Off Leash Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
I had never popped over to the old man's house to borrow a cup of sugar for a reason. The eight-foot stone wall topped with iron spikes that separated his lot from mine communicated his stance towards visitors perfectly well. The tips of the spikes shone in such a way that Dirty Harry quotes reeled into my mind. I recalled that cougars had been known to jump ten to twenty feet high. I should be able to clear it no problem, right? I hunched down and prepared myself to jump, but videos of cats falling on their faces kept materializing in my brain as I gathered myself, including a very unfortunate one that had resulted in a cat being skewered through the leg.
No need to sweat, or in my case, pant, however. My yard was well furnished with several overgrown trees. Large and straight pines with lots of small branches--nothing I would have rated as a good climbing tree back when tree climbing had been a favorite activity, but maybe good enough now. Hoping that my claws were good for something other than ripping my bed sheets to shreds while panicking, I drifted over the tree nearest to the stone wall. The trunk looked a bit thin, about five inches wide, but I didn't need to get up very high. After sinking my claws into the soft bark, I caught a whiff of an odd scent. It smelled like cut plastic. Looking closer at the tree, I found that a brown extension cord ran up the length of the trunk, nestled in the folds of the bark, and held in place by rusting staples. Peering upwards, I spied a ball of leaves in the upper branches.
Just how long had Rudy been watching me? And how the hell could somebody who couldn't weigh more than five pounds operate a staple gun? I muttered to myself about having a squirrel burger the next time I saw the bushy-tailed maniac as I climbed, which for all my mental bitching proved to be a trivial affair. That was until I actually looked over the fence and into the Archmagus's yard and nearly fell right off the tree purely from shock.
"It's bigger on the inside," voices from Doctor Who exclaimed in my head. They were right. Through a hazy purple tint stretched a garden that belonged in an English manor. Rows of well-trimmed hedges seemed to stretch for miles beyond the fence, forming circular spaces around opulent statues and fountains. I could see the old man's little house but it sat in the distance, nestled under two gnarled oak trees that grew together over it, sheltering it with their combined foliage.
My fur prickled as I jumped over the fence, and my ears needed to be popped by the time I landed. It had been a much longer drop than I had been expecting, and my paws stung a bit from the impact. Shaking them out, I looked around.
On this side the fence had become a wall, perhaps thirty feet up, with no helpful trees anywhere near it. The air smelled wonderful--full of the scents of grass and piney hedges. Yet there was an emptiness to it, like a steak missing salt. Maybe it was just the lack of exhaust? I wandered down a cobblestone path, trying to stick to the main route. I gave the statues that lined the walkway a wide berth. Each one depicted a recognizable, but younger, Archibald with a large staff ornamented with a gem the size of my paw. They had a variety of costumes, ranging from business suits to monks' robes. Most of the Archies were accompanied by a small cat, but some had other animals with them. They seemed likely candidates for the type of statues that come alive and try to kill you when you're not paying attention. Whenever I stepped close, I saw glints of color flicker over their stone eyes.
Fortunately the statues did not seem to have any interest in killing me, although I swear a few of them shifted slightly to get a better look. If they were any more than decoration, then apparently the Archmagus had added me to the guest list. Or perhaps they needed the Archmagus alive to function. I kept my eyes peeled for any rips in reality or a tentacled monstrosity skulking around, but the garden seemed determined to keep its sunny disposition in the face of my paranoia. As I continued to trot for what was surely several miles along the hedges, I did not see a single living creature--not a bird, not bug, just plants and statues. As I drew close to the central maze, the hedges themselves animated. The leaves rustled as if something unseen moved through the leaves.
I talked at them and said hello, but they steadfastly refused to engage me in conversation. The old "rustle once for yes, rustle twice for no" suggestion produced zero rustles. I did provoke a reaction when I attempted to jump over a hedge in the maze. The plants grew about five feet while I set up for my jump, the branches reaching up and curling around each other like frenzied tentacles. The bushes were so intent on blocking my air that they left their bottoms defoliated enough for me to scoot through. The hedges turned a bit surly after that, aggressively putting dead ends in my way and forcing me to jump over them. Had you watched me from the house, I'm sure I looked a bit like a jackrabbit in deep snow, punctuated by a few cries of surprise as I jumped over a few hedges and into a fountain. By the time I flopped onto the ground beyond the maze, my tongue had become a tripping hazard.
I did what came naturally. I took a nap.
* * *
It had not been my intention to take a nap, but the sun had been warm and my paws wet, and my muscles argued against further movement. A blink, a deep sigh, and the sun had moved most of the way across the sky and threatened to duck behind the house. Yawning and stretching, I moved towards the building, my ears catching scattered threads of conversation. I could hear a woman's and a man's voices coming from inside, but I couldn't make out the words. The distorted voices sounded like the adults from Charlie Brown cartoons but far angrier.
I paced the house, looking for an opening. Unlike the garden, it was the same house that I walked past every day before I lost my job: a one-story ranch, probably three bedrooms or so. There was a screened-in porch sporting plastic furniture from the seventies, all brown plastic and vinyl. The door had a large doggy flap in it, perhaps indicating that Archibald once had pets far larger than his cat. The windows were a no-go--the classic two-pane sliding windows were all solidly closed. Huge walls blocked me from going around. They completely encircled the garden up to the house. It would be easier jumping onto the roof and over than getting around them.
Two folks arguing in a dead man's home? Curiosity and a perchance for gossip drove me to rip through a screen window and try my luck with the doggy door. After all I had been invited, right? Carefully I batted the flap. It swung in and back with little resistance. The voices continued unabated.
On the other side I found myself in a kitchen, surrounded by a cage of glass tubing. It had clearly become a lab at some point in the distant past. The tubing spider-webbed around the entire room, stretching from a center table and reaching over to the counter. The tubes connected to a bewildering variety of beakers and flasks. They were all filled with things: not really a liquid but distinct dots of colors flowing through the alternately wavy or angular pipes. I could see a few sealed beakers on the table that the dots were boiling out of, but I couldn't see any flame on them. Most of the tubing was above my level, but some reached down to and even through the floor.
The voices were more distinct here, and I recognized one as O'Meara's, heatedly arguing with a man who sounded Scottish. "Listen, Scrags! Whatever you and the Archmagus were hiding in here I don't care about. I'm just here to find out who killed him. Let me do my job." O'Meara's voice bubbled with barely restrained anger.
"And as I've been saying, you can wait your turn with all them other vultures. You or anybody else are not taking anything from this house until the wards collapse," the male voice hissed.
"I don't have time or the artillery to get involved in the battleground this place will be next week. This is my right as an inquisitor!" O'Meara's voice began to scale upward.
This didn't sound like a conversation that I needed to get involved with. All I needed to do was figure out what the old man had meant by something in the cupboard for me. The kitchen lab certainly had plenty of cupboards; most of their handles had a faint golden hue to them similar to the runes on Sabrina's house. Were they simply subtle or losing power? How would I know if a ward would open for me? If I chose wrong, would I be aged into dust while some ancient knight made an obvious statement as to the quality of my judgment?
"Why dicht ya prove it, then? Summon the seal. Go right ahead. Oh, right, you've got no familiar so you're just an overgrown matchstick!" the man retorted.
Fortunately my choices were actually slim; the glassware spidering around the kitchen didn't allow for many of the cabinets to open. I slowly weaved my way around the tubing towards a cabinet in reach near the sink as the argument in the next room escalated.
"Well, if you hadn't forgotten what happened in the last month I could just talk to you! But since you're barely coherent as it is I have to get at Archibald's journal! Don't you want justice?" O'Meara snarled.
"I want you gone from my doorstep, Lassie! You've always been pokin' your nose in our business, waving your sword around. As if a pointed stick would have got you any respect. Don't matter who offed him. Ha! Justice? If there were justice the council would have been purged. There's no justice for a fallen magus; revenge and politics is all there ever was and all there ever will be."
A movement caught my eye. I turned and a chirp of surprise fled my throat before I could stop it. Two misshapen eyes stared at me from inside a beaker. They were composed of the same dots that swirled within the glass network, somehow congealed into two amber eyes, each filling a beaker, their pupils slit like a cat's, a surreal 3D pixel artwork.
The gaze settled on me like a weight, their expressionless stare somehow accusing. I watched them back for moment, waiting for the thing in the beaker to raise some sort of alarm. Nothing happened; the eyes just continued to stare back at me. Cautiously I turned back to study the cabinet. Tiny golden runes floated within the tarnished metal of its handle. Bringing my paw near it the light brightened, whether in warning or recognition I couldn't be sure. I could feel the eyes digging into my back, which I tried to ignore. In the front room I heard a door slam, O'Meara shouting vexations as she left.
Now or never. Carefully I extended my claws and hooked one on the underside of the worn kitchen cabinet, positioning myself to spring away in case it exploded. "My kingdom for an eleven-foot pole," I muttered under my breath and flicked open the cabinet.
It did not explode. Instead, the door swung open and cracked against a glass tube that prevented it from opening fully. The pipe started to hiss as a crack expanded along the length of the pipe. Holding my breath, I looked up into the cupboard to see a white index card hanging from the middle shelf. In shaky handwriting it read, "For Thomas Khatt," with an arrow pointing down. The shelf was too high for me to see inside, but there was a glint of metal just visible over the lip of the shelf.
"Who in the bloody hell is in there?" the Scottish voice shouted through the door, jarring me into action. I quickly pawed at the metal thing, hoping to pull it down onto the floor. Normally when you pull something off the shelf, inanimate objects have the common decency to respect gravity and fall. When a blur of sliver shot out of the cabinet, I reacted much like anyone else would have. I screamed, "Snaaaaaake!" and jumped back. Unfortunately when you're a cougar, jumping straight up isn't just a piddling white man jump. Instead I slammed myself into the ceiling through all the glasswork. That hurt, but not as much as hitting the floor afterwards, which knocked the wind out of me. Glass rained down around me, and those little dots of magic poured out into the air like neon confetti.
"What in the name?!" The door to the lab swung open as I tried to clear the stars from my vision--the ones that I was fairly certain were due to violence in my optic system, not the ones jetting out of the broken glassware, anyway. The world was blurry but cleared when I felt those odd third eyelids retract. Standing in the doorway to the kitchen was old Archie's tiny cat. His eyes were wide as he took in the destruction and then settled on me, narrowing into slits. His lips peeled back to show many more teeth than one would expect in a cat his size. "Who the fuck are you?" his voice boomed from his tiny body. My eyes searched for a burly Scottish ventriloquist but found none.
"Uh. Hi? I'm Thomas. Your next-door neighbor."
"Oh! And ah suppose you--" He stopped midsentence. "Damn, he actually did it. We actually did it. Bloody fucking goddamn hell! He did it and died! You fucking bastard, Archibald!" The growl that followed, high and tinny, was adorable. I couldn't fight the smile, and the little angry stomping of his tiny body made a laugh burst out from me. I saw him back at the coffee shop, splayed out on his belly, getting petted. Juxtaposing that cat and this was too much, and I just lost it. His eyes, which had grown distant, snapped back to me, flashing with anger. "And what do you find so goddamn funny about this?"
It just made me laugh harder.
Scrags charged up to me and flashed his many fangs. "You know what could be funny? Don't mess with me, lad! One bite and you'd be stone dead. That'd be real funny, wouldn't it?"
"Sorry," I gasped, "It's just--" I fought against a giggle fit and failed. "I never thought--"
I could see his fangs dripping a green ichor. "Never thought what?"
"I saw you and Archibald at the coffee shop at least once a week," I managed to wheeze out. "I just never imagined you'd be so . . . gruff. You always looked so at peace." The cat went dead still.
"You saw us? That can't, ugh . . . hell, you were human. On the other side of the Veil." The anger had gone away and the grief, the warble of being near tears, became plain. He shook himself and fixed me with a look. The spark of his previous anger reignited, but he looked tired. "Why are you here and"--he looked at the open cabinet and then back at me--"why are you not dead? That ward should have burned your eyes out of their sockets."
I winced at that imagery. "I was sort of invited?"
"What you bloody mean by that?"
"I was there when Archibald died. He was hit by a car."
"He was not killed by an automobile!"
"I--I dunno, it's all a little hazy. I think I changed the moment he got hit. He told me there was something for me in the cupboard."
"And you thought it was prudent to break in through the back?"
"Hey, I haven't had good luck with people since changing. I was sort of hoping it was something to change me back." As unlikely as that had been, my hopes always tend towards the unrealistic. I'm pretty used to them getting crushed. Speaking of what I had come here for, where had that shiny thing gone? I didn't see it after hitting the ceiling, probably because I had closed my eyes. I scanned the room, but among the spray of dots and shattered glass I saw no sign of its shine.
"Who have you met so far?"
"Uh, Sabrina and O'Meara."
Scrags laughed. "That's a load of rotten luck. Not that you could have had good luck in this town. Who claimed ya? Sabrina, right?"
"Uh, yeah. How did you--"
"Because you're not bonded to O'Meara. Otherwise she'd be here, rooting through all of Archibald's secrets. Now she gotta wait with all the other vultures."
"Would she bond me without my permission?"
The cat considered, leaning his small head first this way and that. "Maybe not, but she'd do anything to get it. She'd make any sort of promise, including ones she cannaught keep. She's desperate, lad, and you can never trust a woman who reeks of that." He stopped, peering at my neck. "So that's what you came for? That old thing?"
"What?" I started to ask, and then I felt it--something wrapped around my neck. I pawed at it, or tried to, but the best I could do was feel it with my wrist. A chain had looped itself around my neck three times. I pressed against it and felt the cool of the metal against my skin, but the chain itself seemed to have no weight of its own. "What the hell is it and how do I get it off?" I asked as I snared the chain with the claws of my back foot. A quick tug only led to a choking fit as the other two loops pulled taunt.
"Oh, it likes you. Great. Glad to have that damn thing out of the house."
"What the hell is it?"
"A fey chain."
I rolled my eyes. "That's not very helpful!"
"No, because it's not bloody useful to anyone. Fey chains got banned for a reason. They were used to bind familiars in ancient times before the modern binding method had been discovered. The bond they create is fragile and easy to disrupt; during the second age, familiar theft was rampant. The life bond is much more permanent and comparatively nigh impossible to break." Scrags's accent was fading a bit as he got technical.
"Then why did Archibald want me to have it?"
Scrags exploded with a sputter of green spittle. "I dun know! He's dead and it don't matter!"
His sudden rage rocked me back onto my haunches. Faint wisps of smoke rose from the floor where the spittle hissed. "Ah, sorry. I didn't mean--"
The rage settled back into glower. "You have no clue. Do ya?"
"Uh, no."
He took a deep breath. "Then listen to a word of advice. Never, ever, let your bond look beyond the present. No matter how desperate it looks. No matter how much they beg, wheedle and bribe you. You say no. Walk away and take away their sight. Now get your arse out of my house. I've got a civil war to wait for."
"But--" The little cat was only creating more and more questions.
"No. You want a lecture, go join the TAU. Go home and go away." His amber eyes stared up at me, hard and unblinking, projecting an almost physical force. There was a hunch to his body, a deep pain weighing him down. I had so many questions I wanted to ask him, but there were clearly no more answers here for the moment.
Not seeing any other choice, I slinked out through the living room, which had been converted into an impressive library. The front door opened itself to let me out. Too occupied by the fragments that Scrags had given me, I crossed to my own house, not giving two shakes if a neighbor spotted me or not.