“I felt that,” Jude teased.
“Yeah, but I’m warm enough now.”
He smiled, his teeth white against his dark complexion.
She gazed into his green eyes, opening the link between them wider. The silver cord throbbed and her blood pulsed along with it. Her nipples hardened and her sex swelled. She could feel his desire surge as well, feel the blood pulsing in his cock almost as clearly as she saw it swell and grow, eager to enter her.
They pressed together again. Jude’s skin felt like heated suede, hot and soft and buttery against her mound and her sensitive nipples. She tasted blood as they kissed, coppery and rank, and for an instant, it cooled her. Then a tendril of Jude strayed into her mind, a tendril of his lionside that yearned to share the hunt with her. He knew he couldn’t—not only was she human, but she’d been raised vegetarian, according to Donovan tradition, and still rarely ate meat—but he begged her to try to understand.
She tasted the blood then through his animalside, the sensual pleasure of raw, fresh meat, and while she still didn’t enjoy it, she accepted it and moved on.
Kissing him again, she tasted only Jude, warm and spicy and feline.
He slipped one leg between hers as they kissed and she ground against it, feeding her growing arousal. One of his hands cupped her breast—a full breast for someone her size, but small enough to fit easily in his big hand, small enough he could easily cup it and roll the nipple between thumb and forefinger, sending darts of fire through her.
The other hand dragged against her ass, letting her feel his nails, letting her feel a hint of claws. In full lion form, he could tear her in half. There was some small, dark part of her that liked knowing he could, reveled in his contained power—knowing he had it and knowing he wouldn’t use it against her. Some small, dark part of him knew and loved that dark part of her and could sometimes, as now, come out and tease it and play with it, catlike.
Fire followed behind his nails, met up with the fire from her nipples and caused a conflagration in her pussy.
How could something be on fire when it was as wet as she was? Her slickness spread, marking his thigh. Her body screamed to come, and with just a few well-timed grinds, she could do it.
She didn’t.
Instead, she contained her rising arousal and let the warm scarlet power build. The slight distraction was enough to keep her on the edge of coming, but not tumbling over.
Jude must have sensed her holding back. He nipped at her neck, worked his way up to her ear and nipped at the lobe, then whispered, his hot breath a caress, “More?”
“Yes. Please, yes.” The energy surged inside her at his throaty voice, at the nips that let her feel teeth now slightly sharper than the human norm. He slid both arms under her ass, lifting her so she could wrap her legs around his waist, and carried her to the kitchen table.
To her witch-sense, the table—on which she’d prepared meals for the two of them, potted plants, prepared herbs for spells and made love several times—faintly glowed. When he set her down the wood tingled against her skin, sending a pleasurable jolt through her sex and traveling up her spine. Part of it blossomed out the crown of her head, sending its energy out to join with the wardings around the house.
Part of it hit her straight in the pelvis, making her vulva fuller and more sensitive, opening her womb, even teasing at her ass.
“Lord and Lady,” she groaned, both an exclamation and a prayer, and spread her legs.
“I honor your body as I honor the Goddess, the female principle in all life,” Jude said and sank to his knees. He might not have grown up practicing red magic, but they worshipped a similar pantheon, although Jude’s also included the androgynous Trickster. Between that upbringing and his natural inclination to “honor the female”, or at least have hot, sweaty, mutually pleasurable sex with the woman he loved at every opportunity, he’d had no trouble learning to support Elissa’s magic.
Which, at the moment, was to drive her absolutely wild with desire, but not let her come until she gave the go-ahead.
“You smell like life.” Jude rumbled against her thigh as if he were lionside as he kissed his way to his goal. He pressed his face between her legs and began to lick.
Surges of pleasure washed over her. She curled her fingers in Jude’s thick dreads, enjoyed the heat and the colors dancing under her skin. No release for her, not yet, but the erotic energy flooded her system like a drug, giving color to sensation and flavor to colors and textures. Jude’s skin was chocolate, his hair saffron for some reason.
Power. Energy. Magic. Enough now to encompass not just the house itself, but the land surrounding it. All during the long Central New York winter, she’d been able to do only minimal reinforcement on the protections around the yard, but now, between the erotic power they’d unleashed and the approaching vernal equinox, the green power starting to wake within the earth itself, she could do much more.
She tapped the daffodils and crocuses starting to push up like little green phalluses through the melting snow. Tapped the sap running in the big maple in the backyard.
She sent those energies surging to meet the quiet energies of the wards.
Hearth. Home. Heart. Let all that is mine be encompassed, enclosed, under your protection. Safe.
Everything was connected. Her. Jude. The trees and the bulbs and the muddy, half-frozen ground. Everything.
“Now!” she said. Jude thrust two fingers inside her and cupped her G-spot in the way that always drove her over the edge. She roared with the force of the orgasm that tore through her body, and through her spirit, to power and strengthen the wards.
To bring what was hers into their protections and keep it safe.
A thunk audible only to her witch-senses, a sound like a door shutting to form a barrier between home and the world, told her it had worked.
“Now it’s playtime,” she mock-growled, tightening her grip on Jude’s hair.
And he obliged.
Chapter Two
Officer Raphael Benedict huddled in the backyard of the green and white two-story house, trying to figure out what he was going to do next. In the freezing rain, any tracks of the purported large cat washed away and scents were dissipated to the point where even if he’d had tracking dogs, they couldn’t have told a cat from a canary. And of course he didn’t have the K-9 unit at his disposal because Dispatch had been ninety percent sure it was all a mistake, an ordinary coyote or fisher cat, or even a larger, more vicious dog. Despite what the hysterical caller had claimed, everyone at the station was sure it wasn’t an actual lion.
They were right.
It wasn’t a lion. The dog had been killed by a careless dual. He’d known it as soon as he’d set foot in the alley where it died. There was no way to prove it, but he knew.
Despite what they’d told him as a teenager, when he’d chosen life in the human world over his cougar-dual heritage, like called to like.
The suppressive drug that kept him in human form and made it possible to do the job he loved was supposed to make him just like a human for both good and ill, giving him human self-control, consistently humanlike thought patterns—and also duller human senses.
But Drozz was imperfect. He couldn’t change forms, but his senses of smell and hearing were unusually keen, allowing him to notice subtle clues humans missed. Sometimes, like tonight, he could pick up…something. Maybe he’d be able to define that something if he’d been raised among duals—probably they had a name for it among themselves—but he was human-raised and just called it “weird shit”. He didn’t know why the Drozz didn’t block that better. Maybe it was something so uniquely dual that human scientists couldn’t isolate it to block it.
The “weird shit” had led him here. Tonight, around the kill site, he sensed a restless, warm, golden energy he was able to follow in the right direction until, near this house, he came upon a single faint, distorted track in a patch of melting snow.
Normally he’d worry about how he’
d explain the leap of logic in his report. Not many people in the department knew he was a dual, and no one knew Drozz didn’t always work like the Agency said it did, so he was used to fudging things that were clear to his senses, but not to most humans.
Not this time, though.
No, this time he’d be fudging the whole damn report, because he’d arrived at this seemingly normal house just in time to see someone ghost in the back door through the freezing rain, someone or something neither animal nor human, but moving between the two.
His temper flared. He’d been dreading something like tonight since the new laws had gone into effect eighteen months ago, but he hadn’t known what he’d do when he finally came up against a dual who hadn’t done anything majorly wrong.
He’d be damned if he turned in a report that sent someone to jail or worse just for not being human. That wasn’t the way he’d been raised, or the reason he’d become a cop. He was supposed to protect people from criminals—not help drag an innocent guy away from his home and family for no apparent reason.
Okay, so the guy had killed a dog. He could see where humans found that disturbing. Hell, he found it pretty disturbing, thanks to being raised by humans, and he supposed being carnivorous was his inner nature as much as it was the lion-guy’s.
It was just nature in action, though. To an unmedicated carnivore-type dual, Fluffy and Fido looked like snack food. Really delicious, bad-for-you snack food, the kind you knew you shouldn’t eat, but once in a while couldn’t resist.
Used to be you’d just get slapped on the wrist—fines, community service, maybe a short treatment with Drozz so you’d be better able to spot when your inner animal was prompting you to do something that was a bad idea in the human world. Now it was a long, mandatory term in a rehabilitation center—and confinement was pure torture for a dual, even if you were medicated—confiscation of property, psychiatric monitoring, mandatory Drozz and mind-numbing, libido-killing, potentially liver-destroying Parvan for life.
Rafe had chosen his path. Chosen, when his dual side manifested out of the blue, late and seemingly uncontrollable and definitely interfering with his plans to follow in his adoptive dad’s footsteps as a cop, to get on Drozz and fit into mainstream society.
Forcing someone to do it was a whole different story.
He could just walk away. Go back to the station, report he hadn’t found anything except a frantic, half-asleep woman who’d just seen her dog killed by a coyote and the remains of said poor mutt. They’d believe him.
They’d want to believe him. A lot of cops were turning a blind eye to things they’d once have pursued. The current administration wasn’t fond of anyone who wasn’t human, and new laws meant any nonhuman, not just a dual, who had even a minor brush with the law was in serious shit.
But he found he couldn’t just walk away. He had to do something.
This guy was careless, and he was going to get caught. He needed to be warned that humans were on to him. Even though they’d chosen different paths, this guy and Rafe were cousins of sorts.
That was one reason.
The other was that the walls of this seemingly ordinary house thrummed and throbbed, and if he could feel it through the Drozz, there was something weird afoot beyond a dual who’d had a hankering for an ill-advised midnight snack. Not necessarily something bad—in fact it felt warm and fuzzy and positive—but definitely something strange. To the best of his imperfect knowledge, duals didn’t have any abilities that would make a house seem that…alive. At least nothing they’d ever talked about in the “Dealing with the Nonhuman Population” class at the Academy.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but a cougar was one big, tough, hard-to-kill cat, and this sort-of cougar wanted to indulge his curiosity.
Rafe squatted on his haunches between an overgrown yew bush and the garage to observe. To try to figure out why the house twitched and vibrated like it did. To wait for the right time to approach the house and offer his warning.
The cold didn’t bother him—never did, even with the Drozz keeping his body temperature closer to human norm—but wet was far from his favorite sensation, and the icy rain dripping down his neck and into his navy police anorak was not making his night. Or morning. Or whatever the hell you called this hour poised between dark and dawn, between winter and spring…
Between him and his nice, comfortable bed.
The eaves of the garage channeled the drip right into his collar. He was tempted to move. But from here he had the best view of the back door and the kitchen it opened into.
Not that he could see much. Dim figures, shadows seen through the cheerful sunflower—patterned curtains: the dual—a lion or some other big cat, bigger than a cougar—and a much smaller person who might be a teenager or a petite woman. Hard to tell, since he wasn’t sure how big his dual quarry was in human form. He’d been a big, black-maned lion, from what poor, shaken Mrs. Andersen had to say, but that proved nothing.
He waited. Not for all that long, he supposed, but in the cold and damp, it felt like forever.
He wanted coffee. And a sandwich, or a sweet roll. Anything.
Hell, he wanted a cigarette right about now, and he hadn’t smoked since high school.
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that unDrozzed duals could be damn useful in police work if they were just a little more stable, a little more willing to play by human rules than most of them were. Plenty of criminals had parahuman abilities—why shouldn’t the cops? If he were a functional dual, he might know what was going on in that house, maybe see or smell something that would help him make sense of it, instead of having a vague and not terribly useful feeling of friendly strangeness.
He wanted to have cougar-keen senses, cougar-quick reflexes—but without the cost.
If he were everything his genes would allow him to be, he wouldn’t be a cop.
Rafe prodded mentally at the house, not that he expected to detect anything new. That would take magic, and magic was a human gift, although a rare enough one that human magic users were ranked among the Different. Still, he always had the feeling that when faced with the “weird shit” he should be able to make sense of it if he could figure out the right way to look at it.
As he probed, something burst out of the house. Not an actual something, but a wave of energy, a wave of sensation.
Or maybe it didn’t burst out of the house. Maybe he burst into the house, because suddenly he was warm and dry and safe in a way he rarely remembered feeling, even though icy water still dripped on his head and his leg muscles were sore from the long crouch.
But he—his consciousness, at least—was inside. Inside the house.
Inside the inhabitants of the house.
Holy shit.
Chapter Three
Some small part of Rafe’s brain pointed out he should be terrified. But he was too busy being confused for the fear to sink in. He was literally seeing and feeling things through another’s perception. Maybe several people’s, because the images that flooded him were scattered.
Scattered and startlingly erotic and bombarding him all at once.
A chocolate-skinned, dreadlocked man, tall and solid yet lithe, kneeling between the open thighs of a tiny redheaded woman who perched on the kitchen table, his dark hands resting on her pale thighs, his face pressed into the joining of her thighs, tasting her, pleasuring her.
The woman’s hands—small, freckled, short nails glazed a deep wine color—clenching and unclenching in the man’s dreads. The clean, oceanic taste of her on the man’s tongue, the way it went straight to his cock, making it heavier, harder, more insistent. The waves of her pleasure rippling out from where the man licked and suckled.
The woman’s triangular, fey face flushing red with ecstasy, spreading down her neck and chest.
Rafe saw from a bewildering variety of perspectives: a camera view, outside looking in at the action—the man’s, the woman’s, what would have been a fly’s on the ceiling. He experienced
tantalizing flashes of her orgasm, the man’s smug delight in making her scream, their love and lust for each other.
Before long, his cock was straining against the fly of his polyester uniform pants.
The woman slipped off the table into the man’s waiting arms. The man was tall, broad, dwarfing her. Hell, he’d dwarf Rafe, who was pretty average-sized for a human, if on the small side for a dual—five foot ten and leanly muscled.
He felt the woman’s hand wrapping around the man’s cock, felt its heft and weight as if he were touching himself.
No, Rafe admitted, not touching himself. Definitely touching another man, stroking and caressing another man’s hard cock. An uncut one, which made it different enough from his own to let him know this wasn’t just a fantasy. If he’d been fantasizing, he wouldn’t have thought to make Anonymous Fantasy Guy #23 uncircumcised.
Shocking, searing desire exploded through him as that unasked-for, unexpected secondhand experience opened a Pandora’s box of memories and fantasies. A cock in his mouth. His cock in someone else’s ass. Yearning and frustration and fulfillment and rejection as could only be experienced by a young man, barely more than a boy, in love or what passed for it at that age, with another boy. It had been so long since he’d been with a man that he’d almost convinced himself his bisexuality had been a phase.
Those suspicions went right out the window. He’d just gotten fussier once he got past his horny I’ll-do-anyone college days, and a small town like Geneva hadn’t had much to offer that side of his personality.
Until this guy.
The couple in the kitchen had shifted positions, the woman leaning over the table, thrusting out her small but adorably rounded ass, looking over her shoulder in clear invitation.
Rafe could see through her eyes as well as the man’s. He got a good look at the man’s face for the first time, broad-featured and handsome, with light green eyes that stood out against his dark skin.
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