As the accusatory voice vibrated through Meaghan’s bones, she felt a seizure coming on. “Lay me down,” she whispered urgently, but Kyle was already easing her onto the grass. To her dismay, someone else—someone who was probably the woman who yelled at her, because those hands were small, though strong and calloused—was helping.
The vision surged over her, and for the first time she knew what it felt like: like being sucked under by a great wave, with no hope of rescue. The ocean frightened her less, though. The ocean might have killed her, but it loved her at the same time. This just hurt.
Her body arched. Her hair stood on end. The stench of blood and a child’s panicked cries filled her brain. But for some reason, it wasn’t as bad as it normally was, not as painful, not as all-encompassing. She was still herself inside the vision, retaining some control.
Suddenly she knew who the woman was, the one who’d called out to her as if she knew Meaghan and had reason to hate her. “Child of five bloods is…your child, I think.” The words came out hard and harsh, fighting against the vision. “In danger. Agency knows her. Knows her name and what she is, anyway. And she’s here. I can feel her. You must…protect her. She matters…in some cosmic way…not just because she’s a kid.”
The vision fought through her words, filling her mind with a family’s anguish, a child’s terror, death.
And hints of what the Agency wanted with the baby, the destruction they could force from her innocence and power.
Meaghan reared up, started to scream.
Two sets of arms wrapped around her, easing her back to the ground. Two male bodies, moving almost as one, lay down, one on each side of her as if to protect her from the voices in her head. One was Kyle. She recognized his ocean-and-fur presence. The other was a stranger, tall, solid, and even though he was a stranger, safe in a way she couldn’t explain. “Shield, dammit,” a strange male voice said. He sounded angry but Meaghan knew he was just afraid. “Shield. Work with me, babe. Shield.”
“I can’t…” she started to say, but suddenly she found she could. Her rudimentary shielding that kept out the buzz of other people’s minds never stood up to the force of the visions, but this time a wall of water, flexible but impermeable, rose up between her and the horrors she’d been forced to experience. Hidden inside those walls, her body lost some of its rigidity. Her hair flopped down again like it was supposed to.
And she transported into another vision, but this time it was the delightful one of making love with two men in the ocean.
Like most of her visions, she’d forgotten the details when she snapped out of it, but now they came back, sensual and vivid.
How had she not realized that Kyle was one of the two men, the one she’d recognized as nonhuman?
This deep-voiced, hard-bodied stranger who felt vibrant and liquid and right in her head, was the other.
She sank farther, not fighting anymore, letting sensation take her.
She didn’t have time to enjoy it, though, because the woman was there, pushing the man who wasn’t Kyle aside to kneel beside her. “What about my baby?” the woman demanded, her voice hoarse as if she’d already been crying for days. “I saw you in my baby’s mind. I thought you were in league with Chenier or Shaw, but you’re no sorcerer. Victim of a sorcerer, maybe. How does the Agency know about my baby?”
Meaghan snapped back to normal consciousness so fast it hurt, as if the woman’s voice netted her, then pulled her to shore. Her skin tingled, and her nipples and her sex ached with arousal, even with sorrow and horror crashing over her again. She took a deep breath, cut herself off from her traitorous body as Shaw had taught her to do when she was little and the neurological problems began throwing her balance off and causing random shooting pains.
Calmer now, distanced from her pleasure-drugged body and able to focus on what she needed to remember, she said, “It’s my fault and yet it isn’t. I tried to die, but I already told them without knowing it. I must have, like I told Shaw about the lion man. But the lion man wasn’t magical, not like the vision told me, just another dual who could have been turned into a soldier for the Agency. Except he got away and that pissed Shaw off, and this baby…they think they can use her for terrible things, and she’s just an infant and…Kyle said he knew people who could help protect the baby but he didn’t say the baby might be here. That’s bad. Really bad.”
Something bright and terrible edged the woman’s voice. “No. That’s good. That’s very good. Let those fools try to attack us at Donovan’s Cove, at our own hearth and home. I beat them before with only Jude, Rafe and someone else’s dead at my back, and Jude was weakened and Rafe didn’t know what he was. Now Rafe is in his full power and the whole family, even the ghosts, are here. Let them try to take our baby.”
Jude. Meaghan knew that name. That was the lion man’s name, the one she’d accidentally betrayed.
The one who had somehow been able to show her how she’d been used.
Waves of power were crashing off the woman—cool and spring scented, erotic and sensual, raw and dangerous. Meaghan shrank back. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “The Agency figured out how to manipulate my visions. They took me when I was little. Shaw…I trusted him. He was like my father, and then he became my lover. But the lion…your Jude…he was different. I saw what they were doing to him that time. I woke up. I thought things would get better after Shaw died, but then I saw your baby…”
To her horror, Meaghan started crying again. The woman’s power still pushed at her, battered her, refused to let her retreat. Bright, terrible, fiercely angry. Maybe she would kill Meaghan, end it.
“Leave her alone!” Kyle yelled. She thought he shoved at the other woman, from the way he moved.
The air shivered, and everyone went very still. Meaghan smelled cut grass and burning cinnamon, and she had a feeling that those pleasant smells might signal something terrible was about to happen.
Then the other man moved, jumping to his feet. The way his muscles shifted sparked on her skin, despite how upset she was. “Don’t, Kyle,” he said, his voice rumbling like thunder. “Elissa’s changed. I don’t know what she can do anymore. And it’s her daughter we’re talking about.”
The strange smelled subsided.
“She’s telling the truth, Elissa. I can still smell traces of Shaw on her spirit.” Someone had snuck in to join them, moving almost silently, but his voice came from high above Meaghan and the voice was deep and booming, but sensual.
A lion’s voice.
She knew that voice. She’d heard it in her visions. Heard it defiant, holding out while Shaw tried to break him. “You’re safe! I’m so glad. I prayed and prayed, but I didn’t think anyone would listen to me.”
“The Powers always listen. Sometimes Trickster answers and things get strange, but it works out in the end.” That was yet another male, seemingly standing very close to the first. Like Jude’s and Kyle’s, his voice felt like fur on Meaghan’s skin, but this guy had something else going on, an uncanny energy she couldn’t place.
Rafe. The dual with magic. The one she’d seen in the vision that led Shaw to Jude instead.
Slender arms drew her in. A cloud of soft hair and magic surrounded her. “The Powers work in mysterious ways,” the woman—Elissa, she’d been called—said. “If it wasn’t for your visions getting us mixed up with the Agency, Jude and I wouldn’t have met Rafe or have Jocelyn.”
“But I…”
She found herself pulled against a female body. She tensed, then realized Elissa was just hugging her. “The guys believe you, so I do too. Shaw got to you when you were a kid, and he was one of the two most powerful sorcerers I’ve encountered or even heard of. And Trickster must love us all very much. I can also sense the other sorcerer, Chenier, has his spells on you too. Because the two of them just had to be working together.”
“Yeah, and we helped take down both of them.” The lion—Jude—again. “Go us.”
“Shaw got into my head,” Elissa admitted, “and I’ve been trained to fight off mind magic for my whole life. He could even get into duals’ heads, and sorcery doesn’t usually stick on duals. The other sorcerer, Chenier, had a fae ally, so you didn’t even need to get anywhere near him to be affected. It wasn’t your fault.”
“So…what is a child with five bloods?” Meaghan asked nervously.
“Simplest explanation: humans and duals usually can’t interbreed, but Rafe is part manitou, and since manitou are fertility spirits, we were able to have a baby. Jocelyn carries all three of our genes. It’s a manitou thing that I don’t even begin to understand and I’m a geneticist as well as a witch. Plus Jocelyn has fae heritage from the Donovan side, and Rafe and Jude are two different species of dual. Hence five bloods, which is apparently a big draw for creepy sorcerers.”
“But what does she do?” Meaghan knew she was better off not knowing, but she couldn’t help asking.
Elissa laughed, and though it was strained, it was also sweet. “She’s just over six months old. We know she’s a seer…”
“Poor kid!”
“Figured you’d understand. Fortunately it’s not a strong power and it seems to be fading as she gets older. But other than that, we have no idea. We’re not even sure what species she is, technically speaking.”
“What she is, is adorable,” Jude’s deep voice said. “So do you want to meet her?” He took Meaghan’s hand, helped her to her feet.
“I warn you,” Jude added, his big voice now as amiable as Garrett’s. “Our Jocelyn’s a dangerous creature. She’ll wrap you around her little finger and you’ll be forced to do her bidding. Luckily, at her age, her bidding’s just play with me.”
Meaghan followed, not sure what hit her, other than the sheer force of personality and magic embodied in the tiny, intense Elissa and her husbands.
But she was starting to believe that maybe Kyle’s confidence that these people could help wasn’t misplaced. She knew now who Elissa was: the witch who, with the help of two duals, had exposed Shaw’s secret soldier project in New York.
Which would make her two fur-voiced companions the ones who’d killed Shaw. That should bother her far more than it did.
Maybe it was just another one of the ways she was a broken freak. Or maybe the broken part was that she thought she should mourn the bastard because he’d sometimes created the illusion of caring about her.
As she walked away with Elissa and her men, she heard the other man, the one Kyle had started to introduce her to, say, “Kyle, what the fuck were you thinking bringing her here?”
Meaghan didn’t even cringe. But she wished the stranger had vented his anger on her instead of Kyle. It wasn’t Kyle’s fault she was a freak.