Lions' Pride Read online

  “No. It’s not like that.” Elissa shook her head, the fall of her red curls obscuring her face. With a hand that wanted to be a fiercely clawed, tawny paw, he brushed the hair away so he could look into her eyes.

  He sniffed at her, letting her scent wash through his nose and mouth to fill his body with her warmth. No lies there, but a simple no wasn’t the whole truth either. She smelled frightened, but not, he thought, of him.

  She should have been scared of him right now. Instead, what he sensed toward him was annoyance and confusion. What a wonderful woman—even if she was a wonderful woman who owed him an explanation.

  “Why did I feel someone else here if you didn’t invite him in? I mean, a passing thought is one thing. I know you humans can’t always help it.”

  “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but trust me, you had all my attention.” She play-roared, more like a squeaky toy than a lion. “And since when were you the jealous one? That’s usually my job.”

  “I believe you. But I felt him, Elissa. I smelled him. I still do.”

  Elissa glanced toward the skylight then away so quickly an ordinary man might not have noticed. He did, though, and followed her gaze.

  Nothing. Nothing now, anyway. And frankly, he couldn’t picture Rafe Benedict climbing onto their steeply peaked roof to peer in the skylight.

  Eyes meeting his unwaveringly, she said, “I wasn’t thinking about him, not while we were making love. But I felt him, too, and saw him.”

  “Looking in?” Cougars could climb, and even in wordy form they were unusually sure on their feet. Not like lions, who sacrificed a certain amount of lithe grace in exchange for strength.

  “No. A vision, a hallucination, a projection…something. He wasn’t actually here. Safe, home in his own bed, I think.”

  She flushed as she said it. Jude guessed what she must have seen and couldn’t decide whether to be disappointed or relieved he hadn’t seen it himself.

  The parts of him that did the better thinking were relieved.

  His cock, on the other hand, offered its own opinion: anything that involved Rafe Benedict naked and horny had something to recommend it, even if it involved him astrally projecting his naked, horny self into places he had no right to be.

  “I hadn’t been thinking of him, I swear. Not then. And even if I had been, that wouldn’t explain it. I know you don’t understand the whole fantasizing-during-sex thing, but we humans do it sometimes—and the entire cast of 300 has never popped into the bedroom. Not even in some weird ethereal form.”

  Jude didn’t feel like laughing, but she was so clearly trying to diffuse the situation he forced himself to chuckle, more at his own behavior than her words. He’d been grasping at straws…and maybe, just maybe, accusing Elissa of something he could just as well accuse himself of.

  Elissa touched his arm, apparently sensing he was calmer. “Maybe you’re on to something. It’s a matter of figuring out the details. Rafe’s been on my mind on and off all day. I’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong with the wards, why he was drawn here. Maybe by thinking about him so much, I’ve fed the link, whatever it is.”

  “In that case, we’ve both been feeding it. You think I haven’t been worrying all day, wondering if he’s going to pop in again, or if someone else will? So if that’s what’s doing it…it still doesn’t explain how he got in here last night.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe it was just a fluke.”

  A fluke. Some kind of cosmic freak accident, unlikely to repeat itself.

  The lion was still restless, but that notion soothed it. A traveler, a male without a pride of his own, had passed through his territory without meaning to. Just ruffled fur in the long run. The lion cared only about the threat to his pride of two, and the immediate fear his mate was losing interest in him had been appeased.

  The wordside, though, was far from calmed, understanding how complex the situation was and how few clues they had. Even if Rafe Benedict meant them no harm, he’d breached their defenses. If he had, what else might?

  “Sorry about the plaster,” Jude said, trying to make it an apology for his fears and accusations at the same time.

  “Hazard of loving a dual.” She’d taken it as he’d meant it.

  “I talked to my dad today,” he added, knowing it sounded completely out of the blue but that she’d keep up. “I asked if we had any cougars in the family tree. We don’t, not that he knows.”

  “I don’t think we do, either.” Elissa grinned weakly. “Never mind that duals and witches can’t have kids, can you imagine how miserable a cougar would be with my family?”

  “All sixty million of them harping on about the ancestors and tradition? And not a steak in sight? The poor cougar would lose all his fur from stress. I’m sure they’d cure the mange…”

  “But they’d make him feel inadequate for getting it.” This time, Elissa managed a real smile. “I love you.” She snuggled against him and his world felt more right. “Besides, you’re warm.”

  “Your hands are like ice, woman. Put them between my thighs.”

  For a few pleasant minutes, they cuddled without talking, and Jude thought she might have drifted off to sleep. Then she stirred and said, “Maybe I should call home. My mom might have some ideas about the wards, although there’s no way she’ll be able to resist saying ‘I told you so’ a million times and trying to get us to go to Oregon.” She sighed. “If only I could talk to Grandma Josie. She was the expert on things that shouldn’t have worked but did. And she liked you.”

  Jude thought he was used to the level of weirdness life with a witch sometimes reached, but that comment threw him. “Uh, I thought she died like fifteen years ago.”

  “Aunt Bathsheba’s a keeper of memory,” she said, as if that explained everything—and maybe to her, it did. “Maybe Aunt Bath could ask the ancestral ghosts about the problem with the wards. We’ve got a few centuries of Donovan experience floating around the estate. One of them might have ideas.”

  “Of course,” he said gently. “I don’t think I want to understand, but do what you need to do.” He kissed her forehead, grateful to feel her small, silken body against his, grateful to have her in his life.

  His lion purred, a huge rumble that shook his wordy body. As far as the lion was concerned everything was fine again. The distracting solitary male was gone, and Elissa, as a female should be, was on the hunt—in this case, the hunt for answers—with him following along to protect her if she should need it. The fact that the hunting party might include dead relatives didn’t bother the lion. Once the lionside had accepted a mate who didn’t have an inner lioness, he figured any of her other vagaries followed from that.

  The wordside Jude knew it wasn’t that simple. Something was wrong in their world, and whether Rafe Benedict deliberately triggered it or was caught up in the weirdness with them, he was involved. Involved and somehow tied into his own deep, erotic connection with Elissa.

  Right now he’d let the lion overrule the wordy side. There was little he could do to block the intruder who had already found a way in. That was more Elissa’s line. What he could do was protect his home and his woman in a more physical sense: comforting, guarding her with his body as she guarded him with her magic. He would not fail in that.

  His tail flicked.

  Elissa opened her eyes and giggled. “That tickles! What are you…”

  She pulled away from Jude, her amber eyes wide and alarmed. “Jude…why do you have a tail?”

  Chapter Ten

  “Tail? What tail?” He tried to make a joke out of it, although it was no joking matter. The lion brain asserted itself a lot, but he’d never let the lion body out of his control around Elissa. When the lionside came out around her, it was always deliberate.

  Not like now—a tail and, dammit, a tawny coating of fur obscuring his dark skin.

  Could be worse. Could be claws. But it was definitely not a habit he could afford.

  With an effort of will, he se
parated lionside and wordside, pushed the lion deep down and told it to sleep. There was a brief snarl of protest. He promised a long run over the weekend, a chance to hunt.

  He felt the tail and fur pull themselves inside, not retracting the way his claws did in lion form, almost rolling up like a window shade. Although it didn’t hurt, it felt strange. Whatever his outer form, even a half-cocked one like a human with a lion’s tail and fur, seemed the natural one, and the moment of transformation—unless he was so distracted he missed it altogether—jarred him briefly.

  “Better?” he asked, trying to pretend he wasn’t concerned. “I must be more tired than I’d realized.” He faked a yawn.

  “I know, I know. Big cats sleep eighteen hours a day and you have to get by with eight or ten. Spare me the sob story.” She smiled and cuddled up to him again, but he sensed her disturbance.

  She should be disturbed. This was wrong. He was losing control. First the dog, now this.

  He couldn’t blame Rafe for the dog incident, though. Or could he? He remembered a smell he couldn’t name, a sense of some great and exciting, possibly dangerous, change ahead.

  Within a couple of hours, Rafe was inside their wards.

  “I’ll never be able to sleep now,” he said. “I’m going for a run—in human form, I promise.”

  Before Elissa could protest, he was out of bed, pulling on sweatpants. “Don’t worry,” he said, knowing she would anyway. “I won’t be gone long.”

  —

  Anthony Hage was on his second lap of the park that fronted Seneca Lake when his cell phone rang.

  That ringtone.

  He cursed, considered ignoring it. It was after midnight. Agent Shaw had no reason to think he was even awake, let alone up and out.

  Then again, did he have any illusion Agent Shaw wasn’t keeping tabs on his every move? He’d never figured out if Shaw was one of the more-or-less normy Agency employees, some stone-killer ex-Special Forces type, or one of the terrifying characters most people called sorcerers and he, to play it safe, called sir or ma’am. In either case, he’d have his means. The Agency boasted some tech so advanced and stealthy it might as well be magic.

  Reluctantly, he stopped running through a grove of naked willow trees near the icy lake. In summer, it was a pleasant park, a nice spot for a picnic or a game of Frisbee. Now, it was desolate, menacing. Or maybe the thought of talking to Shaw made everything spooky. “Hage here,” he answered.

  “Jude Duclos is heading toward you, alone and on foot, coming in from Canal Street. Detain him long enough for our agents to get there.”

  Anthony knew better than to ask how Shaw knew where he was. He certainly knew better than to argue.

  He argued anyway. “I’ve seen nothing. No evidence.”

  “We witnessed an uncontrolled shift,” Shaw said. “I guess you missed it, but I can understand if you had to break the link. That was pretty hot stuff.” This was more conversation than he normally got from Shaw, and Shaw’s voice sounded gruffly approving, with a little manly teasing that from some other middle-aged straight guy would have been humorous. “You did well for someone at your level by setting up the link. Now contain him for us and we’ll take care of the rest.”

  Anthony’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

  Agent Shaw, the creepiest thing he’d ever seen that didn’t have more than eight legs and live under a rotting log, had watched Jude and Elissa making love. The idea made him queasy.

  But not nearly as queasy as realizing that, for a second, he’d thrilled at the hint of approval in Shaw’s voice.

  “Is this necessary? Is he that dangerous?”

  There was the slightest hint of a sigh. “Would we be going through all this if he weren’t?”

  Anthony literally bit his tongue to keep from saying something regrettable, such as, “Maybe.” He couldn’t bring himself to say the expected, “No, sir.”

  Shaw picked up on the hesitation. “You have your orders, Hage. Carry them out.”

  He didn’t need to tack on “or else”. He hung up abruptly and the silence said it for him. So much for the fatherly tone. Not so much different than his own father, then—he could be pleasant as long as you did exactly what he wanted, without question.

  In the silence, Anthony realized he was just as screwed as Jude Duclos, just as trapped by the Agency. But in his case, he’d gotten himself into the mess.

  He could go through with this and live with the consequences and hope the Agency’s purpose was worth Jude Duclos’s future and his own self-respect, or he could try to warn Jude and hope they both lived to tell the tale.

  He chuckled bitterly. For once, he might have a problem his father could relate to, but there wasn’t time to ask for advice. Jude would be here any second.

  —

  “Aren’t you Elissa’s husband?” The vaguely familiar voice came out of the dark from a trail leading through a grove of willows. Jude jumped and cursed under his breath.

  Humans shouldn’t be able to sneak up on him, not if he was paying attention. This Rafe Benedict business was distracting him dangerously.

  He stopped, jogging in place to keep his muscles warm, and glanced toward the source of the voice. A man stepped forward: boyish-looking but no boy, a bit pasty and slim to the point it was hard to say whether wiry or skinny described him better. He was dressed in sweats, too, obviously out running himself.

  It took Jude a few seconds to put the affable, deceptively young face into context. “Dr. Hage?”

  “Anthony, please. We insomniac joggers have to stick together. Glad I’m not the only one.”

  “Hell, no. Usually I stick to my own neighborhood, but tonight the lake was calling to me.” The park was far from wilderness, but at night, he could pretend there was nothing but him, the trees, the lake and the wind.

  “Yeah.” Anthony jogged over to him. “Mind company?”

  Actually he did, but it wouldn’t hurt to be polite to one of Elissa’s co-workers, and besides, while the guy looked to be in decent shape, the night he couldn’t outlast a lab rat when it came to athletics would be the night they threw dirt on him.

  Anthony was blessedly quiet, not trying to make conversation as they ran. From his ragged breathing that may have been because the pace was a little fast for him to spare the wind. It was barely a good jog for Jude, but he figured he’d give Anthony a fighting chance to keep up. He’d let the human pick the trail, too, the flatter one along the lake front.

  Anthony had just said, “We should head back,” when they came out of nowhere, like ninja or ghosts, five big guys with guns, surrounding them. Jude’s brain wasn’t up to registering what kind of guns other than too fucking big.

  They had to be Agency. “Run!” he hissed.

  “Too late.” Hage’s voice was almost inaudible. Even before he said it, Jude realized there was no place for the other man to go except into the lake.

  He shoved Hage back and prepared to stand guard.

  The air smelled of sulfur and ice.

  One of the ridiculously well-armed men was a sorcerer.

  Chapter Eleven

  Fuck.

  Talk about overkill. Unlike witches or other nature-magic types, sorcerers could wield lethal force without corrupting or diminishing their power. It wasn’t legal, but the Agency policed that kind of thing—and no one policed those particular policemen.

  The lion roared inside him.

  He wanted to shift. Lionside, he had a chance, even against Agency professionals. Even against a sorcerer who also had a big gun.

  But if he defended himself while in lion form, the best he could hope for was Parvan and life in prison. And that was only if Anthony Hage would speak in his defense, say Jude had been protecting him, an innocent bystander. He didn’t know Hage well enough to trust the guy would go out on a limb for him.

  He forced the lion down. “I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but your business is with me, not him,” he said. No use pretending
. A simple blood test would prove he was a dual. “Let this guy go. He’s human. Not of interest to you.”

  Someone laughed. Once again Jude smelled sulfur.

  Hage choked back a noise that might have been a sob. You couldn’t blame the poor bastard. The guy was a botanist, about the most harmless thing on the planet, for Powers’ sake—and his late-night jog had turned into something that belonged in Hitler’s Germany.

  “Hands up,” one of the Agency thugs barked.

  For less than a second, he thought about resisting. Getting shot by those fucking personal cannons they carried had to be quicker and less messy than whatever was likely to happen next.

  Dr. Hage clutched his ankle. In a small voice that was calmer than Jude would have expected, he whispered, “Cooperate with them. For Elissa. Don’t let them kill you.”

  Elissa.

  Shouldn’t have taken a human to remind him Elissa came first.

  He raised his hands slowly. “I’ll cooperate,” he said. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “That’s easy. You.” An older man answered. His military carriage and still powerful body—not to mention the air of barely contained violence—suggested a background in Special Forces. As soon as he spoke, Jude tasted sulfur and knew he was the sorcerer.

  “What are you charging me with?”

  “Nothing, Mr. Duclos. Consider it being drafted.”

  Then he fired his weird-looking weapon.

  Prompted by instinct and civilization alike, Jude threw himself on top of Hage, shielding the scientist as best he could. Something whizzed over his head as he dropped, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

  But these guys were good. Too good. The second and third shots hit. It didn’t hurt as much as it should have, but the world instantly went blurry and askew.

  The goons closed in, dragged him off Hage.

  Shaw stated, “Serving your country is risky, Dr. Hage.”

  Dr. Hage said something quiet and defiant, something Jude’s addled brain couldn’t pick up—something that turned into a scream.

  The scream filled Jude’s ears until they began to bleed. The dark, blurry night became an acid-hued nightmare, then abruptly went silent and black.