Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2) Read online

  Marking Territory

  Book Two of the Freelance Familiars Series

  By

  Daniel Potter

  ISBN: 0-9965940-2-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9965940-2-8

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Art

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  To Amanda Potter

  Because I love her and to list all the reasons would more than double the word count of this book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I smiled at the waiter, and when he smiled back without flinching, my vision blurred. My third eyelids pushed away the excess moisture to wet the fur in the corners of my eyes. Mountain lions aren’t made to suppress tears.

  "Can I take your order, sir?" the waiter asked, his smile briefly fading. Had he actually seen the tears? The thought made it even harder to suppress the purr that desperately wanted to rumble out of my throat.

  "I- uh-" I looked back down to the table where a thick leather board held a limited menu. I knew what I wanted. I looked to Noise across the table, her own smile broad with an edge of laughter as she watched me. Her usually amber eyes had faded to ice blue thanks to the new moon, and they glowed with delight. She wore a stunning sea green dress that accented her lithe frame. When she'd walked out of her bathroom with it on and her short hair styled with curls, I briefly thought she might have been kidnapped by an extreme makeover TV show. Never in my life had I imagined her looking so lovely.

  I took a deep breath through my nostrils, pulling the sweet scent of succulent beef up into my head, and my mouth flooded with anticipation for the meal.

  Pity slipped into the waiter's eyes as I gathered my scattered thoughts. Really, I wanted to savor this moment for as long as I could. Thanks to the Veil that blinded mundanes to any magically-induced weirdness, he surely saw a miserable wretch of a man slumped in a wheelchair despite the snappy tuxedo. I didn't need pity, for this was a triumph! I sat at the table, instead of hiding under it like a pet. He couldn't see my smile filled with teeth designed to crush the windpipes of a deer or the huge paws that awkwardly pushed on the armrests of the wheelchair in which I perched. Nobody but Noise saw the nearly three-foot long tail that protruded from the space between the back and the seat of the wheelchair.

  No one could comprehend a reason for a cougar to come into their restaurant dressed in a tuxedo sitting in wheelchair. Therefore, logically, I must be a man. It was a trick I'd only been able to pull off on the internet or in a dark alley.

  "We'll both have the prime rib, sixty-four ounces," I said.

  The waiter only blinked once at that, his eyes flashing over to Noise's petite frame before returning to me. "Of course, sir. Will you be having anything to drink?"

  I looked to Noise and bathed in her smile. This had been her idea, and gratitude flowed though me like a river flooding its banks. My body itched to press against her, feel her fingers rake through my fur. But jumping over the table for a petting session would definitely shatter the illusion. Instead, the low rumble of my purr became audible.

  "I'll have red wine." Her smile dimpled her cheeks. "He can have water."

  "Aww," I said.

  "Remember last time?" She winked at me.

  My ears started to burn before I drew up into a dignified pose and looked down at Noise over my muzzle. Perched on the seat of the wheelchair, my 200-pound feline frame towered over her. "Not at all," I said, even as the memory slammed into my mind, one filled with images of toilets and the taste of vomit on my tongue. Becoming a cougar hadn't done anything good for my alcohol tolerance.

  "Lucky you." She rolled her eyes and laughed, shrugging off any effect of my newfound tallness.

  "Very good!" the waiter announced. "I'll be right back." He spun on his heels and walked toward the double swinging doors that guarded the kitchen.

  I took a moment to look over the Stockyard, the best steakhouse in Grantsville, which is saying something in ruralish Pennsylvania. The place had a rustic ambiance, brilliant white table clothes draped over the simple lines of Amish-made furniture. Nobody came here to admire the interior design, though. The Stockyard was all about the scent of well-seasoned meat that flooded the room as our waiter pushed one of those doors aside.

  I turned back to Noise. "Thank you," I told her. I wanted to follow up with the L word. But we'd both been avoiding that since the change. It sat on the back my tongue, like a bullet in a loaded gun. There were reasons I couldn't pull that trigger.

  "Happy Birthday." She reached forward, and I put my paw on the table, her fingertips touching it before retreating.

  Aww, that’s so sweet. The biggest of those reasons projecting her thoughts into my head. Privacy is a difficult thing to come by when you're a familiar.

  O'Meara! I thought-screeched at my magus. Go away!

  Oops! Sorry! I didn't mean to! Just happened! I'm so bored of this show. My thoughts drifted...

  O'Meara, it’s my day off. Get out of my head. Unfortunately, the growl I accented the thought with might have been audible.

  Going! I could still feel her squeeing as she pulled herself from behind my eyes. She slipped back though our mental link to her own crippled body and shut the door behind her. Lately the 'door' between us had become more like a gauzy see-through curtain than any substantial barrier. O'Meara's injuries had required that I allow her mind to be housed partially in my own brain for some months while hers recovered from saving my hide. But even after she'd moved out, she could slip back in without realizing it herself.

  Noise's smile had vanished, her eyes gone stony and dull. The distinct sound of her teeth grinding together filled my ears. "Something wrong?" she asked.

  "Nothing. I took care of it." At least O’Meara wasn’t looking through my eyes. I could feel her on the other end of the link, noisily paying close attention to a pair of actors on the TV and hoping one of them would have their shirt ripped off soon.

  "She was watching again, wasn't she?" Noise growled.

  "I sent her home," I said.

  Noise took a breath so deep it strained the fabric of her dress and squared her shoulders,
placing her hands on the table as she did so. Had it not been a new moon, I suspected the tablecloth would have sustained some claw marks. "Six more months," she muttered to herself; the term I had told her that my contract was up with O'Meara, and a poorly thought out lie. Truth was the bond could be broken at any time I wished. I had my reasons, and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt O'Meara's brittle health, even for Noise.

  Noise opened her mouth to say something, but the waiter appeared and her jaw snapped closed. He poured her wine and filled my goblet with water. Whatever she was going to say, she swallowed it down and managed a smile as the waiter departed.

  She raised her glass as a mischievous gleam crept back into her eyes. I eyed her quizzically, and she nodded at my water glass. Apparently she wanted to move on from the interruption by testing how far the Veil would stretch tonight. While it had masked my appearance, it hadn't blessed me with actual hands. Still, I braced my thighs against the sides of my chair to avoid toppling onto the table before reaching out with both forepaws to grasp the glass. In these last six months, I'd learned how to do lots of things you wouldn't expect paws could do, but the glass trembled with the effort it took to hold it up from the table. The smooth glass threatened to shoot into air like a banana escaping its peel. Droplets of water spilled over the rim and wet my leathery pads. I blinked away a sudden haze in my vision as I brought the glass up to clink against hers.

  "To new beginnings," she said.

  I momentarily racked my brain for something then said, "And happy endings."

  She took an effortless sip.

  I attempted to do the same, but the water fell out the sides of my mouth and dripped down my chin. I coughed and dropped the glass. Noise's hand shot forward and caught the glass before it had a chance to empty its contents all over the table. She chuckled. "No, you have to clench your lips before you sip. It's possible. I promise. If I can pound back a beer with a foot-long muzzle, you can sip from a glass with your itty bitty one." She leaned over the table and attacked me with a napkin.

  A sudden haze pulsed and cracks of purple spidered across my vision. Not real purple, but the neon color of reality-buckling: magic. My heart dived for my stomach as I instinctively seized O'Meara mind and slammed my vision into hers. I frantically twisted my head around, searching for the source. But there was none. The magic surrounded us like water pouring into a submarine.

  Thomas? Aw crap. TRANSITION! O'Meara shouted in my head. Spell now!

  My ears folded flat against my head. A transition? Here? Now? Transitions, a place and time where our reality passes through another and briefly blends, weren't entirely rare; one happened somewhere in North America every day. Yet I'd seen one happen in Grantsville two weeks ago! I didn't have the time to figure out the odds of that cosmic dart throw.

  I pulled back from my body as the mental connection between us snapped into clarity and we formed a circuit with our minds. With our deep bond we didn't need a physical circle anymore.

  Human magic extends not from rituals and odd hats but from the souls of the magus and her familiar. And real souls aren't little balls of ectoplasm that sit around looking pretty. They are connections to other realities. They stretch in a direction our minds have difficulty fathoming. Not up-down, left-right or forward and back, but another way separate from them all. And in that direction, yee-ward or yee-down, lie realities stacked on top of each other like an infinite sea of flapjacks. In one of those flapjacks is the other end of a magus' soul, their anchor, but it passes through hundreds of thousands of realities along the way. An experienced magus has mapped that pathway, knows what lies where, and can tap into any of those realities to bring their energies to bear. After a brief embrace, O’Meara’s mind rocketed away from me, plunging into the thread of her soul. I likewise drifted yee-down into my own thread and braced my awareness, a stake in the ground to O'Meara's kite.

  I felt the slightest tug as O'Meara came back through her tunnel. I pulled her back to me, reeling her in like a too-small fish on a line, the hook snagging occasionally on some pondweed. She gasped for breath as she stumbled into our mindspace and pressed a pearl of power to me. The glimmering white thing surged into my body and beyond it.

  I opened my eyes to find myself in a crystalline bubble pushing away the purple of bending space around me. White, the color of Order, the universal color of raw magic. There had been no time to craft it into a useful spell, so instead O'Meara let it pour out of me, my body frozen as still as a statue. The Order would protect me from the surge of chaos. I could only watch Noise staring at me with concern as the purple light crept into her and everything around us.

  "ThoOOOOOOMAS?" Noise's voice stretched out into an animal bay as everything around me twisted, including her! I couldn't turn my head away as black splotches appeared on her skin.

  Her eyes, wide with shock, slid to the sides of her head, pushed there by the growth of a heavy muzzle. Horns erupted from either side of her skull, and her dress strained to contain the sudden bulk of her body and breasts. The glass she held shattered, crushed with strength of a massive two-fingered hand.

  Behind her the wall shimmered from plain white into roughhewn planks. The elegant table before us became a barrel covered with a red-checked tablecloth, and the silverware, wooden spoons and knives. The salt and pepper shakers blossomed into shallow bowls with piles of spice.

  Noise held a hand up to each eye. Her mouth, a maw filled with blunt teeth and a black tongue, hung open like a dentist had use too much Novocain. She closed and opened it as if to speak, but all that came out was loud, panicked MOOOOOO!

  Noise clutched at her muzzle. The waiter, or what had been our waiter, appeared. He bleated a question at Noise as he effortlessly balanced on cloven feet, wearing nothing but his blue vest. Noise just stared at him, her huge blue eye flicking up and down the man's goat-like body. Around us the mundanes, now blended with a reality that resembled a barnyard, continued with their meals, the Veil preventing them from noticing anything unusual had happened.

  After a stricken silence, our goat waiter bounded away with an absurd spring in his step. Noise turned her head to regard me with one eye. She still sported humanish lips on the end of her cow's muzzle. She pressed them together and worked her bottom jaw back and forth, feeling out the newness of it. "Haaawmus," she tortured out my name.

  Sorry, I couldn’t grab enough power to get both of you. O'Meara’s voice slid through my mind, the words heavy with exhaustion. A taste of her pain washed through the link. The scent of wrongness and rot rolled over me. She'd reopened that wound, AGAIN.

  Yeah I did. It will heal. Always does. But at least you won't be chewing cud with your girl there. That'd be terribly embarrassing for a cat.

  What about Noise?

  It’s a transition. She might have an echo or two, but they should fade in a few days. Next time wear your harness under the tux. She gave a long mental sigh, thought, Goodnight, and then slipped away into her exhaustion. Guilt flared up in my gut as I pictured my service dog harness sitting in the back seat of Noise’s car where its protective enchantments were no use to anyone. She'd just hurt herself to protect me once again, and for what? Saving me from looking odder than a talking cougar for a day or two. But I couldn't dwell on that with Noise here in front of me.

  The waiter chose that moment to return with two huge slabs of beef.

  Noise' nostrils flared and she gagged on the scent of the meat. She clutched at her throat and squeezed tearing eyes closed. Locked in the bubble of stasis, I could only imagine what the fragrance of cooked beef smelled like to a cow.

  The purple light had filled everything, but something shifted within it, a shadow passing through everything as if something huge lurked beneath reality. The light flared as the change reversed itself. The bovine features left Noise as quickly as they'd come, and the charming barnyard cafe faded back into the upscale steakhouse, mostly. Small objects scattered throughout the restaurant hadn't made the trip back to our reality. A
few wine glasses remained wooden cups, and my plate remained a wooden cutting board, all glimmering a dull gray in my sight and bursting with tass, the raw stuff of spells.

  With the last of the purple haze winking out, air found my lungs and my body remembered to breathe. "Noise, are you okay?"

  She wiped her mouth and glanced at her plate, her face instantly turning a shade of green. "Oh gods. No, definitely not. I’m sorry, but it smells like death in here. Check please!"

  A confused waiter appeared. He looked human, except for the small horns protruding from his forehead. "Is there something wrong, miss?"

  Noise stared at him for moment, her hand flying to the back of her head where a set of horns had protruded moments before. Finding nothing but hair, her hands fluttered down her body, probing for lingering features. The waiter watched with furrowing brow.

  I cleared my throat and pulled the waiter's attention to me. "My apologies, but could we have it to-go? I’m having a slight health flare up."

  Relief smoothed his features. "Uh- Of course, sir. I’m sorry you’re not feeling well."

  I eyed the glimmering cutting board with my succulent meal perched on top. If I had my guess, the tass it contained was worth several months’ salary from O'Meara. "And the cutting board. It’s charming.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  After leaving the restaurant, it became clear that our evening together had come to an end. I needed to get back to check on O'Meara, and Noise grew increasing disturbed by the fact that the best steak in town smelled like carrion to her. We stopped at her place to change out of our formal duds. Well, she changed into a t-shirt and jeans, and then carefully pulled me out of the custom tailored tux before strapping on my service dog harness. We stowed the cutting board in the tass bag that I keep in the side pocket of my harness, otherwise the tass would evaporate into the ether before too long.

  "Are you sure there are no long-term effects?" Noise asked again on the way back to O'Meara's house on the edge of Grantsville.

  "Hopefully your sniffer will be back to normal in a few days." I tried to hunker into the back seat. Noise had every reason to be scared, but there was nothing I could really do about it with O’Meara KO’d. "If I had felt like ransacking the restaurant, we could have gotten more tass. But other than that, I don't know much about transitions. I saw one happen at a distance a few weeks ago. If not for that I wouldn't even have had a word for them. And O'Meara hurt herself slamming me into stasis."