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

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

Instead, a great wind roared up, swirling snow in its wake. A very targeted wind that went right to the cloud and pushed it away from Rafe and Jude, and right back onto the sorcerers. Something flashed as if it were hitting a layer of protective spells, but two sorcerers doubled over coughing, and one dropped. He was still alive, but Cara heard him wheezing and choking across the clearing.

  Spells volleyed back and forth.

  Cara froze. Too much going on at once, too many targets, no real idea who to shoot and no idea what to do with her magic. It was pulsing inside her painfully, wanting out so badly her head swam with the effort to contain it, but she had no idea what to do with it. If Jude and Rafe hadn’t been between her and the enemies and if Elissa and Jack hadn’t been so close, she might have improvised, asked Lynx for help and hoped for the best. But she had no idea if that might backfire horribly and distract or, worse yet, damage, her friends.

  Moose ears. That and fire were the only spells she could cast reliably, and Jack had drummed it into her head that setting people on fire was bad, even if they deserved it, so moose ears it was. At least it wouldn’t hurt her friends if she missed and got one of them by mistake.

  She figured most of the sorcerers might not even notice in their concentration, but the young one whose aura was almost normy might.

  He might not notice them sprouting from his own head, though, so just to be safe, she targeted a guy who’d been in his line of sight as well.

  Only she made them antlered as well as eared, because the spell might not last for long, but the weight alone would be a distraction and, with luck, might at least give the guy a crick in the neck.

  The power giggled its way out of her. “Lynx, help this to work right,” she thought at the cat she could no longer see but could still sense.

  The older man staggered under the weight of… Well, they didn’t quite come out like any antlers she’d ever seen, but a trophy hunter in a horror novel would be proud to put them in his collection. The sorcerer lowered his hand, and the steady stream of spells he’d been sending forth abruptly stopped. The younger man went all wild-eyed for a second. “He’s trying not to laugh,” Lynx said. “Or scream. Or both. Hit him now.”

  This time, Cara let herself giggle maniacally as she cast the spell. Why not? It was funny to see a sorcerer with moose ears and a rack of oversized antlers trying to get his concentration back and at the same time trying to keep his feet with his newly altered balance.

  For her next victim, the young guy, she added her best approximation of a rhino horn to the moose ears and antlers.

  He clasped his hands over the upturned facial appendage, shrieked more like a little girl than a full-grown sorcerer, and ran for the tree line.

  One of the other sorcerers calmly turned. Cara couldn’t see exactly what he did, but the poor kid screamed, not in panic but in actual agony, arched and fell. She saw him twitch a few times and then lie disquietingly still.

  Great people to work with. Sure, she’d been hoping to see some of these assholes meet a nasty end today, but that was so carelessly callous it sickened her.

  At least she knew who would be Target Número Uno if she ever got a clear shot with the gun.

  Elissa and Jack both did…something. She couldn’t see what it was in either case, but suddenly the clearing was in bloom despite the cold. Lethal bloom. Bloom with thorns, a wall preventing advance.

  And the enemy line, both the ones in human form and pseudo-animals, were being dive-bombed by jays and crows.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The wall of plants, Cara detected, was partly Elissa’s green magic and partly Jack’s illusions.

  A couple of the sorcerers were bleeding. Certainly they didn’t seem as organized as they had been, expending a lot of their focus on the birds. One of the wolves broke from the rumble, though. Bleeding, limping, his fur torn, revealing not blood and muscle but a hint of a human form inside the mangy fur, it still moved with purpose.

  It stopped at the wall of thorns and howled. There were words in the howl, which Cara was just as glad she couldn’t make out. A scream of rage, a curse, a shattering.

  The wall of thorns fell apart, the real plants withering, the illusion dissolving.

  The wolf sorcerer glanced at the wolverine, at the birds, and then, chillingly, at Jack.

  The wolverine sprang in a way she didn’t think wolverines could really spring, toward Jack’s throat.

  So much for her planned first target. Sometimes you had to do what you had to do, shoot who immediately needed shooting. She fired twice, aiming too quickly yet somehow knowing she’d shot well, willing the bullets toward their target. The magic chuckled maliciously and complied.

  The bullets grew small wings and steered themselves.

  The wolverine yelped once, a surprisingly small sound that nevertheless cut through the noise of battle, and fell almost at Jack’s feet. Its fur fell away and hit the ground separately, leaving a powerfully built middle-aged white man with an irascible face, frozen by death into a final parting sneer at the world.

  Jack mouthed thanks and went back to work. He was pouring whisky on the ground and muttering something, and one of the wolves still tussling with Jude and Rafe suddenly turned into what she thought it was a mouse, although she couldn’t be sure at this distance.

  One of the other wolves promptly ate it.

  Then it sat down, shed its wolf form abruptly and began to vomit.

  Apparently, a bit of the mouse had fallen from its lips, because there were a few human body parts strewn on the ground.

  Later, Cara figured she’d feel pretty sick about that herself, and a quick glance showed her Jack was greenish. Clearly that wasn’t what he’d planned. A dual wouldn’t do something like that creature had done, and he was supposedly further from a real animal than a dual was.

  Crazy, though, was universal.

  “Nice work with the bullets,” Lynx said in her head. “I wouldn’t try it too often, however. Guns and magic don’t always mix as intended.” She received the image of a gun backfiring like it would in a Looney Toons cartoon, which in real life would hurt a lot. Then she saw the gun letting loose a barrage of roses, a stream of smelts (which would at least be distracting), and a little flag with BANG printed on it.

  “Any suggestions on how to get rid of the sorcerer boss from a distance, then?”

  “Let the lion do it.” There was a rare hint of admiration in Lynx’s tone.

  Sure enough, freed up from several foes, Jude had broken away and was on the line of sorcerers.

  One of the sorcerers was preparing a spell. Could Jude see it? While Cara was desperately trying to figure out what to do, white and green light shot from Elissa’s hand, surrounding Jude with what had to be protection. The sorcerer’s spell slid off harmlessly, sizzling the snow.

  He spoke another word, one Cara couldn’t understand but still shuddered at. The air stank of sulfur.

  Jude started to change form in mid-leap, into something neither human nor lion but a tortured mixture of both. Elissa shrieked and countered with another spell. Jude fell back, once again in lion form but seemingly shaken and cowed. Rafe finished off his last wolf and closed in to aid Jude with the remaining sorcerers.

  The big guy was preparing another spell. The stench of rotten eggs and blood filled the air, and Cara somehow knew he was using all the death to power something terrible.

  “Help Jude and Rafe if you can,” she directed her spirit guide. As an afterthought, she added, “Please.”

  She raised her gun.

  Her vision blurred as the headache of crisis hit her like an avalanche.

  Her wrist went weak. She lurched to one side. A wave of bloody memories crashed over her, some her own, some not.

  She steadied her bad hand with the healthy one.

  Then she lowered the gun. No way she could shoot safely and be sure not to hit Rafe and Jude. Or Jack or Elissa, for that matter, not with this fucked-up sight, these shaky hands.

  S
he sat down abruptly in the snow.

  She wasn’t sure what she expected the guides to do—they didn’t seem to be corporeal to anyone except her. But suddenly a jay the size of an eagle was dive-bombing the sorcerer and seemed to be conducting the other birds. A huge lynx flanked him, growling and biting and scratching. A glowing cougar popped in behind them.

  Together, they drove the sorcerer toward Jude and Rafe.

  The headache dimmed, the visions receded to memories of horror, and the world went clear again.

  She wished it hadn’t. Some things would be more bearable a little blurry.

  Jude and Rafe worked in perfect concert, and it was almost beautiful. In fact, it was beautiful, and that made it worse. It was like a fucking National Geographic special, except they’d never show one where a human got killed.

  At the last second, when the big cats were already tearing into him and it was clearly too late to change the outcome, the sorcerer reached under his coat. Grabbed something.

  Fuchsia and gray blared in the air. Cara choked on the stench of sorcery, squeezed her watering eyes closed.

  When she dared to open them again, she wanted to close them forever.

  Every corpse or living but injured man, was Phil. And then they changed to Jack and back to Phil again. Which was horrifying, but at least she could be pretty sure she was seeing a spell that wasn’t working quite right.

  Elissa screamed and ran to the nearest body, cradling it like an infant and keening. Jude roared, and Rafe screamed, then looked around in confusion.

  Jack blinked and shook himself.

  Then he took three steps and shook Cara. “It’s not real. Ask your guide to help you.”

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “I’m not even seeing what I’m seeing, Cara. Because where I’m standing, every one of those bodies has your face, and you’re talking to me right now. At least I think you are.”

  “I’m real, Jack. I’m alive. Dead women don’t have headaches.”

  He pulled her close, his grip on her arms bruising even through the layers she wore. “You’re alive. Thank the powers you’re alive.”

  She let herself sag against him, taking comfort in the contact.

  Before she relaxed too much, though, she forced herself to look at the scattered bodies.

  They still wore Phil’s face, but as a transparent mask over their real ones. It was horrifying in a completely different way to see what they’d done.

  Elissa stood abruptly and strode over to the sorcerer, whose body Jude and Rafe now guarded as if that of a loved one. She made soothing gestures at the two cats, who stared at her, obviously so puzzled that they didn’t know how to react.

  She knelt by the sorcerer’s body and pried his hand open. Lifted something from it.

  Held it up to the sky, which grew paler as sunrise approached.

  She proclaimed a few words in Gaelic. Power gathered around her. Flames burst from what she held, then died down. “Cara, come here please.”

  Numbly, with Jack supporting her, Cara obeyed.

  The big cats had gathered round Elissa by the time Cara stumbled her way to the witch. They pressed up against her, purring like freight trains, love and something more—relief, most likely—palpable in the lines of their bodies.

  “This creature was holding a smoked human heart in his hand,” Elissa said, her voice gentle but lined with anger. “He used it to lure us here and to cast that last illusion, so it must have been the heart of someone close to one of us, either Ben or Phil.”

  “Phil was shot.” Cara forced herself to remember the details of the autopsy. “His heart wasn’t cut out—everything looked like an ordinary carjacking. It must be poor Ben’s. Was that why I saw Phil’s face on everyone who died?” She didn’t want to admit she’d also seen Jack. That was just…weird.

  “Yes, and because he was able to use a real bond, it worked far too well. I’m still not sure why it worked on you as well as it did, since you didn’t know Ben. Sorcery works in odd ways, and if Jack’s teaching you, maybe you got an echo that way.”

  “Must be that,” Cara said quickly.

  “Powers, though, there’s a powerful sorcerer involved here, and I don’t think it was necessarily the guy who set off the spell. I saw Jocelyn and even though I can still feel her, I believed. I’m pretty sure the guys saw me. Don’t know who Jack saw, but he looked shaken too.”

  “Ben.” Jack blatantly lied. “Only they’d tried that once before, so it didn’t work.”

  “It was designed to break us,” Elissa continued. “Luckily, Jack’s too much of a trickster himself to be fooled, and thank the Powers for that.”

  That and his subconscious made us both see someone who was actually here…but I’m so not getting into that.

  “No point in standing here in the cold,” Jack said. “Let’s get back to the village and warm up.” He glanced at the two humans as he said it. Cara felt a rush of gratitude. He probably wasn’t cold, though he was probably looking forward to getting back to a peaceful, shielded place, but he obviously guessed that she was.

  “Good idea,” Jude agreed, pulling Elissa and Rafe close. “I want to brush my teeth. Skinwalkers taste disgusting.”

  One foot in front of the other. That was how she got back to the village. Walking took all of Cara’s concentration, and she was grateful for that.

  “Warm,” she said, not realizing until Jude and Jack smiled that she’d spoken out loud.

  “Come on,” Jack said, putting an arm around her waist as if she were a child. “Let’s get you home to your woodstove.”

  “Hope Gramps checked it.”

  “If your place is too cold, look around for signs of life. Someone’s bound to be awake. It’s nearly dawn.”

  “It’s dawn?” Damn, no wonder she was tired. She was still enough of a city girl that she found it hard to keep track of time without a watch or a phone, but people here went by “dawn” and “dark” and “I’m hungry; let’s eat” rather than a number on a clock.

  “Yeah, and see? Winter ends, even here,” Jack said. “Look at the sky.” The stars were fading, and the eastern sky was paler. It looked as though there might be a proper day instead of the minor respite in darkness that passed for winter daytime in the far north.

  “It’s still a long way to spring,” she said. Her half-frozen feet and icy hands would remind her of that if nothing else did. Still, the light at the horizon meant something. Meant hope, although she couldn’t manage to find any for herself.

  “Until warm weather and grass and stuff, yeah, but now that the Equinox is past, we’re starting to see actual sunlight again. We’ll have leaves and birds and flowers sooner than we can imagine. Only first we’ll have mud, a lot of mud.”

  She hesitated with her hand on the door. She saw smoke rising from her chimney, and the warmth called to her, but she couldn’t let the conversation go.

  That would mean being alone with her thoughts, and she couldn’t bear that yet. “Others won’t see spring because of this night’s work.” God, where did that bleak thought come from?

  “I know, and it sucks. But they seemed hell-bent on dying if they couldn’t be killing.” Jack shuddered. “It’s like they wanted to die… Oh shit.” He looked around as if he expected to see enemies in the shadows. “Can I come in, Cara? There’s more to tonight that we need to figure out, and I don’t know what might have ears and eyes, even here. And you’re shivering.”

  She thought about saying no. She wasn’t quite ready to face that temptation, and after a night when she knew sorcerers had been toying with her mind, she couldn’t trust herself to know whether her thoughts and fears, the shattered, bloody images of the night’s battle and what she felt for Jack were real or not. Then she thought about being alone, and she felt a cold all the woodstoves in the world couldn’t thaw.

  “Come on in,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jack didn’t pick up h
is interrupted train of thought until he was sitting at her little table, a steaming mug of coffee warming his hands. “So they’d hoped to kill us, but when they couldn’t, they reverted to Plan B, which seemed to be to cause as much death as they could, and it didn’t matter much who was dying. The leader is harnessing power for something big.”

  “And why were we targeted? I get trying to lure someone into bringing him Jocelyn—we know he wants the baby—but it seems risky to take us all on at once.”

  “Because killing the lot of us would not only weaken the village but be a real bonus for a sorcerer doing blood-magic. Rafe and I are rarities. Neither of us has extra-special mojo, but dual shamans are almost unheard of. And Jude has an incredible amount of life force.”

  She nodded, seeing what he meant. “Elissa’s super-powerful. I knew a few witches in Toronto, and she makes them look like normies. But why Gramps? And especially, why me?”

  “Trickster’s tits, do you have any idea how powerful your grandfather is?”

  “He said he’s almost stopped doing magic, that Coyote deserted him when Grammy died.”

  Jack shook his head. “Worse than I thought. I knew Sam had been lying low since your grandmother passed, but if he says he can’t do the work anymore, he’s lying to himself. That’s a deadly thing for a shaman. Coyote’s still with him. I can see him sometimes, and I bet you could if you squinted right.”

  Gramps? She’d never thought of him as being extremely powerful. She’d seen him drumming and playing tricks, making the world around them seem brighter, but in her childhood memories, Gramps was mostly this goofy, sweet old guy who took nothing seriously except his family and Saturday morning cartoons.

  Which he watched on a TV given to him by Coyote, a TV that didn’t plug into anything.

  Yeah, there was more to Gramps than met the eye.

  Then she stared at Jack. “But again, why me? I don’t suppose you’re about to tell me I’m something powerful and unique, because I’ll know you’re lying. I have the makings of a half-decent shaman, but I’m not there yet.”