Free Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) by Daniel Potter

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