Lions' Pride Read online

  Jude was dead.

  And someone was annoying the hell out of her by forcing her to live while he was gone.

  If she got rid of the intrusion, she could go back to that cold, starry place and maybe catch up with her husband.

  She opened her eyes and summoned her energy. A big guy leaned over her, not as big as Jude, but too solid to push away easily. Her brains weren’t working well enough to recognize him even though his face seemed vaguely familiar.

  Using what magic she could muster without confronting the emptiness where her link to Jude should be, she shoved.

  The big guy flew across the room and landed against the coffee table with a startled grunt. He sat up, rubbing his shoulder, and said, “What the hell was that for?”

  As he did, she realized two things.

  The man was Rafe Benedict and she should have recognized him because she had a tentative new copper cord linking her spirit to his.

  And the silver cord connecting her to Jude still pulsed, weakly and erratically, but leading somewhere in this world, not the Otherworld.

  Jude was alive.

  She sprang to her feet.

  That was the intention, anyway. She was trapped in blankets and her legs were shaky. Rather than springing, she struggled until she oozed off the sofa, blankets and all.

  She clutched the blankets around her. The room was warm, warmer than it usually was, but she couldn’t stop shivering.

  “Jude…still alive…” Her voice seemed to come from someplace far away, someplace cold and studded with stars. Her teeth chattered. “But we’ve got to…”

  She sat again, abruptly. Her head swam with stars and images of Jude being tormented by a stern, military-looking older man using magic and plain, old-fashioned pain.

  With remarkable grace for someone who’d been knocked ass over teakettle, Rafe reached her side. “Easy there. Take it slow.” He sat next to her and drew her close. “You were in shock. Still are, a little. You collapsed at the foot of the stairs, and you were freezing. Talk to me, but don’t try to move yet.”

  His skin burned her through the layers of blankets. She didn’t think it was only because she was cold.

  His eyes were cat’s eyes, with slitted pupils and no whites. Not Jude’s lion eyes, but something close.

  Her mind snapped back into focus.

  “Might want to take those jeans off…” she said weakly, “or they’re going to be uncomfortable in a few minutes.”

  “Sweetheart, I told you to take it slow!” Rafe grinned in keeping with the desperate attempt at silliness. His teeth were pointed, a carnivore’s fangs. His voice dropped, became throatier, not like a man talking dirty in the dark, but the way a big cat might sound if it acquired human speech. “I appreciate the compliment, but this isn’t the time.”

  “No, it’s not. You’re going to go cougarside any second now. Get your pants off before you’re tangled up in them, and get off my couch before you rip it.”

  Or rip her, but she decided not to say that. Making him nervous could be bad.

  “What…” He either saw something in her face or realized something strange was going on with his body, but in any case he rocketed to the center of the room. “You’re awfully calm about this,” he said with another overly toothy grin. “Doesn’t having a cougar in the living room faze you?”

  She shrugged, although the movement was probably lost under blankets. “For me, a big cat in the house is normal.”

  He tried to answer—to make a smartass remark, she suspected. He opened his mouth, but the sound that came out wasn’t anything human. His catlike eyes went wide and wild and astonished. He fumbled at his zipper with hands that were sprouting tawny fur.

  He didn’t get them off before they ripped.

  She turned her head away. There was something intensely private about the moment a dual embraced his animal. She and Rafe had found themselves sharing—maybe oversharing—a lot during the last terrifying hours, but watching him bring himself to orgasm felt less invasive than watching his first shift.

  When she looked back, a cougar paced in circles around her living room rug, his tail twitching nervously. She hadn’t realized how big cougars were. He was leaner and more lightly built than Jude was as a lion, but long. He took up a lot of the living room.

  Even after years with Jude, she couldn’t read feline expressions the way another dual could, but at a guess, this cougar looked confused.

  Fortunately, life with a dual meant she didn’t have anything fragile at tail level, because Rafe as a cougar had as much tail action going as an over-excited lab puppy, with a lot more tail involved.

  Unfortunately, a twitching tail on a feline meant something very different than it did on a dog.

  “Hold onto yourself,” she said, quietly so as not to startle the cougar.

  She trusted wordside Rafe not to harm her. He was a cop, a good cop, the kind who took protection of the innocent seriously enough to go outside the letter of the law if he needed to in order to do what was right.

  Cougarside Rafe, on the other hand, was a mass of instincts he didn’t know how to control. Probably an alarmed mass of instincts, and anyone who’d ever spent time with house cats, let alone big, wild felines, knew nervous cats could be dangerous.

  Jude should be here. Jude could reach him with silentspeech, would know how to guide him safely through the bombardment of his feline senses and the new sensations of his feline body.

  But Jude wasn’t here. Jude was alive, and that was a miracle because she swore she’d felt him die, but he was still in terrible danger.

  He was still in such danger because she and Rafe hadn’t managed to spring him yet.

  She had to face facts. Even if she could summon a ghost to help them, the only way she could gather enough power to rescue her husband was through partnered sex magic. Every time they’d been able to contact, let alone aid Jude, she and Rafe had been touching, or interacting sexually even if they weren’t actually touching, and when they stopped, the contact broke off.

  She watched the cougar pace.

  To save her husband, she’d have to risk her marriage and her heritage.

  That was, as soon as two hundred or so pounds of cat figured out how to turn itself back to a man.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Meanwhile, she had a ghost to call and a decade of fear to overcome. And Rafe needed some alone time to figure out his new form. It wouldn’t do either of them—or more importantly, Jude—any good for her to sit there shouting, “Don’t sharpen your claws on the carpet!” If the carpets couldn’t take it, they didn’t belong in her house anyway. The bedroom was the safest place for her to work; the protections were strongest there.

  Moving away from Rafe, even cougar-Rafe, made everything cold and scary again, but they’d be better off with a bit of distance between them, even if it was just one floor.

  Elissa flopped on the unmade bed, which still smelled of Jude so much it brought tears to her eyes.

  No good. She moved to the floor, sitting cross-legged in front of the altar.

  She could still smell him.

  She bit her lip and forced back the tears. No time for that, or for curling up in a ball and trying to escape the problem, because there was no escaping it, no one else who could handle it, at least not without smoking-crater potential.

  She had exactly one ally—who, from the sound of it, was practicing his hunting skills on her sofa.

  Like it or not, she’d need a ghost on their side.

  Deep breath. Ghosts couldn’t actually hurt you. Even normies who shrieked in pleasurable terror at horror movies knew that.

  Elissa grounded and centered. Tried to center, anyway. Her first attempt left her feeling off balance.

  Jude wasn’t there.

  Panic tightened her throat. Was he…

  No, the silver cord still bound them together, and the cord pulsed with his heartbeat. Alive, but far away and heavily warded, as if they’d put extra protections arou
nd him after his brush with death. To let him recover or to block outside aid—block her, basically? She had no way of knowing.

  Or maybe she was far away. Everything she’d been taught claimed the things she’d already done with Rafe, let alone the sex magic she figured they had to try, should damage both her power and her bond with Jude.

  So far, though, the magic seemed to work. The hearth glowed with a warm golden light to her witch-sight, although the fire had long since burned out, and she’d been able to light the altar candles without striking a match.

  The bond with Jude would do no good if the Agency killed him or warped him beyond recognition.

  Never mind what her family claimed. Sometimes the end did justify the means. If she spent the rest of her life alone and magically inert, but knew Jude was alive, the sacrifice would be worth it.

  She tried to center again, reached inside for that point of stillness and safety.

  Still off-kilter. Jude wasn’t where he belonged, and Rafe was where he didn’t belong. She might have to center the way a single person would, cutting off the smaller connections and reaching inward.

  She visualized putting clamps on the pulsing cords, temporarily cutting off her links to Jude and Rafe.

  The imaginary clamps popped off.

  She couldn’t figure out how to cut off her link with either man. It would make this balancing and centering business far trickier, yet she found it comforting. They were with her.

  If she couldn’t shut down the links, she had to make them more even.

  Without taking anything away from Jude, she visualized the cord connecting her to Rafe as beefier. She used her mind to shift the cord so it flowed from the right side of her body, directly opposite Jude’s, which came from her heart.

  No. That might provide visual balance, but not magical balance.

  She had feelings for Rafe. They weren’t as strong or as deeply rooted as what she felt for Jude, but she couldn’t afford to ignore them. She’d been drawn to him, and not just with erotic fascination, since he’d been pulled into their kitchen and their world. He’d risked his career for them almost immediately, and now he risked far more.

  If it didn’t go against everything she’d been taught, she’d say she was falling in love with him, without falling the least bit out of love with Jude.

  She moved the copper cord again, visualizing it emanating from her heart, close to Jude’s.

  As if it had a mind of its own, it moved even closer and twined itself around Jude.

  What the hell? That shouldn’t have happened. The link shouldn’t have that much of a mind of its own. Maybe a link with another magic-user, but duals weren’t magic-users.

  Then again, Rafe seemed to be a pretty unusual dual.

  Tentatively, she tried to center again with the cords in their new configuration.

  Stable as the pyramids.

  Now was not the time to question how that worked, curious as she was. Now was the time to power up and…Lord and Lady help her…talk to the dead.

  She reached deep into the earth. The uppermost inch or so was mud, cold, but rich with the promise of spring. Below that lay ice crystals. She cursed the necessity that forced her to work unfamiliar magics before the spring equinox. If the Agency had waited another week, she’d be a lot stronger.

  If they knew who she was, they’d planned things this way.

  But even with winter still gripping the land, enough life-force lingered for her to work with. The soil here liked her, and it was thawing from its long winter’s icy slumber. Roots of trees and perennial plants ran deep, and they liked her. The soil cradled seeds, and sleepy as they were, they liked her. Inside the warmth of the house, her potted plants thrived, and they didn’t just like her, they loved her to the extent plants could love because she was their goddess, the bringer of light and heat and water. All were willing to loan her a bit of their green energy.

  The room glowed green, faint and pale at first, then the vibrant chartreuses and emeralds of new spring growth.

  From there she went deep in her own body, drew on the energy of her womb, her sexual energies. Shaken as she was, it wasn’t easy to find the place where the serpent energy of sex and sensuality lived. Images of Jude in her arms, his body drenched with the sweat of passion, his cock hard and ready, mutated all too quickly to the awful moment when she thought he was dead. Stray thoughts of Rafe’s hand stroking himself, his eyes penetrating her as surely as a cock ever had, did the same, spiraling to the end of all things: Jude broken, Jude dead.

  Finally, in desperation, Elissa rummaged in the toy drawer of the bedside table and pulled out her favorite vibrator.

  She looked at it dubiously. Donovans considered it bad form to call upon sex toys for magical use. A strong witch, they claimed, was in tune enough with the life-force and in control enough of her own body to turn on sexual energy through concentration alone.

  Whoever had set that tidy dictum down in the Donovan grimoire—back in the day when sex toys were made of bone or ivory—had obviously never tried to raise red power in a life-or-death emergency.

  She touched the vibrator to her clit.

  Her mind fought its familiar persuasions at first, but the vibrations eventually became too strong to resist. Moisture flooded her as tendrils of energy spiraled inside her womb, then issued out to add their red glow to the room. Her pussy clenched.

  Biting her lip to keep from coming, Elissa turned off the toy. She needed just enough sexual energy to give her summoning a little more oomph.

  And to heighten her own protections.

  Through all the preparation, she had deliberately let herself forget what she was trying to do. Otherwise she might have been too anxious to set up the preliminaries properly. Rushing and jangled nerves had both played their part, she knew, of what had gone wrong so many years ago.

  She wouldn’t take that risk now. Then she had been a lonely teenager so desperate to talk to her grandmother that she hadn’t considered other spirits might answer her call. Those hadn’t even been seriously unfriendly—they were relatives, after all—just annoyed at being pestered and trying to teach her a lesson in using her powers respectfully.

  Now, she had to take every precaution. She was stepping into unfamiliar territory this time, territory she couldn’t see and the ghosts could. Chances were good the ghost she summoned would be angry and quite possibly insane.

  She reinforced the protections on the house and on herself one last time, visualized the etheric path to the Agency compound, following Jude and closing in on the stench of fear and despair.

  In a place such as that, there must be ghosts.

  With luck she’d find one willing to help.

  It surprised her how quickly she made the journey—a whoosh that reminded her of the pneumatic tubes at the bank drive-in, and she was there.

  Wherever “there” was.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Elissa could see only the dimmest blurs of light and shade, faint, blobby outlines with a nimbus of energy around them. But she could sense things she probably couldn’t have were she there physically.

  Earth overhead, concrete and metal. Crushing weight. Crying, damaged earth contaminated by toxins. The place was buried and bombproof, and could withstand just about any force.

  Despite all that, something felt familiar. It wasn’t too far away, under exactly the same weather Geneva was experiencing. Once, this poisoned soil had been the same rocky but fertile clay as her own yard.

  Damn, it had to be the old Seneca army depot.

  They’d decommissioned the base more than ten years ago. The soldiers were gone, the missiles once stored there moved elsewhere, and the parts of the land not too contaminated by leaked toxic chemicals were gradually being converted to civilian use.

  Or at least that was what the army claimed. But it would be easy enough to say that then let some other branch of the government quietly continue to use some of the facilities under the guise of a private company. What t
he hell else would you do with acres of underground nuclear missile storage other than use it for some other shady “national security” purpose?

  At least it would be easy to get there. Getting in was another question, but she and Rafe wouldn’t need to drive to Arizona or something crazy like that.

  Elissa walked—floated, rather—down the corridor, trying to get her bearings. More people worked here than she’d expected, although the moving blobs of energy looked more like ghosts to her right now. Many were normies, their auras day-at-the-office neutral, some with the dark orange overlay of working too hard. A few looked red—an angry, muddied shade of red, not the clear, healthy red of sexual passion—or dull charcoal with resigned despair.

  When she saw one from a distance that flared with the telltale screaming magenta of sorcery—streaked with a muddy black that meant bad to the bone—she squeezed herself as close to the wall as she could and backed up. Surely there’d be an open door somewhere she could slip through, a corridor she could turn down.

  A sorcerer wouldn’t necessarily sense her etheric form unless he was looking for magical anomalies. But he might, if he was good enough. And that strange brown-striped blob with him—that looked like a beast witch, though tainted, and a witch might sense some disturbance, something/someone who shouldn’t be there. This wasn’t like riding her link to Jude. She was, for magical purposes, really there.

  They wouldn’t put out a welcome mat and make her pancakes.

  The sorcerer-blob and the witch-blob were still heading for her. They seemed to be talking. At least she figured that was the low hum she heard from their direction, but about what? They were faceless to her. For all she knew, they might be arguing about how to contain this disembodied intruder. All she could do was keep backing away, hoping for a hidey-hole.

  In theory, her defensive spells might work in this form, but she’d never tried.

  Why hadn’t someone made her try?

  Right. That would be because a witch with any sense would avoid any situation where she’d need to cast while etheric, especially a weak witch like her.