Free Fall (12 page)

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. Each one echoed back a tiny reflection of Khunbish. All the medallions around the living room door cracked. A few crumbled to ash. Several more turned the color of charcoal. She heard their shrieks in her head.

Another scream rocketed through the air and another of the threads she was tracking winked out. Eight, now. Her heart pounded so loud she could hear it.

“Lys.”

Telos didn’t have to tell her to get ready. She knew what was coming because she’d seen it happen. In the next few minutes, there were going to be eight magehelds in this room, and Telos wasn’t going to survive.

He headed for the door, but the visuals blurred because she was looking at present and future at the same time. She stopped trying to follow any speech but what was in her head.

“Behind me. 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.

“Call Nikodemus and tell whoever answers they need to be here now or it’s too late.”

“Is there another way out?” She concentrated on the thread she felt most clearly and traced it back to the source of the vibration. In the mental image that took shape, she saw a demon step over an inert body. Corpse. Eyes closed, she broke the thread the way she had the other. Her stomach roiled, her head blazed with fire, but she watched the mageheld fall to its knees. She didn’t stop until that thread, too, winked out.

“Seven,” she whispered. She was in full free fall now. Her connection to her body thinned, and her stomach threatened to revolt. More images flickered in and out. Seven magehelds were still too many. Telos needed better odds than that. Pain shot through her head, and she wavered on her feet, but she refused to give up contact with those seven remaining threads. She touched a hand to her ear and her fingertips came away bloodied.

“Call, Lys.” Telos positioned himself next to the door. Waiting to die. “Do it!”

Phone in hand, she retreated to the sound of footsteps pounding down the hall. First the ones in her head, then the footsteps for real. They weren’t bothering with stealth now. Her fingers shook, and her palms were clammy, but she got the phone engaged without dropping it. Seven of them. Demons. Slaves.

And Michael.

Lys found the recent call list and pressed the first number in the column.

Five magehelds shot through the doorway and slid to a halt inside. All of them had short hair, and all of them focused on Telos. Because Michael had told them Telos was the immediate threat to eliminate. Not her. Two of the magehelds were the ones she’d seen Telos kill. That left the others for her.

The inside of Lys’s head lit up, scouring, burning, overwhelming her ability to process what was 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. Two more people here. Outside. One demon. One something else. Hybrid? One person who felt like demon and mage. “Hello?”

Nothing.

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

“They are here.” She concentrated on speaking clearly and making sure the words were uttered for real and not just in her head. At the same time, she picked out a thread and tracked it back the way she had the other two. “Inside the house. Something will 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 one of them. He felt different from the magehelds, more like Telos felt to her when he wasn’t blocking what he was. She thought he was a demon until her sense of him changed, and she could have sworn he was like Michael. A mage. A smaller figure, a woman with her back to the window, had her hands on her hips. She, too, had that odd duality of magekind and demonkind. In her, though, the two aspects weren’t at war.

Two more demons stood not far from the woman. They weren’t magehelds, but she felt the stink of Michael’s magic from them. One was doubled over. The other pressed a hand to his chest like he was having a hard time breathing.

“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.

“Not three minutes. 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 was loud and clear. “Whatever the heck you’re doing with it, you need to learn some control.”

“Too late. Too late.” The horror of knowing made her voice crack. “You will be too late to save him.” Without disconnecting the call, Lys put the phone on the window sill. Blood smeared the glass surface of the phone.

Telos engaged one of the smaller magehelds. While she ran toward him, in her head, she heard a snap and saw the mageheld’s body go limp.

Telos threw the body away from him. It hit the wall and slid down, boneless, and then it happened again. For real this time.

Six.

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 larger one this time. Through that veil of crimson against black, she saw Michael walk into the room with two magehelds behind him. Again. The smell of blood filled the air.

Telos killed the mageheld.

Five.

She found the most insistent of the threads and, as she had before, concentrated on following it to the source. Michael stretched a hand toward Telos. Contact made.

She opened her mouth to warn him, but something hit her in the back. She lurched forward and lost the thread. She went down hard, jamming her knees against the floor. Her stomach turned inside out. Heat sizzled through her, burning, and thousands of images flashed before her eyes. Telos. Michael. The magehelds. The woman outside and the man with her.

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

On the floor, she fought to hold herself together, to keep herself from sliding into unrecoverable madness. The threads in her head slipped in and out and she couldn’t isolate them because she was losing it. She swallowed against the nausea. She was not going to watch events play out in her head. Michael had to be stopped.

Too many images came at her too fast. So much blood. She crawled forward, half blind. Screams rang in her ears, deafening her. Overhead, the air sparked. She identified the thread that was Michael.

“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. A mageheld rose up behind him. “Get out.”

The muscles of her back seized up, but she moved through the pain. Michael might as well be 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, and he was doing it on purpose. To give her a chance to get away. Tears burned in her eyes as she kept moving like some mortally wounded animal intent on protecting her mate. The higher functions of her brain had shut down. Her sense of him turned. Nothing. Nothing at all, and then it came back, tainted. And then it all happened for real.

A petite woman walked in. Lys recognized the resonance of the woman who’d been outside. Behind her was a demon in human form. He no longer felt anything like a mage. His presence dominated the room. His eyes flashed blue, green, and red. Ice formed at the base of Lys’s spine. Image or reality? She had no idea. The two were opaque to her. Their minds did not claw into hers because they’d blocked her.

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

Telos crashed to the floor. Gone from her. Michael’s now.

Something hot splattered her cheek. Burning. She wiped at her face and her hand came away smeared with blood. She clawed halfway upright and lunged for Michael. In her mind, she got a hand on his knee. He kicked back, but she dug her fingers into his leg until she was sure the bones of her hands were breaking apart. Michael tangled his fingers in her hair while Telos stood rigid before Michael, his mouth open in a scream that had no sound. She used her other hand to shield her head from his blows. Heat streaked through her body, pain like nothing she’d ever felt. She couldn’t get high enough to hit him in the crotch so she pounded away at his knee.

She couldn’t fail. She refused.

She took the images in her head, focused on Michael, and imagined his knee shattering.

Across the room, the dark-haired woman touched another of the magehelds. The demon in human form flowed past the witch and touched another mageheld, and her sense of that one winked out then returned, free of Michael’s taint.

In her mind, she reached for Michael. Anything to stop him. His future was hers to shape. The fire building in her body flamed through her, burning her. Killing her. Hot as the sun. She was made of wax. She was Icharus falling to the hard and unforgiving earth. Tumbling in the chaos of her mind, creating a future where Michael wasn’t a god.

Michael stands triumphant. Telos kneels before him
.

Another mageheld stumbled, touched by the other woman who spun and tapped the last one to have come in with Michael. The only threads left in Lys’s head belonged to Michael and Telos.

“Kill the witch.” Michael pointed at the dark-haired woman, then at her. “When that’s done, kill her.”

Michael stands triumphant. Telos flows so quickly, too quickly to stop his attack on the smaller woman. The demon/mage steps in front of her and Telos dies by his hand
.

Telos whirled toward the woman. The air sizzled. Already the other demon was moving toward Telos. She stopped the image in her head, and in her mind, the woman touched Telos the way she had the others.

The man who’d come in with the petite woman moved with incomprehensible speed. He intercepted Telos, slamming him against the wall. Lys saw everything twice. In her head and then in front of her eyes, all of it melting together.

“No!” The word tore from Lys’s throat, raw and painful.

“Harsh.” The woman spoke in a calm voice. “Don’t kill him.”

“Do it.” Telos’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “Do it before it’s too late.”

The demon the woman had called Harsh held back from what Lys was sure would have been a killing strike. “Quickly, Carson.”

Carson touched Telos the way she had the others. He convulsed, gasped, then went still. Her sense of him returned, but there was the faintest sense of the witch coming from him now. Not that she cared much. Telos wasn’t dead. Harsh released his grip on Telos, but kept a hand on his upper arm. Carson faced Michael. “Mage,” she said. “It’s over.”

Michael yanked on Lys’s hair, forcing her to stand. “One step, and she’s dead.”

Carson stopped, hands on her hips. A telephone headset curled around the outside of her ear. “You were warned, mage. You know the consequences.”

“I don’t accept a demon’s authority over me.”

Michael stands triumphant. He speaks words of horror, fingers digging into her hair. She touches him, and the sun inside her incinerates him
.

“I sent a team to your house,“ Carson said. “By now you know the magehelds you left there are no longer in your control.” She smiled, and it was just about the scariest smile Lys had ever seen. Carson took a step closer to Michael, and, yes, she was small and dainty, but she didn’t look like someone you wanted to have mad at you. “Nikodemus authorized a sanction against you.” She tilted her head in Harsh’s direction. “I warn you, my guy here is really good. If you don’t let her go, you’re dead.”

Michael wrapped an arm around Lys’s throat, tight enough to restrict her air. Telos lunged then pulled up short when Carson raised a hand. “I wonder which of us is faster?” Michael said. “Me?” His arms tightened, squeezing off her air. “Or your pet demon there?”

Michael stands triumphant
.

Harsh hadn’t moved from the door. He stood there, relaxed. Lazy, even. In his human form, he looked distinctly Indian, with black-as-coal hair and dark, dark eyes. His smile was eerie because of the way it failed to reach his eyes. Telos vanished from her field of vision. She went up on her toes in an attempt to relieve the pressure on her throat.

The sun inside her incinerates
.

“No question about it,” Carson said. “My guy is faster.”

She didn’t have any more time, and she wasn’t going to let Michael choke her to death. With the last of her strength, Lys punched back with her elbow, but Michael was already falling away from her. She gulped in air.

“But Telos,” she heard Carson say, “is closer.”

Michael laughed. Lys turned and walked toward him. She no longer knew what was real and what was the future, what was something she’d twisted into being or something simply meant to be. She twisted her upper body and touched Michael. Behind him, she saw Telos stretching out a hand and Michael turning to address the threat. The heat inside her flashed through her skin, through her mind and into Michael and the world went away.