Whipping his phone off his back, he swiped the screen, and the domes spun in unison. "All controlled by an encrypted data signal that is totally unhackable." He beamed with pride.
O'Meara pushed behind my eyeballs, studying my vision for any sign of active spell foci. I scried hard for her, but besides the tass, there was nothing. Disbelief poured out of her. Those were all complex effects, not explosions.
"There's no glyphs! Rudy, where did you learn this!?"
O'Meara’s memories began to froth.
Rudy punched his phone, and a small hollow punt sounded, popping a small cherry bomb out of a tube. It landed with a crack at my feet. A yellow rune flashed in my vision. Startled, I jumped away, or tried to. My paws skidded out from under me, and I spun, suspended in mid-air. A yellow field of energy had blossomed beneath me and O'Meara. She floated in a much more dignified manner, eyes wide with shock as her long hair splayed out from her head as if it had come to life. "That's—"
"A demonstration of how very little human magi actually know about magic. Or, more than likely, have forgotten about magic. How do you think magic worked before familiars came along?" Rudy grinned, oblivious to O'Meara's hollow stare out into a sea of memories.
"Turn it off, Rudy!" I nearly screamed. The spell faded out, and we both thudded to the floor.
Too late. Dark memories erupted through our link.
In my mind's eye, a young woman appeared. Her long hair - a warm ocean blue - framed her bright smile. "Hey! They left us some tass!" She presented a chunk of rock with a simple spiral symbol on it. I reached out my hand - a younger, slender version of the same hand that I allowed to scratch my ears. A forceful "No!" rippled out of my throat as the stone burst into blackness that ate the light of the world around me. A scream sliced through the darkness. When the sunlight bludgeoned back into the world moments later, the only things left of that woman were several strands of that impossibly blue hair slowly wafting to the ground.
I pulled back from the memory with a shudder, only to be slammed with another: this one, the sensation of cold sweat breaking out all over my body as I woke to the sound of a laugh like spiders crawling across my skin. With a growl, I batted the memory away before its horror could unfold. More came, a torrent of memory erupting from O'Meara.
I dived on through and found my friend's mindscape boiling. Shadow magic! The words hissed through the roiling memories, stirring them into a frothing mix, each containing a new horror: the memories of war. A howl of pain shuddered through the mental mass. I pushed forward, trying to shut my heart to the barrage of scenes that latched on to my consciousness, closing my inner eyes to them, dismissing them as nothing but horror flicks on a TV. But no flick can smell of charring flesh and the fetid rankness of perforated intestines mixed with the sweet tang of human youth. Pushing through it all, I found the dead Great Dane in the center of it all. Sir Rex. His mouth foamed as he frantically tried to shove the escaping memories back into the hole they were fountaining out of. His efforts were as effective as an attempt to plug a geyser with a finger.
He greeted me with a growl. "You stirred them up! Why did you stir them up? All the vampire talk was bad enough! But now!"
The shadows are coming! O'Meara's thoughts echoed like primal screams. Everywhere I turned, I found a new death, but I still didn't understand. Who were the shadows, and how did she witness all of this? I felt the thick air of the Congo fill our lungs, the memories taking root around us, blending into a nightmare of death and battle.
"No, no, NO, NO!" Red rage slammed over us like a wave of molten steel. the gate to her anchor yawned wide, an abyss of nuclear fire. Cursing, I pulled back into my own body. O'Meara stood, her fists raised into a fighting stance, her eyes seeing nothing but long-dead enemies. This time I'll get them. This time I'll get all of them. Her thought rang out like a wail of pain as she filled herself with the heat of a sun.
"Aw, nuts." Rudy dived for the sink as I flung myself at O'Meara. She swung out with fist and heat. The blow slammed into my shoulder, crisping fur and exploding with pain. Still, I wrapped my paws around her waist and bowled her over.
I shouted her name with everything I had. O'Meara! You're not there! This isn't real!
But the memories were swarming her, drowning me out as she gathered more power. If an African nation had ever claimed to have been nuked, I think I knew the source. There was no time to dig through the memories. We had to defuse the energy she was drawing in. Filling the void left in her body with my own mind, I moved her body as if it were my own, placing her hands down on the floor and covering them with my paws.
I slammed the energy she had gathered down between us, focusing on to a circle on the floor. The tile first buckled and then melted into a red slurry before disappearing downwards as the heat drilled down through the floor and into the earth, melting into its very crust.
Kill them all! Kill them all! Kill them all! The chant came out of the storm of O'Meara's mind. She was no longer going to incinerate the city block, but if I didn't stop her, Las Vegas might have a brand new volcano. I dived inward.
Rex thrashed among the memories, trying to shove them back into O'Meara's subconscious where the ghost had been keeping them. His growl echoed through the mindscape. "Do you see now? Do you see why you must not leave her?" he shouted as I attempted to tear away the memories swarming her. But my mental claws only seemed to enrage them further. Each one clung to me, giving me a fresh face, a fresh death to haunt my own mind. The sight of blackened bones that laughed with voices of children, juxtaposed with O'Meara's sooty hands, staggered me. My god, she had killed children? That couldn't be true. Were these memories or nightmares?
I pushed the thoughts away for later. Focus on the task, I told myself.
The nightmares were a plague of locusts. I had to calm her - not just her but her entire mindscape. Reaching back, I recalled the many times I had taken her exhaustion into myself to give her a few hours of wakefulness in the depths of her illness. I conjured that heavy feeling on her eyelids, the muddled slowness of thought, and tempered it with the warmth of my body against hers, the safety of her own home and subtle scents of the dust cooking on those ancient radiators. Wrapping it all around myself like a cloak, I hurled myself into the center of O'Meara's mind. The memories resisted at first, clawing at me with sharpened terror, but as I continued to push, enveloping them in my invitation to slumber, they began to fall away. Other memories mixed with the others I had brought with me. Warm cocoa after a hard day in the snow. My lawnmower purr against her chest. Lying in bed on an autumn day.
The nightmares yielded and the fire subsided, although the fur left on my paws had been charred to black and the floor between them was a mass of bubbling molten rock. We held each other in our minds and pulled our bodies away from the heat.
Her arms wrapped around my chest, and she bawled into my neck. Time passed as her tears soaked into my fur and I tried to assure her everything was okay.
I had forgotten how much of a monster that war made me, was her first coherent thought after a long time. I could see the ghost dog still working to corral the memories away, but O'Meara - armored in a blanket of good times - would snatch one, examine it, and toss it away, sending Rex chasing after it as if it were an evil tennis ball. That's the problem with having another magus force you to forget things. When it fails, it fails in a rather spectacular manner.
My head nodded as I attempted to bury the burning question in my head, but she caught it. Her body stiffened as she dug down and pulled a memory that glowed as a black hole. A shiver went through us both.
It's true. In the war, our enemies used a particular type of vampire as a shock troop. Tikoloshe. They do not feed on blood but grief. Kill one beloved man or woman in a village and they could draw their strength from everyone who missed them. So empowered, they'd be able to slip back and forth through reality, ripping through packs of spell dogs at a time and blinking out before magic could scratch them. We did the only thing w
e could think of: found and destroyed their source of power. The villages.
Fuck. I didn't know what to say or think. Wars were ugly things.
O'Meara pulled back to lean on one of the waiting room chairs and wiped her eyes. Then she rubbed her thumb and fingers together, feeling the memory of ash between them. Never realized what I was doing until after I'd done it. Nigel and I both went mad in our own way. He got himself killed, and I was relieved of duty. Not much good to anyone if you're a blubbering mess. The war ended soon after. Not too many came home from it.
Nigel, the name recalled to me, had been O'Meara's first familiar, a black cat with mad eyes. O'Meara glanced up at me and then back down at her hands. I thought back to the reaction of some of the elder satyrs in that bar, the ones that had withdrawn into the corners.
You're judging me, she thought at me with a sad shrug. Do you want me to leave?
No! My mind jarred back from a numbness that I hadn't realized had gripped me. Not so much not understanding but not wanting to understand, to the point of stopping thinking at all. My best friend was a murderer. That I'd known, really, the way she'd casually burned a hole in the head of a poor mundane who happened to be mind-controlled. O'Meara was firmly a good guy, but she had never been a Batman.
What would you say to a military vet who's dropped bombs on enemy cities, Thomas? Would you be afraid of them, too? Behind her words, I saw excuses and explanation pile up in her mind. Yet she did not push any of them at me.
Yes. I forced myself to lean back onto her, resting my head on her chest. War should not be an excuse for murder, but that was its definition. That's definitely not the way it should be. Yet still wars happen.
Rudy made a surprisingly deep "ahem" sound. "Any time you guys get done snuggling over there, that'd be good! Not like we've got three days until a death match or anything!" Rudy said as he stood next to the bubbling pit. He had a fryer basket filled with nuts held over the liquid stone. "This is going to be radiating heat for weeks, I tell ya! Going to be murder on the AC."
30
Tiny Cat Versus Squirrel
A text from Veronica put any more discussion of old war and dead children to rest. O'Meara and I leapt at the chance to think about anything else.
Jet had been found. We loaded up into O'Meara's Porsche with a small cooler of ice water for Rudy and headed out into the desert. At least we managed to get the top up. At Vegas temperatures, racing down the highway in a convertible is like throwing your body into a convection oven.
A glittering star on the horizon slowly resolved into the figure of Veronica, or at least some other woman who was insane enough to wear a sequined gown into the desert. At least she'd brought a parasol. I knew she took a strange glee in doing this, augmenting her fashion's durability and comfort with magic. When we had tracked a slippery elemental through a swamp three months ago, she'd done it in heels. We'd enchanted the heels, of course; otherwise she'd still be in that bog. That was part of the game of her against the world: an added bit of difficulty, a training weight. If you manage to push her to the point she no longer cares about it, the weights come off.
"See! They know how to travel! No need for this flying business," the tiny black cat in her arms grumped as O'Meara's car rolled to a stop near the side of the road. He sported a new focus around his neck; I guessed he'd just had his first flying lesson.
"Oh, it can fly when it needs to," O'Meara said as she stomped on the parking brake.
"It is a Porsche." Gus twisted out of his magus's arms and hit the burning sand with all four paws. I caught a wince on his small face. "Would it kill you to take better care of it? You poor thing, you're rusting."
"I'm lucky it runs. The inquisitors stripped out decades of magical work on it. I've got things in the engine now that do nothing but add weight." O'Meara stepped out of the car as Gus sort of danced over the sand and into the car's shade.
"Hrrrm, it's a '78!" Gus bounded up into the seat I had just vacated. "Engine work? It needs engine work?"
"We didn't even hit a hundred miles an hour on our way out," I added, remembering how the car plastered me against the back seat the first time O'Meara had given me a ride.
"Oh, the poor little thing. You've got it all choked up!" Gus dashed underneath the front of the car, where he let out a yowl of actual pain. "What is all this? You've got a literal hole in the engine block! You drive this much further and the only way you're going to get anywhere is yabbadabbado-style."
I had to chuckle as Veronica crossed her sparkly arms and sighed like a midday soap actress.
"Hey, I spent two hours this morning helping you with that getup. You can help me rebuild this engine. Jet loved Porsches almost as much as he loved Harleys," Gus said. "Could work on them for hours. Not that there were many in Grantsville. Two, really. But somehow Jet convinced them both to come to our shop. He charged them half labor. In the back of our shop, he parked a junked '77. Always looking for parts on the interwebs. Was waiting for a new engine to show up when things got strange." Gus's voice got smaller and smaller with each word. "Talked about getting custom tools for the hooves. And..." he trailed off.
Veronica knelt, opening her arms, and Gus hissed. "No, I don't want a fucking hug! I want to take this car and flip it over! I want to take a hammer and put it through a wall! I want to go to a bar, get drunk, and start a fight with the first fella that looks at me funny." A swirl of black fur and fang attacked the car's innocent tire. "Hiss! Mrowl!"
After a few seconds, he fell back from the tire, panting. The tire appeared to be unharmed and unimpressed by the assault. He glared at us all, his expression making it very clear that the first one that so much as snickered was going to have tiny teeth lodged in their nose. I busied myself with some urgent grooming as Rudy popped up onto the edge of the car door looking like a drowned rat. He'd given up drinking the water twenty minutes from town and had been riding in the cooler.
"What's with all the hissy-hiss?" he asked innocently.
"Are you laughing at me, squirrel?" Gus skittered out from under the car to get a look at the squirrel.
"Me? Laugh at a cute little feline like you? Never!" Rudy damn near giggled.
Gus went into a crouch before Veronica stepped up and scooped up her familiar. "Anyway!" Her broad show lady smile turned into a wince as Gus sank his claws into her arm. "The grave is just over there. Gus has seen enough." Her other arm closed down on him as he growled.
We found the pit less than a hundred feet from the roadside, hidden by a small rise in the baked earth.
O'Meara, being three feet taller than me, saw it first. "Blood and ashes. What the hell did this?"
"Ooooh, ow," Rudy said. "I wish I had a hat to take off."
My only response to the corpse was to feel a hairball suddenly manifest in my throat as I padded forward for a closer look. Jet lay in the two-foot-deep grave on his back, his ribcage yawning open like the leaves of a Venus fly trap. Desert dust caked his black hide, turning it a grey-brown. It had only the faintest scent of death; the desert had already begun to leach most of the moisture from him. The shriveled lungs lay there, deflated. The through-the-bone cuts were so clean that the diaphragm still held the digestive system in place. No sign of the heart. I moved his muzzle back and forth; no neck trauma. How do cheetahs hunt? I looked at the ribs; something had sliced straight through his sternum and pulled him open with precision and care.
"Do Tikoloshe usually use a scalpel?" I asked out loud for Rudy's benefit.
"No, but they eat the heart," O'Meara said, pulling a bag of salt out of her backpack and making a circle around the grave.
Rudy hopped down from my shoulders, his fur already dry in the scorching sun. His tail dragged in the dust as he examined the body.
"I don't see any trauma other than the obvious. Do you?" I asked.
"Nope. Not that we'd find anything. Tough to see a bruise on black skin."
"Then let's see what magic can tell us." O'Meara sat down at the edge of
the circle of salt. The desert's winds had died away, as if it were respectful of our task. I hopped opposite her, closed my eyes, and opened our bond.
To my sight, Jet was simply meat. Utterly of this world, there were no traces of even the spell that allowed him to talk.
This body has been magically bleached, O'Meara observed, her thoughts running through a mental checklist. That doesn't happen by accident.
So there is definitely a magus involved. We know that already. Doug and Ceres. I thought back.
We have to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. That will force the Inquisition to arrest them. A ray of hope began to shine in the back of her mind.
I seized on that thought. Then, if they're arrested, we won't have to face them in the hunt. I grinned. We couldn't get Doug in trouble for murdering Trevor or Jet, but being a vampire in Vegas would be enough of a crime to get them executed. It would be a side-handed justice but probably more likely to happen than besting the cheetah in the ring.
Now, the trouble with bleaching is it turns a body into a bit of a magic sponge. We won't be able to see anything that happened before they bleached it, but everything since will be as if they wrote a book. Scry as hard as you can.
My tail curled with skepticism. Scrying - looking deeply into spells - generally required spells to look at. They were the light. Pointing a microscope at darkness doesn't show you anything. Still, I breathed in, recalling that almost telescoping sensation that accompanied my senses when I looked deeply into a spell's inner workings. Opening one eye, I sighted myself on Jet's open chest cavity and mentally drilled into that darkness. Nothing happened. I pushed myself as far as I had dared before, feeling my mind extend outward, my other senses becoming distant and muted.
Rudy's got our back, O'Meara assured me, her mind a gentle pressure on the back of my head, urging me deeper.
And there - the faintest of faint colors. A purple. Not a spell but a residue. O'Meara reached into my mind and did — I'm not sure what, but it felt as if she jerked me sideways. The spell snapped into focus: a teleport rune.
High Steaks (Freelance Familiars Book 3) Page 18
