Lions' Pride

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  She needed a side corridor, a broom closet, anything.

  What she found was a stairwell, and she found it the hard way, by falling backward. Not that she could get hurt in her current form, but it was just as startling as an in-body slip would be.

  The blobs walked past the opening, oblivious to her presence.

  She went through the motions of breathing a sigh of relief. Strictly speaking there was no breath involved, but it was still like taking a deep breath: you got a good whiff of whatever smells were in the area. Only what she smelled was terror, pain, despair and dark magic. And death, recent death.

  It throbbed up from the bottom of the stairs.

  The side of Elissa that was on a mission pointed out if she smelled despair and death, that would be a good place to find ghosts.

  Her more sensible and cowardly side pointed out it would be a great idea to keep far away from whatever was down there.

  Thinking of Jude kept her moving.

  If she’d had her body with her, Elissa would have been shaking and queasy. As it was, she glided slowly down the stairs, pausing every few seconds to look and listen with etheric senses that weren’t exactly seeing and hearing.

  She detected magic that didn’t read like sorcery or anything else she could recognize. Whatever it was, though, it smelled/felt evil and just plain wrong, as if it violated not merely ethics, but reason.

  She smelled death and horror.

  Was she too late?

  She forced herself to stretch, to seek the silver cord, the etheric path to Jude.

  Yes. It was faint, but present, somewhere behind the door at the bottom of the stairs.

  Behind a locked steel door, with a keypad to punch in a security code she didn’t have—and couldn’t punch in if she did—and worse yet, about fifteen layers of interwoven wards and deflections and protections designed to keep out unauthorized magic. It was amazing her probe could get past it, a testimony to her bond with Jude. There was no way she could get farther.

  Elissa sank down in despair, letting herself lose form.

  Footsteps clumped on the stairs.

  She made herself even more diffuse, hoping to avoid detection. Powers, that felt weird.

  One look at the person-blob coming down the stairs convinced her she didn’t need to worry about being spotted. He—she assumed he, since it was a large blob with a surly, aggressive air that suggested too much testosterone and too few legitimate outlets for it—possessed an aura slightly to the right of textbook normy. This guy didn’t simply lack magical ability, he’d come up with a mundane explanation for magic happening right under his nose. His brain couldn’t cope with it.

  Which must make him useful for certain thankless tasks in a place like this. He’d be nearly immune to mind-altering spells—and wouldn’t perceive ghosts at all.

  Elissa collected herself, literally, and slipped over behind the man-blob. When he opened the door, she followed him.

  And immediately regretted it.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  This area crawled with ghosts.

  The Oregon estate had a dead population almost as high as the living one. After all, the whole extended family was always welcome, including dead relatives. Like her living relatives, some had been more loveable and friendly than others, but they’d all meant well. Donovans, at least in recent centuries, tended to live to a ripe old age and die peacefully, surrounded by their loved ones, which made for calm ghosts. Being around the family spirits was unsettling at times, but not bad.

  This was bad.

  Bad enough Elissa almost forgot why she was there, almost forgot she needed a ghost. All she could think about was getting away from the bombardment of dead people’s feelings, dead people’s memories, dead people’s pain. It made her woozy, and she was pretty sure back in Geneva her heart was racing at triple speed from adrenaline.

  At first they were a swirling mass. She couldn’t distinguish one from another. Didn’t want to. Her instincts screamed to go back through the door, back to the other side where spells and cold iron kept the worst of it at bay.

  But she couldn’t.

  One of these ghosts might be willing to help Jude.

  The first spirit she brushed was wolflike. It howled weakly, as if it been dead a long time and howling a long time and was fading. Not crossing over to whatever version of the afterlife it yearned to reach, just fading into one of those fuzzy ghosts that had no personality, no form, no gender, no self, just a series of habits dimly recalled from life. Elissa tried to find a wordside to speak to, but the spirit seemed completely lupine, its humanoid aspect forgotten or simply too broken and afraid to come out.

  Elissa tasted dust and dry bones. Her heart cracked at the weight of the ghost’s misery. Tears welled in her faraway eyes.

  “Go home,” Elissa soothed, and did her best attempt to silentspeak images: a bright doorway, a sunny clearing in a mountain forest, friends and family waiting, healing and peace.

  Did the ghost cross over or simply flee? Elissa couldn’t be sure, but it was gone and she thought the air where it had been smelled of green.

  She probed again. Another ghost, this one stronger, more focused, more individualized.

  And evil. This one wasn’t a dual, at least not any sort of dual she recognized. It wasn’t anything she could identify offhand, and she thanked the Powers for that because she had a feeling too much information about this thing might make her head explode.

  “Tasty.” She heard a vile slurping sound. “Come here, little witch-girl. I’m hungry and your soul’s sparkly.”

  A void opened, a black hole that would suck her inside.

  They’d killed this…whatever it was…but it wasn’t a ghost. Ghosts might retain any malice and menace they had in life, but not their powers. This creature had its powers.

  It didn’t have a body at the moment, but there were beings for which that was just a temporary inconvenience, demons and unseelie fae and things of that ilk.

  That very powerful, very bad ilk.

  Trickster’s twisted testicles, she thought, pelting down the corridor as fast as her etheric body could move, the creature’s laughter mocking her. Figured when the Agency killed something that actually needed killing, it didn’t work right.

  She looked back, actually turning her head out of habit although she could just as easily have moved her focus, trying to determine if the thing was following. Distracted, she ran smack into another ghost.

  They bounced off each other like oppositely charged magnets.

  This one didn’t feel evil, but it was a mass of rage. She could make out an outline of the spirit’s chosen form. Yup, definitely a dual. Without the confines of a body, the spirit partook of both wordside and animal—wolf, Elissa thought, although it was hard to tell an insubstantial glowing wolf from an insubstantial glowing coyote—in one constantly shifting form.

  “Please,” she addressed the ghost. It came out as a sound she and the ghost could hear, but most people couldn’t. “I need your help. My husband’s in here…”

  “No one helped me. Where were you when I was taken from my pups?” Definitely female, definitely wolf and definitely, righteously angry.

  “I would have if…”

  The ghost shifted form, and Elissa was silenced by a barrage of images, each one more ghastly than the next.

  The dead dual had been tortured like Jude.

  She’d been raped, in both her forms.

  Anything that smelled human stank of the enemy to her, including Elissa’s disembodied but human spirit.

  The magic didn’t help, either. A sorcerer—probably the one she’d spotted earlier, since powerful sorcerers were fairly rare—had been involved.

  “I’m not a sorcerer. I’m a green witch.” Oversimplification, but people thought of green witches as harmless and in her case they were mostly right.

  A blob of ectoplasm hit her in the face, even though her face wasn’t anywhere near the ghost and she’d never though
t ghosts could spit anyway. “Fuck you and your moral superiority. Who do you think figured out all their mutation magic? It was green witches and beast witches.”

  Shitshitshit. She choked down guilty nausea. She’d been trying to not think about that, trying to blame sorcerers, scientists, the nebulous government “them”, anyone but her kind. But of course rogue green witches might be involved. She already knew there was at least one beast witch.

  “I’m sorry,” Elissa thought, trying to fight off wave after wave of guilt. Had any of her family been involved? It went against everything the Donovan tradition stood for.

  “Funny how morality can fail when someone makes you the right offer. Or they have someone you love over a barrel.”

  Elissa nodded. There had been rogues before, Donovans who couldn’t pass up the potent lure of worldly wealth or shiny new magic. And Donovans and other witches were just as blackmailable as anyone else—maybe more so, given how family-oriented witches were.

  Though it was probably fucking sorcerers who came up with the idea in the first place. Certain elements of the way sorcery worked made it easier for sorcerers to slip into morally dubious territory, and from there into downright wrong. It was a much bigger slide for someone who practiced nature magic, witch or shamanic magic of any sort.

  “If my people were involved, that makes it even more important I end this thing. Will you help me?”

  The ghost seemed to falter. She flickered, as if she almost fled then stayed. A few words passed through Elissa’s mind, disjointed and emotional.

  The barrage of images started again.

  She’d had pups…children… Two had been safe at school when she was taken, but her baby had literally been torn from her arms. She didn’t know if they were safe, if they were even alive. Elissa got the sense of a husband as well, but it was the children who concerned her most.

  Tears poured down Elissa’s face, so hard she was going to lose focus, lose the thread of the spell, have to start the whole process again from home. “I don’t know. I’ll try to find out…”

  “If I help you? Well, fuck that, witch! I don’t want to make bargains. I want answers.” The ghost shoved and, spirit to spirit, it worked. Elissa let out an oof of breath and went flying.

  “They’re fine, I think,” a different ghost voice said. “Your kids and husband got away because you put up such a good fight it distracted the agents. We think they made it to Canada, because they were just…gone. Shaw was spitting mad. He wanted to poke at those kids because they were cross-breeds. Me, I drank a bottle of champagne when I heard they were off the radar.”

  The first ghost gave a sob of relief. “They’re okay? Hank got them out?”

  “Yup.”

  “When he bolted…I hoped he was going for the kids, but I was afraid he’d just run. He’s a fox. They’re lovers, not fighters. They’re really safe? No one’s going to drag my babies in here? I can move on?”

  For less than a heartbeat, Elissa had the selfish impulse to keep this strong, angry ghost and see if she could help. But she couldn’t keep her here at the site of her suffering. “Yes. Go and be at peace. If I get through this, I’ll find your family for you and give them your love.” She didn’t know how she’d do it, but she meant it.

  No one had told Elissa that the keeper of memory who guided someone over could see the door to the Otherworld open. She’d never gotten that far in her training, and besides, the ghosts on the Oregon estate moved on of their own accord when they were ready.

  Elissa saw the door. It was more like a wrought-iron gate—or maybe a great stone portal or the heavy wooden front door to an ordinary late-Victorian two-story house like the one she shared with Jude. Whatever it was, it glowed with a clear silvery white light that made her yearn to head toward it.

  A burst of energy that wavered in shape between a wolf and a woman started walking toward the door.

  The door opened, letting in light and a smell of pine, and the energy form changed firmly to wolf and ran, a little joyful scamper in its stride.

  “You changed me, Patti,” the other ghost called out. “You made me think about what was going on here. You were the only one who managed to put up a fight until the big guy they’ve got now.”

  The ghost kept running until it disappeared through the bright gateway that folded around it, but Elissa scarcely paid attention. “Jude?” Elissa said. “You know Jude? Where is he?”

  “He’s right down the…” The second ghost stopped, obviously thought for a few seconds. “Oh, shit. I’m dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Elissa braced herself for hysterics. Given her long history of avoiding ghosts, she’d never had to break it to someone they were dead, but Aunt Bath had a few less than pretty stories about ghosts who refused to believe the truth.

  The ghost made a little “sheesh” sound. “They took me out faster than I expected. So I’m a ghost now? And that was the portal to the afterlife or something? Who knew?” The ghost sounded calm about being dead, but incredulous and not altogether pleased with the whole afterlife thing. “You a ghost, too?”

  “No. I’m a witch who can talk to ghosts and spirit-travel.”

  Elissa hadn’t been able to see this ghost before, merely hear her, but now she could see a dim outline of someone even smaller than she was. Either the ghost was barely holding on or she’d been tiny in life. The outline shrugged. “You know, I never believed in ghosts. Magic makes sense. It has a DNA marker and an evolutionary function. Duals and manitou and fae and dragons—they’re just other species. More interesting than squirrels, but no more otherworldly. But ghosts are oogie-boogie stuff. And now I am one…” The ghost laughed, a snorting chuckle that reminded Elissa of Anthony Hage—classic geeky-genius behavior.

  Suddenly some of the things the ghost had said made sense in a new way.

  She’d worked here. Not a dual or some other innocent Different killed by the Agency, but one of their people, probably one of the creepy scientists who’d tortured Jude, who’d met with an accident.

  Elissa must have been thinking too loudly because the ghost came back with, “Accident? They killed me because I didn’t want to play their ugly game anymore and I knew too much for them to let me quit. What they’re doing to the last guy they brought in was the last straw. Are you here for him—the big lion, Mr. Duclos? If you’re going to spring him, I want to help.”

  How much could she trust this woman, who’d been one of them not too long ago?

  Elissa wasn’t trying to communicate the thought, but apparently it got across. The ghost put a tiny ectoplasmic hand where Elissa’s forearm would be were she there in body. She could feel how cold it was, not death-cold, but as if the woman had always had cold hands in life and still thought of her hands as icy. “I won’t lie to you. I’m not sure I could lie to you if I wanted to. I was always a lousy liar anyway, more likely to blurt out the truth at just the wrong time… Completely transparent, and now I really am. Anyway, I’ve done some bad things,” the ghost said. “And a lot more stupid ones. I got recruited for the Agency when I was right out of med school, and all I could see at first was how exciting the research was, this fusion of magic and science no one else was doing. At that point, it was all in a lab, all theoretical, and they told me it was for the good of the country. I believed them. Then I got promoted into hell and I was too scared to do anything. Now it’s time to atone. Or maybe it’s payback time, because getting your ass fried by black magic is not a pretty way to die.”

  Elissa wasn’t sure how to react. So much information…

  “Sorry. Always talked too much when I didn’t talk too little, and either way I was likely to confuse the hell out of the person I was talking to.” The ghost sounded remarkably good-humored for someone who’d recently been murdered by her own government. “Oh, I’m Maggie Krantz. And now I should shut up and let you tell me how to help you piss in the Agency’s swimming pool.”

  Elissa laughed. She realized something very imp
ortant. She was laughing with a ghost. She’d sent a righteously angry ghost who’d started out wanting nothing to do with her to the Otherside.

  Sure, she’d had help. If Maggie hadn’t been able to tell the other ghost that her children were safe, it would have been a lot harder. But while reliving Patti’s traumatic memories with her had been awful, she hadn’t broken down. She’d never want to share anything like that again, thank you very much—but she hadn’t been thrown back into her body or allowed the ghost so far into her consciousness that she went a little crazy, as she had as a teenager.

  If she was ever able to tell Auntie Bath, she’d be so proud.

  “Here’s what I need,” she said to Maggie, feeling more confident than she had in a long time. “First, take me to Jude.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  He was in a secured hospital cell, but she and Maggie could waltz past the dim humanoid blobs that were the armed guards.

  The problem wasn’t the ordinary humans.

  The problem was the angry purple glow around the door. Some kind of sorcerous warding or warning system that, even out of body, Elissa couldn’t approach.

  “Don’t worry,” Maggie said. “I have an angle. Can you slip inside me so we’re sort of stacked? The wards are keyed to certain people and I doubt they’ve had a chance to take me out. I can’t have been dead more than an hour.”

  “That couldn’t possibly…” She paused, thought about Grandma Josie and about some of the crazy things she’d done that shouldn’t have worked, but had. “What the hell, let’s try.”

  Maggie hadn’t figured out how to expand or diminish her form yet, so Elissa had to compress herself to fit inside the ghost-shell of the tiny scientist.

  Moving awkwardly as a unit, they stepped forward—and passed through the ward with no more than a tickle.

  Elissa broke free and ran to Jude.

  Jude was so deeply unconscious she couldn’t even enter his dreams. She could see him more clearly than she could see other dim shapes of the physical realm. She could even see the silver cord connecting them and, to her surprise, a fragile-looking copper one extending outward toward Rafe. She could touch him as she’d been able to touch little else in this bizarre preview of post-body existence. But she couldn’t feel his mind at all, other than the dim reassurance he was still in there.