Lions' Pride Read online

  Whoa, where had that come from?

  The truly weird thing was that he meant it.

  He’d shaken his head regretfully in the past when a dual “went bad” and got sent into an Agency rehabilitation center, because he knew the rehab centers never rehabilitated anyone, just broke them into a drugged docility that made humans feel safer. But he’d never felt the urge to intervene.

  For Jude, he would.

  Never mind the guy had made a concerted effort to take him out. Maybe it was for Elissa, with her honey eyes and her attitude. Or because despite everything he swore he could still feel those strings connecting his heart to this crazy couple.

  “So, I…” If he was going to get embarrassed, shouldn’t he have done so a long time ago? “I should be going. Let you guys…get dressed and get on with your day. Night. Whatever.”

  Elissa put a small hand on his arm. Even through the heavy coat, her touch burned him. “Yes, go now. But you must come back, and soon.” Her eyes were intense, her diction formal. Rafe recognized it as a geas, a spell of obligation. He’d been drilled in how to recognize them at the academy. He bristled for a second, trying instinctively to resist.

  His body took this moment to remind him, rather insistently, it would be a reason to see her again, and Jude. Presumably with clothes on, which was a pity, but an excuse nevertheless.

  “Elissa!”

  She turned her gaze to Jude. “There is a mystery here, Jude, one we cannot ignore. Rafe means us well. I can sense that much of him, and you should be able to smell that much of him, even through the Drozz. But the wards recognize him. We need to learn why, or my heart tells me all of us may be in danger.”

  Her voice didn’t sound normal at all. Rafe shivered, realized the geas was being woven tighter around him. Jude shook his mane of dreadlocks, said, “You heard the lady. Get out of our house. You’ll know when she’s ready to have you back,” and made a shooing gesture that seemed curiously good-humored under the circumstances.

  Rafe could move again. He managed, somehow, not to scramble for the door and bolt. Instead, he walked with studied nonchalance into freezing rain and a small-town dawn that seemed all the more ordinary in contrast with the cozy kitchen that was the scariest and strangest place he’d ever been.

  Chapter Six

  For an irrational moment after Rafe Benedict left, Jude wanted to lash out at his wife. How could Elissa’s magic make a mistake like that? Sure, the cop seemed like an okay guy. He smelled honest, even with the undertone of wrongness from the Drozz that made him seem almost human. Jude even understood how, if you’d always thought you were human, you might want to keep the comfortable illusion instead of the unfamiliar and socially unacceptable truth.

  But “okay guy” shouldn’t have pulled Rafe in. Otherwise, the sweet older couple next door should have been popped out of their beds and into the kitchen. Even “charming and easy-on—the-eyes guy” shouldn’t have done it. Not unless…

  “Elissa,” he finally asked, because it was the only explanation he could think of, “were you fantasizing about that guy?”

  She snorted. “I should get mad at that, but it’s so silly it’s not worth the effort. I’m a witch. We were doing red magic. I have enough discipline not to risk a backlash because the magic didn’t know where heart was. Even if I’d ever seen the guy in my life to fantasize about him, which I hadn’t.”

  “Of course. Of course. I had to ask, though. I still don’t understand…”

  “Magic? It takes a while. I don’t understand it fully, and I grew up with it.”

  “I was thinking more human brains. How can humans think about anything else, let alone anyone else, during sex? I know you can, that it’s normal, even. It’s just so damn bizarre.”

  “I’m surprised so few witches have figured out that duals make the perfect partners for red magic, even if you’re not much on conversation in bed. That focus is something else. It’s fun, too.” She managed a smile, and it diffused a lot of his remaining anger.

  Finally, Jude said, “I respect that he came to warn me. He didn’t need to do that. It would be safer for him if he didn’t. Even if you choose Drozz, they’re always waiting to see if you screw up, and that’s got to count as a major screw-up.”

  “You’re intrigued by him, aren’t you?” It sounded like a non-sequitur, but Jude knew it was more like Elissa reading his mind, his body language, what he wasn’t saying, far too well for his comfort.

  He considered trying to lie, just to see if he could, then decided he’d given her enough good reasons to be mad at him lately. Throwing a pointless lie on top of them was living dangerously, and the dog-snack had been more than enough living dangerously for this month. An angry witch wasn’t comfortable to live with. The static in the air made his fur stand on end, which tickled the internal organs when he was lionside-in, even though the fur wasn’t actually there in the usual sense.

  “Yes,” he said slowly, trying to think just how to answer so he was telling the truth but not the parts of the truth he wasn’t ready to bring up. “There’s something compelling about him. Unusual. Not normal human or normal dual, and it wasn’t just the Drozz. I felt like I should trust him, even though it made no sense. It didn’t make the situation any easier.”

  “No, it didn’t.” She laughed, one of those laughs that seemed to start deep in her body and end somewhere around his cock. “The whole bronzed Native American god thing he had going on didn’t exactly help, either, from my perspective.”

  He raised his eyebrows. Normies were a mixed bunch, some monogamous by nature, others anything but. Witches, though, were like duals with a wolfside—one partner until death, as if it were bred in the bone. Elissa’s movie collection proved a witch liked a good ogle of their preferred sex as much as the next person, but they never, ever touched.

  And he knew, just from the tone of those few words, she’d gotten the impulse to touch.

  He didn’t want to know any fantasies Elissa harbored about the black-haired, dark-eyed, copper-skinned cop who’d popped into their kitchen. Knowing his own fantasies right now was disturbing him enough.

  The shocks of sheer lust grappling with Rafe evoked still echoed through his body.

  There’d been a brief moment of kill or be killed. But as soon as they’d touched, it got mixed up with another type of conquest. If Elissa hadn’t intervened, the fight might have ended in one of them trying to rip out the other’s throat—but he thought it more likely he’d have ended up ripping off the guy’s wet uniform and shoving some of the soggy cloth into his mouth to muffle the screams as Jude drove himself into the cop’s ass.

  It would have looked like rape, but it wouldn’t have been—any more than it would have been if the cop had won and had done the same to him—right in front of Elissa, and as far as Jude’s aching cock was concerned, that would have just added to the fun.

  What in the name of the Powers was going on? He wasn’t bi. If he was, he’d certainly have figured it out before age thirty. He’d been on the receiving end of masculine attention before, from good-looking guys who had the bonus of not being Drozzed-out cops, and he’d never been anything more than flattered.

  He supposed he should focus on said Drozzed-out cop confusing Elissa’s magic so much he got sucked right through the wards, or on the way he’d let his lionside out in front of humans, endangering both himself and Elissa.

  And he would—once his cock stopped its running commentary on how good Rafe’s sensual mouth would feel wrapped around his shaft…

  “Why,” Elissa asked, although it really seemed to be addressed to herself rather than to him, “would it have been easier to have a homely total stranger materialize in the kitchen while we were naked? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does to me.”

  “I’m glad you understand it. I don’t. Bad enough he got inside my magic. I don’t like that he’s gotten under my skin as well.”

  Neither do I, Jude thought, meaning that in both po
ssible interpretations.

  But instead of saying anything, he wrapped Elissa in his arms and pulled her close, drinking in her familiar, comforting smell, reveling in her petite, curvy female body and her silky red hair, the sheer rightness of her and him together.

  He bent his head, pressing his lips to hers, and his distracted cock remembered where home was.

  She gasped and clung to him, stretching on tiptoe so she could rub herself against his burgeoning erection. She was slick, hot, swollen, still wet from their earlier sex and if some of the need, the moisture, was from naughty thoughts about the cop, well, Jude could hardly complain. He wasn’t about to quantify how many inches of his erection might have been from fantasies about hot man-sex.

  They didn’t bother getting to the bedroom or even the table. Within seconds, he’d lowered her to the floor, barely taking the time to arrange her robe under her for some protection against the chill, and skewered her on his cock. No further preliminaries, but from the way she cried out, the way her sex started gripping him like a silk vise, she didn’t need them any more than he did.

  As soon as he entered her, her wet heat, the fierce animal smell of her desire, wiped his mind clean of anything but her and what she was doing to him. Both his sides, wordy and animal, united to take her, claim her, bring them together into a simple world of sensation where everything made joyous sense. Red fire and heat and joy and a body and soul merging.

  Sex was always like this for a dual, a loss of words, of worries and concerns, a way to bring the sides together into perfect union. Always like that, but more so with Elissa than with any other lover—although, inside her, he could barely remember any other lovers, barely remember anything existed beyond the union of their bodies and spirits.

  This time, though, some vestige of consciousness, some clinging to purpose remained, as it did when they worked red magic.

  But this was a different purpose from Elissa’s magic. This was older, more primitive, coming from his lionside.

  Reclaiming his mate.

  Reclaiming himself.

  And as all thought annihilated itself in the rush of orgasm, the lion roared, secure of victory.

  Chapter Seven

  “Is everything all right, Elissa?”

  Elissa dropped the pencil she’d been absently chewing and barely suppressed the urge to jump at the unexpected intrusion into not only her lab, but her thoughts. “Just fine, Anthony. Why?”

  “You were late this morning. That’s not like you. That and I’ve been standing at the door for about fifteen minutes now trying to get your attention.”

  Oops. It had probably been longer than fifteen minutes. Dr. Hage was shy, especially with the magic-users on the staff. She suspected it was because he had just enough magical potential to be aware of the energies around him, and it gave him the jitters some people got when a thunderstorm was brewing.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude. I was just lost in thought.” He didn’t need to know what she’d been lost in thought about, although she got the feeling her colleague would find the idea of being sandwiched between two extremely handsome guys just as sexy as she did. Especially if one of them was Jude. The couple of times he’d met Jude, Anthony hadn’t been able to stop staring.

  It was cute, especially since Jude was utterly oblivious.

  But distracting as fantasies about Jude and the yummy Rafe were—and never mind that she’d never do such a thing, the fantasy was enough to make her nipples ache and cause a flood in her panties—it wasn’t enough to displace her worries.

  Instead of working on her cold-hardy figs, she’d spent much of the morning racking her brain and making use of the facility’s extensive library to figure out why her wards had confused a stranger for part of the family.

  She’d come up empty-handed.

  The only similar cases she’d found involved an intruder with dark or neutral magic strong enough to confuse weak positive magics. But Rafe was a dual. Duals couldn’t work human-style magic. Even if he were some kind of oddball case, he was on Drozz, which suppressed any kind of Different abilities.

  “Elissa?”

  This time she did jump, because Anthony had somehow not just entered her lab without her noticing, but was standing over her shoulder. Fortunately, the file she had open on her computer was related to the figs and not to her earlier delvings. Anthony, tall and lanky, could probably read over her shoulder while she was standing, let alone sitting. “Ladybugs,” she sighed. “You have any ideas about the ladybugs?”

  “Hell, no,” he admitted. “Ladybugs don’t eat plants. Period, end of sentence. It must have been the longevity spells.” He picked up her pencil and rolled it between his long fingers. She wondered if he’d be happier if he could knit constantly like her aunt Roslyn instead of playing with pencils or picking at his nails.

  “It might have been the earlier genetic engineering, which would make it your department. Not your fault, I know—before your time—but more your area than mine.”

  “Or the work Patel and his crew in Illinois did on the ladybugs in the first place.” Hage shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to start on that, other than by calling in Patel.”

  “How about a time machine so we could convince them it was a bad idea? Tinkering with plants is delicate enough. Changing animals that can get out and breed with the wild population is just crazy. Sure, enhance them, but don’t make it hereditary. You can’t blame us witches for that. Our powers don’t work that way.”

  “I wish ours didn’t.”

  “So, what’s up?” Maybe he’d finally relaxed enough to pop in to say hi to a colleague, but chances were he had a reason that had slipped his mind. Anthony did that a lot. Brilliant in the lab, but an utter, though sweet, space muffin outside it.

  “I…forget,” he admitted. “It was something about the disease-resistance spells for one of the local vineyards, but I can’t think what.” His face flamed.

  From someone else, the awkwardness would come off as a crush. But a red magician got good at reading other people’s sexual signals, and Anthony’s were directed at his own gender.

  No, apparently Anthony was embarrassed to the point of agony by his own absentmindedness.

  “Oh, right,” she said, casting a minor soothing charm to calm Anthony’s nerves. “It’s getting to be that time of year again. Bit early, though. Usually we don’t do the first round of protective spells until the vines are starting to leaf. It must have been Weimer. They’re going for organic certification this year and they’re really anxious. How did the call get to you, anyway?”

  He shrugged. “No clue, but that temp receptionist isn’t exactly a genius. Should I refer them to you, then?”

  “Hector and Laura do most of the vineyard work, but Laura’s in Ithaca today—spider mites infesting a greenhouse—and Hector’s home with a sick kid. I can call Weimer, though.” No point in upsetting one of the most successful wineries in the Finger Lakes.

  “Thanks.” Anthony headed out, leaving her wondering why he hadn’t just forwarded the message in the first place.

  Hage clutched the pencil he’d purloined from Elissa Donovan and hurried down the hall, his heart racing. She was so damn careful, washing her dishes immediately after eating, keeping her hair pinned up and confined so he couldn’t get a single red lock. The traces of saliva clinging to the pencil might be his only chance to give the Agency eyes into her home.

  He did his best to shake off the queasy feeling that gave him. It was his job, his duty. The fact he liked and respected Elissa didn’t matter. He had a job to do, a responsibility to his government and his country.

  If Jude Duclos turned out to be human after all, or even an ordinary, garden-variety dual with his animalside under control and none of the specific genetic markers the Agency wanted, none of this would matter and Elissa would be no wiser.

  And if he wasn’t…well, it would suck.

  But one of the Agency’s tame seers had seen that Elissa Donovan’s
partner was a rogue dual, potentially dangerous enough that the Agency would normally target him for destruction. The seer had also seen, however, that he was one of the exceptionally rare duals with a latent gift for magic. The Agency had ways to make such duals useful to society.

  Anthony had to believe that. Otherwise, what he was doing was betraying a friend, and that was unthinkable.

  He made himself shut out the memory of Jude’s thoroughly human, thoroughly charming smile and the way Elissa’s face lit up when she talked about him.

  Instead, he focused on the news transmitted from a source in the Geneva police department. Jude had apparently snapped last night, killing a domestic animal while in lion form. Unfortunately, they hadn’t gotten anything they could use to set up a trace spell. The dead dog’s owner had refused to turn the body over to the police, and the reports from the police were so nebulous as to make Anthony doubt their accuracy. They were forced to resort to whatever slim hope this pencil provided.

  He had to believe the news was accurate. Uncontrolled, Jude might be a public menace. A friendly and distressingly handsome public menace, but that made him all the more dangerous, because humans would want to like and trust him. Like Elissa did.

  Like Anthony did himself, God help him.

  In the right hands, though, Jude, or at least his genes, could serve his country in ways most duals couldn’t understand. They were loyal only to their families, their prides or packs. They were hardwired that way, which probably helped them survive, outnumbered as they were by humans, but they just couldn’t see the bigger picture.

  The bigger picture was that China, Japan and Korea had dragons and kirin in their governments, beings older than this country and wiser and more powerful than most Americans of any species could imagine. This country was desperately seeking a means to balance that—but it wanted the Differents on the government’s terms, not as free agents.