Lions' Pride Read online

  “I can’t imagine eating.”

  “Magic takes a lot of energy. Even I know that. You’ll need to eat.” He put one hand on her arm. An almost brotherly gesture, but heat shot through her at his touch.

  “Thanks,” she said weakly and fled the kitchen.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jude passed from the warm, safe Otherworld and the company of his beloved mate and someone who, for whatever reason, smelled like home, to being alone in an Agency cell, in lion form.

  He felt safer in that form, but he had to make sure his body, and his shifting abilities, were his own again.

  He took a deep breath and willed himself into his wordy body. It worked, without the racking pain he remembered.

  Thank the Powers for that.

  He instantly regretted the shift, though. In lion form he’d felt tired but basically healthy. In this body he felt like he’d been hit by a truck.

  No, worse than a truck. Trucks weren’t trying to hurt you.

  Jude’s body ached in places he didn’t know it was possible to hurt. His face. His scalp. His fingers and toes. Basically everywhere, including a few places that didn’t have nerve endings, like his dreadlocks. His left shoulder throbbed dully, as if he’d torn something, and he was so tender where the tranq darts—or whatever they’d been—had hit him that he figured there must be a spectacular bruise.

  Still, he felt better than he had before. More whole, more like himself.

  Cautiously, he opened his eyes. He was alone.

  The cell was blurry.

  Shit and double shit. Blindness meant death, his lionside insisted.

  He blinked several times. It helped with the blurriness, but his eyes ached and burned and the dim light made him cringe.

  If he thought about it harder than his throbbing head liked, though, forced himself to move the aching muscles of his face enough to squint, he could see more or less normally, thank the Powers.

  Not that there was a damn thing worth looking at.

  No, the sights he could see when he closed his eyes were far superior—Elissa naked under him, her breasts and throat flushed a mottled rose with her pleasure, her face transfigured by ecstasy. Hell, Elissa sitting across from him at breakfast, hair frizzy, bathrobe pulled tight around her as if it would keep morning at bay, clutching the coffee that was her last hope of AM salvation.

  But he made himself focus on the ugliness, so he could find a way out of it.

  There was no way in hell he’d let those Agency bastards beat him. Oh, they were cocky, sure of their power, sure of their ultimate victory, especially the older guy, the sorcerer. In most cases they were right. You didn’t often hear of people getting away from the Agency. But Jude had Elissa, and with Elissa on his side, there was no one who could tame this lion.

  Including who or whatever was on the other side of the door right now.

  Jude rolled off the cot and to his feet. The room spun and a surge of pain and nausea almost floored him. He couldn’t find strength to shift again—must be the drugs, since shifting usually felt exhilarating, not draining—but by the time the door opened, he was solid on his feet, ready to pounce on the invader and do whatever he could. He surged forward, gathering what strength he could find within himself, in nature, in the thought of Elissa.

  He crashed into an invisible wall of ice.

  With his balance already shaky, he fell, hitting the cold cement floor as if he’d fallen from a much greater height.

  He looked up, and through eyes that were blurry and dim again saw the hard old man, the sorcerer who looked like a retired but still dangerous Special Forces officer.

  Great. He’d tried to punch out someone who could eviscerate him with a flick of his hand.

  The sorcerer raised his hand, said one word Jude couldn’t decipher.

  Ice filled his veins, freezing him in place. He couldn’t breathe properly, couldn’t think, could only fight the magic and fail and try not to let the fear show in his eyes. The terror of feeling his blood congeal and his flesh crystallize was worse than the pain, and it was excruciating enough to make everything he’d already experienced in this place pale. The only good thing was that he literally couldn’t move, so he couldn’t beg for mercy.

  “Hello, Mr. Duclos. Please forgive the binding, but you haven’t proven yourself trustworthy.” The sorcerer gave him a narrow-lipped smile.

  If the sorcerer were a sick bastard enjoying Jude’s suffering, that would make sense in a Psychos-R-Us way, but the smile belonged on a businessman satisfied he was doing a good job. Not even a businessman who loved his job; one who was bored, but pleased he was going to close the deal.

  He was a sick bastard, all right, but not the kind they made slasher movies about.

  He was the kind who had been made into a weapon and couldn’t find his way back again. The kind the government hired because it would be a waste to kill him after investing in the expensive training to make him the monster he was.

  The scariest sick bastard: the kind for whom it was all in a day’s work. Duty. Some people would even think he was a hero.

  “I am Agent Shaw. You, when you are allowed to speak again, will address me as Agent Shaw or sir, and not by any of the epithets that will occur to you at various points in your training. And you will be trained, Mr. Duclos. Your government needs what you can become. You’re a big predator, and as such you don’t fit into the human world. But you will help protect it once I’m done with you. Unfortunately, your training will be somewhat less pleasant than my own military experience, and I assure you Special Forces training is enjoyable only when you’re boasting later about what you endured. We start now.”

  Jude tried to spit, felt ice crystals in his throat.

  This had to be an illusion. Otherwise he’d be a corpsesicle.

  If it was an illusion, he could fight it. That didn’t take magic, just stubbornness—and everyone always said he had plenty of that.

  Jude called on memories of basking in front of the flickering fireplace; the drowsy warmth of his lion in the morning sun; the heat of Elissa’s body against his while they made love on a summer night.

  Better. He was still cold, but the sense of being trapped in a glacier receded enough that he could shiver. Through chattering teeth, he said, “Choke on a hairball and die, you Nazi wannabe.”

  His heart froze to a lump of crystalline meat in his chest.

  Not a metaphor. Death.

  Jude’s heart stopped. His spirit tried to leap from his dying body. The pain stopped abruptly, and he glimpsed the Otherworld, the Powers and his ancestors welcoming him to his next home. He wasn’t ready to go, but it didn’t look so bad. At least he couldn’t hurt anymore.

  The silver cord leaped and pulsed, sending warm, pleasurable sensation jarring through his spirit and through a body that should by rights be done with all feeling. From a great distance, he heard his wife scream his name and push breath and life at him.

  He slammed back into ice and pain. As he tumbled back to life, he realized Elissa hadn’t called him back. If she’d done it, it wouldn’t hurt nearly so much.

  He opened his eyes—he could again—saw Agent Shaw through a nimbus of colors that should be visible only to infrared sensors. Or maybe infrablue sensors, because they were sharp and cold and so far past violet they didn’t make sense. Shaw completed what looked like a ritual gesture.

  He gave another of those businesslike smiles. “Not so fast. That would be too easy an out for you. You are a fighter. I know you. You’re like me at heart.”

  “Evil and pompous? Don’t think so.” Jude’s voice came out a weak croak. Probably stupid, but being killed outright might be preferable to being tortured like this. Except he wouldn’t see Elissa again in this life, and that was enough reason to hold on.

  Shaw shook his head. For a fleeting instant, Jude thought he saw something in the lifeless gray eyes, something like a memory of what compassion felt like when Shaw still let himself have feelings.


  Shaw pointed his forefinger and sent another jolt of icy agony through Jude’s body. “Don’t try to goad me into killing you. It won’t work. It will only cause you more pain. I have no compunction about hurting you. I don’t enjoy it, but it’s part of my job and I pride myself on doing my job well.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You may yet. I haven’t decided. More likely I would fuck you, but forcing you to take a more active role might be…useful.” Shaw’s voice had no desire in it, just implacable will.

  Jude, struggling against pain and fear, had an unbidden memory of the dream about Rafe, Rafe’s elegant body with the feline obvious even inside the human form, Rafe’s caress, Rafe’s cock in his mouth.

  What had been delicious now seemed nauseating in the face of Shaw’s threat.

  Stubbornly, perversely, Jude held the memory, stroked it, made it more vivid.

  He didn’t know if he’d ever see Rafe again, or, if he did, if he’d react to him the way he had in that dream. But Trickster’s turds, Shaw wasn’t going to mess up a perfectly good erotic dream on top of everything else.

  Shaw took a few steps, crouched next to Jude, put one hand on Jude’s bare chest, right over his heart. The hand felt hot against Jude’s freezing skin, but it was the deceptive heat of ice. The smell of rot—moral rot decaying an aging but otherwise-healthy body—was overwhelming, even to Jude’s wordside. Far away, the lion retched. But at Shaw’s touch, the pain and cold that gripped him let go—it snaked back inside the sorcerer, to lurk until it was needed again—and warmth returned to his body as if Shaw’s magic had never tried to freeze him solid.

  “Please be aware that like hurting you, using you sexually would be serving my country. Nothing personal. Your psychological profile suggests you’re unlikely to bargain with your body, but if you’re tempted to try, know it would have unfortunate results.”

  As if he’d willingly get within five hundred feet of the guy without a sniper rifle, let alone willingly fuck him. “Anything you take from me will be taken by force,” Jude found the strength to say. “And what you take, you can’t keep. You may kill me, but you won’t break me.”

  “Oh, we will break you.” Cold confidence filled the sorcerer’s voice. Another blast of pain racked Jude, not as bad as others, but bad enough to remind him he was fundamentally helpless, at Shaw’s mercy.

  “You will live,” Jude heard above the pain. “You will learn. You will suffer. You will hate and fear and want to die and then you will want others to die because it will siphon off some of your pain.” The sorcerer’s voice was cold and dark and strangely layered, as if more than one person spoke through his mouth. It was silkily, sickly seductive, and Jude fell into it as if he plunged from a stunning height into oily black water. He drowned in the words. They filled his ears, his nostrils, his lungs.

  It was a spell. A spell to affect his will.

  Recognizing that, Jude could shake it off a little. Elissa had taught him a few things every young witch learned in case she ran afoul of someone using mind-altering magic. He couldn’t do them as well as a witch could, but Elissa said the lion, not easily moved by words—and the fact he was, as she put it, a stubborn, perverse bastard who never wanted to do what he was told anyway—would help him in a pinch.

  Trickster’s tits and testicles, she’d better be right.

  Focus on Elissa. Focus on the cement floor. Focus on soothing the lion, pacing angrily, unable to understand why he couldn’t eat this dangerous but conveniently distracted human. Focus on anything but the words.

  “You will despise me and yourself and everything else, and your anger and self-loathing and pain will become your whole world, until they are as beautiful to you as the daylight or the face of your woman. You will become your anger and you will kill without compunction.” Shaw’s words echoed the cadence of a human religious ritual, like the chanting Elissa’s family had done when they were married, like the call-and-response parts of the Mass, which he’d attended with human friends as a kid. Seductive, persuasive, beautiful. But no gods showed themselves, just bleak, oily power.

  His lion wanted to leap on the sorcerer now, but Jude held still, pretended he was drowning in language. He thought sorcerers might be vulnerable while casting these complex spells, especially when the power built to a head. Thanks to Elissa he knew enough about magic to be pretty sure Shaw was reaching that point.

  “In the end, you will be my creature, my killer, my creation and tool, and whether I tell you to suck my cock or kill the president or skin your mate alive, your answer will be…”

  “No!” Jude roared and flung himself at Shaw, knocking him backward with Jude on top of him. “And no is all you’ll get from me except a big ‘fuck you’.”

  Shaw was a massive man, almost as tall as Jude and solidly built. The guy must be over sixty, but he was still physically powerful. Jude was younger, more agile, probably stronger. He lacked the intense military training Shaw had gone through, but he was a black belt. If he’d been himself, he was pretty sure he could have kicked Shaw’s ass in a hand-to-hand fight…well, at least had a chance, especially with Shaw drained from casting.

  Having been dead, however briefly, does slow a guy down.

  Jude connected when he hit or kicked, but he didn’t have much force behind it. A couple of times he got an “oof” out of Shaw, but that was it. The only good news was that Shaw looked shaky, even though he managed to throw Jude aside and scramble to his feet. He hit hard enough to make Jude see stars, but considering he was already one giant ache, that didn’t take much.

  Finally Jude saw his chance. A good kick to the balls knocked the wind out of anyone, even a sorcerer.

  Unless he’d been Special Forces, in which case he grunted and tried to break your jaw before he let himself curl up in a self-protective ball.

  He was easier to tackle then, but hitting the floor with him jarred every already-sore muscle and joint in Jude’s battered body.

  For a second the two men lay panting on the cold floor, almost companionable in their exhaustion.

  Shaw tried the freezing trick again. It worked for about ten seconds, then Jude was on him again, shakier than ever, but madder than ever as well.

  Finally, after ineffectually rolling around banging each other’s heads into the floor, Jude ended up on top, kneeling on the older man’s forearms, using his weight to pin him while choking the life out of him. Shaw’s face darkened, his eyes bulged. His body struggled, but he was tiring, unable to throw Jude off.

  Or maybe Shaw wasn’t really trying, because he still looked triumphant, although he must realize he was one good squeeze or twist away from dying.

  It came to Jude like a message from the lion, although it was in human words: This was part of the Agency’s game. Otherwise, someone, probably several someones, would be in here, guns blazing, to rescue Shaw from the crazy lion-man, because the Agency was way too high-tech not to have surveillance cameras in the cell.

  You will become your anger and you will kill without compunction.

  It was already starting.

  There was no fucking way Jude would let it.

  Jude kept his weight on Shaw, but released the older man’s throat. “I get it,” he said. “You don’t give a shit if you die or not, because you break me either way and you’re so crazy it’s worth dying for. If I kill you, I prove you’ve half succeeded in turning me into a killing machine and the others will work on me that much harder. And if I don’t kill you, I’m weak in my own eyes, which might make me easier to break. But you know what? I can live with that better than with killing you and handing them my soul.”

  “Far too smart for an animal,” Agent Shaw croaked and passed out.

  At which point the door opened again and four agents with tranq guns poured in. Clearly they’d been waiting for this moment.

  “Guess I was right,” Jude said to Shaw’s unconscious form and raised his hands in the classic “don’t-shoot-me” pose.

  They shot anywa
y.

  The last thing he saw was a skinny, fragile-looking woman in a lab coat—nothing like Elissa, who was petite but muscled and fit. He thought he remembered her from feverish bits of the night before. A doctor? She rushed to Agent Shaw’s side, but as she reached for him, Jude could see her hands shook as if she reached for a venomous serpent.

  He wanted to reassure her somehow, because for all she was the enemy, he felt she wasn’t much better off than he was.

  Two of the agents dragged him back to his cot. He snarled, but couldn’t resist. His muscles wouldn’t cooperate. The convulsions started, and the pain and the sense he was being ripped apart to see if they could make something new from the scraps.

  Not this shit again. He couldn’t fight it and, weakened as he was, might not survive trying. Elissa and Rafe had pulled his bacon from the fire last time, but he couldn’t rely on it happening another time. Magic was chancy, especially long-distance magic.

  With his last scrap of strength, Jude willed himself to pass out.

  Chapter Twenty

  Elissa tumbled through stars, completely untethered. Something had snapped her connection to Jude and to the earth. Falling didn’t seem too bad in comparison.

  Landing was going to be a bitch, but in the meantime, the stars, blurring with her speed, were cold glory and in the vacuum of space she felt safe.

  Detached and alone and so very cold, but safe. That was all she could hope for, without Jude: to be alone and cold, but safe.

  Then something grabbed her. Anchored her. Shook her roughly.

  Hands gripped her shoulders. A voice she should recognize but didn’t blasted away the stars and ordered her to wake up.

  She squirmed, tried to escape the intruding, unwelcome presence. Waking would mean reality, and reality meant pain and loss.

  “Wake up!” This time she could identify the voice and the hands as male.

  She was half in space, half somewhere else, aware now she wasn’t actually moving. Aware her heart was beating, her lungs faithfully collecting air, although the last thing she remembered before she fell was Jude’s heart stopping.