Shit.
Jude didn’t react. He probably couldn’t hear her and certainly couldn’t understand her. With him furious and drugged, human words would be tricky to understand, especially if he couldn’t see their source.
But Elissa heard and reacted.
She called upon the energy she held in reserve to freeze Jude and sicced thorny vines on anything that wasn’t her family.
The spells worked on the goons. They looked much better, she thought, in plant bondage.
Not so much on Shaw. The vines crept toward him, but slipped off as if he were coated with oil—or as if they didn’t want to stay in contact with him.
While Elissa was working her spell, Rafe changed with startling speed, faster than even an experienced dual could usually manage. He threw his weight against the stunned Jude. As a cougar, he was much smaller than the lion, but surprise and Jude’s own shakiness allowed him to throw the larger cat off balance. Jude staggered away, and Rafe landed on top of the sorcerer.
“Another one?” the sorcerer asked. His voice was deep and silken and would have been beautiful except for the overly calm, so-sane-it-was-crazy tone. “And this one is unique. Probably the one my seer meant in the first place. What do you do, witch, collect them?”
“Everyone needs a hobby. At least mine’s not torture.”
Rafe bit into the sorcerer’s shoulder. It was clumsy—he obviously didn’t know how best to use the cougar body—but it must have hurt like seven flavors of hell.
The sorcerer didn’t seem to mind it nearly as much as he should have.
Rafe tried to claw and tear out his throat, but with a casual gesture Shaw knocked the cougar aside. Rafe twisted in mid-air but didn’t manage a full rotation. Landing on his back, he skidded across the slick floor to wind up at Elissa’s feet, blinking dazedly.
Maggie had been right: the sorcerer must have wanted Jude to harm him, because otherwise he’d have tossed him away.
Elissa smelled rather than saw a spell swirling around him. Tasted rather than saw that it was dark and cold and deadly, tinged with the abyss. Something worse than death.
“Shaw always was a crazy bastard in his own controlled way,” Maggie remarked.
The ghost flowed toward the sorcerer as something materialized in the room.
The thing Elissa had encountered before, the thing that wanted to eat souls.
Only this time she could see it, shadowy and dark, with an emaciated body, a swollen belly, a huge mouth. And wings.
“Shit,” Maggie said. “That thing. A sluagh, someone called it. We destroyed its body, but that didn’t kill it. Shaw’s made it his bitch. Or maybe the other way around.”
A disembodied sluagh? The spirit of a very powerful, very dangerous soul-eating unseelie fae?
Great.
What the hell did you do with the ghost of something that had never been technically alive in this realm of existence—except be very afraid of it? And how the hell had Shaw gotten control of it?
“Maggie, no!” she screamed, but the ghost had interposed herself between the demon-thing and Ken.
“Come and get me,” the ghost taunted, her voice audible, though faint and crackling like a distant radio station. “I’ve seen you without your skin on. Neener-neener.” She sounded disarmingly like she was taunting a schoolyard bully.
The sluagh flared with purple black light and swooped toward the ghost.
The ghost soared up. It followed.
Everyone froze, even the two felines and the sorcerer, watching the deadly game.
“Time to go,” the ghost urged, once again loud enough that even the agency guys jumped.
Rafe nudged Jude, pushing him toward the door.
Elissa remained rooted in place.
Shaw would be weakened now, distracted by the effort of commanding a soul-eating fae that, on its own turf, was a thousand times more powerful than Shaw could ever hope to be. And he was commanding it, because it wasn’t getting near his men or him. If there was ever a time to run…
But what about Maggie? If she sent Maggie on to the Otherworld now…
Maggie seemed to hear her thoughts.
“I didn’t expect an afterlife. If I don’t get one, no big deal. Let me do my thing and you do yours.”
Elissa drew on an imperfect memory of an ancient grimoire she never thought she’d need in a last-ditch to drive the sluagh back to its own reality, or at least disorient it.
It didn’t work. The spell sizzled and popped in the air, which might have been funny under less deadly circumstances.
One spell freed Ken Hamaguchi. “Get us the hell out of here!” she screamed. It wasn’t until she saw how he scrambled to obey that she realized she’d put a touch of geas into her dealings with him.
Bleeding badly, pale, in obvious pain, the sorcerer still managed to laugh. “How do you choose? How do you choose who lives and who is forever lost?”
“Easy.”
That was a blatant lie, but she couldn’t cross Maggie over against Maggie’s will, or cheapen her willing sacrifice by risking the living. “Go!” She made shooing motions at Jude and Rafe, but their obstinate posture made it clear they weren’t leaving until she did.
Fine, then. With one desperate prayer for Maggie, that an atheist whose soul got devoured by a sluagh could still find her way to the Otherworld, she ran.
Correction: they ran. Two big cats, one witch, one shaking young researcher.
They were partway down the hall, heading toward the emergency exit Maggie had mapped out earlier, when spellfire struck at them.
Shaw and the sluagh had caught up.
The protective bubble held around Elissa, Jude and Rafe.
But Ken fell.
The sluagh approached him, waiting to suck his soul when he was dying and unable to fight back.
Elissa held her ground.
Raised her hands.
Thought holiness. Thought cleansing. Thought desperate need.
And blasted with fire. Real fire, not the non-burning, etheric fire she’d used before, but the real deadly deal. Somehow, she’d become a human flamethrower.
In the oldest grimoires, they called it Brigid’s Blessing, this battle fire, but warned against using it except in the greatest of urgency because it was so hard to control. She hadn’t known she remembered the spell, let alone had the power to cast it.
Hell, she wasn’t sure she even had cast it. She’d thought of it, needed it, and the flames manifested. Flames with women’s faces.
Brigid’s Blessing, the fire of the Lady under one of her ancient Irish names.
Both demon and human fell back, unable to cross through the holy flame.
But when she reached Ken Hamaguchi, he was gone.
She could feel his spirit, though, and it was battered, but bright enough, and it seemed to know where it was going. “I’m sorry,” she said, tears falling. “I’m sorry.” The dead man didn’t notice. He slipped through a set of sliding rice-paper doors that appeared near the ceiling and into the arms of an old couple who must have been his grandparents.
She sent another blast of fire toward the sorcerer. This time she didn’t think cleansing. She thought hurting.
Then they ran like hell. She prayed as she ran, for her own soul as much as those of Maggie and Hamaguchi, but even though Elissa set a few more things on fire and the guys bared their fangs at terrified staff members, she didn’t think their escape had much to do with their own efforts.
She could hear screaming behind them. Shaw must have lost control of the sluagh.
The only good news was that it was still stuck inside the building’s wards. With any luck it might devour Shaw’s black soul, get indigestion and die for real.
They sprinted back to where they’d come from. She pounded frantically on the elevator call button, wondering how she was going to herd a couple of hunt-crazed duals into the hated elevator.
And quickly realized they had a worse problem than that. The call button didn�
�t light up. Someone had shut down the elevators.
They were trapped.
If they were lucky, something human would get to them before the sluagh did.
Chapter Thirty-two
The air next to Jude shimmered, coalescing into some other damn enemy.
“Shit,” Elissa said, preparing to blast whatever it was, even though she was tired. So tired. The weight of all the power she had expended was dragging her down, and every cell in her body screamed with fatigue.
But she wasn’t going to stop now.
“This way,” the shimmering said in Maggie’s gruff mental voice. “Touch where I touch.”
The sparkling figure, now human-shaped although faint and transparent, touched a spot on the wall that looked very much like the rest of it.
Gingerly, Elissa put her hand on top of…Maggie’s? Was it really Maggie’s? It was certainly cold enough to be Maggie’s hand.
A panel slid open, revealing narrow stairs lit by the dimmest of emergency lights.
They piled in. Another switch, this more obvious, shut the door behind them. She tried to zap it with a burst of magical energy.
It fizzled.
Power still zinged and zoomed inside her, but at the moment, Elissa couldn’t muster the focus to use it properly.
She raised her hands and closed her eyes, preparing to try again.
Everything swayed. Or maybe she swayed and imagined the room moved with her.
With a bump of his proud, maned head, Jude nudged her aside. Then he raised one paw and tore the lock mechanism off the wall.
He wouldn’t have been able to do that before.
She tried not think about it too much, just prayed it worked for both sides of the door.
They climbed, following the dim glow that, by some miracle, was Maggie. “How did you…” Elissa panted as they climbed. They hadn’t even gone a full flight yet and she was already winded. Eight and a half more to go.
Damn, she needed to work out more.
With luck, she’d live long enough to worry about that.
Jude was panting and limping, but at least he had an excuse. Rafe, on the other hand, bounced up the stairs, his tail high and twitchy with pleasure. Well, they called cougars mountain lions for a reason…
Maggie, of course, didn’t have to worry about running out of breath. “Kill me once, shame on you. Kill me twice, shame on me. I reminded the sluagh I knew what its insides looked like and it decided my soul might taste gamy.” Elissa sensed rather than saw a fierce, feral grin.
They reached the top of the stairs, wheezing. Elissa frantically punched in the door code Maggie rattled off to her and sent the two cats tumbling out into the snow.
She turned to the ghost. “Maggie, thank you. Thank you so much. We couldn’t have done it without you.” She paused, tried to focus on the shimmering outline that had become an unexpected ally and unlikely friend. “I can open the door for you now—to the Otherworld.”
Maggie’s outline lit up as if she were smiling. “No worries. I’ve seen the door. I can find it when I’m ready. But meanwhile I’m going to have some fun annoying these bastards. Riccardi in the drug lab never followed back-up protocols, and he actually enjoyed the drug tests that killed the subjects. So I’m going to go fry me some valuable data and see how he explains why he never backed up.” The cloud of Maggie giggled manically and was gone.
—
Even with the fighting, even with that kid dying, Jude knew it was too easy, though nothing seemed easy with every nerve in his body on fire and his lion form feeling like he was wearing a badly fitted costume.
Just the fact he could come up with an analogy in lion form was wrong. That was a wordy thought.
Just as much as the hatred that soured the pleasure of running free with his pride was a wordy emotion. The lion could get vicious, but it couldn’t be bothered to hate. Hate was too long-term, too…human. Duals could hate with the best of them wordside, but in animal form, it subsided to a need to keep away from what you hated. Destroy it if you had to, to protect the pride, but better to just avoid it. Life was short, and the world was too big and marvelous to waste time and energy on bad things.
But the lion hated Shaw, as much as the wordy did. He tasted the hate, bitter and rotten at the same time, on his tongue, savored it like he’d yearned to taste Shaw’s blood.
He hated everything connected with the Agency.
Worse, he thought he might hate the cougar bounding up the stairs ahead of him. The cougar smelled of his mate. As if he’d fucked Elissa.
Only Jude couldn’t hate him, because while the wordy side could get mixed up about all kinds of dumb things, the lion couldn’t hate his own mate.
The cougar didn’t just smelled of his mate, he smelled like he was his mate. Like family. Like family and sex and comfort and sex and home and safety and yeah, like sex.
It didn’t make sense, but maybe it would make more sense in wordy form. That side was better for thinking.
Focus now on getting out, and on the sweet, sweet smell of Elissa.
On killing anything that stood between him and freedom.
And on not going crazy in this damn narrow, dim staircase that went on forever and ever. Confining him. Channeling him, forcing him…
He snarled then roared, a noise that echoed painfully in the enclosed space.
He hated the staircase. Was starting to hate Elissa for driving him into it.
“Easy there.”
It wasn’t silentspeech, but not words in his head like he picked up from Elissa, either. More like a dual kid learning to control silentspeech, but stuck in wordy ways of thinking.
He felt a touch in his mind. Someone stroking his fur, soothing him. The cougar. Rafe.
The touch felt like cool water on a hot day, like sun on his fur.
Like Elissa, only not.
Like love.
“Hold it together. Not much longer.”
He hated…hated…
He didn’t.
Shaw, sure, he hated, but for the moment he’d settle for getting far, far away. He hated the idea of the Agency, hated what they were doing, but probably half the people who worked here didn’t know what was really going on.
But he didn’t hate Rafe, and certainly not Elissa.
He stopped long enough to take a deep breath. The air was stale, but it carried the scents of Elissa and Rafe.
Then he kept climbing. It was still too easy—the hunters should be pursuing, but he couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t smell anything—but the Agency wasn’t going to get him that way. Not by fucking with his head.
They finally burst out the door and into a white, cold, swirling world.
Bare trees and the smell of weather and underneath, the smell of deer.
“Venison. I’m starving.”
Rafe-cougar did that soothing thing again. “Food soon. The deer are helping us.”
Jude didn’t even try to make sense of it, just bounded along, following Elissa although his overstretched nerves longed to outpace her and just gogogogo into the forest where there was game and he’d be…
Safe?
What was safe anyway?
They burst into a clearing. It took his brain a while to register car because it was seeing two things at once: Elissa’s Highlander and a cluster of low-growing bushes of red-branched dogwood where a number of white deer, almost hidden against the snow, were browsing.
They stopped in their tracks, first Elissa, then Rafe, then finally and reluctantly Jude. Any second now, the deer would smell big predator and bolt. Then he’d give chase.
The heat of pursuit, and the hot taste of blood and fresh meat…
He twitched with longing.
“Behave.”
Rafe or Elissa? Hard to tell whose thought that was, but someone had picked up on how much he wanted venison, now please, or maybe ten minutes ago.
Rafe made a little noise that didn’t sound very feline, as if he was trying to speak with a body
unsuited for it.
The deer perked up their great ears and sauntered off. Didn’t run, didn’t bolt, just calmly headed out.
Right over the footprints left by one woman, one cougar and one oversized lion.
For once in his life, Jude felt totally frustrated by the lion form. Too many complicated questions burned his brain, and he couldn’t begin to ask them in silentspeech.
No time for that anyway.
They pelted to the car, jumped in, Rafe changing almost in mid-step with a fluid grace that rivaled a dancer’s. Naked, he got into the driver’s seat. A near tussle there—Elissa glared at him, trying to shove him aside with her tiny body, then gave up and got into the passenger side of her own car.
Jude tried to change, but the memory of pain froze him.
“No time,” Rafe said in his head, an awkward mixture of human words and images. “Keep moving. Change later.”
He scrambled into the back, claws tearing at the already battered upholstery and Rafe—wordy again, naked and unaccountably gorgeous—slammed the door closed because Jude couldn’t.
They took off in a whirl of snow, between trees, down an almost invisible road. White deer darted everywhere, almost invisible themselves in the snow, watching their progress, stepping between them and the dark, unmarked SUVs that appeared out of nowhere.
Jude clung to the seat and prayed and tried to remember what his wordside form felt like. He could remember only the pain of transition.
A small hand reached around the seat and touched him. Her touch filled him with green, healthy, positive energy, Elissa energy, but tinged with the power of the storm around them, the heat and ambiguous power of fire, the power of sex and love and home-hearth-heart, as she called it.
His jangling nerves calmed. Nausea eased that he hadn’t even recognized.
He changed, and it hurt like hell, but not as much as before. Changed on a roar that rattled the car and turned into a scream as his vocal chords shifted to ones adapted for speech.
Different colors, diminished smells and no fur.
And hands that could touch his woman and a voice that could speak to her.
And no fur, dammit. It was cold.
“Clothes are in a bag on the floor,” Elissa said. He realized his teeth were chattering, although he could usually handle cold better than this. He rummaged in the bag and threw on sweats and a sweatshirt and searched for socks while Rafe used his cop skills for crazy defensive driving that belong in an action movie.
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