The memory of fear’s acrid stench hit his nose under the scents of earth and ancient decay. The spirits were as frightened as he had been. More so, because they were about as dumb as a box of dirt and had no clue how they’d gotten where they were.
He probed, wondering how he knew how to probe. Another one of those things he’d think about later, if he had a chance.
No, they weren’t dumb, just incomplete. Bits of spirits, the part that belonged to this world rather than the greater part that moved on to the Otherworld when you died. They knew they’d been summoned for a purpose, but they couldn’t communicate with Elissa.
He didn’t know what to do, but he made his best guess. These were duals, or bits of duals. Alive, they’d thought in images.
He opened his mind and showed them the Agency.
Showed them black sorcery in government hands.
Showed them Jude tortured, and Patti dying alone to protect her mate and cubs.
Showed them making a difference—and showed Elissa as the one who would let them make a difference.
Targeted rage crackled like ozone in the cool air—the cool green-scented air.
Elissa worked her plant magic. Spring was coming to this patch of earth.
Something weird was happening to him, too. Make that something else weird, on top of being able to communicate with ghosts and talk to deer and sometimes find things, like the farmhouse, that he shouldn’t have been able to see, and all that other seriously bizarre shit. He heard the green magic whooshing around, prematurely awakening slumbering vegetation. He heard what Elissa whispered to the plants in their own language.
Something in his own spirit answered the call, made him want to throw himself into the magic and help nature arm them. It was even stronger than the call to help the dead had been, and it sang along his synapses. He didn’t know what to do with it, but it was seductive.
Seductive, but not for him. This wasn’t Rafe Benedict’s life. Staking out a cemetery waiting for a showdown with magically enhanced bad guys wasn’t all that far from life as a cop. He just had different weapons. Facing the bad guys in the form of a cougar was new and strange, but at least he’d always known the cougar was part of him.
The magic-type stuff, on the other hand, hurt his head. He wanted to block it out. Block out the plant and earth voices, block out the ghosts. More to the point, block out that he’d managed to talk to the ghosts when Elissa, who was supposed to be a ghost-whisperer or whatever Donovans called it, couldn’t. Block out the way the magic teased him, suggesting he could do it, too, if he only tried.
Duals didn’t have humanlike magical abilities. He’d think if some mutant freak dual did develop human-style magics, it would be while he was in wordy form.
Certainly not while he was in cat form, his reasoning and verbal functions diminished, his instincts in the forefront. Everyone knew magic-using genes were linked to certain types of verbal intelligence, even though using them properly also called on intuition, what witches called the sixth sense.
Then again, he shouldn’t be thinking this wordily in cougar form.
Enough to make a guy wonder what the fuck was going on.
He wasn’t going to have time to ponder that big, big question, though, because the Agency posse barreled through the gate, guns drawn.
For not quite a second, he regretted his choice of form. Regretted he didn’t have his weapon. He was—had been—the best shot in the Geneva police department, better than the guy who’d been an army sharpshooter. Even on Drozz, his reflexes and vision had been superior to most humans. With a gun in his hand, he felt safe.
But the Agency had no quarrel with the Rafe Benedict who carried a badge and a gun, because that Rafe was the guy who followed the rules and took his Drozz and turned himself into a good little imitation descendent of monkeys.
The Rafe who had a problem with the Agency had fur, and fangs, and big-ass claws, and jaws that could snap necks.
He gathered himself, gathered his energy. Felt his muscles bunch and twitch.
Said a prayer to God, Goddess and especially Trickster, and felt an answer as he never had in years of going to a human church.
Leapt at the Agency flunky unlucky enough to be in the lead.
He heard screaming before he lashed with his claws.
He lashed anyway.
Jude issued a warning in clear images: “Play with your prey until it gives up, but don’t kill it. It’s not good to eat”—the mental image was eating a toad and getting sick—“and once it stops moving, it’s no fun anyway.”
The prey stopped moving pretty quickly once Rafe pounced on it, although it didn’t stop screaming. In any case, it stank of pee and voided bowels, and what feline would put up with that if he had a choice? Sheesh, humans. So messy!
Luckily there was plenty of prey for him to play with.
Some of them had guns, which would have been scary except they didn’t always remember how to use them.
When a bullet did hit him, it just stung like a big bee and he ignored it.
He hit the human who shot him a little harder than he’d meant to, and the human fell over, blood gushing from a torn throat. Oops. Accidents happened, and at least the fool human wouldn’t be around to shoot his pride-mates.
After that, he lost words.
The rest blurred red, except for the gray of dead wolves flowing past him to surround their attackers and invoke the terror only things long dead can invoke, and the tawny gold of Jude, his brother, his lover, his mate, fighting by his side and the green blur of energies that was Elissa.
Rafe smiled as a cat smiles, showing his fangs, and another enemy began to scream.
All around them, spring was coming—with a vengeance.
Chapter Forty-one
Power welled up from the earth, from the plants Elissa revived and commanded. The snow didn’t simply melt from the heat; it sublimated, turning instantly to steam. She directed it into the eyes of their attackers.
More surprisingly, power surged up from inside her, a deep, hot well as if she’d been working passionate red magic. There was no way she should be able to raise that kind of power without sex.
But she was. When she had time, she’d say a prayer of thanks to the Lord and Lady and especially Trickster. But right now, she was busy.
Directing wildly twining grape vines to rip the guns from agents’ hands, binding them with grape vines, or with the nastily thorny canes of wild-grown rambling roses. Setting branches in their way. Making sure those who ran away, spooked by the ghosts, would get no peace from the local vegetation. Chasing them on their way with gouts of Brigid’s fire.
Only a few shots had been fired, and her plants had made those go wild. The agents who’d been taken out of the fight, either by her magic or by the guys tackling them, seemed to have all the wind knocked out of their sails. Some raised their hands in surrender. They were guarded by roses and ghosts, frozen in place by spells. Others had fled.
It was all too damn easy.
There were a lot of agents—twenty, maybe more—but Shaw had apparently brought along raw recruits. Not one of the men had a trace of magical ability—human-standard auras, all of them. Most looked terrified to start with, easy victims for ghosts and mobile plants and displays of showy but not especially dangerous magic. They weren’t even very good shots. Some of them were still doing their best to fight, but even she could tell their best wasn’t very competent.
Shaw wasn’t with them, even though Rafe had spotted him earlier.
Shaw wasn’t that stupid. Crazy, maybe, but not stupid. And yet he’d sent in the black-ops version of the Keystone Kops and wasn’t there to back them up.
Which meant he was trying to soften the three of them up, make them use a good chunk of their energy before he even showed his face. Maybe he’d found some new trick, a weapon so powerful he felt his victory was assured.
That was it. He was holding back, waiting for them to weaken then hit them with something th
ey couldn’t possibly resist…
Or, she told herself firmly, he was fucking with their minds again, making them sweat from a safe distance. Setting his cloud of doom and gloom on them so they gave up when they had a chance of winning.
Elissa sucked in more energy from the green things around her. It was a loop, a cycle, giving them energy enough to grow, then taking back some of what that growth generated.
One of the roses had started to bloom out of season, out of time, and the sheer surprise of that light clove and silk fragrance at this time of year made it seem even stronger.
The sun was setting.
Her heart leapt inside her and she remembered what day it was: the vernal equinox. The last night of winter was beginning.
“Too bad you won’t live to see spring. Your pet cats I have use for. You, not so much—except to eat your soul.”
She heard the voice in her head, tasted sulfur and blood.
Shaw’s and not Shaw’s.
He was here, or very near. He’d snuck up, somehow. Tendrils of dark magics surrounded them. So far they lapped impotently at the wards, but she couldn’t imagine that would last. Not with Shaw here.
Why couldn’t she see him? There was no such thing as a true spell for invisibility or she’d have used it a lot lately.
She used her witch-sight, stared wildly around. She should be able to detect him if he’d cast a don’t-notice-me type spell.
Nothing except Jude cornering the last few hapless agents.
Rafe drew closer to her, shifted so abruptly it made her head spin. Rafe was naked in the snow again, but it didn’t seem to bother him. His eyes were still cat’s eyes, slitted and focused on something she couldn’t see.
“I smell him,” Rafe said. “Can’t see him, but I can smell him. He stinks. Sulfur and ice and death. And I can hear him moving. I know where he is. Give me my gun.”
Her breath caught. “He’s playing with you. You can’t shoot something you can’t see.”
He flashed fangs in his human smile. “Want to bet?”
Maybe he could shoot something invisible. She was willing to believe his reflexes were that good.
If this wasn’t another elaborate head game on Shaw’s part, designed to make them destroy one another. If Shaw was actually there, if she could find him somehow, she might be able to do something that wouldn’t risk, oh, Rafe shooting her or Jude.
She handed Rafe his gun, but said, “Point him out. I want to try something first.”
He pointed.
She focused. Hard, harder than she’d ever focused in her life, bringing her witch-sight and all the power of the equinox and the awakened land to bear.
Saw an outline: Shaw and not Shaw. Shaw with glowing eyes, a gaunt face, the swollen belly of famine and vestigial wings.
She’d vaguely wondered, as they’d fled the compound, how Shaw was going to get the sluagh back under control. Apparently, it had worked the other way around.
Wonderful. Now they were dealing with a sociopathic sorcerer controlled by a dark fae.
That would explain the magically null agents chosen for this mission. With no understanding of magic’s darkest possibilities, they might notice their boss was acting more vicious than usual, but literally wouldn’t see the changes in him, or would write them off as anger because his big experiment got away.
He was more powerful than ever, thanks to the sluagh.
And the sluagh had a body again, a body that couldn’t be contained inside wards.
“Ah, now you understand, little witch. Your soul smells like herbs and rainwater. It’s sparkly. I wonder how it will taste. And my companion will break your men and rebuild them, and if they do not survive, I will eat them as well.”
The grotesque Shaw-figure licked its lips and took two steps closer.
It flowed in a way a human body shouldn’t and an unseelie fae should, in a way both disturbing and beautiful.
An unseelie fae was a being from another world. And this was a time when the door between worlds was open, a time of perfect balance. That might make it stronger—but it made her stronger, as well. The damn thing was trespassing in her world. That had to give her some kind of advantage, if only she could figure out what that advantage was.
Then she noticed the cemetery fence poking out through the snow.
The pointed wrought-iron cemetery fence.
“The gun, Rafe. But wait until I tell you. And tell Jude to be ready to pounce. No biting, no clawing, just pouncing and pushing.”
Rafe glanced at her, then in the direction she was staring.
“What are bullets made out of, anyway?” It wasn’t something she’d thought about.
“Lead. Sometimes steel-jacketed.” Grim understanding crossed his face. “It matters, doesn’t it? Shaw’s not human.”
“Unseelie fae,” she mouthed, hoping his police training had covered the fae, who operated according to unpredictably alien rules. The well-intentioned ones, the seelie, were dangerous more or less by accident, because even the laws of physics could get strange around them. Add malice and they could screw you six ways to Sunday. And while they weren’t quite immortal, they were damn hard to kill in this world. “Pass it on.”
Would the guys understand what she needed them to do?
A vivid image appeared in her mind: a bleeding body on the fence, a satisfied lion and cougar smirking at it.
All her training rebelled at the idea of killing a sentient being. But if there was a human soul left inside Shaw’s body—if he hadn’t been devoured from the inside, leaving a shell with his memories, entirely controlled by the sluagh—it would be a blessing to free it.
Shaw wouldn’t see it that way, but if they couldn’t banish the sluagh any other way, there wouldn’t be much choice. A sluagh-possessed sorcerer was too dangerous to let live.
She prayed to the Lord and Lady for guidance, prayed to Trickster for good measure.
She could believe Trickster’s touch was behind so much of this, behind her and Jude meeting Rafe and falling for him under such crazy circumstances. “Trickster gives a gift with one hand and a slap with a dead haddock with the other,” Jude often said, with curious respect in his voice.
They could use a cosmic dead haddock right now. What they had was her and a righteously angry lion.
And a few bewildered ghosts.
And some pissed-off plants.
And a naked cop with a handgun.
It would work, though. Trickster loved stories like this.
Mind you, the cosmic dead haddock might smack them on the backswing, but she’d take that chance if it smacked the bad guys harder.
Chapter Forty-two
Elissa closed her eyes and reached for the silver cord and the copper one, feeling the three-way connection pulsing with nervous energy. She reached for the energy of the earth. Of the setting sun. Of the moment of balance that approached: night and day in perfect union, one season past and the next waiting to be born with the sunrise. Of the moon phase—a perfect half-moon would soon be visible in the rosy silver sky, although the last light still concealed it.
Reached for the plant energy, sending thorns and vines chasing for the Shaw-thing with an audible rush.
The remaining members of the Agency brute squad dove out of the way, some of them shooting at the plants as if that would do any good. The brighter ones tried to shoot at her, but the bullets deflected. It occurred to her to wonder if her own shields were that strong or if the sluagh was saving her for a snack.
Better to believe in the shields.
A blast of eldritch fire hit the thorny rose canes snaking in from the left. They went up in cold purple flame, but in the light of the blast, Shaw became briefly visible.
Rafe took aim.
Jude advanced, snarling, his body low to the ground, his tail twitching.
While their motion distracted Shaw or the sluagh, wild grape vines snaked in from overhead and wrapped around him, binding his arms to his body with lightning speed.
With any luck, that might distract the Shaw part of him from casting immediately. With luck. Fae were magic, and didn’t need to concentrate to cast a spell anymore than a human needed to concentrate to breathe. She just hoped Shaw wasn’t at that point yet.
The vines went up in smoke, but as they did, Shaw became clearly visible.
He raised his hand, pointing at her heart. His lips moved.
Three things happened at once.
Rafe shot, three blasts in quick succession.
As if on a signal from Rafe, Jude leapt as Rafe lowered the gun.
Elissa pushed back and up.
No other spell, no pyrotechnics, no fire or ice—just putting all the force of her will and the power she collected and the energy of the equinox into a child’s training spell, an exercise in moving small objects that adults used only when they couldn’t reach the remote without waking the toddler or cat in their lap.
But what could pull could also push, especially when helped along by the impact of three bullets and the weight of a lion. Shaw flew backward. But not high enough.
Jude’s claws raked at him. When he moved to follow up with a bite, Elissa and Rafe screamed “No!” in one voice.
He listened, an equinox miracle. Even wordy Jude didn’t take direction well.
Elissa prayed for forgiveness. She might never be able to cast again after this night—her magic might become too corrupt to use safely—but she was ending this. What could push and pull could also lift. She called on the plants for help. Vines hoisted Shaw as she threw him up—and dropped him hard on the iron fence.
Not hard enough, though. He was caught, injured, but not impaled. Not enough to kill a near-immortal fae.
All her instincts wanted to believe this was enough. She was trained not to shed blood, trained not to kill.
Fortunately, Rafe and Jude weren’t witches.
Another shot rang.
Jude’s claws caught the squirming body, pushed it down. Rafe tossed his gun aside and shifted to cougar blurringly fast. Two leaps and he added his strength to Jude’s.
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