His cock felt huge, treelike. On fire with need. Wrong, yet so right. Elissa’s cunt was its natural home, but he felt an equal pull toward Rafe’s lush mouth and firm, elegant ass.
The air throbbed with the smell of herbs and pears and pine and fur, of male and female musk. Jude closed his eyes, trying to shut out some of the stimuli, but this was a dream and the sight of Rafe, of Elissa, of the two of them touching him and each other, burned through his eyelids.
“Rafe, what are you doing in my dream?” Jude finally stammered. He’d meant it to sound accusing, but it came out plaintive and eager, as if he’d been yearning for Rafe to be there for so long he’d given up hope.
“This,” Rafe said, and reached up to kiss him.
To the extent he’d thought about it, Jude imagined a man’s lips to be harder than a woman’s, but it wasn’t true, at least not in the dream. Rafe’s heated skin had a hint of rough stubble, but his lips were living silk and moved over Jude’s with skill and delicacy.
Rafe tasted of pine and maple syrup and honey. And curiously, of Elissa—not her flesh, but her spirit. That homey comfort let Jude’s beleaguered senses take charge, let his brain stop trying to figure out the whys and accept that it felt right to kiss this man, to feel a hard male body against his own.
A body where he could feel the cougar stirring under the skin, calling to his lion.
Ordinary big cats, Felis whatever, the kind without wordy sides, weren’t queer as far as he knew.
Duals weren’t that simple. Their sexuality was as complex and convoluted as any human’s, further complicated by a cat’s rich response to smells, touch and other sensations human language, based on human sensory experiences, couldn’t readily describe.
His lion wanted Rafe as much as the wordside did. Never mind that Rafe was a cougar; he smelled close enough to right.
Jude growled.
He grabbed a handful of Rafe’s ass, just as succulent and perfect as it looked, and hung on for dear life as he rode the kiss.
His hips pressed forward so his dick met Rafe’s, the hard lengths passing over each other, teasing and tantalizing.
Someone let loose a throaty, “Oh, gods. Can’t believe…how beautiful…”
He thought it must be him. It sounded like what he was thinking.
But it was Elissa, staring wide-eyed, one hand on each man’s arm, her nipples ready to tear through her robe.
“My heart,” he said, and since it was a dream, she could hear it, although his tongue danced with Rafe’s.
“My heart, my home,” she echoed. “Always. No matter what. Take what is offered and let it feed my magic. You know how.”
He felt his skin lift off. Felt his heart swell and expand, surrounding both Elissa and Rafe.
He slid a hand down to stroke Rafe’s cock. Like touching himself and yet not. He was acutely aware of the similarities and differences between their bodies. Acutely aware of Rafe’s weight and thickness. A slightly shorter cock than his, but thicker, cut as his was not so it felt pleasantly alien. It was swollen and proud and a deep purple at the crown.
With his other hand, he reached, found his wife, who’d shrugged off her robe so she, too, was naked. He slipped his fingers between her legs, parted her drenched curls to caress her hard little clit.
Rafe’s hand closed around him. Surer than Jude’s touch on the other man’s cock, Rafe stroked and caressed. The perfect pressure, the way he’d touch himself—harder than Elissa normally would unless he urged her to be rough. It felt as though Rafe were drawing liquid silk over him, but that was his own fluids, pre-come leaking in his eagerness.
Pressure built inside him, and not just in his dick.
The air smelled different, not only of sex, but of flowers, and when he forced himself to look he saw the world around them was in springlike bloom. The tree had transformed into an enormous lilac, filling the air with its heady fragrance.
Quickly, he raised his hand to his mouth, licked it to moisten it, tasting Rafe as he did, then went back to stroking that delicious length.
Dancing on the fingers of his other hand, Elissa mewled. Her juices drenched him, flowing down his hand, flowing to the dry earth, he swore, and making it blossoming.
“Fuck me,” she breathed, and both men turned to her.
She shook her head, beckoned to Jude.
Jude lay on his back with Elissa straddling him, her slick, tight folds engulfing his aching cock.
Rafe hung back, his eyes sad, his erection blazing.
This was a dream. You could do what you wanted in dreams—and Jude knew what he wanted. “Let me suck you,” he said. “I’ve never…but I know what I like.”
Rafe’s grin would have been reward enough, especially when paired with Elissa contracting around him like a silk vise.
Rafe kneeled beside Jude’s head. He clasped his hand around the base of Rafe’s cock, took a deep breath, ran his tongue over the slick, swollen head.
Not bad.
Damn good, in fact.
He wanted more.
Elissa moved over him, riding his cock for all she was worth, the liquid sounds of his penis moving inside her an added stimulus.
Another man’s cock filled his mouth for the first time ever.
He’d never known he’d wanted this until he met Rafe—had figured it wasn’t his thing.
But it was. Oh, it was. He simply hadn’t had the right offer before.
Slick with his saliva, his hand stroked more easily now, moving up and down the shaft. He bobbed his head to take in more of Rafe, and he was sweet and salty and rich like one of those soft French cheeses Elissa loved. He suddenly understood she liked them because they tasted like a man’s sex when he was ready to explode in her mouth.
He’d probably appreciate it more the next time she bought some, he thought, and chuckled. The chuckling must have done something good, because Rafe made a strangled but happy noise that went straight to his own dick, made his hips buck, pushed him deeper into his beautiful wife.
The air smelled like rain and forest, like spring, like sex. He opened his eyes to see Rafe almost too close, a copper and red blur. Elissa moved gracefully yet wildly, her breasts bobbing, her hips rolling, a green and silver nimbus around her pale body. His own skin glowed gold.
He closed his eyes and saw the colored auras weaving together.
Elissa cried out, clamped around him, her body bucking.
He drove the nails of his free hand into his palm to distract himself, to hold off at this amazing plateau a few minutes longer.
“I’m gonna…” Rafe groaned, trying to pull away.
“No, you don’t,” Jude said around the other man’s cock. “Want to taste you.” The words should have been unrecognizable—he could barely understand them and he knew what he’d tried to say—but Rafe got it.
Remembering something Elissa had done for him, he reached around, cupped Rafe’s tight balls, ran his fingernails over the spot where balls and anus blurred together.
Rafe exploded.
It almost choked him, and the salty, musky flavor would take some getting used to, but Jude didn’t care. That surge of the other man’s pleasure carried him away.
The fire started somewhere around his heart, where the cord that bound him to Elissa started. It ran through his belly, burning with sweet intensity, shot through his groin and into his cock and out again, a fountain of red-hot pleasure.
He saw the universe open. Saw the regal, remote figures of the Lady and the Lord and the fractured, androgynous, species-blurred face of the Trickster with its lopsided grin and its tears. Felt Trickster’s tears as rain began to fall.
Heard Elissa’s voice, as if at a great distance, saying, “We did it. Rafe, we did it! His aura’s almost right again!”
He tried to hang on to Elissa and Rafe, but he was falling, falling. Not a dangerous plummet, more a feather-light float toward his destination. They weren’t coming with him, though, and that made it bad.
H
e woke still in his cell, but in a body that no longer hurt.
A lion’s body. His own.
Chapter Eighteen
The kitchen solidified around them, clean and sharply focused and smelling like home: lavender and fur, safety and comfort, Elissa and Jude.
Only Jude wasn’t in it and Rafe was, naked, delicious and entirely out of place. Those two things made a mockery of that sense of safety. The serene light of early morning, rose-tinged and cold, underscored how wrong everything was.
How could so much have happened in just a few hours? It was barely late enough to call in sick to work.
Not that it was worth the effort. Odds were she wouldn’t be going back to the Ag Station. One way or the other.
Everything was changed utterly, changed to wrongness. Life would never be normal again.
Elissa, shaking all over, fought off the urge to vomit, to fall to her knees and from there to hit the floor in a little ball of panic and misery. Instead, she stood and began to pace. It didn’t do much to center her, but it kept her from curling up and wailing.
Rafe stood and touched her arm when she approached him. The contact and the magic that flared almost painfully fractured her scant focus. She jumped away. “Sorry,” Rafe said.
“No problem. In a little while, I’ll probably need a hug. But you’re too distracting when I’m trying to think.”
A Donovan witch stayed focused, kept her mind on solutions, not problems. She wouldn’t succumb to panic.
On the other hand, a Clemens witch, a crunchy-granola hedge-and-kitchen witch, as the Donovans called Grandma Josie when she wasn’t listening, might panic when the situation called for it. But then she’d find some way to use the strong emotions, the love and the need and the fear, to fix the situation.
That, Elissa might be able to pull off. She hoped so, because she sure as hell couldn’t say she wasn’t panicking.
She kept experiencing Jude’s pain, smelling the death in that cell before they’d pulled him to the Otherworld, the dark magic working its way through him. Even though her physical body hadn’t been there, the evil clung to her. Death itself wasn’t evil—it was merely the natural end of life—but what was going on in that place was.
They’d saved him, for now, but she could almost taste Jude’s death.
“What they’d done was almost too strong. We did it, but it was close. If we’d gotten there much later, we’d have lost him.”
Dark eyes wide and solemn, Rafe nodded. “What was that stuff? He’d been shot up with something that makes Drozz look like homegrown pot. I don’t know about medicine, but I could smell the wrongness. Which doesn’t make sense because I wasn’t there, not with anything I could smell with. Right?” He sounded like he was trying to not think too much about the utter weirdness.
Elissa froze. “I’m surprised you picked up on that.” More like amazed—without magic of his own, he shouldn’t have scented anything more specific than sickly sweat—but his odd abilities were a lesser concern. “They’re trying to force some kind of change in his genes with a combination of science and magic. Like we do with plants where I work, only what we accomplish over several generations, gently, they’re trying to do instantly. It shouldn’t work…but it is, to some extent. Not like they want it to, I think, but enough to be dangerous. Maybe even fatal.”
“It’s okay.” Rafe sprang to his feet, his muscles twitching like a cat’s poised to pounce. “We’ll get him out, if we have to blow up the compound. If we have to start a goddamn war. Maybe it’s about time.”
“This from the guy who would barely admit he was a dual a few nights ago?” She tried to smile, thinking the effort might give her the positive outlook she’d need to work any further magic. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Maybe it’s you and Jude. Maybe I’m finally awake and realizing how bad things have gotten. I don’t want a war. But if that’s what it takes to stop this…”
She put one finger to his lips. “No war. I’m a Donovan, remember? We do this with as little violence as possible—no matter what I may be tempted to do. Because right now I’m so angry and so scared I wish I could use sorcerer’s magic and fry those bastards until there was nothing left of them but little heaps of ash. And then I’d kick the ash heaps. That’s why we don’t start with violence. I’m not sure I could stop.”
Rafe put his arms around her. He felt so close to right, to being where she belonged. Despite different wild undertones to his scent, he felt feline and manly all at once, like Jude. He made her magic dance.
He felt like someone she could cry on, and that was the worst thing she could do.
She pushed herself away, resolutely ignoring the way his shoulders sagged at the rejection—not to mention the way her spirit did.
She started pacing again as she thought. Rafe fell in next to her. Despite his longer legs, their strides synched up easily. Great, they could wear perfectly matched ruts in the floor. Despite the grave situation, she almost giggled at the image. It took three silent laps of the kitchen before her thoughts gelled enough to share.
“We’ve got to pinpoint where that compound is and find a way in. Once we’re inside, I think we can smuggle him out. Donovans are pretty good at concealment magics and illusions, although I haven’t had a lot of practice myself.” It hadn’t been one of her better areas, but to admit it would be to admit how weak a witch she was—and the last thing Rafe needed to hear was that she might not be strong enough to do the job.
Rafe picked up an apple from the table when he passed it, tossing it from hand to hand as he walked. She suspected it was because he wanted to take her hand but wasn’t sure it was a good idea—suspected it because that was why her arms were crossed over her chest. “Getting out is the easy part—just pretend you belong there and bamboozle ’em with bullshit. If you can create illusions, better yet. But getting in… Even if you’re the world expert on illusion magic, that’s going to be difficult unless we have someone on the inside.” He didn’t actually say damn near impossible, but she could hear it in his voice. “They’re going to have crazy security at a place like that. Nothing alive could just sneak in there.”
“Nothing alive…” Elissa’s arms prickled with gooseflesh as she tried to fight the logical implications of that idea.
She couldn’t. Much as she wanted to pretend the idea forming was stupid and doomed to failure, it might work. Fighting to keep the fear from her voice, she said as casually as she could, “How about a ghost?”
Rafe’s face took on a nasty greenish tint. “Ghost?” It came out almost as a squeak. Under other circumstances she’d have found it funny, but she felt like squeaking herself.
“Ghost.”
“You mean…like summon a ghost and get it to let us in?”
“Something like that. There was death in that cell. At least one other dual died there, and I don’t think he or she has fully passed over. I should be able to summon the spirit and get him or her to help us.”
Should be being the operative words, but she wasn’t about to tell the obviously nervous Rafe that. It had been well over a decade since she’d tapped into her legacy as a keeper of memory, and the last time had been close to disastrous.
“You can do that?” Rafe backed a few steps away, then stopped, staring wide-eyed.
Most people were a little scared of ghosts even if they couldn’t hurt you. Rafe seemed almost phobic.
Which meant she couldn’t let it slip that only pride and necessity kept her from panicking at the idea of dealing with ghosts again.
She’d been fifteen, she told herself firmly, fifteen and messing with magic too advanced for a girl that age. Now she’d be messing with magic she was rusty at—not to mention magic that just plain terrified her. Hardly the best idea. But unless she or Rafe could come up with some way to waltz into a secure government facility, she had no choice.
“Would your family help us? It seems a lot less iffy than playing with ghosts.”
Elissa laughed
because it was better than crying. “That’s what you call irony. I’m part of one of the strongest witch clans in America and that’s exactly why I can’t ask them for help. They’d be here in a heartbeat—we take care of our own, even the furry freaks who married in. But our magic draws on the earth, and if we’re using it for violence, even violence in a good cause, it gets ugly. The last time Donovans got into a serious magical war, it was back in Ireland. You’ve heard of the potato famine?”
His eyebrows went up and scrunched together when he realized she wasn’t joking. “Ouch.”
“Yeah, ouch. And at least we try to fix what we broke. The Agency…”
“Would blow more up more shit for cover and blame terrorists or duals or terrorist duals. The ghosts sound better and better.” He shuddered theatrically, obviously making fun of his fear. “Okay, they still sound bad, but better than a potential smoking crater where Geneva used to be.”
“Yeah,” she said, only it came out as a yawn. “We need to get some rest. We’ll be useless without it. The couch is pretty comfy—I’ll grab you some blankets.”
Rafe ventured a smile. “I’m not going to be able to sleep.” As if she would—but she might at least be able to get some peace if she and Rafe were on different floors.
“I doubt I will, either, but I need to meditate. Between summoning ghosts and reversing a weird DNA alternation, I have a lot of complicated magic to do. Exhaustion won’t help.” All true, and more polite than saying flat out that she had to get away from him before she either jumped out of her skin or jumped him.
“You do what you need to do, Elissa. Point me at your coffeepot and I’ll start attacking things from my angle, see if I can crack any codes to get us in. No offense, but I’m not sure about this ghost thing.”
Neither was she. It had been more than ten years, but the memory of long-ago ghostly howls and shrieks almost drowned out the awful, tortured sounds Jude had made while trying to regain control in the lab. The ghosts’ icy, clammy touch stroked her skin even now.
“If all else fails,” Rafe said, “I’ll make breakfast.”
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