Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) by Daniel Potter Page A

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 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 counters that ran along the walls. 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