Authors: Carolyn Jewel
Four women crossing the plaza on a collision course with Khunbish detoured around him. She lost sight of him while the women continued toward the lobby.
“Lys!”
That was Jack calling her. She paid no attention because Khunbish took three longer steps and was right in front of her. From within her icy barrier, she felt the zing of attraction all the way to her toes. That’s how it always was with them. She stuck out a hand because he was safe to touch. In her life, she’d met maybe four other people who were safe that way. She had her suspicions about why. No proof, though. “Khunbish.”
“Counselor.” He sounded like he smoked cigars and drank whiskey every day for breakfast. Lunch and dinner, too.
She gave him her best Litigation Lawyer smile. “Thank you for coming.”
His expression didn’t register any curiosity about the reason she’d met him out here. He looked her up and down and ended up at her face. They both knew he was thinking about sex, and they both pretended he wasn’t. The way his eyebrows drew together told her she looked worse than she thought. “That pussy over there is calling you.”
“Really? Who?” Her voice was calm. Serene even, and that had to be a miracle because her control wasn’t anything like reliable right now.
“Here in three, two, one…”
“Lys. You dropped this.”
She turned in time to see Jack slow from his jog across the plaza. He had her frog-shaped stapler in his hand. While she watched, he closed the distance between them. He was grinning because to him, a normal, everyday person, how absurd was it to chase a woman across the plaza with frog stapler?
“Oh, hey. Thanks.” She stuck out her box, intending for Jack to drop the stapler inside.
Jack held out the stapler and put a hand on her arm. The boom in her head went off like a cannon. She jerked away. Her vision winked out. Jack twitched, and the stapler dropped from his fingers.
His knees give out, and he falls to the concrete. Bright crimson blood flows from his head.
Reality slammed back.
“Dude,” she heard Khunbish say. “You okay?”
Jack’s eyes rolled up in his head, and his knees buckled. He hit the paving stones hard. She heard the crack when his head hit.
“Holy shit.” Khunbish whipped out his cell phone and started dialing while Lys dropped her box and knelt, afraid to touch him in case there was a chance he could be saved. Jack didn’t move. Blood pooled around his head. Red. So red.
A girl with pink hair, leggings, and a tatty black tee-shirt emerged from the gathering crowed. Lys snatched her hands away when the girl dropped to Jack’s side and pressed two fingers to the side of his throat.
That’s all she needed; to kill another innocent person. Every ounce of Lys’s energy went to keeping herself out of free fall. If she didn’t stay in control, Jack might not be the only casualty. She was aware, in a distant way, of Khunbish talking to 9-1-1 and of the young woman doing chest compressions on an unresponsive Jack.
Sirens, far away at first, came closer and closer. Lys shook with the effort of staying here and in the present. She didn’t want to hurt anyone else. Her head was going to crack open, but she’d managed to seal herself off. She could observe without feeling anything. Ice protected her from all the people around her.
A fire truck pulled up, then an ambulance. Paramedics jogged across the plaza with their gear. Radios squawked. The strobe effect from the flashing lights on the emergency vehicles flashed inside her head, too. The pink-haired woman doing compressions let one of the EMTs take over, and some time later the EMTs loaded Jack into the ambulance.
She answered questions from one of the firefighters. She was ice. Nothing but ice inside and out. It was horrifyingly clinical the way she didn’t feel a damn thing, but this was how she needed to be. More time passed, there were more questions and answers, and then the firefighters were gone. The last of the crowd dispersed.
Khunbish cocked his head and shoved his hands into his front pockets. Her head hurt. She wondered idly what he would say if she told him Jack was dead and that it was her fault. He’d call her crazy, and he’d be right. He held her gaze, and she got trapped there.
She braced herself, but nothing happened. Nothing at all. Her stomach, however, did a slow flip-flop. The conviction that he knew about her sprang into full bloom. He knew what she was. Without understanding why or how, she’d stepped onto a tightrope here with Khunbish, and there wasn’t any net.
“Ms. Fensic.” His low, scratchy voice made it easy to imagine him awake at four in the morning, a bottle of whiskey at his elbow. Some blonde babe with a tramp stamp and a fondness for glitter would be on his lap while he hacked into someone else’s server. In between rounds of beating the crap out of men stupid enough to cross him.
Khunbish was the calmest man she’d ever met. Nothing rattled him. Not an adversarial deposition or a vicious cross-examination. Or seeing a man drop dead at his feet. “Someone you knew well?”
She swallowed. “A colleague.” She wasn’t a talkative person, but hell if she could stop herself. “I quit my job today, and he wanted to help me with my things.” She nudged her moving box with the toe of her pump and swallowed the lump in her throat. “I told him not to follow me. I told him to go back to his office.”
“Was he harassing you?”
“No. God no.” Their eyes met again, and the world stayed in place. “Nothing like that.”
“So. You quit your job and called me.”
She waited for a group of people to pass them on their way to California Street. On a purely selfish level, she’d been right to think of him. He was perfect. She needed someone mean and dangerous, and Khunbish fit the bill. With a prayer that she was right, she made the leap that would change her life forever.
“I need a favor.”
He was going to do her the favor. Why? Because he was a sucker for smart chicks, and Lys Fensic was smarter than just about anyone he knew. Because despite her ice-cold exterior, she could make him laugh. Also, she was fucking hot. Curves in all the right places, legs that didn’t quit. She had a great ass, too. The woman was gorgeous and untouchable, and he’d wanted a piece of her cool elegance for a long time.
More important than his other reasons, she had power he didn’t understand. Most of the time she registered to him as completely normal. A woman without any magic. A complete vanilla. Every now and then, like now being an example, whatever magic she had going for her worked him hard.
She wasn’t a trained mage, he was sure of that. If she were in that life, he wouldn’t be consulting for her because she’d already have tried to kill him or enslave him. He suspected she was one of the survivors: a kid thrown away by magekind parents who thought she didn’t have any magic. Most of the throwaways died before they hit twenty. Some of them, like Lys Fensic, didn’t. He thought about that poor guy, dead before he hit the ground, because sometimes, possibly like Lys Fensic, the survivors grew up to be dangerous. He wondered how much she knew about what she was and what she could do.
Right now she was in front of him, eyes big and wide, skin pale as ashes, and so completely opaque to him there was no way she was normal. Vanilla humans couldn’t block the way she was doing. They couldn’t make it impossible for him to get anything at all, not when he was trying. He checked out her eyes in case she was self-medicating. Copa, the drug the magekind took to amp up their power, changed their eye color while they were under the influence. The stuff also eventually burned out their power, if it didn’t outright kill them. Her eyes were the same dark blue as ever.
He stooped to retrieve her now broken stapler. It was cute that she’d kept his joke present to her and decided to cart it with her. “I’ll get you a new one.”
No reaction.
He tossed the stapler in the box. “Let’s talk about that favor. Coffee?”
She squeezed the strap of her purse with both hands. Completely opaque. It bothered him that she could do that. “Okay.”
He picked up her box and pointed in the direction of Market Street. “Seeing how you’re unemployed, it’s on me.”
“Thank you.” Her smile was brief and didn’t reach her eyes. She was something else when she smiled for real.
Five minutes later they were sitting at a table at Peet’s Coffee. Her moving box was on the chair beside her, her purse on the floor at her feet. Telos sat across from her, holding his chai. She drank half her six-shot espresso macchiato without blinking.
“Jesus, Fensic.”
“Two hours of sleep in the last forty-eight hours.” She lifted her cup. He still wasn’t getting a thing from her. How the hell long could she keep that up? It had to be costing her. “I could use a couple of these.”
Neither one of them said a word for long enough that the silence got awkward. He wasn’t good with human expressions when he couldn’t pair them with what he picked up naturally, but even he could guess she was about to tell him to forget the favor.
“So.” He nodded the way humans did when they were taking about anything except what needed to be talked about. “A favor.” He gave her an encouraging smile, but his attention flicked down to her truly fine rack. “Between friends.”
“Yes.” She smoothed a palm over her head and rested her hand there for a bit. “Between friends.”
“Go.”
She licked her lips. “I need a ride.”
He quirked his eyebrows at her. “That’s it? I thought you were going to hit me up for a loan.”
That got him a nanosecond’s worth of a smile. “Just a ride.”
So much for her coming out to him about her magic. A ride was a lot less interesting, though, on a personal level, he liked the idea of being alone with her and nowhere near her office. That would change everything, and if he was even a little lucky he could get her between the sheets with him. Not that he expected sex in return for any favor, but he could hope they ended up there.
“A ride. Sure. Where to?”
“Noe Valley.”
Noe Valley was an upscale neighborhood of the city, and the way she said it, a bit too quickly, set off all kinds of alarms. He was doing her the favor, sure, but that didn’t mean he was dumb enough to forget a street witch could be dangerous to him. “Do you need a ride back?”
“Yes.” She slipped the cardboard sleeve off her cup and started tearing it into pieces.
“Why?” He wasn’t used to seeing her frayed at the edges like this, and that added to his uneasiness.
“My car got wrecked.”
“Damn.”
She nodded, but he thought that was a non-verbal lie. Not certain, because she was blank to him right now, but she was on the edge of some kind of massive collapse, and, well, in his experience there wasn’t much coincidence where the magekind were involved. In the life or not, she was magekind.
“Hit and run,” she said. “The other guy. Not me.”
“That blows.” He tried not to think about how long he’d wanted to hook up with her but didn’t have much luck. She was right in front of him, gorgeous and tired and vulnerable in a way that worked on every protective instinct he had. He knew she could take care of herself, but whatever was going on with her was really messing with her. He was curious, and he wanted to help.
Her eyes were a million miles away. Whatever was going through her head, the recollection was powerful enough to shake her control. She stopped being opaque. The mental hints he’d been trying to pick up flashed into place. It was like being pushed into a volcano of magic. The hair on the back of his neck lifted, and then she shut down hard. She was back to total vanilla, a human with no magic at all.
Her hand shook so hard she almost knocked over her macchiato. He moved her coffee to the middle of the table. Goddamn, but that was some power she had. All this time she’d had enough control to convince him she was nothing more than minorly talented. Well, hello to the majors. “Okay. When was your car wrecked?”
“Last night.” She blinked, and she looked so lost and uncertain he almost didn’t recognize her as Lys Fensic, ice queen. The break only lasted a second or two, then she was back to her usual self. Almost. Whatever the hell was going on with her, he couldn’t turn his back on her. “No. I think it was two nights ago. I’m so tired, I’m losing track of time. What day is it? Tuesday or Wednesday?”
“Thursday.”
“Really?” She wiped a hand across her forehead. The breaks in her control were spiderweb fine, spinning out so that, though he got almost nothing from her, he got more than previously. “Two nights, then. My car got wrecked. I was in the hospital at some point, but I checked myself out.”
“Against medical advice?”
She shrugged. “I’m fine.”
He peered into her face, but she avoided eye contact. Not totally ignorant, then. “All due respect, bullshit.”
She drank more of her jet-fueled coffee. “There’s something I need from my house.”
He leaned his forearms on the table. His skin was a lot darker than hers. “And?”
“Something terrible will happen if…” Her expression closed off, but for half a second there she’d looked terrified. Enough afraid that he could see the fear without being able to pick up the psychic clues to her mental state.
“If what?”
She dropped her head, staring at the table. Fractures in her ability to block him spun out like cracks in melting ice. He could waltz right inside her head if he wanted to. He didn’t. But he could. Not that he needed to right now. She was pretty much wide open. A wave of despair came at him, so intense he was tempted to do the unthinkable and give the ice queen a hug. Then…nothing. Her switching on and off like that was disorienting as hell.
She let out a breath. “I don’t know who to trust.”
“You called me.” He tapped a finger on the table near her so she’d look up. She did, and he cocked his head. Her looks really worked for him, and now that she’d lost her usual frosty reserve, she was even more his type. “Here I am.”
Her power cycled up again, cranked him something fierce, and he thought this had to be the point where she told him what she was. She didn’t, though. She winced. Just like that, she was vanilla again. But not opaque.