Off Leash (Freelance Familiars Book 1) by Daniel Potter Read Free Book Online Page B

driveway, my escape route. I could try to leap over the white picket fence, but the white pickets had tips that glinted with gold in my vision. The window hadn't fried me, but I didn't want to take another risk.
    Waiting a moment changed nothing other than the frequency of the woman's flapping. Had her arms been wings she'd be in danger of getting hit by a jetliner. I glanced back up at the window I had jumped through, it now occurring to me that waiting until dark might have been prudent. Too late now. I charged over the grass. As I brushed past the woman, she let out a shrill scream that might have shattered glass. I did not stop to check and concentrated on bounding across the street. As I dashed over a neighbor's fence, my mind divorced from my body. The bounding motions of my legs triggered that same creepy sense of pure wrongness that I had first experienced waking up. I nearly screamed in terror as I leapt up onto the roof with barely an effort. Parts of my mind hollered at my body, "I can't move that fast! I can't jump that!" as I ran over the roof and launched over the yard, and crashed into a huge stand of holly in the next lot.
    Only then did I realize the woman had stopped screaming or at least was far enough away that the pounding of my own heart drowned her out. My tail twitched with the adrenaline flowing through me as images of trigger-happy police flooded my vision with shiny badges and jet-black shotguns. If Sabrina hadn't known of my escape the moment I jumped through the window, she knew it now. I had to keep moving. My place was about five miles away.
    I kept to the backyards and woodlots the best I could as I bushwhacked my way home. The neighborhood seemed asleep. Most of the houses were dark and empty, and the remainder echoed with the sounds of small children. I stayed away from those. In about two hours the streets would be roamed by school busses and feral children would fill the yards. Now it appeared those parents who were home were enjoying the stillness of the early afternoon. I imagined how much harder it would have been to slip through the neighborhood twenty or thirty years ago, before the dual-income lifestyle became a way of life. The town was a commuter burb of the city, and most of the folk worked. I could just hear the sounds of cars start rolling home as I slipped into my backyard from the woodlot behind the small bungalow that Angelica and I called home.
    My thoughts had been returning to Angelica the entire way home. I kept imagining what it would feel like to have her arms around my neck. I stared at the darkened windows of my home with disappointment. Angelica had not come home in the last few hours, nor would she for another four days.
    I admit, the human me may have been a bit of a doormat for Angelica. Yet I wanted to at least see her one last time before I got whisked away to the magical pound and put up for adoption, and try to say good-bye no matter how poorly that would go. I’d often thought of getting a cat recently, but any time I broached that subject she'd make cracks about the various ways the cat would accidentally wind up in her cook pot. I always laughed it off as a joke, but she had licked her lips awfully convincingly.
    The old man’s place was probably the last place I wanted to be if I wished to avoid Sabrina and other wizard kind for a few days. But if the old man had actually left something useful for me, then it might pay off. That said, maybe the old man just wanted to feed the big kitty a nice can of tuna with his dying breath.
    If so, I declared I would hate all wizards forever.

 

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