Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2)

by Daniel Potter

  Richard and Tom each took one of the long lines at the registers with me and Rudy in between. Each customer possessed a few motes of tass that had formed in ice crystals pushed out of their orifices. Both Richard and Tom skipped a few where the tass wasn't on their faces but in their pants. I declined to comment, but Rudy had no such inclination.

  Still, both magi were hobbled by the icy floor, and the aisles were covered in lethal ice spikes that resembled obstacles from countless platformer games rendered into horrible reality. Just looking at them made me want to jump out of the way and sing a death ditty. By the second pair of lines I could tell the transition had already crested and we only had minutes to gather the tass we needed. I dispensed with the caution of waiting for Tom and Richard to fumble around. Where the tass was easily reached, I batted them off the popsicles people with my paws. Richard gave up his own collecting and followed me with the tass bag, sweeping anything I knocked to the floor up into it. It wasn't the proper way to do it and didn't treat my "magus" with dignity, but it was fast and that's what mattered at that point.

  It worked all the way to last of the nine register lines, where I found that same old man who'd called the cop by name to let us in. He wasn't in line particularly. Looked like he had been chatting to a woman with hands frozen in fluttering motion and a gap-toothed smile on his face. Ice spikes had formed in that grin. You might have took them for teeth if they hadn't be pointing the wrong way. Tass glinted within them.

  I should have realized that our time was up when I saw his eyes follow me as I pushed myself up on my hind legs. I shattered the icicles from his mouth with a swipe of my paw.

  His mouth worked, and he said, "Ooooooowwww," as if the word had been slowed down and played at quarter speed. "Baaaaaad Kiittttty!" His finger waggled in slow, exaggerated motion.

  "Oh, I'm sorry," I said before giving any thought to what this meant. "But you’re mistaken. I'm a dog." I turned so he could read the words printed on the side of my blue harness. Any moment now the Veil would kick back in.

  The man responded, his words now only slightly slowed. "Hooly shitting bonkers! It’s a mountain lion! A talking mountain lion!"

  He moved to run, but the thaw of his body hadn't quite caught up with his mouth. His leg lifted, but he didn't get it where it needed to be in time, and he toppled over like an ill-posed mannequin. Eyes fall on me as the nearby shoppers looked at the commotion. I paused, waiting for the icy crawling of the Veil on my spine, waiting for everyone to shrug and dismiss me as a dog as they always did.

  Yet as slow, ragged calls of "LION!" erupted around me, I realized the Veil wasn't going to come and save my tawny hide.

  What did you do, Thomas? Richard cried into my mind as Officer Chris stumbled in through the doorway to Grovers Grocery, hand on his gun.

  Get out of here! I thought back, engaging the muscle drive. My paws scrabbled on the now-wet floor tiles for a brief moment before friction caught on and I shot between two registers. The shoppers screamed as I squeezed past them. I had to choose between a mother and a granny, so I pushed against the mother, shoving her against the counter. "Sorry ma'am! But I really don't want to get shot today!"

  "Get off me!" she screamed, and I took a purse to the ribs.

  "Hey, watch it! He's got innocent cargo here!" Rudy said. "You really afraid of one cop?"

  "I'm afraid of his gun," I hissed back.

  "Nobody move!" the cop shouted. "Where'd all this ice come from?"

  Dark thoughts flared from Richard, and I could feel him reaching for a focus that was definitely some sort of weapon and pleaded patience. I peeked around the corner to see the officer, his gun drawn but pointed at the floor. His mirrored shades were gone, his hair damp and clinging to his forehead and his eyes wide and wild. I could run for the exit, but he'd have a clear shot at me if I did, and I doubted Officer Chris graduated from the Stormtrooper school of marksmanship. "What now, officer?" I called. "You want me come out with my paws up?"

  "Who's speaking?"

  "The cat is!" said the woman I'd pinned to the side of the register. She smelled like spearmint gum.

  "This is no time for jokes! Where is it?" the cop bellowed.

  "He's right here! Pinning my legs and I don't like the way the squirrel on his back in looking at me, officer!"

  "Want me to take him out?" Rudy whispered. "He's just one cop."

  One gun between me and the only exit. And then I mentally slapped myself. That wouldn't be the only exit. It was the exit for the customers, but there had to be a dock in the back. I had to get out of here before this guy's buddies arrived and we had to start having a debate as to how to disarm a cougar. Richard, have Harry meet me around the back.

  Hang tight, Thomas, he's positioning the artillery.

  What? From tone of his mental voice I detected zero irony in the Magus’ thoughts.

  Cover your ears.

  Beyond the wall of the store a glob of yellow lit up in my vision. A kinetic channel brighter than I'd ever seen.

  With a sickening crunch and the shattering of glass, sunlight streamed into the front of the store as the wall that had been there lifted clear of building's foundation. It hovered there for a moment before crashing back to earth with a shockwave I felt pass beneath my paws.

  People behind us exploded with rippling screams that blended into a single chorus of terror as the front of the supermarket flopped forward. Behind it Harry idled in the driver seat of the van, hands clutching a metal rod tipped with a crystal; a larger version of the device I'd seen Jules wield earlier. He grinned with a wicked joy. "There is no Veil!" he called. "None at all!"

  A pop cut through the cacophony and Harry rocked backed in his seat, blood splashing across the windshield.

  "HARRY!" Richard screamed.

  The cop continued to fire. He never even saw Richard whip out his own wand before the beam of force sent him flying into a nearby wall so hard that I heard multiple bones snap.

  "What hell are you doing?" I screamed at Richard.

  "Just run! Get to the van!" I could feel the three magi's panic flooding into my own mind, knocking aside any room for argument.

  Richard and Tom were beating it as fast as their legs would carrying them toward Harry. I looked back at the cop. Already people were swarming toward him crumpled under a battery display. Bloody bubbles blew out of his nose. There was nothing I could do for him. So I ran, catching up with the fleeing magi as they reached the van.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I can't say I'd ever seen blood fountain out of a hole in a man before. Distantly, through Richard, I could feel Harry fading. Tom pushed him out of the driver's seat, and Richard desperately attempted to stop the bleeding by pressing his hands over the hole in Harry's shoulder. But the blood pooling on the floor only grew larger as Tom floored it and the van screeched out of the parking lot back toward Jules’ shop.

  Richard and Tom's minds were a litany of blame, panic and curses.

  "You all teleported here!" I said. "Can you teleport us now?"

  "Not without Harry! Where the hell would we go? Jules has the first aid focus back at his shop. It’s only a few blocks away!" Richard shouted back at me.

  Rudy had climbed up to the back of the passenger seat. "Yeah, but you're driving toward the police station!" Sirens began to howl, as if reminded by Rudy's statement.

  "FUCK!" Tom cried and made a wild turn down a side street, the force nearly sending me flying across the van. "Do something, Richard! He's dying! I can feel him dying!"

  "I'm trying, I'm trying!" Richard said as blood squirted between his fingers.

  "We need a circle! Now," I said.

  "Does it look like I have a circle in here? That'd be a really good idea, but I don't have time for metalwork!" Richard pulled out a pocketknife and franticly slashed at the sleeves of his suit..

  "Put your hands on my head and that will be our circle," I said, trying to keep myself calm in the face of his chaotic thoughts. "O'Meara and I did it
all the time!"

  "I don't have a plane of healing on speed dial! I've never tried healing anyone before!" he protested.

  "Then you're going to have to make a deal. Tom, if we can't get to Jules' shop, then try for O'Meara's. Ixey can deal with flesh wounds easily enough."

  Something passed between Tom and Richard, a thought I didn't catch along with a shudder of dread that cut through even the panic. "Not an option," Richard said. "It’s either the shop or the park, and if there's no Veil, the munds will see the construction."

  "Well then we better make this work. We've got plenty of tass." Now was not the time to figure out why Ixey wasn’t an option.

  Richard lifted his blood-covered hands from Harry. The bleeding had stopped and so had his breathing. Rudy shook his head as Richard upturned a velvet bag and dumped a pile of tass crystals onto Harry's chest before grabbing hold of the sides of my head. I closed my eyes.

  Shape the tass into a vessel for a spirit, I commanded Richard, pressing the memory of a book on basic summoning and several conversations with Ixey into his mind.

  Richard tore through the information, devouring it like a pack of piranhas. How the hell will this help? Yet he did as I asked, quickly forming the tass into a hollow fourth-dimensional sphere that could open and close. I took it and folded it within myself, into that strange space the dragon had carved into my being, a sort of transdimensional smuggler's pouch.

  I only had one shot of making this work. I rose into my mental space and flew out along the path to my anchor. Since Richard didn't know of a plane that held the concept of healing, I only had one idea. Ixey had many spirits at her beck and call. I'd seen her appeal to them to assist in knitting flesh together before. Yet she knew them all by name, having spent countless hours building a web of relationships with beings from other planes.

  I traveled to the very end of my soul thread, where the one spirit I knew resided, and pushed through into his head. He had my hands around a stout stick and was prodding the dying embers of a fire. The bones of a recent meal lay scattered around it. Hello, Bone Whistler, I thought at him.

  Greetings, he who creeps into my head and covets my hands, he thought at me. "Here to teach me more of a thousand and one uses for opposable thumbs?

  I have a name.

  But it is a meaningless name, little more than a series of sounds on the wind. You should get a new one that suits you.

  We always had this argument. Whistler was fond of it since I usually lost, but I had no time for diplomacy. I'm calling in a favor. I need a healer right now. I have a client who has lost his breath.

  Whistler's face, my old human face, frowned in thought. His world appeared similar to Earth at first glance, but he had been intelligent before the Archmagus exchanged my body for his. Every living thing in his world had a voice. No doubt the previous owner of those bones around his fire had pleaded for its life before Bone Whistler snapped its neck. I rarely came to visit Whistler on purpose, but occasionally, when the full moon shined through O'Meara's window, I spent the night in the back of Whistler's head. I watched his thoughts churn, ideas bubbling up and popping as he rejected them. He settled on a particularly black one. You need the Weaver, who has a debt of life to me. If I call that debt, you will owe me far more than tricks.

  I didn't have time to negotiate and Whistler knew it. Harry was technically dead. I had seconds before that became a permanent condition. If the Weaver can perform the task assigned, then I'll be in your debt, brother. I hoped to remind him that on a cosmological level we were the same person. My soul was also his. If I died, so did he. Time is of the essence.

  Then we will not waste it. Bone Whistler put his hand to his mouth and bit off a small chunk of skin, his teeth cutting as clean as they had been razors. Had I a body I would have winced, he chuckled at my squeamishness all the same. Squeezing bright red blood from the wound, he held it aloft.

  "Come, Great Weaver. I hold the price of your debt. Do not tarry or the quarry will escape into the moonlight."

  The wind shifted, a chill from in front of us and in the shadows something danced. A voice, a sinister hiss called out from beyond the brush. "You call my debt so soon, Hunter. I would not have thought you would be so quick to be rid of it, given your new affliction."

  "There is no time to chat, Weaver. I pass your debt to another." He licked the blood from his wound.

  Movement stirred from the brush and a spider the size of a buffalo carefully stepped out of the vegetation. A weaver of webs, long, polished limbs supported a body with a head the size of my torso, sporting fangs that were daggers in their own right. Its chitin shone black as it stepped into the sunlight and watched us through eight narrowed human eyes. "I see, dear Whistler, that another pulls at your string." It laughed a woman's laugh discordant with its harsh voice, as if it had eaten a singer once and had somehow kept the voice.

  "See, this is Weaver. I transfer the life debt she owes me to you, Thomas." As Bone Whistler said it, something pressed against my being and passed into it. The spider shivered, and its gaze shifted slightly. But I knew those eight eyes were no longer focused on Whistler. They were looking directly at me.

  "I know of your world," it hissed. "I have danced among its branches in times nearly forgotten."

  Bone Whistler lent me his lips. "Whistler says you can heal a dead man. I need you do to that."

  "I can. If the corpse is yet warm. The wounds can be woven together and the soul returned."

  "Let's go then." I pushed the sphere into Bone Whistler's body.

  With a hard retch, the sphere dropped from Bone Whistler's mouth and into his waiting hands. Dark green like the leaf of an ancient tree, it opened like a flower, revealing an abyss of darkness within.

  Weaver regarded the spell for a moment. "I dislike this part," she said, her torso emitting a whistle that might have been a sigh, and then without any warning she flung herself at us. Her body twisted impossibly in midair and funneled down in to the sphere.

  With a quick swallow, Bone Whistler passed the sphere back to me. I cradled it, folding it into myself. I had so many questions I wanted to ask about Weaver and Bone Whistler and his world. Yet there was no time.

  Thank you, Whistler.

  "Do not thank me, Brother. You will not repay this debt easily," He said to me and whomever might be listening.

  I dived into the strand of our soul and hurtled back to my body.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  "What the hell did you do? Where did you go?" Richard exclaimed as I slammed back into our reality with Weaver inside me.

  I ignored my bond. Spirits usually couldn't just exist in our world. They needed to be given a body. It didn't particularly matter what the body was unless you wanted them to stick around for a long time. For the short term, anything would do. Weaver was big enough to possess the entire van if I asked her to, but the van wouldn't provide her much articulation. My gaze fell on the tool chest that lay along the side of the van's wall, which contained several foci. It was probably not a good idea to give Weaver foci, but I saw no other inanimate options.

  I vomited the spirit forth like a hairball. The tass egg shattered in my throat, and I felt too many legs tumble over my tongue. The tool chest lit up with the yellow of kinetic energy as it rattled. "So much metal!" Weaver rasped as the drawers and hatches opened and closed spastically.

  "Thomas! Whatever you did, it's too late. He's gone." Tom had twisted in the blood-covered driver's seat to look back into the van. His arms were wrapped around the seat back as if it were the only thing that kept him afloat.

  The tool chest spoke. "He is not gone." Then it laughed, differently now, as if a woman's voice had passed through an electric pickup. That actually made it less creepy. Various tools flew out of the drawers, the wrenches assembling themselves into eight spindly legs that heaved the toolbox into the air and lurched toward us. "Out of my way, magus."

  Richard backed away from the entirely still Harry, eyes wide. "Dear Gods...
"

  Weaver's head was formed from mashing together a power drill and a circular hand saw, her eight eyes all slightly different sized sockets, her fangs screwdrivers mounted on articulated clamps. She would have been a cool sculpture at an art fair had it not been that she moved with silent grace that spoke to an unearthly presence. The oil dripping down the screwdrivers was also a nice touch. "I am a singular God. And for him, the only one that matters now." She reared up, holding her front four limbs over Harry. A strand appeared between the pliers that tipped each one, green and purple energy dancing along it. She didn't weave the strand; she danced, those insectoid limbs moving to a rhythm as they stabbed into the air and Harry's body. Something in the strands snared, and she fought it, dragging it back into Harry's body, weaving it into his chest. With a final motion, she sank a screwdriver fang into his heart.

  Harry screamed blue bloody murder. Then took a breath and did it again.

  Weaver shrunk back, laughing at the screams. Richard pounced on Harry as soon as the spider was clear, clutching the dark man to his chest. "Harry! Harry! I'm here. We're all here." Harry clutched back with clumsy fingers, wrapping his arms around the taller man.

  Relief flooded from Richard, and I closed the link to give them some privacy.

  The Weaver studied the pair, clearly pleased with herself as she rubbed her front legs together as if washing them. Her entire body froze when she noticed Rudy perched on the back of the passenger's seat.

  He returned Weaver's examination with a narrowed eye. "Nobody's found a big enough stick to squish you yet, Weaver?"

  "Ah, I remember you, squirrel. Good to see my handy work still holds even after all this time." The spider preened with pride.

  A moment of confusion spread over Rudy's face. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Oh? Don't quite remember where you learned my name?"

  I gawped between the bug and rodent. "You know each other?"

  The spider laughed again. "You are far from the only lost soul that has been bound to my world, and the passage between them was not always so difficult. Earth is my second home and it is good to be back."