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.

  Khūnbish 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 Khūnbish 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. Khūnbish 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. Khūnbish 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?”

  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 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.

  Khūnbish 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 Khūnbish, but then Khūnbish, 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 Khūnbish 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,” Khūnbish 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 Khūnbish. 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 Khūnbish 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.”

  Khūnbish 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.

  _______________________________________________________

  CHAPTER 4

  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.

  When the noise stopped, the mageheld collapsed at her feet. He saw her shoulders slump with relief. She was wrong. Killing a demon’s physical body wasn’t enough. Not if he wanted to stay alive and free, which he did, and not if he wanted to make sure that goddamned mage couldn’t fuck both those demons worse than he already had.

  To stay dead, the dead fiends’ magic had to be safe from the magekind. If Telos allowed the 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 your still-living magic trapped like that.

  Michael came down the steps at a run, blood still dripping from his arms. Idiot. Some vanilla human was going to notice and call the cops. Telos knelt at the nearest mageheld’s side and gave the life there a path home. Though it cost time he didn’t have, he did the same for other one, too. When he was done, he grinned at Michael with vicious satisfaction. “Too late, mage.”

  Michael hit the last step, slowed, and then walked toward Fensic. She extended the canister and pointed it at Michael, deadly serious. “Not another step.”

  The mage lifted his hands. “You betrayed me.”

  She yelped and dropped the canister, shaking her hand as if she’d been burned.

  “Fitting, I think, if your companion kills you for me.”

  “Enough, Michael.” She stood her ground, shoulders back. She’d gone opaque again. “No more.”

  Michael glanced at his arms and muttered something under his breath. His words carried power that made the skin on the back of Telos’s neck ripple. The blood on Michael’s arms flaked away. “Once you two are dead, I think I’ll be done for the day.” He spoke 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. No way in hell was this asshole some self-taught street mage. Someone like Michael trained for this from the day he could walk and talk. Judging from the color of his eyes, an opaque and unnaturally bright brown, he’d recently taken copa. The effects came at a price. Copa was addictive and eventually lethal for the magekind.

  He pulled magic through him again. He was prepared for anything. “There’s rules in this territory, mage.”

  “I don’t take orders from demons.”

  “Nikodemus won’t be happy when he finds out about the talisman. How many magehelds did you murder to pull off that one?” The unknowns were a worry. He didn’t know how many magehelds Michael had, how much copa was raging through his system, or how much new power he had after the ritual murders. This could go all kinds of wrong fast. He jerked his head in Fensic’s direction. “Not to mention what you’ve been doing to her.”

  The mage brushed lingering flakes of blood off one of his arms. “I don’t know what she’s told you, but surely you’ve noticed by now she’s too dangerous to be on her own. Uncontrolled. She doesn’t have any idea what she can do. She might be nothing but a street witch, but she’s almost as dangerous as you.”

  “Nikodemus is going to find out about what you’ve been up to.”

  “I do not accept that creature’s authority over me. Or anyone.” He sneered. “The sooner you’re all dead, the better.”

  “The car,” Fensic said from behind him. “Start the car.”

  Without taking his eyes off the mage, Telos pointed his fob backward in the direction of his car and pressed the button. The minute the motor came to life, he flipped the keys to her. He didn’t hear them hit the pavement and hoped that meant she’d caught them. Every second’s delay brought them closer to disaster.

  Michael’s attention flicked past him to the car, assessed the risks, then snapped back to him.

  Fensic needed time to get to the car. They were both dead if she didn’t make it in time. “You’re going to die a painful death, mage.”

  The mage muttered words that weren’t English. A chill shot down Telos’s back and the surface of his skin crawled. He wasn’t any stranger to pain, but the electricity turned searing hot. Foul magic spread through his body as Michael worked the spell that would enslave him. It happened a lot faster than he expected, losing his freedom. His chest burned and his heart slowed. The pain short-circuited his brain. There wasn’t any air, and when the mage headed for him, he was paralyzed.

  His legs crumpled and both knees hit pavement with a crack. He fought for his life, reaching for his magic, deeper than could ever have been safe for a place where there were vanilla humans, and he pulled. Nothing happened. Panic and horror at what was happening floored him. There had never been a time when he hadn’t been able to touch his magic. A trickle came through, and he seized it, and pushed all of it at the mage. He managed to rock Michael back on his heels, but the respite wasn’t going to last.

  “Khūnbish!”

  From the street-side, Fensic popped up over the driver’s side of his car and tossed something at him. He caught whatever it was with the tips of his fingers while he battled for what shreds of himself he could protect. Michael walked closer, muttering ugly words, words that touched the core of him and turned it. The tearing inside him stopped his heart.

  In a desperate bid for his freedom, he rolled out of Michael’s immediate reach, but he was already dying and about to be reborn a slave. The mage’s will flowed over him like stagnant water. His fingers tightened reflexively, and he realized one of his hands wasn’t empty. A corner of his mind made the ironic observation that he was spending his last moments of freedom with a can of pepper spray.

  Michael stood over him, triumphant. “You will kill Lys. Make it painful for her, please.”

  On his back, and with his entire body being ripped apart and reshaped as Michael’s order hooked into him, he oriented the device and depressed the button, and then he gave in to the rage of losing his freedom and the compulsion Michael had set on him.

  The mage went down sputtering.

  The pain and tearing stopped.

  Telos’s heart contracted once and sensation flashed through his body.

  Michael howled.

  His obscene connection to the mage vanished. Telos lurched to his feet. Jesus, fuck. He was going to puke. Right after he killed that goddamned mage so dead the parts left over wouldn’t fill a tuna can. Behind him, a motor revved, and before he could off the mage, his car shot past him, forward and over the verge. Fensic jammed on the brakes in time to pull even with him. Then her head disappeared and the passenger-side door flew open.

  “Get in! Khūnbish. Now!” She was straightening from her stretch along the seat when his brain understood they needed to get the fuck out of here. He threw himself inside. She hit the gas while he grabbed the passenger door and slammed it shut.

  The car flew over the curb so fast his head snapped back and hit the side of the headrest. The BMW went briefly airborne. He braced one hand on the dash and grabbed the seat belt with the other, and somehow he managed not to break his head against the windshield when they hit the pavement. Fensic gunned the car, his head hit the seat again, and they roared down the street like her foot was welded to the gas.