Free Taken by Fire by Sydney Croft

you can fly, we’re stuck fighting.” He stared hard at her.
    “They’re going to kill you—you need to hide.”
    “Oh, sure, that’s going to happen. I’ll just let you walk back into Itor’s hands. Not a problem.”
    “I’m trying to save you, Stryker. I’ll get rid of them for you. I’ll pretend to be Phoebe.”
    “Forgive me if I don’t trust a damned thing you say.” He took her arm. “We deal with this together.”
    He mentally calculated how quickly he could have sex with her, wondered if her power sparked instantaneously after an orgasm, like she could point and shoot right as he …
    Ah, forget it
. He drew his pistol, shoving Mel behind him in a gesture that struck him as oddly protective. Cursing himself as the biggest idiot on the planet, he eased toward the entrance just as the pounding stopped … only to be replaced by a hissing noise.
    “What’s that?”
    He frowned. “I don’t know.” A chemical odor filled the air, and he whipped his head up to a vent in the ceiling. “Shit! The window!”
    “I don’t understand—”
    He grabbed her hand, sprinted toward the window, and stumbled. He heard a thump behind him, turned, his vision going fuzzy, to see Mel, unconscious, on the floor.
    His last thought as he joined her was that, seriously, only pussies used gas …

Annika Svenson was now eight and a half months pregnant and kept saying that Oz’s predictions didn’t always pan out, that she was fine, that they’d been through so much shit together that the bad things between them had no doubt already happened.
    As much as he wanted Ani’s bravado and assurances about her pregnancy to wipe away his worries, Creed McCabe wasn’t having it. He was pretty sure Ani knew she hadn’t convinced him fully, but he wanted to keep her calm and so he pretended he didn’t hear the death watch beetle ticking in his ear all the goddamned time. It was driving him crazy, and he was superstitious enough to tie the omen to Oz’s prediction.
    The thing was, Ani couldn’t hear the tapping—when she woke in the middle of the night and found him staring at the ceiling, he’d tell her that the noise was driving him nuts. She told him he was hearing things.
    Death watch beetles also tapped and ticked while looking for a mate, he reminded himself. He remembered his own long waitfor Annika to decide to give him a chance, and for a moment he sympathized with the damned bug.
    She didn’t strut as well anymore—she had for the first eight months and now it was more of a strut-slash-waddle. And she looked damned cute doing so, and fuck, this should be the most joyous time in his life and instead he was walking around like Lurch with a hangover.
    Even his own mother told him to
lighten the hell up, dear
. Only Kat, the spirit who had been bound to him almost since birth through the tribal tats that went from head to toe on his right side, seemed to understand. Hell, she shared his anxiety. She’d fought the relationship with Annika for so long, but both females—one ghost, one warm, breathing woman—had learned to respect each other, to even like each other. Kat didn’t want to lose Annika either, and they both needed to keep their minds off even the remotest of possibilities.
    And so he worked with ACRO’s ghost hunters and took on jobs that wouldn’t take him far away from Ani, went with her on every appointment, and enjoyed the fuck out of her hormones, which kept him really busy for many, many hours of the day and night.
    She was excited and restless, and somewhere, deep down inside, he knew she was worried as well.
    And the whole time, he kept the ring in his pocket as if it could possibly ward off all evil, twisted it like a worry stone, and stared at Ani’s finger a lot when she was sleeping.
    “
We don’t need a piece of paper
,” she’d argued, and no, maybe they didn’t, but he wanted it, wanted something between them to be goddamned fucking easy for once.
    “You are seriously