Future Tense Read Free

Promise.”
    Ten and a half years ago, she’d found out she wasn’t alone in her unusual Jewel/Future Tense— Chapter 0
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    abilities, her life curse, as she liked to call it. She was what Michael, who had been the one to enlighten her, called one of the magekind— a human who could do magic. Her talents were limited. Stunted, Michael had said, but the plain truth was that if she hadn’t learned to shut herself down, she’d have gone insane. That act of self-preservation had cost her the magical facility she might have developed had her life been different.
    A month after Michael had told her about her gift, they were an item, and before much longer she was practicing magic, without much success, meeting Michael’s friends, going to college then law school because if she couldn’t do magic, she had to do something else. After law school, she spent her time getting promoted to senior associate at her firm, billing twenty-six hundred hours a month and more just to stay on track for a partnership. And finding out there were people who weren’t what they seemed. People who weren’t really people.
    Dangerous people. Demons who passed for human.
    Mages like Michael? They killed those demons.
    Jewel/Future Tense— Chapter 2
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CHAPTER 2
    The car continued though the afternoon traffic with Lys wondering how much longer she would last before she broke down. Her thoughts refused to focus. The signs that she was losing control over her curse never abated; headache, pressure in her chest, sensitivity to light. Even with her sunglasses on, whispers broke though her disintegrating efforts to keep her mind safely walled away.
    She needed solitude. Quiet. Isolation. Instead, she was driving through San Francisco at midday with a guy who spent most of his time skirting the law. She didn’t doubt he’d broken a few. Her head throbbed in time with her heartbeat. The pain was wearing on her. Making her weak. Vulnerable.
    He will fall fall fall swiftly into cold hard water.
    Khūnbish kept one hand on the gear shift and drove without saying anything.
    For whatever reason, he wasn’t impinging on her thoughts. The screaming into her brain came from people outside the car; staccato bursts through the breaks in the barrier between her and all the lives out there. Then the Beemer would be out of range and someone new flicked into her consciousness. The images got more explicit and more insistent when they stopped or had to slow down.
    —boyfriend will terrify her—
    She understood that one.
    Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 2
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    If she lost control she’d go into free fall, and then she’d get something from everyone within ten feet of her, no doubt including Khūnbish. God forbid anyone should touch her and send the full weight of their entire short-term future straight into whatever freakish meld of neurons and gray matter passed for her brain. She might never recover from that.
    Unspeakable heartbreak

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

    “Lys?”
    “What?”
    Khūnbish put a hand on her shoulder and she braced herself for the deluge. But nothing happened. Really, nothing. Better than nothing. For one blessed moment the breaks in her control sealed over. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re going to be okay.”
    “I’m always okay.”
    Once he had his hand back on the steering wheel she could feel the breaks again.
    But she was better than she had been. Now, only a flutter of perception came through instead of the full-bore clatter of knowing. Whatever the cause, she was grateful for the respite.
    He stopped for a red light where a knot of people stepped into the crosswalk in front of them. She tensed again. Some of them were bound to get through to her. Telos put a hand on her knee.
    “I’m not sleeping with you.”
    “We’ll see.” His fingers stayed partially on her bare leg. She didn’t get anything from the people in the crosswalk. Not even when they were directly in front of the