Lions' Pride

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  The thing that had been Shaw screamed horribly, and she screamed with it, stabbed through the gut and the ribcage with iron stakes.

  Jude shifted. “Fuck you and the ghoul you rode in on,” he said, looking down into the Shaw-thing’s eyes. “We end this.” He pushed. Pushed hard. At the same time, Rafe’s great jaws tore out the sorcerer’s throat.

  So much blood. So much screaming, abruptly cut off.

  They’d killed. All of them together.

  “It’s okay,” a gentle male voice soothed in Elissa’s mind. “In the end, I did it. Sometimes the only way to keep innocents safe is to kill a criminal. I took on that responsibility when I got the badge and I didn’t give it up with the badge.”

  Exhaustion hit like a sledgehammer, and Elissa sank to her knees in the snow.

  Maybe it would be all right.

  They’d just killed a Federal agent, or a creature everyone thought was one, which wasn’t going to make their lives easier, but maybe it would be all right. They had Maggie’s files, evidence of Shaw’s crimes—the computer might be in a snowbank, but Rafe had saved the files onto several different flash drives and they hadn’t gone flying with the computer.

  The body on the fence exploded into a gray, powdery mist.

  Inside the cloud, Rafe screamed that terrible panther scream. “Shit, he’s hurt,” Jude called.

  It barely registered. All Elissa could do was kneel in the snow, panting, wondering that the snow around her wasn’t covered with blood. The wounds were imaginary, but still throbbed dully, as if she’d slipped into shock.

  Rafe cried out again, a weaker and more human cry this time.

  “Oh, no you don’t, fucker,” she said, her voice hoarse. She realized she’d been screaming the whole time Shaw writhed on the fence.

  The mist took on a vaguely humanoid form. They’d killed the body holding the sluagh, but not the sluagh itself. Maybe it couldn’t be killed in this world. Fine, she’d send it back where it belonged. Somehow. She couldn’t stand. Her legs were floppy and weak as seedlings. But it was the equinox, when all was in balance—a perfect time for getting something that didn’t belong in this world out of it.

  She cast back into her memory for a spell she thought she’d never need, one she remembered only because the rhythm of the Gaelic words had stuck in her mind. As far as she knew, no Donovan had come up against an unseelie fae since the 17th century.

  Until now.

  “This is not your world,” she chanted in Gaelic. “It is ours, heart, hearth and home. We cast you out by cold iron, by the blood I have shed, by my will, by the power of love, which you cannot feel. You are banned from this world for three centuries and three, and when you return again, the children of my blood will ban you again.”

  The cloud laughed at her.

  “No children for you, little witch. One of your men is dying, and the other can’t give you babies.”

  A taunt. That was all it was. Rafe could not be dying.

  But why wasn’t the spell working?

  Duh. It was a Donovan spell. The blood I have shed didn’t mean the blood of others. It meant her own, given for the good of those she loved. She hadn’t bled in their defense. Rafe and Jude had, but she was unscathed.

  Maybe the sluagh knew the spell? It might have. Who could say if it had eaten some unfortunate Donovan in a past century?

  “1496, in your terms. He was delicious.”

  It figured she’d end up dealing with an enemy who wasn’t just evil, but a wise-ass.

  “Jude! Come to me!”

  As he bounded the few leaps it took to get to her, she tried to convey what she needed.

  She had no weapons, nothing edged to shed her own blood. Jude had spent the past five years learning not to hurt her. He was going to have unlearn it, and fast.

  “Trust me,” she said, looking the lion in the eyes. “I need you to make me bleed. The magic needs self-sacrifice.” She held out her arm.

  He shook his head. Then he looked back at Rafe, sprawled in the snow, and nodded.

  In lion form he couldn’t say “I love you”, but she felt him say it, lion-fashion.

  He did what he had to do. She winced, but schooled herself not to cry out as his claws raked through her parka and into her flesh.

  Breathing shallowly, she shrugged off the ruined parka. Jude had good control. The wounds were just deep enough to let her blood drip onto the snow.

  Her voice shaking, but as loud and as strong as she could make it, she repeated the spell.

  Nothing happened.

  Try a third time. The ancients were big on groupings of three.

  This time she swore she heard other voices echoing the words, not quite accurately, but close enough. Swore she felt, through the silver cord and the copper, a lion running a pack of jackals out of his pride’s territory and a cougar, wounded but still fierce, taking down a hunter.

  The cloud wavered.

  Jude’s lion-body shuddered and altered itself down to its normal configuration. He roared with pain then stopped and glanced down at his new-old form. His ears flicked as if he approved.

  “Go!” Elissa screamed hoarsely. “Go back where you belong!”

  With a howl that defined despair, the cloud vanished.

  With it all but five of the living agents did as well, and the one who lay dead in the snow. The living five looked wildly from one to the other and ran toward the road, slipping clownishly in the snow.

  Exhausted, Elissa didn’t even try to stop them.

  Illusions. Shaw and the sluagh had them wasting their energy on illusions, mixing in just enough real people to confuse her magic and the guys’ noses. That explained so much. The fae, seelie and unseelie, were masters of illusion, good enough to fool even a witch who wasn’t busy fighting for her life.

  Jude shifted faster than he could usually manage, scooping her into his arms before his mane settled into dreadlocks, before his eyes went fully human. “Your arm…”

  “Will heal. It’s not bad. Thank you.” Her throat felt raw.

  She wanted to lean against Jude’s chest, to snuggle there forever. He felt right again, the strangeness in his aura smoothed out with Shaw’s death, confirming Shaw’s sorcery had been the force behind the drug cocktail. Still, Jude was naked in the snow, and he was bothered by that sort of thing, unlike Rafe.

  And Rafe… “Rafe’s okay, right? That was another lie, right? Another illusion?”

  Jude said nothing, but the silence itself was an answer.

  She forced herself to look.

  Rafe sprawled in the snow. It was impossible to tell if the blood around him was his own or the Shaw-thing’s.

  “Put me down!” Elissa ordered, but Jude was already running with her in his arms.

  Rafe was back in wordy form, his skin green pale. He opened his eyes as they knelt next to him.

  “Bullets don’t hurt me anymore,” he said, somehow producing a weak echo of his roguish grin. “Pretty cool, huh? I got shot, but they bounced. Check this out.”

  The four bullets he’d pumped into Shaw were strewn on his naked form, with small red dents under them.

  “Too bad it’s not true for shrapnel.” Jude almost managed to sound teasing. Almost.

  He couldn’t quite pull it off with one of the fence spikes stuck in Rafe’s thigh, perilously close to the femoral artery.

  Night was falling, and Rafe’s blood poured into the snow. He needed a hospital, but there was still an APB out on them, and Elissa’s meager healing skills might have been lost or corrupted when she helped kill Shaw.

  “You healed me,” Jude said as if he read her thoughts or her body language. “You and Rafe. Brought me back from the dead, just about. And we took care of you. We can do this.”

  “I don’t dare to do magic, just first aid. We’ll have to chance a hospital.”

  Hospitals had to report gunshot wounds, but puncture wounds were another story. Hospitals had a tendency to check IDs, though. That would be bad.
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  As she tried to stanch the flow of blood, Elissa prayed, hoping someone would still accept her prayer. Jude ran to collect her ruined jacket.

  “Easy there, love,” Jude said, talking to both of them, but holding Rafe down.

  She pulled out the spike, trying to pretend he wasn’t screaming, then immediately clamped the jacket over the wound and applied pressure. The thick fabric turned red.

  Some bleeding was good, right? It would help cleanse the wound.

  Was he up on his tetanus shots? Duals might not be prey to all the ills humans were, but, like felines, they could still get tetanus. She hoped she could keep him alive long enough to worry about that.

  Rafe insisted he could walk, but in the end, Jude carried him back to the relative shelter of the house.

  “Not safe here,” Rafe insisted weakly. “They know…”

  Then he passed out.

  Chapter Forty-three

  “Do something!” Jude urged, setting Rafe down on a wobbly plaid sofa with one charred arm.

  The temptation to say “duh” was strong, but not helpful. Barking, “I’m exhausted and my healing, which wasn’t too great in the first place, may be kaput,” wasn’t exactly useful either.

  When you’re desperate, there’s not much to do except try.

  Elissa took a deep breath, closed her eyes, reached for Jude’s hand. “Help me,” she whispered. “I’ll need all the strength I can get.”

  She tapped the earth and swore it groaned in exhaustion. The plants she’d called into bud and bloom out of season were fading—she’d been too distracted even to thank them properly—and either she was too weary to call on the power of the land again or the land itself needed a rest after being pushed prematurely through the seasons.

  “I can’t…” No. She could. She had to. “I will. Somehow. But Jude, I’m so tired.”

  “I believe in you,” he replied. “I believe in us. All of us.”

  She concentrated and felt his love flowing into her, bolstering her confidence and her powers.

  Flowing into Rafe, offering the wounded man some of his strength.

  Love was all she had to offer at this point. Heart, hearth and home and the cords that joined them, because try as she might she couldn’t muster anything stronger than that.

  “Silly, what’s stronger than love?”

  She swore it was Grandma Josie’s voice.

  Dammit, she’d wielded Brigid’s fire. Why was she so powerless now?

  What had fueled Brigid’s fire but love and desperation, the same forces she had to work with now?

  Brigid was also the goddess of healing in the Celtic pantheon.

  “Powers, don’t let Rafe die,” she prayed.

  Jude squeezed her hand.

  She added to her prayer. “Please, he’s become my heart, as Jude is my heart.”

  Following a magical intuition she hoped was right, she opened her eyes, looked at Jude, asked point-blank, “Do you want Rafe in our lives?”

  Jude did a fine imitation of a gaping fish. Then he swallowed visibly and said in a barely audible voice unlike his ordinary roar, “Yes. I… It’s like when I met you, Elissa. I met Rafe and someone turned on the lights so I can see everything more clearly.”

  That told her almost everything, but she pushed him for the words. “Do you love him?”

  “Do you?”

  She checked the two simple words for accusation or reproach. She found none. “I think I do. It’s really soon, but I can see him in our lives forever. But I love you more than ever. Crazy, isn’t it?”

  Jude wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close to his scarcely clothed body. “Thank the Powers! I thought I was losing my mind, because you’re my world, but I’ve fallen for Rafe. Hard. I want to see if we can make this work, all three of us. So yeah, love’s a good word for it.”

  A surge of warm red strength passed from Jude into her. “And we’re not letting him die. Keep your hands on me, Jude, and keep thinking about the future. Our future. The three of us, together.”

  She laid her hands on Rafe’s wound, let the heat pass through them into Rafe.

  Imagined Brigid’s fire, but in a healing form that burned away infection, stopped bleeding, knit tissues. Imagined the force of Jude’s feelings and her own tugging on Rafe, pulling him back from the Otherworld.

  Rafe let out a long, rattling sigh.

  That sounded bad.

  To the universal force of death, she said no.

  She pulled on reserves she didn’t know she had, pulled on Jude through the silver cord and poured any strength she found there through the copper one.

  A presence tickled in the back of her brain.

  Rafe’s watching ghosts, waiting for him so they could all cross over together?

  “No, please. I’m not letting him go. We need him. We love him. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait a while longer for him.”

  A ghostly hand rested on her head—a small one, she thought, a woman’s. Another placed itself on her shoulder, cold but large and strong-feeling.

  “It’s a day of power,” she sensed. “Perhaps we can help.”

  Cool, clean air filled the room as if they were in a remote forest. Magic flowed into her, unfamiliar but friendly. It felt similar to green witchcraft and similar to the little she knew of beast magic, but not exactly like either. Most instinctual, less learned and controlled, alien in some ways, but it found what she was trying to do, fit into the gaps where her skills were weak or her power was drained.

  Drums throbbed in the distance.

  Shamanic, some small part of her brain reasoned. Shamanic or maybe elemental, an actual force of nature as opposed to magic powered by a force of nature.

  As if one of his parents was human—but that wasn’t possible, was it? Not unless he was something other than a dual. But in that case, what was he?

  Did it matter at the moment? She didn’t want to think about anything but Rafe safe, didn’t want to do anything except breathe thank you, thank you, thank you as Rafe’s bleeding slowed and his breathing became regular once more.

  Elissa stepped outside herself. She wasn’t Elissa Donovan, or Elissa-and-Jude, or even Elissa-and-Jude-and-Rafe, but a channel for unfamiliar forces—forces that wanted Rafe alive. She was pretty damn sure what the reason was, and it was the same as hers and Jude’s: love.

  The room blurred. Jude’s grip on her tightened, but that was all she knew for a while.

  When she came back to herself, both men were holding her, one on either side on the awful old sofa. In the dim light of their Coleman lantern, Rafe still looked pale—but when she asked, he showed off a mostly healed wound. “How the hell did you do that?” he asked. “I felt myself slipping away, but now… I mean I’m sore, but okay.”

  “I don’t think I did it,” she admitted. “Rafe, remember what I said about your parents’ ghosts being close to you? Let’s just say they love you very much, and they have a few tricks I’d like to learn.”

  Very peculiar tricks, too, which raised questions she couldn’t answer, but they had more important things to worry about first, such as staying ahead of the Agency.

  One thing might be more important yet.

  “I’m all right to travel,” Rafe insisted. “Let’s hit the road.”

  She smiled and said, “First things first. I love you. He loves you. We’re not letting you go unless you insist on leaving. Okay?”

  Rafe’s jaw dropped and his eyes went wide. Then he laughed—not mocking or defensive, but a sound of pure joy. Through the laughter, he asked, “Do I get a choice in this?”

  Jude joined in the joyous laughter. “Do you have a problem with what Elissa said?”

  “Hell, no. In fact, I’d like to show you both how little I have a problem with it, but I don’t have the energy.” He yawned.

  “You’re both sleeping while I drive,” Jude said.

  When Rafe didn’t argue and Elissa handed over the car keys quietly, Jude said, “Now that proves
it. Sex is great. But letting the lion drive shows love.”

  Elissa chuckled. “You don’t know how true that is. Perfect love and trust. But only until I’ve had some sleep.”

  They headed north toward Canada and the first day of spring.

  Epilogue

  They’d left the car behind them somewhere in the nebulous region where Vermont blurred into Canada and had crossed the border on foot. Rafe led the way. He’d never been there before, but something called to him, leading him on. Jude was dubious at first, not keen on being guided by vague premonitions, but Elissa backed him up. “It’s his parents,” she insisted. “Remember, I met them. They’re powerful. Freaky powerful, like witch ghosts who keep a lot of the magic they had in life. I’d buy that they know this part of the world.”

  If someone had told Rafe he’d someday be guiding his lovers through a wild area of Canada based on information being fed to him by his dead parents, he’d have laughed. The crazy thing was, it seemed to be working.

  It wasn’t easy going—the days were pleasantly cool, but the nights were frigid and the snow was still deep in places. The men shifted to sleep huddled around Elissa to keep her warm.

  They were deep in the woods when an old woman’s voice, strong but with the slight quaver of age, called to them. “Oh good, we found you.”

  It came from nothing they could see.

  Rafe jumped out of his skin. They were alone in the snowy world. Trickster’s tits!

  Cop instincts were more ingrained than dual ones. Faced with an unknown threat, Rafe drew his gun—and realized he had nothing to shoot at.

  Elissa’s posture went defensive, and he suspected from a slight tingling, a sense that his cougar’s fur was ruffled, she was setting up defenses around them.

  The tingling came and went fast as a thought, though, and from the look on Elissa’s face, things weren’t working quite right.

  Jude threw off his coat and shifted, the rest of his clothes shredding as he flowed from form to form with a grace that made Rafe ache despite his rising panic. Jude bared his teeth, getting ready to spring as soon as there was something to spring at.

  Rafe kept aiming at…nothing. At the direction from which the voice had come. At this point, he figured the gun was nothing more than a security blanket, but maybe it would do some good eventually. If not, he’d try cougar form.