“I give you my word.”
“Good.” The bargain struck, I dropped back into my chair. “What’s on the agenda for tonight?”
After clearing the dishes, he paid a visit to a nearby bookshelf and returned with a mottled tome he placed in front of me. “Open your text to page sixty-five.”
The old leather creaked as I turned the pages. Several were stuck together with the cement that was parakeet poop. The chapter in question was titled Trust Exercises: Testing the Bond Between Practitioner and Familiar. The first subsection read Play Dates: Working in Pairs.
“Oh no.” I grimaced. “Can we not and say we did?”
“Keet is your familiar,” Linus scolded me. “You must stop viewing him as a pet.”
“Your owl tried to eat him,” I shrilled. “How can he do his job if he’s terrified for his life?”
“He’s already dead,” Linus stated flatly.
“There’s dead,” I told him, “and then there’s digested-in-stomach-acid dead.”
Linus had, of course, chosen a great horned owl as his familiar. The symbol of Hecate herself. But Keet, a lowly parakeet, was terrified of him. He believed to the depths of his undead soul that the second Linus turned his head, yellow-eyed death would swoop down and gobble him up before I could intervene.
The poor little guy didn’t sleep for a week after our first attempt at socializing our familiars.
The fact Keet was undead and didn’t require sleep was totally beside the point.
“Familiars are like batteries for necromancers,” he explained for the umpteenth time. “They boost our power, but they’re drained in the exchange. They must be recharged, or they will die.” He squinted at the cage. “Keet is a psychopomp. He’s already dead. The only limit on his capacity to act as a conduit is the breadth of your power, when we haven’t begun to understand your limits. That makes him uniquely suited to channeling your energy, but first you both must be trained on how to siphon.”
“Fine.” I strummed the bars of his cage like harp strings, finding the latch blindly and palming his quivering banana-yellow body. His round, red eyes pleaded for mercy. “But I make no promises.”
A shrill whistle from Linus brought Julius sweeping into the room, and yep, Keet pooped his bird britches, which is to say my hand. Glaring at Julius, I wiped my palm clean on the towel Linus had wisely left on the table. That bird was all beak, talons, and bad attitude, in my humble opinion. The way he followed my every move through wide, unblinking eyes gave me the creeps. I really wished Linus would pack him up and courier him back to the Lawson family aviary.
In preparation for Julius’s arrival, Linus had assigned a tome as thick as my wrist on cultivating a bond with your familiar. Parakeets rated one piddly footnote on page four hundred and twenty-three, but great horned owls? Four chapters. Four. Whole. Chapters. One even insinuated their golden eyes were windows into the goddess’s soul.
I really hoped not. Mostly when I stared down Julius, I saw a predator in want of prey staring back.
Three
Lessons ended that night with me speckled in fear poop, missing clumps of hair, and down one T-shirt. Julius had shredded the back of this one when I leapt between him and Keet during a trust exercise that required we leave the room for five minutes while they acclimated to one another. A bloodcurdling tweet sent me racing back in as Keet zoomed around in search of a hidey-hole while Julius did the owl equivalent of licking his chops then swooped down on him.
Linus had patched up the long furrows raked down my back and checked to ensure no damage had been done to my tattoo before I left. The shirt had too much blood on it to keep. It would have to burn.
As much as I loathed the idea, I might actually have to go clothes shopping soon.
I failed to suppress a shudder as it rolled through my shoulders, and that split second was the reason I noticed a shadow peeling from the rest and striding in my direction wearing butt-kicking boots, combat fatigues, and a matching black shirt. Taz wore her hair in a thick braid down her back, and the only part of her not dedicated to stealth was the bright red bindi dotted between her brows. Her brown eyes twinkled merrily—they did that when she was about to draw blood—and I swallowed. Hard.
Based on the broad grin stretching her cheeks, I was guessing she’d heard.
“Pause.” I threw up a hand before her powerful legs got too close. “I need a second.”
“Pause?” She threw back her head and laughed at the moon. “You can’t mash a pause button when you’re under attack.”
A cage full of traumatized parakeet weighted my arm when I lifted it. “I need to put him somewhere safe.”
“Oh, well, in that case… Nope.” She cracked her knuckles. “You still have to go through me.”
“Hang in there, fella.” I scratched Keet’s earholes through the bars of his cage. “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”
“Get your butt in gear, Woolworth,” Taz barked. “Moving targets are harder to hit.”
Without me realizing it, she had managed to force me to circle around until she stood between me and Woolworth House. How did she do that? Now I really did have to go through her to reach the porch.
Fiddlesticks.
Faster than I could let out a squeak, Taz was on me, and I had no idea what to do except curl in a protective ball around Keet’s cage. Sure, he was undead, but this was the only body he had, and I didn’t want to have to pick the pieces of it from between her boot treads for a proper burial.
The first kick hit me in the ribs, and I swear I heard one crack. My breath left me in a rush, and black dots spotted my vision. I stumbled back, still keeping my body between her and my bird.
“I’m not here to teach you how to take a hit,” she snarled her disappointment. “I’m here to teach you how to avoid getting struck in the first place.”
“Sorry,” I wheezed, forcing myself to straighten. “I’ll do better.”
“What you’re failing to grasp is no conditions will ever be ideal when your life is endangered. In fact, I can guarantee that the circumstances will have been engineered to ensure the conditions are as far from ideal as you can get. They want you off your game. They want you running scared. Fear causes us to make mistakes.” She cut her eyes toward the cage. “Love does too. You have to assess the risks.”
“You’re saying because I’m alive and my bird is technically not, I should prioritize myself above his welfare.”
Stunned into a rare moment of stillness, she zeroed in on Keet. “Your bird is…what?”
Thanks to Maud, few people ever saw Keet, let alone knew what he was or how he had been made, but I had started thinking of Taz as a fixture in my life, and I had let my guard down around her. Big mistake.
“What I meant to say,” I amended in a rush, “is I’m a person, and he’s a bird, so my life is more valuable.”
“Yeah.” She frowned at the cage. “That’s right.”
Desperate to draw her attention back to me, I went on the offensive and swung my left leg out in a kick that hit her in the hip and sent her stumbling. I was about to sweep her legs from under her when she laughed—a gleeful sound that promised pain—and leapt back into the fray with a roundhouse kick that grazed my chin with a cool swipe of mud.
Momentarily stunned that I had dodged the first strike, I was too slow to miss the mule kick that struck me right in the gut.
Doubling over, I heaved and clutched the cage to my side. Bells rang in the distance, and my head swam. I had trouble hearing whatever insult she hurled at me over the thundering of my heart.
An inquisitive chirp cut through the wool binding my head, and for a fraction of a second, it was like standing in the eye of a tornado. Absolute peace, utter tranquility, and the firming of my resolve to stop being a victim.
Make no apologies for surviving.