Future Tense (3 page)

A breeze sent the mist wafting toward him. She’d maced the freak. While Telos’s eyes watered, the mageheld lurched to its feet, stilling digging at its face. Short of its own death, nothing on his earth was going to stop the mageheld from killing Lys.

Telos unloaded everything he had directly into the mageheld’s head. The psychic scream deafened him, then simply stopped. He was close enough to see Lys’s eyes get big as the mageheld collapsed at her feet. Killing it wasn’t enough. Not if he wanted to stay alive, which he did, and not if he wanted to make sure the mage couldn’t fuck the demon over worse than he already had.

To stay dead, a mageheld’s magic had to be made safe from humans with magic.

If Telos allowed the dead mageheld’s life force to drift sentient but unable to interact with the corporeal world, he risked Michael taking the magic for himself. For the demonkind, that was hell; to have the living part of your magic trapped like that. He didn’t have time, but he knelt at the dead mageheld’s side anyway and gave the life there a path home. He did the same for other one, too.

Michael hit the last step, slowed and then walked toward Lys, smiling. He glanced at his arms and muttered something under his breath. The blood flaked away.

His words carried power that made the skin on the back of Telos’s neck ripple.

Telos straightened and planted himself in front of Lys. Choice made. He didn’t trust her, but he trusted her ex even less. The guy wasn’t some street mage. He was Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 3

18

trained. Judging from the color of his eyes, an opaque and unnaturally bright blue, he’d recently taken copa, a drug that enhanced a mage’s magic. But there was a price. Copa was addictive for the magekind.

“You,” Michael said to him in that tone of aristocratic entitlement the magekind tended to have. Telos reacted to the magic the mage was holding; a shiver down his spine, the allure of all that power. “Move aside. This is not your affair.”

“Khūnbish! Start the car.”

“I don’t know what she’s told you, but she is too dangerous to be on her own.

Uncontrolled.”

Without taking his eyes off the mage, Telos pointed his fob toward his car and pressed the button. The motor came to life. He tossed the keys to Lys, and she caught them while she was turning for the Beemer.

The mage was muttering to himself again, and Telos got a chill down his back that quickly turned to searing pain. His heart stuttered as a foul magic spread through his body; the beginning of a spell intended to enslave him.

A demon warlord who called himself Nikodemus had managed to create a fragile peace between the local magekind and demonkind. As a result, the demonkind living in the warlord’s territory were forbidden from harming the magekind. The magekind weren’t supposed to take new magehelds, but Michael was about to break the peace because in the next five minutes, Telos was going to end up a shaved-headed slave.

His chest burned with the initial effects of Michael’s binding spell. If Lys and Michael were working together, he was fucked. He didn’t have much longer before he had to stop the attack by whatever means necessary or get the hell out. If it wasn’t already too late.

“Khūnbish!”

Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 3

19

Lys popped up over the driver’s side of his car and tossed something at him; the cannister she’d used on the second mageheld. Michael came closer, still muttering. The mage stretched out an arm, intending to touch him. If he did, that would be the end for him. Michael would finish what he was doing and Telos would be worse than dead.

The tearing inside him stopped his heart.

Pepper spay in hand, he lurched out of Michael’s immediate reach, but he was already dying and about to be reborn as a slave. The mage’s will slid over him like stagnant. With his entire body being ripped apart and reshaped, he got the device oriented and depressed the button.

Michael went down sputtering. The pain stopped, and Telos’s heart slammed in is chest. Once. Again. His legs turned to water, but he managed to stay upright. His heart beat returned.

Behind him, a motor revved, and his car shot past him, forward and over the verge. Lys jammed on the brakes in time to pull even with him. The passenger-side door flew open. She was still straightening from her stretch along the seat when he threw himself inside. He was woozy, physically and mentally, but he grabbed the door and slammed it shut.

She hit the gas and they roared down the street at fifty miles an hour.

“What the hell?” she said. She threw one hand in the air.

“Both hands, God damn it!” He kept his magic on tap because he didn’t know what was going on or whether he was safe yet.

Her palm slapped on the leather-covered steering wheel. Her magic, completely unregulated and cycling up and down, wreaked havoc on his psychic state.

The car fishtailed when she took the corner at the first intersection. She made the next turn at near reasonable speed, rubbing one arm. “What the hell was Michael doing?” She shuddered. Her breath wheezed, and her eyes were wide open and staring.

Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 3

20

Lys in her corporate get-up was a beautiful, elegant icy cold bitch, but right now she looked like an avenging goddess. “I felt that. What the hell was that?”

The loss of her usual cool had the ironic effect of settling him down. She was wide open to him, psychically speaking, and that turned out to be a help. He straightened on the seat. “Thanks.”

“God, Khūnbish, I am so sorry.” Her voice was low and full of emotion. “I should never have brought you. Never.”

He dropped the pepper spray into her purse. Rubbing his chest didn’t relieve the ache in his chest from Michael’s attempt to take him, but he did it anyway. Ugly bit of magic that was.

“I hope his eyeballs are melting in his head,” Lys said. She didn’t sound like the woman he knew. He hadn’t really wanted to do her before when she was offering, but he did now. The sheer heat of her psychic and emotional state was a turn on for someone like him.

“Get us out of here without getting pulled over, Counselor.”

Mentally, she closed up. Shut just about everything down as she eased up on the gas. The ice queen was back. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. There weren’t many of the magekind who could completely disguise what they were. Not from him. Up until today, he’d have bet money she was pure vanilla. A human without an atom of magic.

”Where are we going?” she asked.

“Anywhere for now.” He kept an eye out for cops. Or a tail. Michael was going to send magehelds after them, no question about that. And not necessarily just for him.

He had the feeling Michael’s attempt to enslave him was one of opportunity. Oh, Michael would have finished it, but that hadn’t been his primary goal. A mage like Michael wasn’t going to risk having Nikodemus on his ass for one more mageheld.

Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 3

21

Even him. The mage wanted Lys. Dead? Maybe. Punished for have the nerve to leave him? Damn straight. “Your accident the other day,” he said. “Whoever hit you was probably one of Michael’s magehelds.”

“Mageheld?” She sent him a confused look. “What’s that?”

“You’re a smart chick.” He stroked his chest. Was she that clueless? “Work it out.”

She thought about it. “Some kind of servant to a mage? But unwilling.”

“Try slave.”

“I have my issues with what Michael does, Khūnbish, but a slave?” She shook her head. “He wouldn’t do that to another person.”

“He would if he didn’t think of them as people.” She was still doing forty-five in a thirty-five. “Pull over. You’re going to get us killed. Let me drive.”

She bowed her head and over corrected after the car drifted because she’d taken her eye off the road. “I’d be grateful if you did.”

They made the switch at the first gas station they came to. He didn’t make any secret about his interest in the way her shirt hiked up her legs when she sat in the passenger seat again. She tugged on her hem. Oh, well. When he was about to pull onto the street, she said, “Those men at Michael’s?”

“They weren’t men.”

“Demons. They were demons, is that right?”

“Magehelds.”

Her phone rang, muffled since it was inside her purse. She grabbed her Blackberry and pushed the talk button. “Michael.” Her voice dropped low and soft on the last syllable. Was that regret he heard? He hoped she wasn’t one of those women who kept forgiving the assholes in their lives. She listened for a while. “Not going to happen.”

Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 3

22

Her shoulders climbed toward her ears, and he got flashes of her mental state; unsettled, determined, on the edge of a psychic crash.

Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 4

23

CHAPTER 4

Telos reached over and took the phone away from her. He considered crushing it to bits of plastic, silicon and metal.

She snatched it back. He couldn’t help but catch the ragged emotions leaking from her. He was getting turned on again, too. Nothing he couldn’t control, though. Lys pressed against the back of the seat and went completely still. After a silence, she dropped the phone into her purse.

“He’s not kidding about killing you,” he said.

“I know.” Her phone rang again. She picked it up and stared hard at the display.

“Don’t engage,” he said.

“You know what?” she said over the ringtone.

“What?”

“You are absolutely right.” Phone in her hand, she pushed the button to roll down her window. Wind whipped through the car. More of her hair came loose from the roll of hair at the back of her head. She stuck her arm out the window and spread her fingers wide. He heard plastic shatter. Lys rolled up the window and said, “I think we can call that refusing to engage.” Her smile was a terrifying thing to see. “Don’t you?”

He looked over at her and then out the side-window. “I think so.”

Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 4

24

She looked out the window, too. “I probably shouldn’t have done that. I have a year left on my contract.”

“You can get a new phone.”

She slumped down on her seat, unaware, or uncaring, of the way her skirt stayed where it was. He didn’t feel guilty for looking. She had great legs. “I’d rather have a puppy.”

Telos laughed. “A new phone would be less work and less expensive.”

“True.” Lys tapped her finger on the top rim of the door. “I can expense a new phone.”

They didn’t say anything more for the twenty minutes it took to reach his house at the far edge of Presidio Heights. He pulled into his garage and shut off the engine.

“Where are we?”

“Home.”

She ran her fingers through her windblown hair. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Probably not.” What he ought to do is take her home— or wherever it was she was staying. Someplace obvious probably, and then Michael or one of his other magehelds would find her and whatever happened to her would be his fault. “We should talk.”

“Why?”

He gave her a look. “Why the hell do you think? Let’s start with your boyfriend’s a fucking mage, and you took me to your house without telling me that.”

Her eyes got big and wide. “I didn’t know you’re like him.”

Telos pulled his keys from the ignition. “I’m not like him, Lys.”

“What does that mean?”

He growled, and the sound was just this side of human. “It means we need to Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 4

25

talk.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“You first.”

In his living room, she dropped her purse on the floor and slumped on his couch, legs sprawled out. She wasn’t wearing panty hose. Jesus. The ice queen was in his house, and he was thinking dirty thoughts about her.

She looked around. “I didn’t realize hacking paid quite so well.”

“You know what I charge per hour.”

She stretched her arms over her head, arching her back. Her clothes were expensive. Tailored. Rumpled now. He didn’t like her, but he wasn’t blind. She was a good looking woman. Way too uptight for him. At the moment, psychically speaking, he got nothing from her. Nothing. She was as closed off and vanilla. “You’re worth every penny, honey.”

“The big money is in spam. All you need is an open relay on a misconfigured mail server and you can send out millions of pitches to enlarge your dick.”

She pulled the clip from her hair and shook her head before finger combing the honey-blonde mass; there was a lot more than he would have guessed, and having it down completely changed her looks. Jesus F. He was used to her being Ms. Corporate Untouchable, and right now, she just looked fuckable. She quirked her eyebrows at him while she got her hair slicked back. Did she know how she looked with her hair down like that? “You’re a spammer?”

He laughed. “No, but I do okay.”

Lys returned her hair to its clip and flopped back on the couch. Her skirt hitched up to mid-thigh. She held a hand over her eyes. He’d never seen her anything but perfectly put together, and now? He did just fine with women, thank you, but he hadn’t ever had one like her in his house. Some sort of ice queen magekind. He couldn’t get the Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 4

26

image of her with her hair down out of head. She fished a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and put them on. “Do you have any aspirin?”

“Sorry, no.” He shook his head. “Headache?”

“The light hurts my eyes.” Now she looked like a movie star, all frosty-cold beauty. “It’ll settle down in a bit.”

Telos walked over to the wall switch and flipped the main lights off. Like she was a date, and he was looking to get romantic with her. He closed the blinds, too.

“Thanks.”

Back at the couch, he took his time studying her. She stayed in her partial sprawl, eyes still covered by a hand. Her pale blue-gray skirt wasn’t doing its job of covering her legs. Her snow white blouse clung to curves. The top two buttons were unfastened, and he could see the top curve of her breasts. She had pearls in her ears and ash-gray pumps that were not practical for anything but looking hot. She had toned calves, high arches and ankles that looked like they should have broken while she was running from her murdering ex and his magehelds.