Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different)

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  She couldn’t say when she started coming. She only knew she didn’t stop, not even after Jack drove his nails into her hips and snarled his inarticulate pleasure into the sudden stillness.

  He carried her to the bed, laid her down with a tenderness that contrasted sharply with the rough sex, crawled in beside her.

  He traced his finger around the scar on her shoulder, still smeared with dried blood from where it had opened earlier. “Bullet?” he asked quietly.

  “Line of duty,” she responded.

  “Most of my fighting’s been in cougar form. The scars don’t carry over.”

  “I know.” She nodded gravely. “I remember examining you for scars… No, that was a dream.” Her brain was curiously fuzzy. None of the sharp pain that preceded an episode, but something felt odd, and it wasn’t just post-amazing-sex warm fuzzies.

  “You dreamed me too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very explicit dreams?”

  “Hell, yeah.” She grinned lazily. “For about two weeks, as soon as I knew I had to come here.”

  “I knew you had this scar. Knew how you got it. Know that you and your partner reached the shooter too late to stop a multiple murder.”

  There was only one thing to say to that. “Shit.”

  “Yeah. Shit. Because you know what the dreams failed to mention?” He picked up her right hand. “This fucking ring. The one I managed to look right though. You’re engaged?”

  Memories of Phil flooded her. Her stomach heaved. “Was engaged. Phil’s dead. He was killed almost five months ago—carjacking. I should have been with him, and I wasn’t, and it haunts me constantly. But I swear I forgot him when you touched me. I could only think about you.” She held her breath. It sounded so lame, and yet it was true.

  “I saw the ring.” The bitter edge on Jack’s voice could have cut her, but she knew it wasn’t directed at her. At himself, and maybe at something else, but not at her. “I should have asked questions, found out if you were engaged or if it had been your mom’s ring or something harmless. Instead, I grabbed you and didn’t let go. That’s not like me. And I bet this isn’t like you.”

  “Even if I was ready for a relationship or a fling or whatever, I don’t normally fuck people I just met. Flirt, sure. Fuck, no.”

  Jack rolled out of bed. “We’re being manipulated, pushed together. Spontaneous is one thing, but this was crazy. Usually I say a few sweet, sexy things before I screw someone senseless.”

  “Crazy fun, but crazy. I honestly forgot Phil. How could I…”

  “Magic.” He ducked and grabbed the blanket he’d abandoned on the floor. “Maybe someone wants us to be together, no matter what we think about it. Grand-mère’s eager for me to settle down, and I’m sure she’d love you to stay in Couguar-Caché. Or it could be something much worse. If those creatures were loups-garous, they were sorcerers, and if there are more of their sorcerer friends out there…”

  “They could be fucking with our heads,” she finished. “But why?”

  “I don’t know, but we have to be careful.” His eyes were very dark, and, even wrapped in the ridiculous blanket, he looked like a warrior crossed with a great cat. “If we’re being pushed together with good intentions, because Grand-mère thinks we’d suit, it’s still fucked up. I think you’re hot and I don’t think whatever just threw us into bed would have worked as well if you weren’t at least a little attracted to me.”

  “Definitely attracted,” she confessed, “but not ready to do anything about it. It was a big step to look at you and admit I liked what I saw.”

  “That’s the problem. Maybe we’d have gotten together eventually, but it has to be our choice. And if it’s not being done with love, Powers only know what kind of trouble it could lead to.”

  “We should keep away from each other.”

  “That’s the problem. We can’t. Except for me, and your grandfather, who won’t teach, and Rafe, who’s not ready to teach, the other shamans here are healers, and that’s not your path. I see that in your aura. So we’re stuck together. Otherwise…”

  He didn’t need to say it, because she knew—not learning would destroy her.

  They stared at each other, the few feet between them an unfathomable chasm. “I’ve got to go,” he said abruptly. “I was supposed to be hunting with my brother anyway. Maybe I can catch up to him.”

  Halfway out the door, he added, “Remember to eat. You probably don’t feel hungry, but you are.” Before he was even out the door, he was in cougar form.

  She bet some small animals were going to meet their end tonight on the fangs and claws of Jack’s rage.

  If she had an animalside, she’d head out there herself, where she could justifiably tear something apart and eat it.

  Instead, she grabbed her clothes. Maybe her grandfather would like company. She sure as hell didn’t want to be alone.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jack ran through the dark—Cara had been out cold for several hours before she woke up and things got interesting—looking for something to kill. Preferably more of the loups-garous/skinwalkers/whatever the fuck they’d run into earlier, but a deer would do, even a rabbit.

  He had no idea where Ben was. He could try to reach out through silentspeech, but right now, Jack was better off alone. Ben would smell Cara on him and ask too many leering questions, because that was what little brothers did.

  Jack needed to think, but not in a wordy way. This was deeper and scarier than his own impulsiveness getting him into trouble with Ms. Wrong. Cara had forgotten her fiancé—and the poor bastard might be dead, but not for anywhere near long enough for him to just slip her mind.

  If there hadn’t been sorcerers encroaching on the village today, he would have confronted Grand-mère about interfering with his life and Cara’s. But there were sorcerers, and he didn’t know what was going on. Someone was threatening his home, and the magic that pushed him and Cara together might be part of it. He needed to figure out what was going on there, at least put enough pieces together that he could talk about it sensibly with the other villagers.

  But if he started thinking too much now, his head would explode. He needed to clear his head of all the jumbled words and his nose of Cara’s scent and start fresh.

  So he ran, big paws crunching on frozen snow, lungs aching from breathing in icy air. He smelled deer, but the trail was old, distant.

  Then he smelled something else, something fierce and foul, like sulfur and fresh blood.

  Sorcery had happened here, not recently, but recently enough it must have something to do with the attack a few hours ago. He opened his mouth and grimaced, flehmening to let his Jacobson’s organ get into the act.

  He regretted it almost immediately as he choked on stench. Wouldn’t have bothered an actual cougar nearly as much as it did him, but the part of his sensibility that was human-influenced rebelled at the odor.

  Sorcery always had that sulfur smell, even if the sorcerer was doing something as benign as charging your solar battery on a cloudy day or “mind-controlling” you out of the winter doldrums. But this was different. Foul and literally rotten and scented with the unique copper reek of blood, this magic could only be evil.

  Cautiously, he went a little farther, then tried to summon his power-sight.

  In cougar form, it was precarious. He and Rafe, due to their part-manitou heritage, could do things no other cougar dual and no other shaman could do, but the abilities didn’t always play well together.

  For a few seconds, he saw the world, not in the crisp black and white of the cougar, illuminated by a rising moon, but in rippling shades of aura and life and magical energy. Unfortunately, he also saw only as well as a human shaman might in the dark, which wasn’t even as well as his wordside form would. He saw the energy but not what it was attached to.

  Something in the snow. But what?

  He blinked, attempting to force the cougar and the shaman to see in sync. All it did was make his eyes ache and blur all
his vision until he had a lot more sympathy for Cara’s crisis-headache earlier.

  Fine. He hadn’t wanted to do it this way, but sometimes a guy had to do what a cougar couldn’t.

  He took a deep breath, steeled himself to freeze his nuts off and shifted to wordside form.

  Fuck, it’s cold was his first thought. He’d left a light coating of fur in place to give himself a bit of shelter, but it only helped a little.

  His second thought, as his sight adjusted to the new form and took full advantage of the magic, also started with fuck. Fuck, that’s not good.

  The snow was soaked with blood. That wasn’t necessarily weird. Wolverines, cougars, and the occasional wolf hunted in these forests, not to mention the duals of the village. But this was a lot of blood and not a bit of fur, feather or bone, though he thought he made out a few anonymous hunks of meat.

  And the blood glowed fuchsia, with black and sulfur-yellow streaks, and a dome of the same colors encapsulated it.

  Something had been sacrificed here.

  Something or someone.

  Jack didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to see what he thought it likely he could, but he kicked up the power-sight a notch and at the same time flehmened again, reaching his cougarside through his wordy form. He stared at the snow, turning all his forces of magic and dual senses on it.

  Bodies lay under the snow, dead, yet still bound by sorcery. At least one was two-legged. Human, or a dual in wordy form.

  Jack probed cautiously at the magic.

  He couldn’t see the hastily concealed bodies, but he had an ugly sense they’d been tortured. The victims had died hard. Their pain lingered, flooding into Jack as soon as he let his defenses down.

  Jack fought to close the connection, suppressing a scream. Then he fell to his knees, vomiting in the snow.

  Someone had committed a ritual sacrifice on Couguar-Caché’s protected land, polluting it with evil.

  If it hurt him, it would have hurt Grand-mère far more. In a very real sense, Grand-mère was the land.

  He needed to check on her. Then he had to rally some help. If a human had been murdered, there might be ghosts trapped here, which meant Elissa needed to get involved. Her witch magic let her communicate with the ghosts and send them to the Otherside without reliving their deaths in detail, like a shaman would. Bringing in Elissa meant involving Jude and Rafe, because the three of them worked best as a team. Which was good, because Rafe had those cop instincts, and whether in lion form or as his six-foot-six, black, muscular wordside, Jude would be handy to have around if a fight broke out. And maybe a few extra people in case the sorcerers came back and needed their evil asses kicked.

  He shifted back to cougar form.

  As he shifted, he let himself scream, but it wasn’t a scream of pain. This was a cougar’s bloodcurdling cry of rage, half snarl and half scream.

  He hoped to the powers that they hadn’t killed all the sorcerers that afternoon. Bullets and broken necks were far too clean and painless for what they deserved.

  Hoping his silentspeech would travel that far, and that his friends weren’t too deeply asleep or too distracted by sex to hear him, he called for Rafe and Jude. Elissa was the one he needed most, but the guys would have to let her know. With no personal link, his silentspeech couldn’t reach her human mind.

  Just in case the guys were busy, though, he broadcast a general Help. West of the village. I’ll explain later, to any duals who might be listening.

  Chapter Twelve

  After Jack left, Cara spent a restless half hour or so with her grandfather, devouring whatever food he set in front of her and trying to talk about loups-garous, but unable to string words together coherently. Finally he took pity on her. “Magic’s still got you rattled. It’ll do that even once you’re used to it, but at this point, pulling enough power to fend off a crisis is going to hurt. Go home and go to bed.” Cara thought her exhaustion might have some additional causes, like great sex, severe confusion and fears that she wasn’t about to share with her grandfather, but Gramps did know magic, and he probably had a point. She dragged herself back to the cabin.

  Cara expected she’d lie awake for a while, torturing herself about her bad judgment and worrying that she and Jack were under some kind of spell, because whether it was malicious or just meddling, that was super disturbing. Instead, she passed out hard almost as soon as she hit the bed.

  A scream awoke her. It sounded like a woman being tortured. Cop instincts kicked in. Adrenaline flooded her body. She was out of bed, throwing a sweater and jeans over the thermals she’d worn to bed and scrambling for her boots before she was fully awake. A nightmarish sense of urgency possessed her, as though a voice screamed directly in her head, warning of danger, speaking of torture and murder.

  Coat. Gloves. Gun and an extra clip.

  The awful sound repeated, perhaps closer than the first scream. Impossible to gauge the direction precisely, and she didn’t know the woods around the village well enough to dash off alone. That would probably leave her in need of being rescued too.

  Who would help her? Jack would, and any awkwardness be damned, but the fact was she wasn’t sure which house he lived in. Gramps might be willing, but both his body and his magic were frail these days.

  The threesome next door? One of them would need to stay with the baby, but any two of the three—a lion, a cougar who happened to be a shaman, and a witch—could be damn handy in whatever trouble might be going on out there.

  The screaming stopped, but she still heard a voice in her head. No, not exactly a voice, but some kind of presence. Her brain filled with images she didn’t want, and her senses were bombarded with information coming in too fast and furious for her to process. Blood on the snow. Hideous glowing colors that meant magic. Trouble. Big, big trouble.

  West of the village. She could figure out west. Her sense of direction had always been uncanny.

  Wool hat. Scarf. Out the door.

  Her door practically knocked down the petite witch Elissa, whose red hair puffed out under a purple fleece hat with a pompom on top. She should have looked cute and harmless, but her delicate features were set into a grim, determined mask and the glow of her power extended about three feet on each side of her. Rafe loomed behind her, his aura so potent Cara saw the cat inside his wordy form more clearly than she’d ever seen in a dual. “What the…”

  “Trouble,” Elissa said. “Jack needs help.”

  “That scream was…Jack?” She couldn’t picture that noise coming from his big body.

  “From the cougar,” Rafe explained in an urgent whisper. He was already on the move. “He’s all right, but there’s dangerous weird shit out there. Blood in the snow.”

  “Blood in the snow,” she repeated, embarrassed to realize her voice was shaking. “I saw.”

  Neither of the others reacted oddly, which, from them, made sense.

  “Rafe says you’re a crack shot.” Elissa’s voice was as intense as Rafe’s. “If I tell you something’s a bad guy, shoot it, but don’t shoot until I tell you to. What you’re seeing may not be what’s really there. Shamans have some defenses against sorcerers’ mind magics…”

  “But I don’t know how to use them.” Cara felt like she should ask more questions, but things had gotten so abruptly out of her depth that she didn’t know where to start, other than a general, What the hell is going on?

  And she didn’t even have time to ask that before they were on the move.

  They were moving fast, following Rafe, who seemed to know where he was going, and who could see better in the dark than either human. Cara regretted not putting on her snowshoes, but probably not as much as Elissa did. Shorter than the others, she was having trouble slogging through the snow.

  Cara stole another look at the witch. In the moonlight, she looked frighteningly pale, her eyes too big for her face. Fragile looking, Cara would have said under other circumstances, but to Cara’s new sight, Elissa looked anything but delicate. He
r aura was huge and brilliant, a nimbus of green and clear red that should have looked like Christmas lights but instead looked like pure power. Cara wouldn’t want to be something that got in Elissa’s way right now. She’d heard most witches weren’t violent due to the nature of their magic, but anyone could be pushed too far.

  “Jude says Grand-mère’s all right,” Rafe said out of the blue. “Shaken, but she’ll be on the job in a little while. For some reason, she’s more concerned about making sure Jude stays with Jocelyn than she is about getting out here herself.”

  Elissa stopped in her tracks. Cara wouldn’t have thought she could turn paler, but she did. “Tell that stubborn jerk to stay. Take the baby to Mr. Many-Winters’s—not to Nella’s—and stay with her.” She closed her eyes, and Cara saw her aura shift as a good chuck of power siphoned off and winged back toward the village.

  Protecting her baby.

  Lumbering through the snow, the two women followed to a spot where Rafe and Jack huddled together.

  “Blood sorcery. Oh Powers, that’s bad.” Elissa’s voice dropped to a whisper. If Cara hadn’t seen Elissa’s aura spiking, she’d have thought the other woman was unnaturally calm.

  No, Elissa was just putting up a front of professional detachment, like a cop might, in the face of horrors.

  Cara had a feeling she didn’t see exactly what the others did, but the pooled blood on the mounded snow was bad enough. “How do you know it’s blood sorcery and not animals hunting?”

  “No tracks on the snow that we didn’t make, for one,” Jack said. It was dark this deep in the forest. Elissa had a flashlight, and Jack had apparently cast a spell that glowed above the bloodied snow. It wasn’t easy to make out details, but now that Jack mentioned it, Cara saw the snow was curiously barren, swept clear of tracks, pine needles, everything.