Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) (8 page)

I peered into my bedroom window. My laptop's screen glowed in the otherwise darkened room. A bag of Doritos lay open on my desk, several partially nibbled chips scattered across the formerly pristine surface of my desk. A righteous growl rolled through my body and I let it. The image of someone waltzing into my territory just helping themselves to
my
stuff struck a deep cord of revulsion. The sense of violation grew with every second.

Slipping in through the bathroom window was a bit of a contortion act, but I managed to fall into the tub without knocking over any of the empty shampoo bottles that I had collected on the rim of the tub. A smell invaded my nose, a scent out of place in the landscape of scents that I had left. My stomach growled, the steak I had this morning forgotten. The scent, whoever it was, tickled my taste buds. I listened, my ears roaming for a sound. A rustle of cellophane. Kitchen—it came from the kitchen.

Carefully, moving one paw at a time, I crept out into the bedroom and peeked down the short hallway. The sounds of a drawer rolling open greeted me, followed by the clatter of silverware being rooted through. The coast clear, I padded down the hallway and hunched low before the doorway, sliding on my belly the last few inches. Ever so slowly I eased my head around the corner. A bushy grey tail waved from the drawer where I kept the miscellaneous kitchen stuff.

"Ah, come on, doesn't anybody smoke anymore?" A muffled voice came from the drawer. I licked my chops as I gathered my body for a pounce. The chubby squirrel was gonna pay. Setting up my legs, I wobbled like a sprinter to secure my grip. As I did so the floor gave the tiniest of creaks. Rudy's head popped up from the drawer. I leapt.

Rudy watched as I crashed headlong into the cabinets over his head and the cheap wood splintered under my paws as I rebounded, my back legs slamming against the wall. My body acted without permission as my legs launched me back into the center of the room. The bruises I sustained back in Archie's house screamed as I skidded across the kitchen island and tumbled onto the floor in a heap.

Rudy's high-pitched titter filled my ears as I lay there for a moment before my injured pride picked me up from the floor, nothing but murder on my mind. Rudy had fallen over the front of the drawer, his small body convulsing with laughter. I hissed as I pushed myself back to my feet. He looked up at me, grinning with his four incisors. "That was awesome, Thomas! The look on your face and then—
blam
! You cats are never as cool as you think you are."

My only reply to that was a low growl. There was part of me that knew I wasn't thinking straight, knew what I was doing was wrong. The rest of me, the frustrated parts, the despairing parts, the utterly helpless parts, the hungry parts all wanted this squirrel, who was too stupid to notice that all the kitchen utensils were sorted by function and the drawer that had the lighter and all the other grilling supplies was right next to him. All those parts, they wanted him dead and in my belly. Everything about this morning was this squirrel's fault. Now there were talking weasels and angry little Scottish cats who wanted to box me off and erase my life. And if this squirrel had just given me a few hours to try to wrap my head around being a cat and figuring stuff out, then maybe I could have dealt with all of this. This was all Rudy's fault.

"Thomas?" Rudy asked, his eyes growing wide. "Ah, nuts."

I lunged at him and the squirrel turned into a fuzzy streak of lightning in my vision before my paws hit the drawer, catching only a few hairs instead of bisecting his midsection. Whirling, I launched myself back towards the hallway, trying to cut off his escape. The squirrel zigged and then zagged out of the way of my clumsy paws, which connected with only the barest fluff of his tail. He bolted down the hall, back towards the bedroom, and I scrabbled after him. Pain bit my addled brain as a claw snapped off in the hardwood floor.

Rudy was a good nine feet ahead of me by the time friction and I interacted, and he remained ahead of me as we charged into the bedroom. I lost sight of him as he dashed around the edge of doorway. I breached the door, my heart thundering in my chest. I saw no trace of movement in the room, so I looked for him with my ears, panning them about the room until—wait, yes, there. Under the bed, there was a tiny scratch followed by a fizz. Peeking under the bed, I found myself staring at the business end of a lit bottle rocket perched on the slope of one of my shoes. "What the—" I managed before the rocket caught and shot out towards me with a high-pitched shriek. A pain bloomed in my shoulder an instant before an ungodly loud bang shattered my ears. Pure panic shot down my spine, as a voice in my head screamed "Danger!" and shoved me aside. In an eyeblink I had vaulted back through the doorway and dived behind the couch. My entire body shook as I crouched there, my claws dug into the rug, nose filled the scent of gunpowder and the slick of my own terror.

Slowly I felt myself settle back into my own body, as if it had shoved me out and had now decided to let me back in.

"Hey, kitty!" I looked up to find Rudy perched on top of my couch, wielding an iPhone. Its lens pointed directly at me. "One more for the scrapbook!"

"W-whu?" My mouth refused to work right. I swallowed, and my tongue felt odd.

"Are you done thinking with your brain?"

I got my tongue untangled. "What are?"

"Do you still want to kill me? ‘Cuz if you do, I have more bottle rockets!" He moved the iPhone so I could see the harness he wore. I saw another bottle rocket, a set of fire crackers, assorted larger cylinders and a small red Zippo mounted over his heart. It was held to his grey fuzz by shiny black nylon. He looked like a pint-sized suicide bomber.

I gave him a sour look. "Kinda." He still looked rather plump and tasty.

He opened his mouth and withdrew a Dorito fragment from a cheek pouch. "I can live with that. Lots of my best customers kinda want to kill me."

"What are you doing in my house, Rudy?"

"I can explain! But! Before I do, you might want to pull the sheets off your bed. They're kinda smoldering."

"What!" Grumbling, I got up and hurried towards the bedroom. "You invade my home, mess up my desk and then set my bed on fire." Smoke was indeed rising from my bed, but there were no flames. Why hadn't the smoke alarms gone off? I looked up and found the bedroom smoke alarm hanging from the wires, the battery panel open. I shot Rudy a questioning look before starting to pull the bed sheet off the bed with my teeth.

"Hey, the bed was totally self-defense. The rest is all standard procedure. And if you think those are annoying to a human when they go off, you’re in for a world of pain with cougar ears."

Standard procedure? I would have asked what that meant, but I had a mouth full of smoldering bedsheets. It hit me a moment later anyway. Dropping the sheet, I whirled towards Rudy, a sawing growl erupting from my chest.

Rudy's tail went stiff and puffy. His paws whipped out a bottle rocket faster than I could see. "Hey!
Think
with your mind! Not your brain!"

"You were going to burn down
my
house!" I snarled.

"Only once you had signed up with the TAU! Look, just think about how pretty all that flame will be!" Rudy's gaze drifted off into space.

"I don't live alone!"

"So pretty!"

"Ruudy," I growled, raising a paw to strike the little pyro.

He instantly held up his paws in surrender. "Hey! Hey! No brain! Don't use the brain!"

"What the hell are you babbling about?"

"He is attempting to describe the fact that your human mind is far more intelligent than a feline brain," said an owl sporting a bowtie perched on top of my TV. "As usual he's doing a rather poor job of it."

I blinked and then stared. How the hell had he gotten in and how long had he been sitting there? Rudy slapped both paws into his face and shook his head. "Oh, for all the cashews in the world!" His tail suddenly bowed to gravity, hanging down behind his perch on the back of the couch. He gestured at the Owl "Thomas, meet Oric. Oric, meet a titanic pain in the ass puma who is hungry, grumpy and probably wants to eat us both at the moment."

"Hey!" I protested.

"Tell me it ain't true."

"Well . . ." Rudy did look like a snack from the right angle, and while Oric really wasn't much bigger, the thought of picking feathers out of my teeth didn't sound that appetizing at the moment.

Rudy crossed his arms. "That's the problem with you preds—you stop paying attention while you’re hungry and it’s
chomp
! Worst thing that happens to me if I stop paying attention is I wake up with my mouth full of nuts and my paws all muddy." He shot an accusing look at both Oric and me, the angles only made possible by his wide-set eyes.

"One must always be aware of one’s instincts," the owl agreed. "Now, Thomas, I'd didn't expect to find you here and not at Sabrina's, but this will work out just as well."

Rudy's face lit up at the mention of Sabrina. "Oh! I got a message for you. She's a bit cheesed off at you. That's kinda standard if you’re breathing, but yeah, she and Cornealius are working on something at the moment. So you can either wait here for her to finish or come back to her place well after dark."

"Or?" I asked.

Rudy made a palms-up gesture. "She'll probably hunt you down, zap you unconscious and stick you in a cage until she hands you over to Oric here."

My ears went flat as I looked to the owl. "You're one of the TAU guys, aren't you."

"Thomas, Oric is
the
TAU guy. He started it like a millennia ago."

"One and a half centuries is hardly a thousand years, Rudy." The owl puffed up slightly. He didn't look that old, unless this particular species of owl wasn't usually pure white. "Anyway." He turned his attention to me and smiled, even though he didn't have lips to smile with—a part of the talking spell, I supposed. "You and I have a bit of business to discuss. An expedited alternative to cages and shocking."

I hunkered down, digging my claws into the floor. A tiny voice in my head shrieked about my rental deposit. "I'm not joining the TAU."

"Oh, kitten, we actually get that a lot from ex-humans." A new, sultry voice came from the prettiest cat I'd ever seen as she waltzed in from the bedroom. Her fur, pure white fur framed and ice blue eyes that froze my gaze onto hers.

"
W
-who, uh, are you?" My tongue felt loose, as if the speech spell was slipping off as the white cat strutted closer.

"I'm Cyndi," she purred, pressing herself against my forelegs, sending my entire body prickling with heat. "I'm TAU's regional representative. The boots on the ground, so to speak. How do you do?" she asked, encircling my paw with her long, very elegant, very attractive body, with a soft tail that just brushed the underside of my chin. I felt like a thirteen-year-old who suddenly found himself locked in a closet with a naked supermodel.

Rudy’s chattering laughter broke the spell. My eyes strayed up from Cyndi to find the squirrel on his back, convulsing with laughter. "You should see your face!" He sobered for a brief moment to do an impression of me, hanging his tongue out the side of his mouth while widening his eyes so far that I could see the whites of his black beady eyes. "Oh, Cyndi!" He clasped his paws together and sighed before collapsing back into his laughing fit.

My ears started to burn as my brain replayed the last few moments. Cyndi made a mew of protest as I jerked my forelegs away from her and scooted backwards down the hallway until both her and Oric were in my field of vision. Cyndi, still pretty, looked put out and made a show of grooming her paw. "Sorry," I said, not entirely sure of what I was apologizing for, as I mentally tried to stuff many thoughts I had about her back into mental boxes that I should not possess. I was human, temporarily in the body of a cougar. Even so, a house cat should be on the menu, not someone you imagine eating spaghetti with like
Lady and the Tramp
. I tore my gaze off Cyndi and fixed my eyes on Oric. "What business?"

"Well, it’s more of a question really," the owl said as if he was reading from a long memorized script. He craned his neck towards me and tilted his head a disconcerting ninety degrees. "And the question we need to answer is: Who are you?"