Damon had to blow out a few deep breaths himself on the way to his car. His reaction to Lily’s meltdown had been intense—and instantaneous. The fierceness of his need to protect her had caught him off guard, and he’d been impressed as hell with how quickly she had recovered from what had clearly been a massively powerful spell. He’d seen terror spells in action before, but nothing like that. Nothing so strong that it could send a fire mage to her knees.

Bannon had money, so clearly he’d hired the best. Damon needed to put resources on the job of tracking which warlocks were unscrupulous enough to do business with scum like Harrison Bannon the Third and had recently come into a big whack of cash.

He popped the trunk lid on the car, which was actually an agency car that the local SAC had offered for his use. The Special Agent in Charge had also directed one of his people to stock the car with the basics: emergency gear, guns, ammunition, and survival gear. The sight of the gear made him grin at the memory of Zane’s phone call.

“I’m putting out a call for the best vest manufacturer in the business to make a bulletproof vest that will fit you when you’re in lion form,” Zane had said, in his best “Or Else” tone.

“Zane. I’m not going to stop and put on a vest when I’m shapeshifting. How would that even work? ‘Excuse me, Mr, Bad Guy, would you please help me into this vest? I’ll just put my left paw here…’”

“Shut up. We’re doing it. We’ll figure something out. You…you saved my life, today, man. You could have been killed. So cut out the damn heroics. And thanks again.”

“Shut up, yourself. How many times have you saved my life, Brain Boy? It’s the job. Get over it. Have Zenia make me some of her incredible chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies and we’re even, at least until the next time.”

Zane had laughed. “My life is only worth a batch of cookies?”

“They’re good cookies, Zane.”

Damon grabbed the sleeping bag and blanket, the duffel bag with his favorite weapons, and the bottle of excellent twenty-year-old Scotch he’d bought on the way from the airport, planning to drown his sorrows at having to deal with fragile, boring witches.

Assumptions, meet ass. There was nothing fragile or boring about Lily.

He tried to ignore the distracting wave of warmth that swept through him at the thought of her, but that was a lost cause, so instead he focused on scanning the area for any sight, scent, or feel of danger.

And found it.

The tiny yard surrounding her cottage was vibrating with dark energy. He couldn’t believe neither he nor Lily had felt it when they’d arrived back at the house after dinner, so either the terror spell had masked it, or the perpetrator had cloaked himself with some kind of don’t-see-me magic and then hung around waiting to see the results of his handiwork.

He—or she--was gone now, Damon was pretty sure, but he tracked the sense of darkness to the edge of Lily’s yard and into the street, where the warlock had either stepped into a car or simply disappeared. When he walked back into the house, he found Lily standing by the window staring out at the street.

“Lily, We need to check that surveillance footage now. I hate to have to add to your stress—“

“Just spit it out, Jones,” she said wearily. “The sky is falling? Harry is walking up my street with a Gatling gun? You’re out of whiskey?”

He held up the Scotch. “Brand new bottle, my friend. The bad news is that I could feel the warlock’s magic outside, and it’s pretty damn powerful. He or she isn’t here now, unless that warlock has some massive stealth cloaking magic that I can’t sense.”

Lily walked over to the kitchen and pulled a couple of red plastic cups out of a plastic bag, and then she shook her head. “I know it’s powerful. Cardinal, remember? I’d be able to feel him if he’d hung around—and it is a him, I can tell the difference in the magical resonance—and he’s gone. The coward must have been watching for me to leave, so he could plant the terror spell.”

“And the lilies.”

“And the lilies,” she agreed, sighing and handing him a cup. “Hit me.”

“This is almost sacrilege, you know. Whiskey this good should only be poured into a cut crystal glass and then savored.” He filled her cup more than half full. “I make no promises about how good plastic-cup whiskey is gong to taste.”

She laughed. “Hey, my cut crystal glasses are at the cleaners this week. Cheers!”

He touched the rim of his cup to hers, and then watched in disbelief as she gulped down a big swig.

“Sip. It’s sipping whiskey, not…not—“

“Boone’s Farm? Pabst Blue Ribbon? Old Milwaukee or generic brand wine coolers? Because that’s what we must drink in Garden City, Ohio, right, city boy?”

“I didn’t--"

“Oh, whatever. I’ve had a long damn day, and I deserve a big gulp of whiskey. So relax, kitten, and worry about your own drink.”

“Kitten?” Damon took a fairly large gulp of his own whiskey, more from bemusement than inclination, and then put the cup down and retrieved the sleeping bag he’d dropped by the front door.

“It isn’t much, but you can curl up on this tonight,” he offered.

“And you? Are you leaving?” She put on a calm face, but he saw the flash of apprehension in her eyes and his gut twisted.

“Not a chance. I’m going to keep watch, in case our friend comes back. Tomorrow your stuff should arrive, so you’ll have a bed. I can bunk on the sleeping bag once we’re sure Austin has all the electronics and the alarm system hooked up.”

With that, he crossed to one of the monitors Parker had set up on the floor and searched for the footage of the warlock entering Lily’s yard. It took a few minutes, and by the time he found the time stamp he needed, Lily had joined him at the monitor.

“There it is. Or rather there it isn’t,” he said, pointing to a dark, moving mass that looked like a smoke cloud. “I just bet your warlock is in that. We’re lucky he didn’t fry the electronics altogether, I guess. Damn.”

She sighed. “I’m sure your electronics are great, if they can ever pick anything up, but I trust the Cardinal wards far more than any surveillance system. Once I get the family in here to ward the house and grounds—“

“Well,” he interrupted, even though he almost despised himself for having to say it. “Remember, our goal is to find whatever evidence we can. If he can’t even reach you to talk to you, we’re not going to get much.”

She tossed back the rest of her whiskey and poured some more into her cup. “Right. I’m bait. I forgot. I’ll be so freaking happy when he’s locked in a deep, dark hole.”

“How did a nice girl like you get involved with a nasty psychopath like him, anyway?”

“That’s the thing about psychopaths. They can be tremendously charming when they want. He did all the Cinderella stuff. Fancy dinners. Lovely, expensive but tasteful gifts. Took me to dinner in Hawaii on his private jet on the spur of the moment.”

“So, he was rich,” Damon said wryly. “We normal guys can never compete with that.”

She slammed her empty cup down on the counter so hard she crushed the flimsy plastic and whiskey droplets splattered everywhere.

“No, damn it. it wasn’t about the rich, it was about the spontaneity. And he was interesting. I’m so tired of dating guys who can only talk about sports, their jobs, their boats, or their freaking stock portfolios. Harry was never dull,” she said, her eyes flashing. She yanked the tie out of her hair and it fell down in silken dark waves around her shoulders, and then she massaged her temples with her fingertips, wincing a little.

“Psychopaths rarely are,” he agreed. “Headache? Whiskey isn’t a great idea for an aching head.”

“I’m fine. And I know, but he never let the crazy show at first. It built up gradually—just like the control freak part. My lease on my apartment was up, and he convinced me I should move into the guest house on his estate. The place was absolutely gorgeous—built on a cliff overlooking the ocean.” She paused and grimaced. “Even as I say this, I can see what an idiot I was. Gilded cage, indeed. There was a pool, the views were amazing, and he said there were no strings attached. He travels all the time, so he wouldn’t be encroaching on my space…I’d be helping him out, he said, keeping an eye on the house…”

Damon felt the big cat inside him snarl and start to pace at the thought of Lily being trapped like that, and his mind locked onto the sensation.

What the hell?

The cat was generally indifferent to human interaction except when they were on the hunt. Lions loved the hunt, and finally they were about to see the prey at the end of this one. Bannon was all but in his grasp.

But this felt different. This felt like the beginning of protective stirrings—for a human. His lion had never, ever done that before. No time to think about it now, though. Instead, he took another sip of his drink. “How long did that last? The ‘no strings’ part?”

She sighed and walked over to look out her front windows. “Not long. Within three or four weeks of moving in, he was suddenly always around. He quit traveling, and he was always just ‘popping in’ to see me or check on the place or something. And it was his house, after all, and he wasn’t charging me rent, so I couldn’t really complain, which was part of his evil plan, I suppose. I started quietly looking for a new apartment, but he had a screaming fit about it, and that’s when I found out he was having me followed everywhere I went.”

He crossed the room to stand next to her at the window and tried not to notice the delicious scent of vanilla and spice in her hair. “What happened then?”

“Nobody leaves Harrison Bannon the Third,” she said bitterly. “What do you think happened? He locked me up. And then I spent the next six weeks trying to find a way out.”

She whirled around and poked him in the chest. “Do you know how frustrating it is to be held captive when you know you could blast your way out, but you’d have to kill somebody to do it?”

He frowned, remembering a small town in Texas. “Actually, yes. I do.”

Her eyes widened, and then she sighed. “Of course you do. Sorry. Anyway, those thugs he hired as bodyguards were crooks, but did they deserve to die for the bad choice of working for Harry?”

“If they were holding you prisoner, then yes,” he told her, aware of the growl that edged his words. “You should have killed them all.”

Her eyes widened, but she slowly shook her head. “No. I would have had to live with that on my conscience forever, and it wasn’t worth it. If Harry had tried to…to force me to have sex with him, it would have been different. Then I would have gone to extreme measures to escape. As it was, though, I couldn’t trade their lives for my freedom. Instead, I waited and watched, until I figured out a way.”

“And then?”

She crossed to the sleeping bag and sat down on it. “Then I knocked two of them out with smoke inhalation, knocked one out with a lamp, and escaped.”

He sat down next to her, not too close, and leaned his back against the wall. “So you were trapped for how long?”

“Nearly six weeks. And all because I wanted something light. Something not serious at all. I don’t do serious. I grew up with everyone in my business, all the time, as you saw at Gianni’s. I just wanted some peace. To be able to breathe. To be anonymous for a change.”

“You mentioned your family, but what about your immediate family? Are they here, too?”

She shook her head, and a trace of sadness darkened her eyes. “No. My mom—she was Brazilian—died when I was in college. My dad—he’s African American, from a small town in Iowa—oh, and that was a thing with Harry. He thought I was ‘exotic,’ like some rare form of pet, because of my heritage.” She paused and her lip curled. “Racist piece of crap. Anyway, my dad remarried after a few years to a really nice woman. She and he travel the world with the Help the World Drink charity they co-founded, working for clean drinking water for everyone.”

She suddenly blinked and shot an accusing stare at him. “I don’t know why I’m babbling on like this. I hate talking about myself. Is this some lion magic? And what did Gianni mean when he said Barbary lion?”

Damon blew out a breath. “Ah, yes. Gianni. How did he know, I wonder? How old is he?”

“He’s very, very old, but don’t change the subject. Barbary lion?”

Damon started to speak, but then he heard something outside. He leapt up from the floor and looked out the window, and then he laughed. “Squirrel.”

“You heard a squirrel from inside the house with the windows closed?”

“Lion hearing.” He shrugged. “It carries over to my human form.”

She raised an eyebrow. “What else carries over?”

“You’ll have to wait till you get to know me better to find that out.”

She laughed—a real laugh—and the sound of it caught at something inside him that he was pretty sure didn’t need to be noticing beautiful women or their laughs.

“Loners gotta be alone,” he muttered.

“What?”

It was his turn to laugh. “Nothing. An inside joke between me and my partner, Zane. From some stupid TV commercial he saw.”

“Are you friends, you and Zane? It must be nice to have a partner.”

She sounded wistful, and he remembered that his intel, usually so complete, hadn’t told him what Lily did for a living. The notes had said: UNABLE TO ASCERTAIN SUBJECT’S EXACT EMPLOYMENT STATUS. SUSPECT SUPERIOR COMPUTER SKILLS AND PARTICIPATION IN THE DARK WEB.

“Zane and I are friends. Good friends. So, you work alone? What is it that you do?”

Subtle, Jones. Really subtle.

She suddenly found a loose thread on the sleeping bag to be fascinating, apparently, because she wouldn’t meet his gaze and she looked down so that her hair curtained her face from his view. “Oh, you know. Computers. Consulting on this and that.”

“But what—“

“Enough with the distractions.” She nudged him with her elbow. “Tell me about the Barbary part of your lion.”

He shifted to get more comfortable, not at all unhappy that he ended up a couple inches closer to Lily. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her hair, firmly shutting down any thoughts of why he enjoyed her company so much. She was a connection to a criminal, that was all.

His lion snarled at him.

“Damon?”

“We were the first,” he said simply, opening his eyes to meet her glance. “The first lions. The original lions. Our genetic memory goes back to ancient times. There aren’t many of us left, though. A few hundred live in the Barbary Principality in the Atlas Mountains.”

Lily leaned forward, hugging her knees. “Do you have family there?”

Sadness washed over him in a wave of longing. “No. I don’t have family anywhere. You’re very lucky, you know.”

“I know,” she said, sighing. “I know. Sometimes all this family in my business is just too much, but I admit I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

She made a point to run her gaze down the length of his legs, stretched out in front of him. “Any other differences? I get the feeling you don’t shift into your run-of-the-mill lion.”

“Is there such a thing as a run-of-the-mill lion?”

She shrugged and rested the side of her face on her bent knees. “I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t know the difference. I’ve only seen lions at the Columbus Zoo.”

Damon frowned. “If shapeshifters have our way, there won’t be anymore of those. Lions trapped in zoos. Any species, really. They should all be free.”

“Free to be eaten to extinction?” she challenged. “Or killed off when people destroy their habitat?”

“I know,” he acknowledged. “Zoos have had their place in the world and certainly helped with conservation efforts. But you can see how things would be different now. You wouldn’t want to see Cousin Peony in a cage, would you?”

She laughed, and the rich, warm sound of her laughter soothed something hard-edged inside him. “If they put Peony in a cage, she’d have all the zookeepers in there with her, fighting to give her special treats, within the first few days.”

“Now you see why I didn’t eat the fish.”

“What about you? Why did you go into P-Ops and the FBI? Nothing better to do?” A giant yawn all but ate the end of her sentence. “Excuse me. I guess that terror spell took more out of me than I realized.”

Damon reached out and moved a long strand of her shining dark hair away from her face. “You have beautiful hair.”

“I—thank you.”

Why had he done that? Way out of line, Jones.

“P-Ops. They recruited me out of grad school. Apparently they hang out at Yale a lot. I was doing a PhD in shifter psychology and got fascinated by criminal profiling. The professor I worked with on a study project was ex-FBI, and he gave somebody my name. Before I knew it, I was at Quantico, running an obstacle course and trying to avoid trolls.”

“My cousin Rose is in business with a troll,” she said, sitting up and stretching. He tried not to notice the shirt straining against her curves, but he was only human.

Mostly human.

At least half human.

“I know,” he said automatically. “We ran a background check on your family, your friends, and pretty much everybody who lives anywhere near you.”

That got her attention. “You did what?”

He admired her sparkling eyes for at least ten seconds before he realized they were sparkling with rage. Directed at him.

“Hey, I didn’t do it,” he said, frantically backpedaling. “SOP: standard operating procedure. You were involved with the modern-day equivalent of a mob boss. What did you expect?”

She glared at him for a long moment before blowing out a breath. “Damn it. I know. I just want this over with, and I want nothing more to do with Harry or anybody or anything about Harry, ever again.”

With that, she curled up on the sleeping bag, facing away from him, and fell asleep almost instantly. A great talent to have; one he wished he could emulate.

Instead, he prowled around the empty little house, checking the windows and the electronic surveillance, and sending out email updates to his partner, Parker, and the agency. Somebody was going to pay for what that piece-of-shit warlock had done to Lily.

Inside him, his lion roared out his agreement. Vengeance was one topic on which they were completely in agreement. He glanced at Lily, who was frowning and uneasy in her sleep. Yes. Bannon was going to be very sorry he’d ever tried to harm her.

A Barbary lion was coming for him now, and there would be no escape.