Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) by Daniel Potter

Author:Daniel Potter [Potter, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Modern Fantasy
Publisher: Fallen Kitten Productions
Published: 2015-07-11T19:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

We drove back to town. O'Meara made a beeline for our own podunk police station but turned into a small strip mall across the street at the last moment. After parking in back, she held out the coffee cup to me to take. I looked at it and then at the unmarked door we had just parked in front of, less than seven feet from the bumper.

"I've got a more comfortable rig inside, but in daylight you've got to have a muzzle extender. We are not on good terms with the Veil around here."

Had I still possessed eyebrows they would have been raised. "The Veil doesn't like you? How does a wall not like you?"

"Same way it knows when you put a coffee cup on your nose that you’re pretending to be a dog. It’s intelligent, and thanks to a bunch of out-of-towners that made it work really hard a few years ago, it’s been grouchy ever since." She cut off my retort by shoving the coffee cup between my teeth and jumping out of the car. She waited impatiently at the door for me.

I chuffed in annoyance and climbed out over the passenger-side door. And then I paused as a strange scent reached through the cup and hit me in the nose. It had a bit of a maple flavor, coupled with a bitter musk that seemed to dance on the roof of my mouth. Flehmming yielded no more information on the scent, but made it stronger. My brain tongued at it, a familiarity poking at me like a rock in my shoe. Regardless, I saw no source of the scent; nothing in the parking lot stirred besides O'Meara.

"Something wrong?"

"Strange scent around here."

O'Meara joined me in scanning the area with our eyes, but neither of us saw anything. "I'm an inquisitor. Lots of people come to me when they can't solve their own problems. Strange scents are bound to happen."

I nodded, and then turned and padded up to the door.

O'Meara hauled the door open to reveal an office manager's nightmare. Unconnected cubicles the color of my grandfather's decades-old easy chair were scattered about a large room randomly. They were the sort of cubes I hadn't seen since the mid-nineties, each panel consisting of a plastic frame over which a cheap knitted fabric was stretched. In the center of the room, a double-wide cubicle seemed to be floating in a sea of paper stacked around it. The papers were sorted into precarious piles due to the nonuniform sizes, as if somebody had run out of office paper and restocked from a fancy art store instead of Office Depot. Large sheets of thick patterned paper with detailed calligraphy were sandwiched between normal white office stock. A few scrolls lay scattered around like pieces of driftwood.

A woman's voice called across the paper sea. "Mistress O'Meara? That you?" The cadence of the words was slightly halting.

"Ixey!" O'Meara stared at the tide of papers surrounding the cube. "What the hell are you doing

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