Free Fall by Carolyn Jewel Page B

too late. He believed it to his core. But he didn’t change. Couldn’t. Didn’t want to. What they were doing answered something in her, gave her something she needed. She took just as much as he gave. Or maybe it was the other way around.
    Eventually, he withdrew from her and let his body return to his human form so he could lie on his back, though their psychic connection stayed in place. He was boneless with pleasure. Sated. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. “You need to move in here.”
    After a bit, when she might still have been recovering, she said, “Not a good idea.”
    “You should be here when you have my kid.”
    She turned onto her side and cupped his face before she leaned in to kiss him. “I don’t think—”
    Telos lifted his head, concentrating on the change in his proofing.
    Lys frowned. “What’s wrong?”
    “You need to get dressed. Right now.”
    Apparently, Michael had a talented tracker.

CHAPTER 9
    Telos stood in the center of his living room with all kinds of wrong flowing through him. His skin crawled. The silence felt wrong. Too quiet in the house, way too quiet outside. Michael was out there, no question about that. He was probably still high on copa and hyped from his earlier kill. The ritual murder of a demon would have added to the mage’s power.
    To one side of him, Lys fastened the last buttons of her blouse. She kicked her pumps under the couch. Smart. Great looking shoes, but a bitch for her if she had to run, and potentially in the way if she left them there. Deftly, she slicked back her hair and refastened it in her clip. She grabbed her purse, took out her ID, some bank cards and cash, and shoved her bag into one of the cubby holes in his entertainment center. She headed for him.
    “Hold still.” She stuffed the items from her purse into the back pocket of his jeans and gave his ass a pat. “Keep it safe, will you?”
    With a crack like ice breaking, one of the hundreds of carved wooden medallions that made up his early warning system snapped in half.
    Beside him, Lys went still. “What was that?”
    “Company.” He pointed at the cracked medallion. “They react to our kind, yours and mine, who don’t have permission to be in my house. When they break like that, it means my company isn’t waiting for an invitation to come in.”
    “Michael.”
    He grunted. Another of the medallions cracked. For about ten seconds, he considered locking Lys in the server room with a pile of blankets to keep her warm, but if he did that and Michael got to him, she wouldn’t be safe no matter where she was. If he got taken alive, she was fucked. If he got killed, they’d eventually find her, and she’d be trapped. Same result.
    “Plan?”
    He walked to the window and took a look outside. He didn’t see anyone out there but that didn’t mean much. Another of his wards cracked. He glanced at the line of medallions around the perimeter of his ceiling. Several of the carved faces were no longer smiling. One was frozen in a scream. His pulse sped up. Michael wasn’t playing around. With this proofing going off like this, there had to be more than just one or two magehelds. Plus the tracker good enough to have found them this fast.
    “We call for help.” He pulled out his phone and brought up the contact he’d sent to Lys. He’d known for the last year or more he couldn’t stay unaffiliated much longer. This bullshit with Michael was only pushing a decision he’d already made. He was fine with that. From what he’d heard, there were worse warlords to tie himself to than Nikodemus.
    “Are you calling the police?”
    “Nikodemus.” Telos kept one eye on the window. “Get the lights. Leave that one on. In the corner there. Kill the rest.”
    Lys found the wall switch and flicked the lights off. On the other end of the call, a woman answered the phone, and that wasn’t right. He was about to disconnect when the woman said, “I represent Nikodemus.”
    Telos said,