Groaning, I let my head rest on the top of the passenger-side door.
"Can't we sleep off whatever you said this is first?"
I thought at O'Meara, deeming speaking too much effort. I could feel her struggling against the same effect I felt. An alcoholic buzz blended with the warmth of a lazy day spent with a lover in bed.
Her arms encircled me, and my skin suddenly was singing with the sudden contact and closeness as she squeezed. Then, as if she were some sort of big sister, she expertly administered the most painful noogie I had ever experienced.
"Wake up!"
She shouted directly into my mind as the hug turned into a headlock.
She released me before I had a chance to retaliate, and I sat there, still feeling the echoes of her knuckles grinding into my skull. "What the hell was that for?" I exclaimed, the hurt of the betrayal making my voice squeak.
O'Meara shook her finger at me, nearly touching my nose with it. Her face was serious with a faint hint of embers inside her pupils. "Those thoughts of yours are making me tired, so quit it. We’ve got five days to figure out who killed Archibald. Linking haze can last for weeks, and we don't have time for it. You wanted this to be a job, not a bond. So I'm the boss telling you to get your ass up from the floor and get to work. Understand?"
That hurt way worse than the noogie. I had been acting like a pet. "Yes, ma'am." I looked down at my paws. "What am I supposed to do?"
"For now, all we need you to do is use your sight so I can undo Archibald's wards. That and try not to make Scrags any more upset than he is. They had a close bond, and he's not the rational sort on a good day. Come on." She popped her door open and started walking towards the front door. I stared after her for a moment, and then realized that I should follow and bounded out of the car to catch up.
The haze still made me weave along behind O'Meara, but she didn't say anything when I leaned against her once we made it to the stoop. The construction of the house pulsed with that golden light, but the individual elements were fuzzy and indistinct. In any case, I didn't look directly at them for fear of rousing the entity within the house.
O'Meara reached for the cheap brass knocker and slammed it home before I could stop her. I winced in sympathy as the bang shook the doorframe. "Inquisition!" She almost sung the word, as if the word invoked Grandma's cookies and not burning women at the stake.
"It’s not like that,"
O'Meara scolded me through the link as I replayed my own reaction to Sabrina's knocker. In a moment the door swung wide open, revealing the Archimagus's living room. A single overstuffed Lazy Boy chair in the center, the walls consumed by bookcases that stretched from the floor to the high ceiling. On top of the easy chair, two small amber eyes radiated hostility set within a tiny skull.
"Gud out, O'Meara. There is nuthing for you here!" Scrags’s outsized voice boomed all the way to the doorway.
"Why don't you let me be the judge of that, Scrags." O'Meara brushed aside the familiar's anger and stepped over the threshold, her back far straighter than it had been during her encounter with Sabrina. She stepped sideways to admit me, and I felt the intensity of his eyes fall to me like a physical force I had to push against to walk into the house.
The anger flickered to bewilderment. "You didn't!" Scrags pulled himself out of his bodily curl to look between O'Meara and myself as I stood up as straight as I could. "You allowed her to bond you? Do you have a death wish, lad?"
"Well, if you want to be technical, I think I bound her actually. The chain sorted the details of the arrangement."
Scrags swore a livid curse, probably at Archibald and not us. "And you’re both still in a binding haze?" He turned to O'Meara. "You should know better!"
"Bah. We don't have time to sit around and wait out the haze. Four days until the estate opens and we’ve got to figure out whom to disqualify."
The little cat shook with fury. "The haze serves a purpose! It builds the trust. It is there to break down the barriers between the magus and familiar! If this is what you do as a matter of course, it is no wonder three of your familiars left you."
O'Meara chuckled drunkenly. "And what good comes of letting Thomas relive my history? He's traumatized enough already."
"It’s only a temporary thing anyway, no big deal," I chimed in.
Both O'Meara and Scrags went still. Scrags's head swiveled to mine.
"Temporary? You put a time limit on your bond?"
My ears went back defensively. "Well, I'm not ready to commit to anything until I know more about this crazy world you all live in. I don't like this TAU deal. I figure I'll freelance for a bit first."
He looked at O'Meara. "And you let him do this? I would think you've broken enough bonds for a lifetime, O'Meara."
"There is no justice for anyone if I can't do my job, Scrags. He offered terms, I took them."
"You’re going to subject a cub to the breaking of a bond before he's even trained. I've always thought you were incompetent, O'Meara. I didna think you cruel."
I looked up at O'Meara, feeling the sorrow roll down the link despite her effort to hold it back. Images of tear-stained pillows, a cycling of days and nights, and the taste of bile coming with it. She patted my head and I dodged it, pulling away a little. "Don't worry, kid, you'll survive. I always do, and you’re at least half as stubborn as I." She held out her hand between us. "You did bind me. That was your intention when you came looking for me, right?"
I sighed, pushed my head into her hand and was rewarded with a good scratching. I had made my bed—nothing to do now but lie in it. It just so happened I'd made it on a roller coaster car. I looked at Scrags. "I chose this. I won't say I know what I’m doing, but this keeps my options open."
"You got no clue at all. That's perfectly clear. And if this is what Archibald set up, then I'll kill him again."
"So he'd been future scrying," O’Meara observed.
Scrags looked at her, annoyed. "Yeah, he's always done it a little, here and there when things looked bleak."
"So he saw the big one?"
Scrags let out a tiny growl of frustration and kneaded the chair beneath him. "Maybe—I don't remember anything from the last month. He could have planned it that way."
"Who wanted him dead?" I asked.
Scrags's eyes shifted to me and back to O'Meara as she kept talking. "Have you looked into his correspondences?" A short message telling me to let her do the talking slipped through the link. My back bristled, but I held my tongue as the image of a tiny me perched at a desk while O'Meara lectured from a chalkboard followed through the link.
Meanwhile Scrags seemed to deflate. "No. And won't."
"Then I will."
"You will give up your right for the estate, then?"
"Of course. I have no need of the scraps that would be left."
Scrags grunted. "Well, then, you've got yourself a new partner. You don't need me." He gestured with his head to the door to the kitchen. Perpendicular to it, a hallway ran down into the house. "Fourth door on the left is the office. If you manage to get through the ward, the rest will be mostly open."
O'Meara nodded curtly at Scrags, mumbled a thanks and then strode for the hallway. I followed after, feeling like an intern shadowing a CEO.
Looking down the hallway was like suddenly looking down a mountain you had not realized you had been on. The hallway stretched far beyond the physical extent of the house. It had the same yellow paint with the scuffed white trim as the rest of the interior but extended far into the distance, doors and hallways branching off at random intervals.
Beside me O'Meara sucked in her breath.
"That's never good. All that folded space. Looks like he made it randomly too."
"How's that bad?"
I responded, but she had already begun to show me. In my mind's eye, cracks spread from the chips of paint, the hallway first buckling and twisting as if in pain. Then whole sections of the wall began to peel up, exposing patches of absolute nothing under the walls. Whole hallways broke off. A rushing wind swept through the structure, howling like wild animals. The hallway shuttered, and the walls blackened to dark stone. The lights sprouted into candles that struggled against the wind. Shadowy figures clung on barred windows, screaming for help as the nothingness grew into them. Something tugged at my shoulder—no, my hand, but the tug was so hard that pain bloomed at the socket.
I turned and saw a man, eyes wide with fear set in a leathery-jowled face. "Come! We must go now!" He clutched something in his other hand, something ill gained.
"But—" My voice protested with a squeak.
"They were lost before we came here—now come along, O'Meara!" The foreign memory broke like glass.
The hallway before me blinked back to that aged suburban look, but I could still hear those screams in my head echoing down its length. I swallowed and pushed them away, concentrating on the real sounds. First my thundering heartbeat, then O'Meara's beside me. I found my voice first. "Talk about your PTSD, damn." Then I winced, wondering where my subtlety went off to.
"I should have closed the link—you didn't need to see that." O'Meara voice was numb as she placed a hand on my head, and I allowed her to steady herself.
"Damn right I didn't. Please tell me the place ain't gonna fall around our ears."
My own ears were folded against my head so tightly that they started to cramp.
That
was a novel sensation.
"It won’t happen yet, but if it was created as haphazardly as it looks, then it won't last long without maintenance. It will be just like what you saw in a few weeks. The estate sale will strip the house bare long before that, though. Come on. We'll find nothing standing about here."
O'Meara led the way down the hallway as I tried not to look at the peeling paint, afraid to glimpse the void beyond it.
I focused on O'Meara’s feet instead; she had small feet for a woman of her size, and she had changed her boots since she had been at Sabrina’s. They had the hint of a heel, black rubber soles that were clearly replacements. The stitching glowed a dull red, like hot iron. She walked with an intentional swagger, putting confidence up before her as a shield. Her thoughts were closed to me, but I could feel her still struggling with more memories of that day. Her thoughts smelled of moist sadness and sharp terror.
We came to the fourth door after walking far longer than I expected. It looked like every other door in a house like this, cheap wood with a dull brass knob. Yet in the veins of the wood I saw a faint glimmer of gold.
O’Meara thought-spoke first.
"Okay, Thomas, we need to do our first bit of magic together. This door is warded. I'm going to need your eyes. This could be a bit dissociating."
With that whatever barrier she had constructed between us fell away and the sensation of pure awareness swept over me like a warm ocean wave. We exhaled a shared breath, and I felt it pass through both our lips. I winced in pain as O'Meara fell to her knees, her legs too weak to support her against the sudden connection.
"Too fast, far too fast."
She clung to me for a moment, that blissful haze sweeping through us both as we shared the embrace from both sides. I could feel the jagged edges of memories that thrust through her mind, pricking mine with cold terror. I did my best to ignore them and focus on the warmth we shared. After a moment they melted away.
This time I spoke first after counting nine shared breaths.
"The ward?"
She slowly shifted her attention away from our embrace with the slowness of a tired child.
"Oh, right. Damn bonding haze. Look at the ward."
Pulling my head out from a comfortable space beneath her chin, I fixed my eyes on the door. Blinking to clear my head of the warm marshmallow that stuffed it, I caught sight of golden threads woven in and out of the wood's grain. Not needing any prompting, I pushed at the threads, and the wood faded, revealing a complex web. It reminded me of the inner working of a very expensive bomb. Various threads bound larger components of different colors and intensities, symbols that made my brain hurt to look at them. In the center of it all, a red globule pulsed like an angry heartbeat.
"Oh, thank the stars you're not a dog."
O'Meara's hand stroked down my back.
"Wards are so much harder when you have to do this by smell."
"How do you disarm it?"
"We don't. I never want to try to disarm a ward like this. See all those threads—we so much as brush one and we'd be subjected to the heat of molten rock for a few seconds,"
she thought-spoke, gesturing at the angry heart of the mechanism.
"Fortunately we have the key for it."
She held up a hand in front of the door, a few inches from a glyph at the center of the door.
"Now focus on my hand, and don't look away."
She pushed away from me, urging me to keep watching as our viewpoint split. I saw her hand curl into a fist from two different angles at once, making my stomach lurch. On her little finger was a ring that glowed with the same fire I had seen in O'Meara's eyes. She stretched out her pinkie finger and traced out eight complex three-dimensional glyphs in the air with an almost inhuman precision. Her concentration was total and complete as the glyphs spun and locked together like a puzzle. Except the puzzle looked wrong. The angles bent inward and outward at the same time. Through her eyes and mine I could see it push up into a direction that didn't exist. Nothing should be able to do that! It hurt to look at. I felt my mind rebel, a slick feeling of wrongness slithering through me.
"You’re doing fine, Thomas. Keep watching. We're almost done."