Lions' Pride

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  “Touch me,” she said. “Put one hand on my shoulder or something. But be prepared to shoot if you have to. Or shift. Or one then the other. But don’t shoot to kill.”

  He shook his head. “I’m a police officer. I don’t want to kill anyone, but if it looks like it’s us or them, I’m not screwing around. I’m shooting to kill. That’s how I was trained.”

  “Guess it’s on me to do as much damage control as I can. They’re coming. Get ready.”

  Her palms were hot, throbbing. She could barely hear over the crackle and roar of magic. Green, thorny magic. Fire magic. Storm magic and water magic, unsatisfied by the small taste of action. So many flavors of power, all striving to escape.

  Her blood roared.

  Jude. Jude was down that corridor. Imprisoned, endangered, enslaved.

  Through the mist of power that skewed her vision, two sets of big, thuggish agents appeared as if they’d been teleported.

  The tingling in Elissa’s palms changed to burning. She wrestled the pain, wrestled for control. She tugged on the silver and copper cords then Jude was with her, groggy, but in her head and soul, supporting her and Rafe.

  The fire turned out instead of in and the first two armed thugs fell, screaming.

  Magical flames surrounded them. They wouldn’t burn, but they might go into shock, pass out from pain. Certainly they’d stop worrying about anything but putting out the fire.

  In what she thought of as the normal world, someone would have stopped to help them. This wasn’t the normal world. Everyone else kept coming.

  Fire pressed against her skin, eager to burst out.

  Two more blasts trapped small groups of enemies. A few others took a look at them and ran, clearly deciding they’d rather take their chances with their bosses than with the crazy intruders.

  One guy had been isolated from the groups, though, and he trained a gun on her.

  Rafe shot him, a deafening explosion in the small space.

  Elissa, open to spirits, felt the man die. He had only a second to register pain and fear and he was gone, winging his way toward the Otherworld as if he was glad to be out of there.

  “I had to,” Rafe mouthed—or maybe he said it out loud, but her ears were ringing too much to hear.

  She nodded. Later, once Jude was safe, she’d take the time to get sick. This death that she hadn’t instigated wouldn’t affect her powers unless she let it, and she couldn’t let it. If she faltered, she and Rafe and Jude would die.

  She said a swift, silent prayer for the dead man’s soul. Then she refocused and asked herself what else Grandma Josie might do in this pass, how she might hold off these lunatics and keep Rafe’s more lethal skills as a last resort.

  It came to her in a flash.

  She called upon the green magic. Called upon it as she never had before. Called upon the side of green magic with thorns and phytotoxins.

  Called forth a spell dimly remembered from an ancient grimoire, something so weird her instructors hadn’t been sure it would work. If it could, though, this was the time, with power thrumming through her veins, more power than she’d ever drawn, and their need desperate and Jude so close and yet so far.

  Grandma Josie always said belief in the magic and the self was nine-tenths of the spell, far more important than following some ancient ritual correctly. It worked for Grandma Josie. Elissa could only hope it would work for her.

  Whispering half-remembered Gaelic and making up the rest in English as she went along, she conjured fast-growing vines with fierce thorns.

  Green magic couldn’t create something from nothing, but it could, in need, translate something from one form to another.

  This compound was surrounded by woods and fields—by plants.

  It should work. It had to work.

  At first, nothing happened, but she held the power and kept encouraging it to work. Confidence was nine-tenths of the spell. She’d never bought that—but lives had never depended on her magic before.

  Something burst through the floor, growing at absurd speed.

  The vine was lush and tropical-looking, with thick, leathery green leaves and red flowers and frighteningly long thorns. It wasn’t anything that should grow in this cold climate, and it grew like nothing that existed in the mortal world. A sweet, cloying fragrance filled the corridor as the vine twined around the thunderstruck guards, holding them fast.

  “Go!” She shoved Rafe in the right direction, sending him past the bound guards.

  It wouldn’t hold them forever, anymore than the freezing spell had. Sooner or later they’d get smart and send down a sorcerer or another witch, and then they’d be screwed. Rafe might be able to shoot them, but even that would help for only so long…

  The leaves of the vines drooped as if from a long drought. The one binding the nearest guard loosened its grip, allowing him to work one arm free. He struggled to reach his gun, which the vine had knocked from his hand. Sooner or later he’d get it.

  Shit.

  Was it because she’d messed up the spell in the first place or because her confidence had flagged? Better to believe the latter, because that she could do something about.

  Not even bothering with what she remembered of the original spell, she sent another wave of power into the vines, putting all the bravado she could muster into it. Obviously she did know what she was doing, more than she realized—at least until she’d doubted. “Thanks, Grandma Josie,” she prayed under her breath. Without Grandma Josie’s unconventional training, she’d have been screwed.

  She bolted in the same direction she’d sent Rafe.

  Toward Jude.

  She passed Rafe within a second or two—he’d clearly been waiting for her—and kept moving. She didn’t dare look back, but no one followed as she led Rafe down the corridor she knew led to the lab. Alarms went off everywhere.

  They reached the lab just as a slight, young Asian man, unarmed, lab-coated and vulnerable-looking, was closing a secondary steel door.

  She bound him with greenery while Rafe held his gun on him. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she said. “Although my armed friend here may have other ideas. I’ve come for my husband.”

  Elissa had been told that menacing wasn’t exactly her most convincing look, but it must work better when she had a nimbus of fire and thorns and a rock-solid man with a gun backing her up. The lab guy nodded mutely.

  “You’re going to help me, aren’t you? Not call for help?”

  He nodded again. “I don’t even know who to call, lady. It’s my first day here. The what-to-do-in-an-emergency briefing was supposed to happen later.”

  Inspiration struck her. “Are you a medical researcher? Got promoted really unexpectedly?”

  “They called me at unfuck o’clock this morning, told me I was working here now instead of Buffa… How did you know?”

  “They murdered the woman you’re replacing.”

  The guy turned greenish beige and his almond eyes got even wider. “You’re lying,” he said, but his tone said otherwise, said he knew damn well there was something fishy about the sudden need for him to be there.

  She reached into the ether, called a name.

  This time when Maggie manifested, she looked pretty solid for a ghost. She’d been cute, in a geeky, couldn’t-bother-with-fashion way.

  Rafe blinked, his gun pointing at something he couldn’t have shot anyway.

  “Friend,” Elissa breathed. Rafe lowered the gun, but his posture was more feline and feral.

  “So you’re my replacement,” the ghost said. Her voice was just above a whisper, but it was enough for the young man to hear. He turned even greener. “It stinks that they finally hired someone attractive around here after they killed me, but maybe you and I can go on a ghost date sometime. They’ll probably murder you sooner or later. Talk about your sucky management policies. Of course, if you’re helpful for this nice lady and her friend, they might help you get away.”

  “I’ll help,” he said. “Just m
ake it look like I’m a hostage or something…in case your plan doesn’t work. No offense.”

  Smart man, this—she peered at his name badge—Ken Hamaguchi. Then again, the Agency recruited smart people. Not necessarily sane ones, but smart ones.

  “None taken. Now get us into the damn lab and to my husband.”

  She dropped the vines, but Rafe kept on the young man’s heels, his gun drawn.

  Ken didn’t need to ask who her husband was. He led them to a small, heavily secured room that looked like a hospital room crossed with a prison cell, and stepped back as he opened the door as if he expected Jude to shift, pounce and devour him. Elissa half expected it too. When he didn’t move as they entered the room, she feared he was drugged or comatose.

  Elissa tried to hold back her emotions, tried to act like a fierce, angry witch capable of doing something far more deadly than tying someone up with vines. But when she saw Jude stir, she smiled and meant it for what seemed like the first time in years. She ran across the little room to her husband.

  He breathed shallowly. His naked body was a mass of bruises, but his eyes opened and he sat up with almost his usual lazy grace. “About time you got here, beautiful.”

  Then she was in his arms, kissing him over and over again.

  She couldn’t let the world shrink to the two of them, though, not the way her body wanted to. No time for that.

  She could feel the wrongness in him. He was chilled, human temperature or less, and his breath tasted of chemicals. He looked like he’d been run over by not just one bus, but a whole city fleet. But his heart beat strong and steady, and his green eyes were clear. The rest was fixable.

  His cock got harder by the second, doing its best to distract them both from more urgent if less interesting matters.

  Rafe cleared his throat, but it came out more like a growl.

  “Rafe, there’s something different about you.” Jude’s smile brightened and he slipped from the cot, crossing unsteadily to him and looking him up and down. “You don’t smell like Drozz anymore. Good choice.” He clapped Rafe on the back.

  “I shifted today. Taking all my self-control not to do it now, but I can’t shoot with paws and I haven’t figured out my built-in weapons yet.”

  He embraced Jude. It lasted a few beats longer than Elissa would have expected, even given the emotions of the moment.

  Jude pulled back, his cock still half-hard. “Hope you make a better-looking cat than you do a wordy,” he teased.

  With one hand on Jude and the other on Rafe, Elissa felt more right, more balanced than she had since Jude had disappeared. The power inside her crackled again as it recharged. She could have stood there forever drinking in the pleasure of being with her man again, drinking in the redoubled power, the pure, exciting surge of red magic.

  But it was time to make a break for freedom.

  Damn, she knew she’d forgotten something. Not that they could have fought their way in burdened with a suitcase.

  “You got clothes?” she asked her husband.

  “Shit, I must look worse than I thought if you have a problem with me being naked.” He grinned and, despite the gravity of the situation, Elissa couldn’t help grinning back. Still cocky despite everything—and despite everything, he looked gorgeous. She gazed up and down his naked body, showing her appreciation, battered though he was.

  He picked up on it, because he grinned even wider. “My clothes were gone when I woke up. They were probably wrecked anyway.”

  Jude didn’t have a shred of personal modesty, but it was too cold to run around naked, even with a dual’s warm-running metabolism. Not to mention a little conspicuous, as if a six foot six dreadlocked black man wasn’t conspicuous enough in this largely white rural area.

  She laughed because it was more productive than crying and said, “In that case, can you shift?”

  “Sure,” he said, at the same time ghost-Maggie said, “Maybe. He been drugged again, Hamaguchi?”

  The kid—he looked like a teenager, although he must have been old enough to be out of med school—shook his head. His eyes were wide with terror. “I was coming in to give him a dose.”

  “Good, then. He can do it.” The ghost nodded briskly, although it was hard to see under the migraine-level florescent lights. “It’ll hurt like a bitch, though. Just warning you.”

  Briefly, Elissa considered stripping Ken and giving his clothes to Jude instead of letting Jude shift. She resisted the urge only because it was impractical. Ken was small and wiry. His clothes would fit her better than they would Jude.

  Before she could consider that, Jude roared and began to change.

  Not the way he usually did, though. Normally, the change looked not only completely natural, but fun.

  This was slower and more awkward, as if his body fought normal behavior—as painful to watch as if he struggled to breathe. Parts changed randomly, changed back. A tail sprouted where it shouldn’t, then reabsorbed. Whiskers grew on his human face. His legs went lion abruptly while the rest remained human, throwing him off balance.

  Ken tried to make it to the sink in the corner of the room. The stench of vomit filled the air.

  Only a feeling that she had to endure this if Jude had to kept Elissa from turning away. Her stomach roiled at the sight, but she made herself watch.

  After the initial roar, neither human nor leonine but something awful in between, he was silent, and that, too, was abnormal. Jude would joke and banter as long as he had words then make noises in lion form like a huge version of a housecat chirruping and mewing at his human.

  He was silent, she realized, so he wouldn’t scream.

  Someone—no, make that several someones—pounded at the door. Even though he was barfing, Ken twitched as if he wanted to let them in.

  As if he were being compelled to let them in.

  Rafe moved between Ken and the door.

  Ken was fighting off the dry heaves, but he crawled toward the door, even though he’d have to go through a wall of Rafe to get there.

  Compelled. Definitely compelled.

  Someone new had turned up on the other side of the door, and he or she—it might be the sorcerer, Shaw—smacked of bad juju from here. His magic tugged at Elissa, trying to force her. It didn’t have much chance against her defenses—witch defenses could almost always lock out sorcerous mind control, especially if you had some warning. That she could feel him at all, though, meant he was scary powerful. If he got through the warded door, his offensive magic would be deadly.

  She was willing to bet he had a door code, but was using magic for the intimidation factor in classic sorcerer style.

  Ken fought to his feet.

  With one casual blow, Rafe knocked him down and trained the gun on him again. “Don’t push me,” he growled. “I don’t want to shoot you, kid, but to protect them, I will.”

  A dark stain flooded the fly of Ken’s pants and he began to cry. He still tried to get to the door.

  Elissa muttered the necessary words and froze the researcher. The poor guy looked relieved as paralysis gripped him.

  With a great roar, Jude went lionside.

  Yet not quite right, somehow. He was sleek and tawny with a full black mane, like always, but his aura looked bruised—she’d never seen the lion with anything but a clear, healthy aura—and madness gleamed in his feline eyes. A feral yet unhealthy look, the look of a man-eater. The lion form seemed bigger, but oddly proportioned and wobbly.

  Maggie the ghost said in her head before she could ask: “So that’s what a lion would look like coming off a three-day tequila binge. It’s the drugs. It’s not permanent—at least in theory. We don’t know yet. No one’s ever survived as much as he’s had.”

  He needed healing, needed her energy.

  The green magic inside her surged. A scent of mint almost masked the stench of vomit.

  She reached out her hands. The lion poised to spring, then froze as if trying to recognize her.

  In the frozen si
lence, the lock whirred.

  She pulled most of her energy from Jude and into reinforcing the shell of protection around the three of them. She sent a bit at Ken Hamaguchi, too, but there was only so much she could do for him, with no connection to work with. The defenses clicked into place, a satisfyingly solid sound.

  Just in time, because several things happened at once, none of them good.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The door banged open.

  The room flashed sickly fuchsia and filled with the smell of thunderstorms in a swamp—ozone and decay. A spell bounced against the defenses. It hurt as if someone was sticking rusty pins into every square inch of her skin. It only hurt for a second, though. Harder to tell with the guys, but she thought they were okay, too. Thank the gods for good protective spells, because she had a feeling it should have hurt a lot more, for a lot longer.

  Gunfire rang out, deafening. She wasn’t sure if all four of the armed agents fired, but somehow, no one was hit.

  Rafe shot back and one of them fell, clutching a shattered knee.

  Why hadn’t the Agency guys been able to do the same? Defensive magic made it harder for mundane weapons to target them, but not impossible. The shooting went as wild as if they were B-movie villains, which seemed unlikely since the Agency recruited a lot of ex-military personnel.

  Maybe they were disoriented by the purple spell. Sorcerous spells, especially the unsavory kind, often worked on the “get them all and let the gods sort them out” principle.

  Jude jumped right over Elissa’s head. He’d never been able to do that before. What the hell? He plowed one agent over with his momentum, leaped on the old man…

  Who grinned as he went down under the lion’s angry mass.

  Grinned?

  No matter how powerful a sorcerer you were, no matter how confident you were in your abilities, you didn’t grin with close to six hundred pounds of angry lion getting ready to bite into your skull.

  “Don’t!” Maggie cried, her voice barely audible. “It’s what Shaw wants. One taste of human blood and you’ll cement the changes.”