Future Tense (5 page)

“Please,” she said. Her voice wavered. “Keep yourself blocked like before.”

“Do you have to see them before you get anything?”

She nodded. Her focus remained outside. “Usually.”

“Which ones?” he asked. She looked at him with a soul that had lived with more pain than anyone should. He said, “Which two do I kill?”

“It never works. Trying to change things. Something always happens.”

“Which two?”

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Her eyes were desolate, her pupils hardly more than black dots in the center of her dark blue irids.

“Which ones, Lys?”

She pointed. “The one by the car there. And him. Across the street. Those two.”

Both the smaller ones. His still-forming plan had included going after the biggest ones first, so he wasn’t exactly comforted that she was getting a read on those two. Did that mean he was going to screw up and get taken? “How? Do you know how it happens?”

“Not an accident. And here. In this room. A lot of blood. They’re what you said.

Slaves. They hate Michael. It consumes them. But they do whatever he tells them to because they have to.” She put her hands on either side of her head. “Unbearable pain here.”

“Time frame?”

She thought about that. “I’m not sure. Soon, probably.”

“Shit.” He leaned his shoulders against the wall and tried to figure out the most likely scenario. He might have to let himself get taken just to give Carson time to get here. The windows at the back of the house started shaking.

He reached for her. After a hesitation, she leaned against him. She felt good.

“I need to know what happens to me, Lys.”

She shook her head.

“I can’t keep you safe if we don’t know what happens to me.” He held out his hand. “If I die, or worse, we need to have a plan to get you away from Michael.” Telos curled his fingers around hers and brought her to him. His skin rippled with goose bumps. “What about me, Lys?”

She closed her eyes, and he slid into her head and opened himself to her.

Dozens of other images were there, each one playing out in her head. He actually Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 5

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watched the two smaller magehelds die, one after the other. In the images he saw, he was the one who killed them. The scenes involving him were intense. The colors and emotions were saturated far beyond normal.

Blood. Searing heat. Bodies falling. A cascade of black hair, crimson droplets in an arc
through the air. Falling. His body falling. His heart and chest tearing magic folding in over
around taking.

“Lys” His heart turned over. She tried to get free of him, but he grabbed her face between his hands. “Lys!”

Slowly, her eyes opened. The desolation about killed him. She was a witch. A fucked up, stunted human witch, and it was like her magic had wanted so badly to stay with her that it had crawled up inside her head and folded itself into her brain. A witch, and right now he’d do anything for her. Anything.

“Listen to me.” He brought his mouth close to her, and she lifted her head, and well, he kissed her instead. Hungry, demanding, a full on kiss with his tongue in her mouth, and his hands touching her curves, and hell if she wasn’t kissing him back. He drew back, breathing hard. “I’d rather be dead than mageheld, you understand me? I won’t be anyone’s slave. It’s better if I die.”

Her eyes glittered with tears. “This is my fault.”

He widened his psychic link with her. Nothing major, hardly more than the low level link he’d have if he were with others of his kind, but enough to come in contact with her psychic state the way he had before. He drew away the pain that pulsed through her head, taking it into himself. He broke their physical contact but left the link going. “Better?”

She touched her head. “God, thank you.” Something shook the entire back of the house. Lys’s wide-open eyes met his. “What happens when they get in?”

“Depends on Michael’s orders.”

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“He wants me dead.” Her body tensed. “You, too.”

“No, he doesn’t want to kill me.”

She had herself under control. Completely shut down. Vanilla as anything. He still had his link with her. “I’m never wrong.”

“You’re seeing him take me mageheld, Lys. Not killing.”

“Then there isn’t much difference because it feels to me like you’re dead.”

He put one hand on the wall above her shoulder then took her hand, turning her wrist up so he was looking at the blue veins on the tender underside of her arm, thinking things he shouldn’t be. “This is going to work.”

“I could leave. Go back to Michael.”

He snorted. “Hell, no.” He closed his fingers a little more tightly around her wrist. Not hard, just enough for them both to notice. “The people I called, they’ll help you.”

Lys settled. He let go of her arm and put a hand on her hip. Not a grope, he just fit his hand to the curve of her body. When she didn’t avoid the contact, he pulled her closer. He put his other hand on her opposite hip. His heart thudded against his ribs while she slid a palm up the side of his arm. “What if you’re wrong?”

The answer turned out not to matter because his back door shattered.

Michael was here.

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CHAPTER 6

No way, Lys thought when wood shattered somewhere toward the back of the house. She was sick to her stomach with fear, but she ignored it. The explosion rattled the windows and shook the floor. No way was she letting Michael do anything to Telos.

She’d kill Michael herself if she had to. Behind her, Telos muttered something. She released her blocks. All of them.

Hot air rolled through the room, raising the hair on her arms. All along the walls and near the ceiling, medallions the size of her palm deformed until more than a few of the faces carved in them looked like they were screaming. The effect was beyond creepy. She clapped her hands over her ears, as if that would stop the shrieking in her head. She kept herself open. For now, she was safe. With Telos blocked off on his own, there wasn’t anyone close enough for her to get hooked into.

Telos strode away from her in a whisper of fabric moving and the sharp pull of his magic. Slowly, the noise receded. The windows stopped shaking. Lys braced herself, got ready for the stimuli and the rush of the future inside her head. When she looked up, the faces in the medallions were nearly normal.

In the back of the house, something screamed then cut off abruptly.

Telos stood near the door, hands clenched at his sides. Unless she was imagining Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 6

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things, and she didn’t think she was, his pupils glowed orange. “I don’t know how long that will hold,” he said in a tight voice. His mouth moved after the words registered in her head. He’d stopped blocking himself from her.

Reality slipped away.

“Do you have a gun?” she asked.

“If I did, it wouldn’t stop a mageheld long enough to matter. You have to sever the spine in order to stop them. Or rip out their hearts.” She blinked hard, but Telos didn’t stay human. Bigger, sharp teeth and talons. His body became a weapon.

The windows rattled again, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Then there was nothing but silence while she watched the faces in the medallions slowly reform to screaming horrors. The medallions around the door cracked. A few crumbled to ash.

Several more turned the color of charcoal.

Telos faced her. He didn’t have to tell her what he was thinking. She knew because the outcome was obvious. They were going to be facing several magehelds sometime in the next few minutes, and chances were they weren’t going to survive. The acrid scent of burnt air wafted through the room. He moved across the room, but the visuals blurred. She was seeing present and future at the same time. She stopped trying to follow any speech but what was in her head.

“Get behind me, Lys. Now.” She did, and he tossed her his cell phone. She caught it squarely because she already knew where he was going to throw it. “Hit redial and tell whoever answers they need to get here now.”

“Is there another way out?”

“Call, Lys.” He positioned himself next to the door. “Do it!”

With the phone in hand, she retreated to the sound of footsteps pounding down the hall. First the ones in her head, then the ones for real. They weren’t bothering to sneak up on them, that was for sure. Her fingers shook, and her palms were sweaty, but Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 6

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she got the phone flipped open without dropping it. Eight men. Demons. Slaves.

Lys pressed the redial button.

Eight men shot through the doorway and slid to a halt just inside. All of them had short hair and all of them focused on Telos. Because he was the threat. Not her.

Two of magehelds were smaller than the others. When those two died, there would be six left to kill. Or to kill them.

The inside of Lys’s head lit up, scouring, burning, overwhelming her ability to process everything coming at her. Image followed image so quickly she could hardly make sense of them. More medallions cracked and turned black. A cut opened up on the arm of the man who’d come in first. He growled and wiped his arm behind him, but he didn’t move from the doorway. Another one yelped and took a step back. Blood continued to drip down the first one’s arm. She tore her eyes away from the sight, unable to tell if she was seeing real wounds or future ones.

The phone in her hand rang at the other end of the call she’d initiated. She got it to her ear just in time but had to fight to concentrate on the call and not what was happening with Telos. The center of her chest burned. “Hello?”

Nothing. The phone rang, vibrating in her hand. It stopped.

A woman answered, her voice sharp, clipped. “Telos?”

“They’re here,” Lys said. She concentrated on speech, on not blocking herself.

“Inside the house. Something is going to happen to Telos. Soon. How close are you?”

“Outside.”

She whirled and looked out the window. Two bodies lay on the ground. A larger man knelt over the one by the mailbox. Four others stood not far away. But they weren’t on guard anymore. One was bent over. Another pressed a hand to his chest like he was having a hard time breathing. A smaller figure, a woman with her back to the window, had her hands on her hips.

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“Get in here. Now.” Lys’s voice slid up the register. The images in her head battered at her. She fought to maintain her concentration on the phone call, to not give in to the chaos in her mind.

A sea of red. Pain. Horror. Hatred. The two largest falling tumbling.

“Three minutes,” said the woman’s voice.

“Now.”

Outside, the small woman turned and glanced upward, to the window where Lys gripped the phone so hard her fingers hurt. From where Lys stood, the woman looked impossibly dainty. “That’s some serious magic you have,” the woman’s voice said in her ear. “You need to learn some control.”

“Too late. Too late. You will be too late to save him.” Without disconnecting the call, Lys put the phone on the window sill.

Telos had already engaged one of the smaller magehelds. While she ran, in her head, she heard a snap and the mageheld’s body went limp. He threw the body away from him and it hit the wall and slid down, boneless, and then it happened again. For real this time.

Lys ran full speed into the mageheld closest to her and kneed him in the crotch as hard as she could. The images in her head changed. From the corner of her eye, she saw Telos whirl, back in his human form. His hair spread out like a fan. A spatter of blood arced through the air. Not his blood; the mageheld who had engaged him. The second of the two smaller ones. Through that veil of crimson against black she saw Michael walk into the room with two more magehelds behind him. Again. The smell of blood filled the air.

She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but something hit her in the back.

Heat sizzled through her head. Thousands of images flashed before her eyes. Telos.

Michael. The magehelds. She went down hard, jamming her knees against the floor.

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Her stomach threatened to turn inside out.

Someone roars. Monster. Teeth tearing. Lust. Michael lifts a hand and says words that
will rip away the world.

On the ground, she fought to hold herself together, to keep herself from sliding into madness. Michael was the threat, she thought. Michael needed to be stopped. Her head filled with too many images to track, coming at her too fast. So much blood. She crawled forward, into the future. Screams rang in her ears, deafening her. Overhead, the air sparked.

“Lys!” That was Telos’s voice in her head, pounding in her ears. She lifted her head and saw Telos in her mind, then in life. “Get out.”

The muscles of her back seized up, but she forced herself to move through the pain. Michael was a million miles away, she’d never get to him in time. In her head, Telos was a living presence with an edge of the unhuman. She felt everything that was happening to him; the dark and oily spread of Michael’s magic and the white heat of his determination to stay alive and free.

Telos was losing that battle. She knew it in her heart. Tears burned in her eyes as she kept moving. She was like some mortally wounded animal intent on protecting her mate; all the higher functions of her brain had shut down.

A petite woman with black hair and green eyes appeared in the doorway. A man stood behind her, tall enough to dominate the room. A ball of ice formed at the base of Lys’s spine. Image or reality? She had no idea. They were opaque to her. Minds that did not claw into her.

The woman darted smoothly into the room and touched the mageheld closest to her. It shrieked and went down hard on its ass, hands clutched to its chest.

Telos crashed to the floor.

Something hot splattered her cheek. Burning. Hot with spilled life. She swiped at Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 6