Lions' Pride Read online

  To save the one they love, they’re going in with spells blazing…

  Duals and Donovan: The Different, Book 1

  Elissa Donovan is a real green witch—when she and her lion-shapeshifter husband have sex, the blazing heat is recycled to warm their house. Now her beloved Jude has been kidnapped by a shadowy government agency, and the last place she can turn for help is her high-powered family, who considers her magic mediocre.

  When Rafe Benedict gets Elissa’s call for muscle to back up her magic, he risks his law enforcement career to answer. He’s spent a lifetime hiding his Dual ability, but something about Elissa and Jude’s magic awakens the cougar within him.

  Tempting, bronzed Rafe is the perfect fuse for Elissa’s sex-fueled magic. Danger lies in breaking her vows; joining with anyone other than her true mate could not only send her marriage up in flames, it could burn out her powers in a last, all-or-nothing explosion. But Jude is worth the risk. And for Rafe, potential heartbreak is nothing next to the chance to help the two people he’s coming to love.

  First, though, Rafe needs a crash course in Cougar…

  Warning: This title contains evil fae, guys with guns, shadowy government conspiracies, a snarky ghost, and smoking-hot, three-way sex.

  eBooks are not transferable.

  They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

  577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520

  Macon GA 31201

  Lion’s Pride

  Copyright © 2009 by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  ISBN: 978-1-60504-671-6

  Edited by Linda Ingmanson

  Cover by Natalie Winters

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: September 2009

  www.samhainpublishing.com

  Lions’ Pride

  Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Dedication

  For Jeff, my favorite Leo. You are my heart, hearth and home, now and always.

  Chapter One

  The lion padded through the wet, slush-covered nighttime streets. Geneva, New York was all but silent at four AM. The chill late-winter air clouded his hot breath, and he skirted dirty remnants of snow. More wet snow spat from the gray sky, but he smelled the coming spring—mud and the thawing lake and far-off manure, too faint for a human to smell.

  Something else was out there, too, something in the air he couldn’t name, but which made his blood thrum with anticipation. It sent surges of energy through his great golden body, made him hunger for the hunt, for the thrill of fresh game. For other things as well, although those he always hungered for: the green, fresh scent of his mate, the heat of her skin, the passion of their bodies intertwined.

  It made him want things he couldn’t name, and the frustration of not knowing what he craved made him want to roar.

  So he did, letting loose with a noise that shattered the quiet darkness.

  A light went on in a neighboring house, but the lion was already slinking into the shadows.

  He caught the musty smell of old dog and heard its wheezing breath before he turned the corner. Normally he avoided dogs. They barked, and humans tended to look out the window to see what was going on.

  But tonight he hungered. He had eaten, and eaten well, and the part of him that was wild and thus sensible realized it was stupid to kill and eat when you were already full. Besides, dogs had a musty, processed-food flavor.

  But blood and meat and the satisfaction of the kill would quench his restlessness.

  He turned the corner, sprang.

  The dog died, but not before it yelped in terror.

  In one of the nearby houses, a light came on. The lion, muzzle buried in his prey, ignored it as he tore into still-hot flesh, gulped the salt-and-copper blood.

  He couldn’t ignore the scream so easily, the woman’s scream that cut through the darkness and the satisfaction of a fresh kill.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  He’d been seen.

  The lion melted away into the darkness and bolted for home.

  Elissa Donovan paced the dim predawn kitchen, clutching a cup of herbal tisane that wasn’t soothing her and vaguely wondering if she was wearing a track in the black and white vinyl flooring.

  How could she have not sensed Jude slipping out of bed? At this time of year, she needed to be alert where he was concerned. The shifting seasons called to his lionside. With the equinox just a few days away, he was restless, tense, prone to let the animal make decisions the more human part of him—the part duals like Jude called the wordside—ought to make.

  Of course, she thought, stretching a body still sated from lovemaking, having the lionside on the ascendant had its advantages. Jude was always passionate, but when the lion was bleeding over into his wordy form, he was deliciously more so.

  If he hadn’t made love to her so thoroughly, though, she wouldn’t have been so sound asleep. She’d have known he needed to roam. Sometimes, when Jude’s lion was too strong, he couldn’t trust himself to drive. He’d get distracted by sounds and smells beyond the range of human senses to focus on the road. But he could have woken her. She’d have driven him.

  Instead he was Powers-knew-where, getting into Powers-knew-what kind of trouble. Damn the man—she swore he got a kick out of teasing the Agency. It would have been easy enough in this largely rural area to find an isolated house, but no…he’d insisted on buying in town. For her, he’d said. Witches need contact with nature, but also with other humans, and since he wasn’t exactly human, she needed to be in a town.

  It was all true, but then he’d go put himself at risk like this, then wonder why she couldn’t sleep unless she took valerian or he fucked her into limp exhaustion.

  Six more months, she told herself. That was all it would take to finish the immigration paperwork. With its cold climate and a Different population that leaned more toward shamans and healers, Canada actively sought green witches who were good at coaxing plants to grow in cold climates—her great strength, and a known specialty of the Donovan line. Back the Donovan name with a Cornell graduate degree in plant genetics and they could apply for the Canadian equivalent of a green card through official channels.

  And unofficially, Canada, with its wide-open spaces, large Native population who’d always lived side by side with their Different neighbors and an attitude of polite tolerance, had an open-door policy for otherwise law-abiding American duals who didn’t want to take Drozz, suppress their natural abilities and “fit into human society” under Agency policing.

  Six more months, give or take a little, until her project at the Ag Station was done.

  If she left before then, someone at the Agency might wonder if she was running from something rather than simply accepting a position at, say, the University of Calgary.

  Once, she’d regretted not being one of the stronger Donovan witches. Now she was glad. The Agency, the otherwise-nameless government branch that kept tabs on witches and other magically gifted humans as well as the nonhuman Differents, noticed if you could shift weather patterns, like her father, or cure diseases that conventional medicine couldn’t touch, like her mother, or talk to murder victims to solve crimes, like her aunt Bathsheba. But she was off their radar. The D
epartment of Agriculture’s magical-research division had seen her name on a few grant applications, but that was it. Green magic was useful, but innocuous, and her only other strong talent wasn’t something the Agency worried about.

  Red magic.

  Sex magic. Fertility magic. Potentially powerful, but at the same time unpredictable, with a tendency to get out of control and become explosive, embarrassing, or both. Best used in the privacy of one’s own home, to raise energy for purely domestic matters and to connect with the Powers.

  Hence the doctorate. That and her green magic made her useful to normies, even if her own family thought of her as a beloved disappointment.

  No one looked at one-trick ponies except when they were doing that one trick. And if no one looked too hard at Dr. Elissa Donovan, good scientist and so-so witch, they might not notice Jude. Or at least not notice he wasn’t human.

  She sat abruptly on the hard kitchen chair, buried her head in her hands, dizzied—not for the first time—by what a government supposedly by the people, for the people, was doing to its own citizens. Including denying the basic rights of citizenship to many of them on the basis of species.

  Head in her hands, she almost didn’t hear the door open.

  Paranoia propelled her to her feet. She knew who it had to be, knew the odds of someone else getting through both physical and metaphysical locks were slim. Anyway, now he was inside the safety of the wards, she could feel him, warm and brown and gold, clearer to her spirit even than to her eyes.

  She turned because she wanted to see him.

  He stood in the doorway, strange and glorious, wet snow haloed in his hair, half golden fur, half bare brown skin, in transition between one half of his dual nature and the other.

  Desire flared and sparked between them in the seconds as he became, in appearance, fully human, cocoa-skinned and green-eyed and delicious and naked as the day he was born.

  Her Jude. Her love. Her lion.

  The furry idiot.

  “Where in the name of the Powers have you been? Couldn’t you wake me up so I could drive you someplace safe? But no, you had to sneak out and make me imagine the worst. That you’d run away for some bizarre reason that only makes sense to a lion, that the Agency had broken into the house and spirited you away, even crazier things. What were you thinking?”

  “Spring fever, I guess. Something in the air is ruffling my fur, even when I’m wordside-out.” He rocked back and forth restlessly, raised his head as if sniffing the air. He was naked and gorgeous, all sleek muscles and height. His cock, tempting in its promise, called to her.

  She wanted to beat him over the head with something because he was a complete and utter idiot, an adrenaline junkie who chose not to control his lionside. No one would have cared if he’d gone for a late-night walk looking like a human. He’d just be a guy walking off insomnia. But no, he had to stalk around looking like a freaking predator of the veldt, which was just a bit conspicuous in the Finger Lakes, and put himself at risk.

  She opened her mouth to tell him so and got as far as, “You asshole. Do I have to lock you up so the Agency doesn’t?”

  He raised one elegant brown hand. “Yell later. I deserve it, but we’ve got more important things to worry about right now. Elissa, someone saw me.”

  “How could you? Do you think you’re fifteen and playing games with the normies?” Fury and fear swirled together. Something red swelled inside her. Magic surged and attempted to break free. She tasted it in the back of her throat, raspy, burning hot and bitter. The undertone of green herbs and earth marked it as her own, but it felt stronger than what she could normally tap.

  Out of instinct, out of need, she tried to hold it, shape it. Use it to defend her home and her husband.

  Hearth, home, heart…

  She felt rather than saw the power shift color from angry red to green. The iron-filings taste receded.

  No use. Tapping that power never worked. It shouldn’t surprise her. She was what normies called, simplistically, a white witch, one who called on and shaped the world’s positive energies: love, lust, green springtime growth, even the passing back of life into the soil in the fullness of time, for that, too, was part of the life cycle. A Donovan witch, one of the strictest and narrowest traditions of so-called white witchcraft. And a weak Donovan at that.

  For someone with different training, it was possible to transmute fear and anger into something useful and positive. But not for most Donovans. Especially not Donovans who really needed the power boost.

  It teased her with its fierce strength. But it remained maddeningly out of reach.

  “High Lord and Lady, what were you doing? No, let me guess. Hunting, right?”

  He nodded, looking as close to sheepish as it was possible for him to look. The humility lasted for all of three seconds before he countered, “At least I wasn’t trying to bring another lioness into the pride. Then you really would kill me.” He had the temerity to wiggle his eyebrows and grin at his own poor attempt at a joke.

  She fought the urge to throw something—such as a fireball—at him. “Can you be serious for a few minutes? Probably not, but try. Unauthorized flirting pisses me off, which is bad. But eating the neighbors’ pets means you’re a psycho or an Undrozzed dual, and either one’ll get you locked and medicated and that’s way, way worse. Is that so hard to remember?”

  “Sometimes it is. Elissa…I’m sorry. I was so restless. I needed to prowl and the lion got demanding.”

  Elissa studied her husband. Now that she wasn’t blinded by emotion, she recognized the meat-sated look in his wide green eyes. A few drops of blood flecked where his muzzle would have been while he was lionside. The shift had cleaned up most of the mess from the hunt, but not all of it.

  Idiot.

  The untappable protopower flared red again, then fell.

  Her anger at Jude subsided, too, replaced by anxiety and love and grudging compassion. If she were forced to hide her magic day in and day out for fear of arrest and forcible “medical treatment” for something that wasn’t a medical problem, she’d get stupid with frustration sometimes, too.

  Jude pounded his fist on the counter. “We’ve got to get ready in case someone called the cops. I tried to avoid snow patches, but it’s muddy out there. I left tracks. You’re the smart one. Think of something to tell them.”

  Tracks? She cursed under her breath, then changed the curse to a prayer. Most Donovans had some weather-working talent—but not her, not even enough to shift the erratic local weather one way or the other, which should be about as easy as making it rain in Oregon.

  She’d never been able to do that, either, much to the amusement of her siblings and cousins. A five-year-old could make it rain in Oregon; not Elissa.

  But sometimes you get lucky.

  “We may be all right,” she said. “Listen.”

  They held their breaths.

  As freezing rain began to fall, wiping out Jude’s tracks, diluting Jude’s scent, she finally took the two seemingly vast steps across the kitchen and wrapped her errant, stupid, immature—and beloved—husband in her arms. “Come back to bed, darling,” she said. “It’s late. Besides, if someone tracks you here, we’ll look less suspicious if they have to wake us up.”

  “Makes sense.” He pulled her a little closer. “Besides, curling up with you is always good.”

  But when she smelled the wild musk and predatory power that clung to him, desire bloomed inside her, gold and green positive energy that fueled her powers.

  The silver cord of energy between Elissa and Jude, an etheric echo of their commitment, throbbed and thrummed. As the magic flared, she writhed against him, feeling how hard he’d become, a hardness that sought to enter and merge with the springtime flood surging between her legs.

  “Powers,” Jude breathed into her hair. “How do you always do this to me? Your magic’s stroking my skin.”

  “Come to bed,” she repeated, one hand on his bare chest.

  “No,
” he begged, “here?”

  She thought of their bedroom, the fireplace that was the house’s actual hearth, the anchor for her magic, the skylight on which the saving rain drummed, the altar by the bed where the plants that supported the indoor wards and protections—the dwarf Alberta spruce from Yule, forced spring bulbs, potted herbs, a passion fruit vine—grew and gathered power. Conventional teaching said they should make love there, in the magical center of her hearth and home, to collect and contain the energy.

  But the kitchen was, in many ways, the heart of any home. So her grandmother Josie had taught, smiling slyly at the Donovan in-laws who called her a kitchen witch, and not always behind her back. Elissa had taken advantage of the bedroom fireplace to set up her hearth and center of her power, but she’d made the kitchen a secondary hearth. It would work.

  It would make Jude happy.

  And the “pardon-me-you-caught-us-in-the-middle-of-fucking” thing would, if necessary, be a good way to deflect a cop’s questions. Naked, sex-flushed people had a tendency to stop conversation.

  “If there’s trouble coming,” she said, “we need to reinforce the wards.”

  He smiled at that. One of the few advantages of needing red magic to augment her limited power was that tasks like bolstering the house’s defenses could be a lot of fun for both of them.

  “Hearth, home, heart,” she invoked, calling upon the three sources basic to indoor magic, and by extension to the Lord and Lady who governed all life.

  The power latent in the kitchen rose, bathing the room in soft light that had nothing to do with the light fixture overhead.

  Elissa shuddered as Jude drew off her bathrobe—then shivered less pleasurably at the chill. Jude didn’t feel cold the way a human would. His basal body temperature, even wordside, was feline-high, several degrees above the human norm. Elissa wasn’t so lucky, and at five feet tall and just over a hundred pounds, she didn’t have much insulation.

  But she did have magic, magic surging through her as Jude’s hot hands ran over her skin. A small gesture and the smallest of spells—one of Grandma Josie’s, not a traditional one—and she shut out the March chill and damp while letting them still hear the sound of the rain.