackness of the underground. My mind hammered on the link, but all I could feel through it was pure animal panic.
I’d pushed too hard. Awakened humans still thought with their meat-brains, and those evolved neural networks did not like their universe to be so brutally expanded.
Abruptly the panic and the footsteps halted. This caused my own heart to seize as I spotted two figures in the distance. Trevor knelt as the second, shadowy and insubstantial, shuffled towards him.
A phantasm. The predators of these tunnels. The deathly pale faces of their victims stared out of my memories as I spat out the lantern and poured on the speed. My jaws clamped down on the collar of Trevor’s shirt as the figure’s outstretched hand grasped for his face. He gave a yell of surprise as I hauled him back from it.
“I will teach you.” The figure moaned as it flickered and solidified into the muscular shape of O’Meara, my first bond, and an incredibly powerful fire magus. I ignored the sudden flare of guilt as Trevor swung a fist into my shoulder.
“Let me go!” he screeched as the fabric of his T-shirt ripped, giving him more slack to twist. Finding his feet, he attempted to stand, but I hooked a paw around his ankle and pulled him back down.
“I will show you the path of flames,” the O’Meara-shade whispered, prompting Trevor to redouble his efforts.
“Let me go!” Trevor cried as I bit down on the waist of his pants and flung him behind me. He shot me a look of pure hatred as he rolled back to his feet, totally in the thrall of whatever dream the phantasm had latched on to. I had to get him back into the light.
There was no time for witty banter. Rearing up, I smashed his shoulder with a paw. It was not a blow a normal cat would land; it had follow-through, and the kid spun into the wall. Circling, I lined myself up as he peeled himself from the concrete. Propelled by legs that can vault me two stories up, I slammed my head into his gut, which in turn slammed him into the wall. His breath exploded from his lungs in a sharp “OOF!”
His link reopened in surprise and pain. A frantic desire to breathe displaced everything else as he toppled across my waiting shoulders and gasped for breath. What happened? he thought, in the manner one asks for the license plate number of the car that just ran you over.
You did so well in your lessons that you forgot to breathe. Never mind the bruises, I thought back, dragging him forward a few feet before looking back at the phantasm.
It still looked like O’Meara, although the dark, empty eyes somehow communicated pleading. “Bond me,” it whispered in the corners of my mind.
“Ha!” I answered it. “As if that would actually fix anything!”
I left it there and dragged my student back to the underground Ranch.
2
The Stables
I broke our mental link to let Trevor collect himself in peace as we walked down the straight tunnel back to the Ranch.
The Vegas flood tunnels were thought to be simple things by those above. Six men could walk abreast under their eight-foot-high ceilings. The city believed they were there to control flooding, but anyone with half a brain knew they housed a literal underclass of magical misfits. Las Vegas was the only city in the world with no Veil to separate the mundane from the magical, which meant if you couldn't walk on two legs and cover up your mutations, you'd frighten the tourists. On the other hand, it was the one place those same misfits could live among people without reality trying to scrub them from existence.
Into this had walked about nine thousand people whose town - my town, Grantsville - had been put into a blender, along with six other realities. With help, I'd managed to get most of them out before everyone got liquefied into a refreshing transdimensional smoothie. In the eight months since, those with mutations that could be covered up or which had simply faded with time had found jobs in the above city or had migrated away. The less fortunate had founded small communities in the tunnels, each sustained by donations from those who had left.
The Ranch was the largest of those communities. The residents had all been blended with animals generally found in the barnyard. Trevor and I approached the gate to the Stables, the portion of the Ranch that housed those Grantsvillians whose mutations had gotten worse instead of fading. So complete were their transformations that the lucky ones - the dogs and cats - had been taken on as familiars by the magi above. The rest - the prey animals, those with hoofed feet and limited binocular vision who made poor familiars - were down here without much hope of ever leaving.
A very familiar grey squirrel was perched on the gate. Rudy nibbled on cashews from a bag balanced precariously beside him.
"So what was today's lesson? Playing chicken with a freight train?" Rudy chittered as we stepped within the light cast by a fluorescent lamp above the gate.
I glanced at my charge. He had no visible bruises but held himself twisted with discomfort, one hand on his stomach. Worse for everyone at the Stables, he smelled hurt. The scent of bruised flesh made my predatory stomach rumble with hunger. It would have the opposite effect on the majority of the residents.
Still, Trevor smiled. "Nope, he just hits like a train." A thumb jerked in my general direction.
Rudy's beady eyes widened, and his fluffy tail waved about as if in search of something to smack. "I thought the point of this was to teach magic without trauma?"
"Ran into a phantasm," I said. I turned to address Trevor before Rudy got another word in. "You did good today. Despite the run-in."
Trevor smiled lopsidedly at me. "Thanks. I—I can't say I remember much of it."
"Practice next time," I urged.
"Trrreevor!" a deep voice exclaimed. The gate burst open, catapulting the bag of cashews into the darkness. Rudy managed to grab hold of the wood to avoid a similar fate. I quickly retreated from the young man to avoid being trampled by the voice's owner.
A young Holstein cow charged up to the kid and pranced around him like an excited dog, her shod hooves ringing out as they danced against the concrete floor.
"Hey, Alice!" Trevor held his hands out in a vain attempt to ward off the excited ungulate, but she nearly bowled him over anyway. Only by wrapping his arms around her neck did he avoid getting flung about for the second time today. "Good to see you too," he ground out through clenched teeth.
"Are you a magus yet?" she asked, just like she always did after a session.
"Not quite yet. Soon," he answered in a pained voice. "Not quite ready for the trials yet, Peach Fuzz." Trevor's eyes sought out mine, a quiet "save me" look. I pretended not to see it.
"See you on Wednesday, Trevor." With a nod, I turned tail and strode into the hubbub of the Ranch. Rudy's familiar weight landed between my shoulder blades before I had taken a full stride.
&n
bsp; "You should totally be training Alice. She's four times as smart as Trevor and doubly motivated," Rudy grumbled.
"The human's the one who has to pass the trials, not the familiar. No trials, no official bond," I answered. "More concerning is that he doesn't want to bind her anymore. Thinks he's too good for a cow." I threaded around a pair of horses that were playing chess on a high table and nearly tripped over a chicken. The chicken described me in some rather foul language as he scuttled out of my way.
The Stables consisted of a single tunnel that had been widened to make room for wooden stalls on either side, one per resident. Lights were strung along the ceiling, and Ethernet cables ran into each stall. Horses, cows, goats, and a few sheep loitered in the central aisle, socializing and talking trivialities. Some conversations stopped as they noticed me, and I felt hostile gazes on my back as I passed.
I understood the hostility; I lived upside, and from a certain angle - including my own at times - what had happened to them was my fault. It hadn't been my idea or decision to put Grantsville on the chopping block, but it couldn't have happened without me either. Of course, by the same logic, it never would have happened if the Archmagus next door hadn't transformed me into a cougar or if my mother never gave birth to me. I tried not to think too hard about it.
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