Future Tense (2 page)

Drugs would do that to you. On the street, cars slammed on their brakes or swerved around the woman and her shopping cart.

Lys watched because it was better than looking at Khūnbish. A mistake, it turned out. The vise-grip of her headache cranked up and made her queasy. She breathed through her mouth, but right now, she was wide open to anyone. The inside of her skull burned and she could swear her head was fracturing. She imagined tiny fragments of bone driving into her brain.

In front of a brick building that isn’t being maintained, she hands over grimy bills and in
return accepts a dirty, much folded glassine paper. Deftly exchanged with a man whose job it is
to peddle poison. The unbelievably intense craving that lives in her is about to kill her.

“You okay?” Khūnbish asked again. She wasn’t sure she heard him speak, but if Jewel/Future Tense— Chapter 0

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he hadn’t then he was about to. Same difference, really. His mouth moved, forming the words
You okay?

She turned her head to him and blinked a few times, waiting for his future to slam into her. There was this odd click between her ears, like a door closing. Nothing happened. “Fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”

He shaved once a week, he’d once told her in a rare fit of talkativeness, because he was a descendant of Genghis Khan on his father’s side, and back in the day the Mongol horde didn’t have much facial hair. He’d said that with a straight face. He must be the tallest Mongolian on record, because he was over six feet. Taller than Michael.

His skin was fine-grained, smooth. No scars, no fading zits, no razor burn.

She resisted the impulse to brush her fingers over his cheek. She never touched anyone unless the contact couldn’t be avoided and then only when she was prepared.

He straightened from his lean over her and closed her door. When he was in the car and he’d merged into the madness of downtown traffic, she stared into the rear view mirror, looking for cars coming up too fast.

Lys looked ahead, into traffic and the cars, taxis and buses full of people and the future. Some weird reflection through the windshield made his eyes flicker between black, gray and red. Creepy. She turned her head to the passenger-side window, but that was worse than staring straight forward and seeing him and that weird eye flicker in her peripheral vision. She concentrated on remaining disconnected from the world outside. It had been years since she’d had to work this hard at staying alone in her head.

He flipped on his blinker and looked over his shoulder. He moved into one of those left turn lanes where the city allowed a turn on the green light. Lys tensed up, anticipating a collision. “Relax,” he said watching oncoming traffic for a break. “We’re not going to get hit. Promise.”

Ten and a half years ago, she’d found out she wasn’t alone in her unusual Jewel/Future Tense— Chapter 0

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abilities, her life curse, as she liked to call it. She was what Michael, who had been the one to enlighten her, called one of the magekind— a human who could do magic. Her talents were limited. Stunted, Michael had said, but the plain truth was that if she hadn’t learned to shut herself down, she’d have gone insane. That act of self-preservation had cost her the magical facility she might have developed had her life been different.

A month after Michael had told her about her gift, they were an item, and before much longer she was practicing magic, without much success, meeting Michael’s friends, going to college then law school because if she couldn’t do magic, she had to do something else. After law school, she spent her time getting promoted to senior associate at her firm, billing twenty-six hundred hours a month and more just to stay on track for a partnership. And finding out there were people who weren’t what they seemed. People who weren’t really people.

Dangerous people. Demons who passed for human.

Mages like Michael? They killed those demons.

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CHAPTER 2

The car continued though the afternoon traffic with Lys wondering how much longer she would last before she broke down. Her thoughts refused to focus. The signs that she was losing control over her curse never abated; headache, pressure in her chest, sensitivity to light. Even with her sunglasses on, whispers broke though her disintegrating efforts to keep her mind safely walled away.

She needed solitude. Quiet. Isolation. Instead, she was driving through San Francisco at midday with a guy who spent most of his time skirting the law. She didn’t doubt he’d broken a few. Her head throbbed in time with her heartbeat. The pain was wearing on her. Making her weak. Vulnerable.

He will fall fall fall swiftly into cold hard water.

Khūnbish kept one hand on the gear shift and drove without saying anything.

For whatever reason, he wasn’t impinging on her thoughts. The screaming into her brain came from people outside the car; staccato bursts through the breaks in the barrier between her and all the lives out there. Then the Beemer would be out of range and someone new flicked into her consciousness. The images got more explicit and more insistent when they stopped or had to slow down.

—boyfriend will terrify her—

She understood that one.

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If she lost control she’d go into free fall, and then she’d get something from everyone within ten feet of her, no doubt including Khūnbish. God forbid anyone should touch her and send the full weight of their entire short-term future straight into whatever freakish meld of neurons and gray matter passed for her brain. She might never recover from that.

Unspeakable heartbreak

At least you didn’t die from a broken heart.

“Lys?”

“What?”

Khūnbish put a hand on her shoulder and she braced herself for the deluge. But nothing happened. Really, nothing. Better than nothing. For one blessed moment the breaks in her control sealed over. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re going to be okay.”

“I’m always okay.”

Once he had his hand back on the steering wheel she could feel the breaks again.

But she was better than she had been. Now, only a flutter of perception came through instead of the full-bore clatter of knowing. Whatever the cause, she was grateful for the respite.

He stopped for a red light where a knot of people stepped into the crosswalk in front of them. She tensed again. Some of them were bound to get through to her. Telos put a hand on her knee.

“I’m not sleeping with you.”

“We’ll see.” His fingers stayed partially on her bare leg. She didn’t get anything from the people in the crosswalk. Not even when they were directly in front of the car.

“Better?”

She leaned her head against the backrest again and looked at him.
Not normal
.

Telos Khūnbish was not normal. His hand stayed on her thigh, but he wasn’t feeling her Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 2

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up. He flexed his other fingers on the steering wheel then relaxed them again. “Yeah,”

she said softly. “Better.”

“Tell me what happened before your car accident.”

“I left Michael, and he didn’t like it.”

“Did he hit you?”

She gave him a thorough once over. He was a physically solid man. Tall.

Muscular. Fit. Even Michael would think twice about messing with him. The silence in her head filled up with the sound of metal breaking, no brakes. The guy who rear-ended her never even slowed down.

“You’re with me.” His calm worked into her, soothing her when contact with anyone else would have sent her screaming from the impact of everything she saw.

Khūnbish was a blank to her. Not blank, but blocked from his side. He definitely wasn’t normal.

“Thank you.”

Sometime later they were on her street. He pulled into a parking space a few doors down from her house and turned off the motor. He left the keys in the ignition.

She didn’t move. Khūnbish turned his torso toward her, one arm draped over the steering wheel. And he looked at her straight on. Wasn’t he just tall, dark and dangerous? That ancient part of her brain quivered in fear, telling her to hunker down or run like hell.

“Let’s get what you need from the house,” he said.

She nodded. She was going to owe him big time.

He took the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car. She watched him walk around the front. She already had her door open when he came around to the sidewalk.

Good thing he was there, because she got dizzy when she stood. He caught her forearm and steadied her. “Easy there.”

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She stared at his torso while she waited for her head to clear. “What on earth does your shirt say?” She squinted at his chest. “While you were reading my shirt, I hacked your bank account?”

Khūnbish smiled. The thing was, it was only partly a joke, that saying on his shirt. He probably could hack her bank account. According to his CV he had top secret security clearance and right coast clients with three letter acronyms. And those were the ones he could disclose. The left coast clients were scattered up and down the coastline from the Silicon Valley to Redmond, Washington.

“Don’t worry, your money is still there.” He smiled as he put a faint emphasis on
your
. He didn’t let go of her arm, not right away, and they stood there staring at each other. His eyes were completely black. She could drop into them and never come out.

Just five minutes of peace, that’s all she wanted. Five minutes of not having anyone’s fate force its way into her head. That was her idea of paradise. For some reason, she could get that from him. He touched her and there was blessed nothing.

They walked to the house, which was on a slope and had two sets of concrete steps with a landing in between. She did feel safer, having Khūnbish at her side. She fumbled around for her keys and eventually found them in a corner of her bag.

She headed up the stairs, keys in her hand. The house belonged to Michael. Not her. She’d never liked it very much. In the last few weeks, she’d come to hate it. At the landing, Khūnbish put a hand on her arm.

“What?” She glanced at him, and he pointed. The upstairs lights were off, but there was a light on downstairs. In the front room. “Oh.” She squeezed her house keys.

The last thing he’d said to her the night before she walked out was that he wasn’t going to let her leave him and that if she did, he’d kill her. Michael never said anything he didn’t mean.

Khūnbish spoke softly. “You should have told me he’s a mage.”

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His casual admission that he knew anything about mages startled her. Scared the hell out of her actually, but she kept it together. “I didn’t think it would mean anything to you.”

“Well, it does.”

The front door opened, and Michael stepped onto the porch, looking down to where she and Khūnbish stood on the middle landing. Michael’s arms were red up to his elbows. Drops of liquid slid from his fingers to the ground. He shook his head to get his sandy hair off his forehead. Two men she didn’t recognize stood behind him, both of them with their hair buzzed short. One of the men had a large cardboard box that at a sign from Michael he turned upside down. Ashes cascaded to the ground.

Lys watched the particles drift in the air. He’d burned her things.

Michael said, “There’s more, but I trust the demonstration was sufficient.”

Her heart stuttered. “You’re supposed to be in LA.”

“As you can see, I am not.” His attention moved from her to Khūnbish. “There is nothing here for you, Lys.”

“I know,” she said.

He gestured, and the two men started down the stairs. “Kill her. Bring the fiend to me.”

Khūnbish grabbed her elbow. The contact was an electric shock. Their gazes connected and she saw his eyes wide with surprise. Then he said, “Move.”

Long before they made it back to the sidewalk, the two men were running full speed.

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CHAPTER 3

Her ex was a fucking mage.

Telos put himself between Lys and the two magehelds— demons magically enslaved to someone like Michael —as they raced for the street. When she had a few steps on him— she was fast despite running in heels —he skidded to a stop and whipped around to intercept them while Lys sprinted for his car.

The magehelds were practically breathing down his neck. Jesus shit. They were big motherfuckers, and they weren’t looking to start a friendship. He didn’t have time to do anything but go for a kill, the hell with anything Lys might see that she shouldn’t.

The air crackled around him as he pulled hard on his magic, pulling up from its source and through his body until the energy electrified him.

He waited until he saw the first mageheld’s eyes turn colors, and then he released everything he had on tap. At the same time, he darted in and slipped an arm around the neck of the demon nearest him, braced with his hand and twisted. If he’d miscalculated what it would take to disable the other mageheld, he wanted this one’s body to be physically dead. He released his hold and stepped back, taking the time to register only that the corpse dropped bonelessly to the sidewalk.

The kill order for Lys was real. The other mageheld was looping around to get at her, a fact that made him decide she hadn’t lured him here for her boyfriend sake’s.

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Michael came down the steps at a run, not having bothered to wipe off the blood that covered his arms. Idiot. Some vanilla human was going to notice and call the cops.

A shriek tore through the air, high and piercingly loud. Telos reached out with his magic to dampen the sound before the whole neighborhood called the police. He whirled toward Lys, expecting the worst. But it wasn’t her who’d screamed. The second mageheld was on its knees, scrabbling at its eyes while Lys stood over him, a small cannister in her outstretched arm.