Three soldiers burst through the back door of the building. The first disappeared in a flash of purple from the muzzle of Naomi’s weapon, and I pounced on the second. The third fired a shot before disappearing in a second purple blast.
An inarticulate howl of pain blasted through my mind. I looked up from the sack of meat I was standing on to find Naomi clutching a bloody shoulder. It's okay. I can heal it. They got Rinoa with a lucky shot beforehand. Almost got me too, but I think the black guy missed on purpose. Tack says he can still feel her, but she's in a black void. She can breathe at least. How bad is Veronica?
Veronica's down, unless you know how to reboot her?
"Aww, looks like the last Blackwing has an owie." The speakers crackled as Jowls cackled. "OH, it feels so good to have a microphone that works! That can hear me! This is fun! Yes, yes, Jules, I'll focus on negotiations. You realize this is going to be a monologue, right?"
Naomi grabbed Morie with both hands and closed her eyes. Both of their auras flared.
"GOTCHA!" Jowls crowed as the air around them erupted into a purple glow.
Naomi! DODGE! I mentally screamed.
Had they not been attempting to do a spell, they would've had plenty of time, but she pulled back from the spell just in time to watch the world around her go black. She and Morie disappeared from my view with a pop, taking a sphere of everything around them, including a small portion of the building.
Tack looked at the shallow bowl in the dirt with an expression of profound despair.
Naomi's thoughts were considerably less demur than her mouth. The curses that streamed through the link would have challenged O'Meara’s best.
Are you okay? I thought at her.
I stopped the bleeding, but now we're in the dark somewhere, Naomi thought.
It'll be fine. I'm here with her, Thomas. We can still make a spell. We can make it back. Morie's thoughts sounded like they'd been shouted through a tube.
I've never bent space on my own! Naomi responded.
We all helped with the portal from the burning place. We just have to do that again. This time we have Thomas' thread to guide us. Morie's thoughts were calm, soothing.
How much time will you need? I asked. I could feel Naomi's fingers questing for her spool of thread.
I really have no idea! As much as you can buy us. We'll work as fast as we can! Morie assured me.
"Now let’s just put Veronica in a safe place as well," Jowls called.
I turned to watch the identical effect happen to where I had left Veronica. My heart dropped into my gullet. Tack pushed up against me and whispered, "T-that’s it then? We're doomed?
"And that will take care of all the magi. Just two familiars left, I believe. You'll notice we used nonlethal means of subduing everyone. Unlike you and your avian-themed thugs. Sandra up here's nearly dead from blood loss and I watched Tom wink out. You're going to answer for them too," Jowls taunted.
Tack wilted further. I nudged him and pointed my muzzle at the hole in the side of the building. "What's Rinoa telling you?" I whispered.
"That if we hadn't killed Neelius, all of this never would have happened. It’s all gone so wrong. She's... not doing well in the dark."
"Then have her focus on your eyes," I said.
“And it's all kittens and puppies on this side,” he whined.
“There's some light here, even now,” I urged.
He swallowed but nodded. "What do we do?"
"Follow me," I said with as much conviction as I could muster, but I really had no idea what the hell I was planning.
Above us, Jowls had continued to talk, explaining that essentially they had put the entirety of Grantsville in the dragon grinder and if I didn't surrender this instant they wouldn't fish out Noise and Dorothy before they turned the thing on. I loved Noise despite this cat/dog romance impediment, but I'm pretty sure she'd punch my skull in if I traded her life for ten thousand others. I didn't want Dorothy to die either, even if she was a bag of hot air. Really, I'm in favor of nobody dying. But if I gotta choose, then its bastards who think that I'd ignore the lives of helpless folk who die first.
Tack and I slipped through the hole in the corner of the building, hugging the wall. A central pillar dominated the interior, an apparent improvement and refinement on the pill that Jules had first deployed into the dragon grinder. The pillar pulsed with magic, shifting colors flowing through its bulbous components. I understood why Jules had built the building. This device was the opposite of a stone monolith, more a stack of devices haphazardly cobbled together. A rectangular scaffolding had been constructed around it and various bits had been clamped to it. Really, I could probably kick the thing and throw it out of whack. Course, throwing a device out of whack that currently contained an entire town might result in some seriously bad consequences, so I put it on the bottom of my short list of options. About two stories up stood a floor that was little more than a grate. On it, all the soldiers stood. The staircase occupied the far corner of the building and appeared to be the only way up. Beyond that floor I could see Jules' outline, on a third floor or so.
"Aw come on, Thomas. You're making me go full-on Mr. Bigglesworth here. Admit it, you lost!"
Actually, if he turns that thing on, nobody gets a damn thing. The hunger plane will eat everything. You have to stall them, Naomi thought, surfacing momentarily from a deep concentration.
How long do I have to stall him? I thought back.
Five minutes, at least.
That was a long time in any situation involving gunfire. The soldiers hadn't noticed Tack and I yet; the corners of the tower weren't particularly well lit. But if I spoke up, they'd find us in a jiffy. The two on the stairway had their guns trained on the door.
"How about you, dog?” Jowls crowed, “Tack, right? I bet Rinoa's having a grand ole time in limbo. Just hanging out in the void. Is she cold? You know she's in the bag too."
Tack growled. I nudged him to silence.
I crept along the wall. If I could just get the pillar between myself and the guards... A quiet creak from the stairway was all the warning I had before gunfire exploded. I leapt for the pillar. It almost worked, but a stabbing pain cut through my hind leg as I landed. The leg crumpled underneath me and I fell. I dragged myself behind the pillar. Bullets pinged into the far side of the pillar and the world around me flickered.
"STOP! STOP FIRING RIGHT NOW!" Jowls howled, his voice producing an ear-splitting feedback. "OW!"
A bullet had gone clean through my thigh and blown a sizable hole out the other side. It didn't hurt all that much, which a logistical part of my brain knew to be a bad sign. Hey Naomi, I think I'm going to need the cavalry a little sooner. I’m shot. "Hey Jowls! Just how delicate is this thing?" I swatted the scaffolding. The pillar responded with an ominous whine.
Try not to bleed to death before we get this working, Naimoi’s mind sang with the focus of her concentration.
"You Fools! Get him! It's just one cat!"
Above, a few of the green men were trying to poke their guns through the grated floor to shoot me. Something seemed to convince them that was bad idea and all seven of them started marching down the stairs.
BOOM! A reverberation shook through the tower as the front door blasted off its hinges, revealing a single clank, fist outstretched and standing in the doorway. On its shoulder stood Rudy, his paws on the sticks of a radio controller lashed to the robot's head.
"Hey Lardbutt! I think you forgot about somebody important! ME!" Rudy pushed forward on the stick and robot broke into a run, hitting the first grunt head on with the outstretched fist. The grunt's head lost in that collision, messily. The second nearly got his gun pointed in the right direction before catching a robot upper cut. The impact set his gun arcing through the air and clattering to the ground right in front of me. "Who wants a piece?" Rudy hollered in a high pitched battle cry.
Turned out the rest of the summoned soldiers did. Rudy barely got the robot's arms up to protec
t his perch before a hail of gunfire rained down on him. Jowls howled incoherently over the load speaker. I looked at Tack, who still stood in the corner, ears flat and worried, looking at me. Well, not right at me. His eyes were on the rather large pool of blood that surrounded me. How had that gotten so big?
Tack visibly swallowed. "S-Stay here. I'm going to t-take care of this. Karma and all." Then the German Shepard was a crow and took flight.
I looked down at all the blood and called out to the bird magus. Naomi, I really hate to be a bother, but there is a lot of blood here. MY blood. Tack's about to do something really brave and stupid, and Rudy's getting shot at. Rudy's bot was taking the steps one at a time, but he kept being driven to the back of the bot and away from his controls by gunfire from above.
I need more time, Thomas!
If I die, then what you’re doing won't work either!
Where's the wound? I showed her where and she hissed mentally. Brace yourself.
I made sure my tongue was safely contained within my teeth. But it didn't matter. I screamed as the bones in my leg shattered and reshaped, feathers replacing the fur on my thigh and scales covering my leg. A bird's leg was now awkwardly attached to my hip, a foot, and three fingers with a long thumb protruding from the back. Fingers. My head flopped to the ground as the transformation finished, my gaze falling on the gun. A weapon operated with fingers. Do that again. Do it to my front paws.
That's way harder. Your front paws will want to be wings. I'm losing my grip on the gate spell.
A shiver of excitement gripped me as the soldiers repositioned themselves to get a better angle on Rudy. Just do it! Unless something changes, nobody on this side is going to make it another five minutes!
In response, the bones of my front paws seemed to burst into flame. On the other side of the link, Naomi groaned with effort as the digits of my paws stretched into taloned fingers, my dewclaws once again becoming thumbs.
Despite the pain, I gave a breathless laugh. I'd become a cat with thumbs. I'd become doom and ruination, if not for all humanity, then hopefully for Jules. I picked up the gun. It was lumpy in weird places, but it had a trigger and a pointy end. It would do. I gripped it in my teeth and started to climb the scaffolding. The sheer joy of closing my fingers around something again made the tip of my tip tail twitch as I clambered up and squeezed onto the second floor.
Purple flared in my vision from Rudy’s direction. I set down the gun in front of me and carefully grabbed the stock. The soldiers had stopped firing, and I heard Rudy curse, but the soldiers didn't turn around. The gun didn't fit my taloned hand. My fingers were too long for the the grip, but I made do. Lacking a big boney shoulder, I braced the stock against my chest and carefully lined up a talon on the trigger. I pointed the barrel at the back of the closest soldier and depressed the trigger. The gun hammered into my ribcage and green blood splashed out of the creature's body. A wave of shock seemed to go through the soldiers as their fellow fell forward into them.
I pressed the trigger and wrenched the gun side-to-side until it refused to fire anymore. The soldiers either lay on the grated floor or limply leaned on the railing to the stairway, their arms tangled in the metalwork.
"AGH!" Jules screamed from above me. "LEAVE ME ALONE!"
A focus flashed, and I heard a squawk of pain followed by a definite growl. I glanced around. No sign of Rudy or the mech. Another one for the void. Along the wall was another stairway and next to it was a door to the balcony that Sandra had been controlling the robots from, the console still sparking. I started for the stairway but thought better of charging headlong into whatever nastiness Jules had up there.
So I snagged a new gun in my teeth and announced my arrival with a burst of rounds sent up ahead.
Jowls yowled as I went up the stairs clutching the gun in one hand and using the other three limbs to climb. I had no defense against Jules' force wand, so I did my best to keep my head down. Fortunately, I could see his outline perfectly. He held an active force wand pointed away from me, probably pinning Tack to the far wall.
"Stop it!" Jules called down to me. "Every step you take is degrading the harvest percentages! We're so close! Don't you see it? I can cut out the black plane! I can save all the tass!"
I reached the top of the stairs and peeked into the room, firing the gun in Jules' general direction every couple seconds. The room was circular with steel walls, and the central pillar of the device terminated in a dome about five feet tall and wide. Thick tubes a foot in diameter ran out of the dome along the floor at right angles to each other, each pulsing with purple energy. Judging from the angles, they powered the curved horns on the top of the tower that had somehow pulled all of Grantsville inside the dragon trap. The dome had several open panels and spare parts littered the floor around it.
Jules crouched behind the dome. But I didn't see Jowls, just felt his teeth as they sunk into my wrist. My hand opened and the gun fell out of my grasp as I jerked away from the pain. Jowls twisted away from my fangs and raked his claws across my nose.
"NOW! HIT HIM NOW!" Jowls cried as Jules stepped out from behind the dome and flung Tack at me.
I took Tack to my broadside. I heard the snap of bones, not sure whose, and the force of the blow knocked me sideways.
I hit the metal wall of the chamber so hard it rang like a gong.
Jules stood in front of me, one hand holding the force wand. The other was pressed over his right eye, blood dripping down from under his fingers. His nose was blowing bloody bubbles. Jowls stood at his feet, looking at me with his remaining eye and shaking his head. Tack lay on his side a few feet in front of me, his breath rattling in his throat.
"So this is how you repay all our kindness, eh Thomas?" Jowls sniffed as he curled around Jules' legs. "We saved you and your inquisitor friend. And you've gone and betrayed us, trying to shatter our dream!" Jowls' lower jaw trembled as if he were about to cry.
I had two questions in my head. Why hadn't he just killed me? Bleeding like that, I doubted he was thinking straight, but I'd seen that wand move a car. It could crush me to pulp. Unless the wall he had to pin me against was more fragile than it looked. I checked behind me. Yes that was it. Beneath the sheet metal lay some sort of ward, a mix of gold and purple. I thought to Naomi, Now would be a real good time to show up!
Almost there. I'm working on it! Just a few more moments.
Jules pulled his left hand from his ruined eye and awkwardly fumbled for a gun at his right hip.
I hissed, "Well, I hate to be the wet blanket, Jowls, but dreams of mass murder really shouldn't come true."
He growled, "You killed Tom. You killed Cyndi, Sabrina, Cornelius and who knows who else is going to die because you let out a dragon. Now every moment we have to focus on you we're losing more tass to that black plane. You're the bad guy, Thomas. I should have known too. I always fall for the bad boys. You don't keep your word and you stab your friends in the back! So we will fish out all the Blackwings because we're not murderers like you! But you can live a few seconds more imagining what it will be like for Rudy and Noise as we set this thing to puree."
Jules flicked his thumb, peeling me off the wall. I floated toward the pair. He pulled his gun from the hostler and it slipped from his blood-soaked fingers. The magus swore. I stopped moving and hung in midair. My limbs felt as if they were encased in steel, bouncing up and down as he struggled to keep the beam focused on me and retrieve the weapon.
"No," I said. "That’s not okay. You need to spare Rudy and Noise."
"So they can try to kill us?" Jowls tsked as Jules got a grip on the weapon. So much for stalling.
Naomi! I thought desperately as the barrel of the gun swung toward me. Whelp, I thought to myself, I gave it my best shot.
A gun coughed.
I crashed onto the ground, my feet catching me on the bare metal floor. No pain.
"My jelly JULES! No!"
I opened my eyes to see Jules slumped against the dome, red spreadi
ng from a hole in his shoulder. Jowls scrabbled over his legs and slapped his paws over the wound. Jules' stared straight ahead, eye wide with shock.
"Please no!" Jowls pleaded. "I'm too young to go back to the TAU! Don't die. You're not allowed to die!"
Tack lay sprawled on the ground a few feet away, the misshapen rifle between his paws. He flashed me a grin, tail wagging limply.
GOT IT! And with that thought, purple light erupted beside me. A round portal formed, allowing Naomi and Morie to step through. What a mess.
Jowls ran to her. "Oh sweet, merciful angel! Please don't let my magus die! Please!"
Naomi didn't move. Morie sniffed, and I felt the pang of an alert from him. He dashed forward, grabbed the fat cat by the scruff of the neck and flung him into the portal they'd just stepped through.
Jowls screamed as the portal snapped closed behind him.
I blinked. Was that necessary?
We're not taking any chances on this bastard, she thought back. Try to find some tass while I stop everyone from bleeding to death. She started walking to Jules but abruptly shifted her path toward Tack and knelt before him. "How you doing, soldier?"
"B-been better. Busted leg. A rib too," he wheezed.
"You did good, Tack." She scratched his ear as she took out her silver thread.
As she and Morie healed Tack's injuries, I watch Jules' aura fade away to nothingness. Veronica's words echoed in my head. I don't want to kill them. I want to save them. Then I recalled the family of four devouring their neighbor and realized I didn't agree. If he had lived, no magi court would make him pay for that crime.
Jowls, when or if we fished him out of the void, would go back to the TAU for either reassignment or retirement.
I laughed as a realization stuck me. Depending on how deep the bond had been between Jules and Jowls, the shattering of their bond could do significant damage to the mind of the surviving partner. Veronica knew how Neelius had died because what her Cabal had told her. There was no trace of the duel itself in her mind. That meant, despite being the driving force behind the founding a House, Jowls might emerge from this completely ignorant of the evil he'd attempted. Is that why Tom had forced Veronica to kill him? The bonds between the trio had been deep. Would that act wipe the memories from Harry and Richard?
Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2) Page 29
