Free Fall (4 page)

He flipped on his blinker and looked over his shoulder before 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 watched oncoming traffic for a break. “We’re not going to get hit. Promise.”

“Sure.” She couldn’t help thinking about people who weren’t what they seemed. People who weren’t really people. Dangerous people like Michael and Telos Khunbish. And then there were demons, even more dangerous than the mages because although they could and did pass for normal, they weren’t even human.

He drove without the least sign of irritation with the congestion and double parked cars and trucks. One hand lightly gripped the bottom left of the steering wheel, the other rested on the stick shift. How odd that a man who dressed like a thug looked so at home in such an expensive car. Then again, she knew what he charged per hour.

She sat straight, legs pressed together, one hand on her lap, the other on the door so she’d have an anchor if she slipped into her special brand of insanity. Her thoughts refused to stay focused in the present. Even with her sunglasses back on, whispers broke though and the physical world blinked out. Every time that happened she had to fight to get back to what was real. She wondered how much longer she’d last before she broke down completely and irrevocably.

He will fall fall fall swiftly into cold hard water
.

The car moved smoothly forward, carrying her along.

They were out of the Financial District now, but traffic was still horrendous. The car’s radio wasn’t on and though she could see a dock for a phone, he hadn’t hooked in to play whatever music it was he liked. She found the silence comforting. Khunbish didn’t impinge on her thoughts the way other people did. He never had. The quiet helped keep her sane.

Her problem now was the people outside the car and her disintegrating ability to keep her mind safely walled away. The BMW would move out of range of whatever person she’d hooked into, but inevitably someone new flashed into her consciousness. When they stopped or had to slow down, the images got more explicit and more insistent.

—
boyfriend will terrify her
—

She understood that one.

She pressed her right arm hard against the side of the car. If she went into free fall the way she had earlier, she’d be open to everyone within ten feet of her, and there was no guarantee that the freakish meld of neurons, gray matter, and whatever else that comprised her brain wouldn’t permanently break from reality. No telling how many people might die because she couldn’t control herself.

Unspeakable heartbreak

“Fensic?”

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

“Earth to Fensic.” Khunbish put a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me.” Out of habit, she braced herself for the deluge, but nothing happened. Nothing. For one blessed moment all the breaks in her control sealed over.

“It’s okay.” He kept his eyes on the street. “You’re going to be okay.”

She was afraid to move or even breathe in case the quiet in her head stopped.

“I mean that. I’ll make it okay.” He returned his hand to the knob of the gear shift.

Slowly, the fractures in her sanity reappeared, though she wasn’t as bad off as she had been before. Instead of the full-bore clatter of knowing, only a flutter of all those alien perceptions came through. She was profoundly grateful for the respite. The mental quiet allowed her time to gather herself, build up another reserve of resistence.

He stopped for a red light.

Half a dozen people stepped into the crosswalk in front of them. She squeezed the side of the door and braced herself. Some of them were bound to get through to her.

Khunbish put a hand on her knee. Above her knee, actually. She looked at her thigh. His fingers were dark against her skirt. Dark against her skin, too. “You okay?”

She nodded.

“I thought you were going to jump out the window.”

“No.” The acid taste faded from her mouth.

His fingers stayed partially on her bare leg. He was touching her, and she wasn’t in free fall. She didn’t get anything from the people in the crosswalk. Not even when they walked in front of the car. She let out a breath.

She wondered if Khunbish was that much more powerful than Michael that he could have that effect on her, or whether Michael was just a sadistic bastard who enjoyed seeing her suffer. Maybe both. She leaned against the backrest again and turned just her head in his direction. His hand stayed on her thigh, but he wasn’t feeling her up. He flexed his other fingers on the steering wheel, then relaxed them again.

“Better?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Much.”

“Tell me what happened before your car accident.” He kept his attention forward.

“Michael and I argued about the talisman. He wanted me to wear it, and I didn’t. I told him I’d lost it. Things got ugly, I left, and he didn’t like it.”

“Did he hit you?”

“Not where it would show.” She gave him a once over. Khunbish was a physically solid man. Tall. Muscular. Fit. If he wanted to, he could hurt her worse than Michael. That was the thing about men. Until you knew what was in their hearts, every single one was a potential danger.

“Bastard.”

The silence in her head got pushed out by the sound of metal breaking, no brakes. Right before the impact of her accident, she’d recognized the other driver as one of the men who worked for Michael. The same man who told her the truth about the talisman. She couldn’t erase the image of him pointing a finger at her; it was burned into her memory. The next thing she knew, her car was a heap of metal and there were sirens wailing louder and louder. Michael’s guy was gone.

“Hey, Fensic. You’re with me.” His calm worked into her, soothing her when contact with anyone else would have sent her straight into madness.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

Before long they were on her street. He pulled into a space a few doors down from her house and turned off the motor. He left the keys in the ignition. She didn’t move. Khunbish turned his torso toward her, one arm draped over the steering wheel. He looked at her, no smile to soften the truth that he was a dangerous man. Her entire body reacted to that truth. With all the defenses she had to have in place, sex was never very good for her. All the same, a part of her wondered what it would be like to have sex with him. She gave herself a mental shake. That just wasn’t a place she ought to go.

“Let’s get your talisman.” 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.”

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?”

Khunbish 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 heart of 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 while she drew on the bizarre calmness the contact offered. His eyes were completely black. No colors. Just black. She could drop into them and never come out. 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.

He let go of her, and the fractures began to reappear. But now she had more reserves than before. He stayed in front while they walked up the slope to the house she’d lived in for going on ten years. She couldn’t help but wonder how things had gone so wrong. It was her home, and Michael had just moved in and taken over everything.

Khunbish took the lead up the concrete stairs. There were seventeen of them with a landing in between. When they reached the landing, she fumbled around for her keys and eventually found them in a corner of her bag. He looked over his shoulder at her, and she held up the keys. He didn’t take them from her.

“We don’t get in without the keys.”

“Yes we do.”

She blinked. “You can do that?”

“Fensic.” He spread his arms wide.

Computer hacker, door jacker. She should have known. She dropped her keys back in her purse and glanced at her front door. The house gave her the creeps. The upstairs lights were off, but there was a light on downstairs. While she watched someone walked between the light and the curtained window.

Her heart thumped so hard it hurt. “He’s home.” She took a step back. “Jesus, he’s home.” She tugged on his arm, harder a second time than the first. He didn’t budge either time. “Let’s go. Now.”

“Fuck.”

Too late. Too late. Too late. She clamped down on herself because she damn well knew their lives depended on her not losing it. Michael knew how to hurt her when she lost control.

The front door opened, and Michael stepped onto the porch. From as far away as they were from him, she could still feel that peculiar fullness in the back of her head that seemed to come along with Michael. Not quite the same sensation as with Khunbish, but then Khunbish, she suspected, was a much more powerful mage.

Michael’s eyes tracked downward, and he walked to the edge of the porch. He’d been using; she could tell from his fever-bright eyes. He looked down to where she and Khunbish stood, a familiar sneer curing the edge of his mouth.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “What’s he done?”

Michael’s arms were deep crimson up to his elbows. Drops of liquid red slid from his fingers to the ground. He shook his head to get his sandy hair off his forehead. Two men emerged from the house and stood behind him, both of them with hair buzzed short. One she didn’t recognize, but the other was the man who’d crashed into her car. He pointed at her and slowly grinned.

“Lys.” Michael held out a red fist and slowly unfurled his fingers. Bright, glittering sand trickled onto the porch, but more red dripped from his arms to the ground. “You lying bitch.”

“Asshole,” Khunbish said under his breath.

“I don’t know why you thought I wouldn’t find it.” Michael swept the toe of his shoe over the sand and pushed some of it to the stair below. He stared at Khunbish. The men behind him stared at her. “This is all that’s left.”

Her head was back in a vise, her vision going grainy and narrow. But she had control. She wasn’t going to lose it. She refused. Michael wasn’t going hurt her. Not ever again. “You’re supposed to be in LA.”

“As you can see, I am not.” His attention moved from Khunbish to her. His calculating, drug-enhanced confidence made her sick. He was always worse when he was using. He gestured at the man to his right, the one from the car accident. “You. She’s yours. When you’re done with her, kill her. You.” He motioned to the other. “Bring the fiend to me.”

Khunbish grabbed her shoulder and pushed her in the direction of the street. “Move.”

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

Telos pulled as much magic through him as he could without triggering a shift in his physical form. The burn forced a roar from him, half frustration at the need to limit himself, half joy at the power. The air crackled around him as he drew hard on his magic, pulling up from its source and through his body until the energy electrified him. Fensic was taking the steps two at a time. He jumped all of them, skidded to a stop and whipped around to intercept the magehelds while she sprinted for his car.

He kept himself between her and Michael’s two magehelds as they, too, raced for the street. Both of them were under the mage’s compulsion, so they were moving fast. Once Fensic had a few steps on him—she was fast despite running in heels—he put on the brakes and whirled to the two magehelds.

They were practically on him, big motherfuckers not looking to start a friendship. He didn’t have time to do anything but go for a kill, the hell with anything she might see that she shouldn’t.

As soon as the first mageheld’s eyes turned colors, he released everything he had on tap straight into the fiend’s head. A shriek tore through the air, high and piercingly loud. Telos magically dampened the sound before the whole neighborhood called the goddamned police. At the same time, he darted in and slipped an arm around the demon’s neck, braced with his hand and twisted hard because he wasn’t going to get a second chance. He released and stepped back. The corpse dropped bonelessly to the sidewalk.

The silence was freaky. The other demon had looped around while Telos killed his buddy. It didn’t matter if the remaining mageheld had been fucking in love with the dead fiend. He’d been given a kill order, he had to obey, and that’s what he was doing. Another scream shattered the peace.

With a mageheld fiend bent on hunting down a witch he’d been told he could fuck at his leisure before he killed her, a two or three second delay was way too long. Telos shot toward Fensic, expecting to see that the mageheld had her already. But she wasn’t the one who’d screamed like a girl. The mageheld was on his knees, scrabbling at his eyes while she stood over him, eyes wild, a small canister in her outstretched arm. Mist wafted toward him, and then his eyes burned and watered, too. She’d maced the guy.

The mageheld lurched to his feet, still digging at his face. Nothing short of death was going to stop him from doing what he’d been ordered. Probably in the most unpleasant way imaginable. Telos was the last thing between the mageheld and the only revenge an enslaved demon ever got.

He pulled again and unloaded directly into the mageheld’s head the way he had with the other one. The psychic scream deafened him, but he kept going, shredding the demon’s mental and physical boundaries until the only thing left was a sort of magical goo. It was brutal, but he didn’t see that he had a choice, unless he was going to let Fensic die.