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

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  With each lick, the pain lessened.

  The cougar worked his way over her, licking all her exposed skin. Wherever his tongue laved her, a warm tingling set in.

  Especially when he found the sliver of skin where her sweater had ridden up and licked there.

  It was healing, but her body heated, remembering Jack naked, all hard muscle and smooth skin, licking her belly before licking his way down to her sex.

  “Open your eyes. I’ve made them better, taken away the illusions that blocked them. It’s only been a few seconds, not nearly as long as it seemed, and everyone’s fine. Open your eyes, Cara.”

  She did.

  First she glanced down, fearfully, at her own body.

  There was no blood, no terrible injuries. She still hurt, residual aches and twinges and a hit-by-a-bus feeling that was likely to get worse before it got better, but nothing like before.

  She rolled off her grandfather, who was singed in a few places, and green with fatigue. His beloved boxers had been ripped at some point during the fight, but she saw no other signs of injury. He was still finishing the “oof” he’d been starting to let out when she landed on him.

  There was no dead baby.

  Of course there was no dead baby. Jocelyn was in Couguar-Caché, with half a dozen healer shamans, several families of duals and Grand-mère all looking after her.

  And Jack was very much alive, rubbing his eyes and staring at her with the same wild, thankful wonder that she felt seeing him whole.

  She still thought the sorcerer would look a hell of a lot better with his head on fire, but she conceded that blowing up herself, her friends and possibly half this town would be overkill.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Elissa checking over Rafe. They both looked charred in places and pale and uncomfortable but didn’t seem to have any real injuries. Illusion, Elissa mouthed.

  Well, mostly. Jude was still encased in ice, but his feline heat was melting it.

  Her grandfather shouted, “Hey, Coyote, we could use a little help here!” The avatar manifested with an audible pop.

  “Uh-oh.” Coyote‘s voice was calm yet dripping with sarcasm. “I’ll say. Shields up, people!”

  There wasn’t time for speech. Cara scrambled energy together, made eye contact with Rafe and Elissa, and with Jack and her grandfather for good measure, and started to weave, hoping the others were with her.

  They were.

  The sorcerer cursed in French, something Cara couldn’t spare brain space to translate but was sure was foul. The air grew thick with sulfur and spells.

  They still hurt when they hit. But nothing like before.

  And whenever she wanted to give in to the sharp pain and slow despair, she looked at Jack, who was pouring whisky and sage onto the floor.

  A surge of heat dissipated the pain.

  The shields came together, a bright, complicated weaving of every color in the rainbow, witchcraft and shamanic magic layered and interlocked. They weren’t perfect. Too much sorcery was flying around for them to be perfect. But they were holding.

  Once they were in place, Jack and Rafe started sniping away at the lesser sorcerers.

  This time, Jude was inside the shield. Once they were sealed as best they could, Elissa looked at Cara and said, “Now.”

  Shamanic fire and red magic worked in concert. The ice melted until it was a thin shell. Jude stretched, and the ice shattered around him.

  Cara sent a wave of water to put out her fire. At the last minute, she changed her mind. She moved the fire onto the lead sorcerer’s elegant hat. The sorcerer put the fire out before it did him any harm, but the hat was a lost cause.

  Without it, and with his sleek hair singed, he didn’t look nearly as impressive.

  The water she dumped on a particularly annoying little skinwalker. Then she sucked the heat out of that part of the room. Icicles formed in his shaggy hair and beard. In return, he graced her with a scaly tail and talons, harmless but startling.

  In both cases, the effects lasted for only a few seconds before the trickster refused to be tricked and the illusion dissipated. This didn’t keep them from trying again.

  All around her, similar hell was breaking loose. The birds returned, worrying at their enemies—and so did the larger, unnatural birds, who dive-bombed their party.

  Elissa cast a spell in Gaelic, and the wooden floor spouted tall pine saplings that stretched to the ceiling, forming cages around the sorcerer and some of the minions. Some of the minions panicked, throwing themselves against imprisoning trees, which seemed curiously sticky, as if coated with tar. A few of the shamans threw off their shirts to reveal the wolf hides they wore strapped to their chests. Their shape change was bloody, painful to watch, nothing like Jack’s or Rafe’s grace, but soon enough they were slipping between the trees in wolf form. As soon as they shifted, though, so did Jack and Rafe, forming a phalanx with Jude. The wolves formed a line of their own, growling and posturing but disinclined to take on the much larger cats.

  And the longer they hesitated, the more of them ended up with moose antlers or bunny ears, thanks to Gramps and Cara. When the bunny ears started popping up, a couple of the younger sorcerers became completely unable to cast, too busy fighting back laughter.

  “Enough!” the leader roared.

  He did…something…something that Cara’s mind simply refused to process, and the trees dissolved into slime.

  This would have been distressing enough if they’d been shamanic illusions, but they weren’t. Elissa’s green magic could call forth living trees from dead wood.

  This dirtbag could dissolve living trees.

  Shit.

  His magic had worked a little too well, though. The floor buckled under the sorcerer’s feet.

  Elissa laughed, a ringing noise that sounded like life.

  “Attack!” the sorcerer ordered. The wolves surged against the great cats, tried to surge around them to reach the women and the old man—but a spirit lynx, a spirit coyote, and a spirit cougar stood in their way, much bigger than their natural counterparts would be.

  The sorcerer—the last among the enemies still in human form—volleyed spell after spell. But the shield held, and Gramps and Coyote looked at each other and winked, and suddenly Gramps was holding up a giant mirror. Cara quickly followed his lead. The mirrors weren’t perfect, sending a lot of the spells to skip harmlessly around the room without finding a target, and the sorcerer had damn good shields of his own, but at least it was keeping the magic away from their side.

  Jude swatted aside first one wolflike creature, then another and another, and once he threw them aside, they didn’t move again. Then the lion leapt, followed closely by the two cougars, going for the sorcerer.

  Who wasn’t there. He was simply…gone.

  About half his minions continued their futile fight against the cats, but, unable to work together as real wolves would, they didn’t stand a chance against the duals. Soon the only ones still standing were ones Elissa had frozen into place or Cara, taking a cue from her, had trapped in giant wads of bubble gum.

  The other half simply bolted for the door, bowling over tables, chairs—and Gramps.

  It was over. Four wolves remained standing, wolves who shifted back to human form and surrendered with gratifying humility.

  “Think we should believe ’em?” Cara asked. She wasn’t inclined to. Petty criminals would stand down before superior force, but they rarely reformed that easily.

  Elissa squinted. “Those two”—she pointed—“are sincere. Their auras are healthier than the others. They know they got in way over their heads. They want to move away from dark magic but were too scared of their boss to do so, and they’re relieved they’re beaten. We’ll contact Grand-mère and let her decide how to handle them. Perhaps a nice trip to the Yukon. The others simply want to save their hides.” She looked sternly at the cats. “I don’t trust them, but they’ve surrendered, and there’s been enough bloodshed lately. Again, we�
��ll leave it to Grand-mère. She has the ear of the Powers far more than I do.”

  Jack shifted back to human form, gestured to restore his clothing. Then he rummaged in the pocket of his discarded coat and threw a surprisingly large wad of cash onto the bar. “For repairs,” he said. “It’s not the bartender’s fault he got his head messed up by a sorcerer.”

  Elissa followed suit.

  “Let’s go home,” she said. “The baby’s going to be hungry.”

  Then they realized Gramps was still on the floor.

  “Think I broke my hip,” Gramps croaked.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Elissa stabilized Sam’s hip with magic, though she didn’t have the power left after the battle to heal him completely. Rafe knew how to rig up a rough stretcher out of broom handles and a tablecloth. Jack used silentspeech to ask his mother to have Nella meet them at the trailhead, so he wouldn’t have to endure quite so long and bumpy a ride in pain.

  After they got Sam settled in the back of the pickup, Rafe and Jude in animal form next to him for warmth, Jack zoned out from the situation. He wasn’t a healer, couldn’t do anything more for Sam other than get him back to the village safely, and Cara wasn’t even going to let him do that. Unable to do much else to help, she was determined to drive the truck, and it made sense to let her. If nothing else, it would center her a bit.

  Plus, it gave him time to study her.

  She was beautiful, flushed with battle. Even the sorciére had recognized her worth—not that a sorcerer necessarily had good taste, but this one had power and years of experience, and he saw how special Cara was.

  Only, Cara belonged to Jack. The battle, in his mind, had proved it. Beginner or not, she used her magic as a shaman should, disrupting and protecting. She was a magnificent woman. And she would be a magnificent mate—once she acknowledged she was his.

  How to get her to do so was another question, one he brooded on through the trip back to the village, through Nella’s healing ceremony, through helping Sam get settled in his own bed—Nella had healed the broken bone, but, given his age, Sam was still fragile and needed to rest a day or two before Nella was willing to let him up.

  They were all sitting around in Sam’s house now, decompressing and conferring and getting warm again, and Jack was still brooding about Cara. He needed to get her alone, but she wasn’t going to leave her grandfather yet. He understood that.

  But part of him just wanted to make her pay attention to him instead of to the old man, to submit to him, to yield…

  The room blurred and shifted to red. Voices became a distant buzz. The only person he could see was Cara, but she was turned away from him. The only voice he could decipher was hers, but damn it, she wasn’t speaking to him. In fact, she was talking to Jude, laughing at something the big lion said. Jack’s cock throbbed, and all he could think about was the need to drive it into Cara.

  Right now.

  Jack stood without realizing it, crossed the room to Cara and pulled her roughly to her feet.

  He fisted a handful of her hair, forced her head to the side, bit down on the tender, tempting place where throat met shoulder. At the last possible second, he remembered she was human for all her intoxicating cougar scent and made sure he bit with wordside teeth, not feline fangs.

  Okay, a beat past the last possible second, because a whisper of blood teased his tongue. He must have scratched as the fangs pulled back. The part of him that knew how to deal with human women wanted to let her go, jump back and start apologizing. Even humans like Cara, who enjoyed playing rough, wanted some warm-up before you got into breaking skin.

  But the taste went straight to his dick, and something black and fuchsia swirled in his brain, and he couldn’t make himself do that. Couldn’t pay attention to the way she pushed him away, to the words of denial she was shouting, to Elissa saying something that didn’t even sound like English, it was so far away. Couldn’t heed his own cougarside growling at him in warning, Jude trying to pull him off.

  Could only heed the way Cara moved against him, and even though it was struggling, the struggle was part of the mating dance as much as the surrender would be, so each movement, each blow of her fists—strong yet barely registering on his consciousness—surged through him like a caress. He was drunk on the musky taste of her skin, the copper on his tongue, the memories of her tight pussy gripping him when he’d pounded into her, how fiercely she’d given back as good as she got.

  He’d take her again, now… Sure, the room was full of people, including Cara’s injured grandfather and everyone’s spirit guides. Let them watch. Let them learn that Cara belonged to him, and to Couguar-Caché.

  He tore at her clothes with hands gone feral with need, stronger and clumsier than usual.

  Which was when Cara slammed the heel of her hand into his nose so hard he saw stars.

  In the state he was in, that might have just added to the fun, if two other things hadn’t happened.

  Elissa hit him with a paralyzing spell.

  And a blast of icy water—a serious blast, like a fire hose—hit him, knocking him back.

  The combination left him stunned, drenched, freezing and fully aware of what he’d been doing, if not why.

  If he could have sunk to the floor and hidden his head in his hands, he would have. Instead, he had to see his friends’ horrified faces.

  Sam was the first to actually say anything. Stuck in bed, he magically projected himself so he still got right in Jack’s face. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you and put you out of my granddaughter’s misery.”

  Old Sam smiled one of his wildly inappropriate smiles, the smile he flashed when he was about to teach someone the kind of lesson that left permanent scars. Jack had occasionally wondered what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of one of those smiles. Now he knew. Fucking terrifying, or at least it would be if he could bring himself to care about his own fate. If he’d reached the point where he was hurting the woman he loved, better his old mentor and his friends took care of the problem. Shamans occasionally lost it. Looked like he’d hit that point.

  Sam’s smile broadened into something both demented and deeply personal. Despite his own despair, Jack allowed himself a frisson of terror. The old man could kill him, and Jack at this point wouldn’t fight back, but the glee was nerve-racking. “Cat got your tongue, Jack?”

  Suddenly, a cat hung off his tongue by its claws, tearing and stretching. Ten pounds or so of claws and fury, and Jack couldn’t do a thing about it.

  And he wasn’t sure he would if he could. Maybe put his hands under the cat’s butt so his tongue didn’t get torn out by the roots, but that was the extent of it. He’d need his tongue to be able to explain—if he ever figured out what had happened—but he figured he deserved the pain.

  Cara let out a tight, choked laugh, the kind that happened because it seemed marginally better than crying. “Gotta remember that one, Gramps.”

  “Nice work with the fire hose, Cara. Very Warner Brothers, but effective. What are we going to do with this asshole? In the old days, we’d cut his dick off and leave him for the crows, but you and Rafe are cops, and I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”

  “Enough.”

  Elissa’s voice rang with authority. Her aura puffed up, filling the room with the green and musky smell of her magic. Elissa’s power usually felt friendly and sexy, but now it loomed, pressing on him, smothering him.

  Figured a red witch would react appropriately—and he couldn’t deny that it was appropriate—to sexual assault.

  She gestured in Jack’s direction, said a word in Gaelic.

  He collapsed to his knees, gagging on blood and clutching at a frantic cat that wasn’t actually there.

  “Lose the cat. He can’t talk, and we need answers.”

  “You’re no fun,” Gramps muttered, but he obeyed. He didn’t, however, fix the lacerations on Jack’s tongue and chest.

  Jack figured he didn’t deserve such courtesy.


  He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, but dim memories were starting to swirl in his fogged brain. “The sorcerer….the one in the hat….René Chenier, he said his name was.” He spat blood and noted with only vague interest that it didn’t actually hit the floor in a red glob. An illusion, but a damn effective one. Even knowing that it was illusion didn’t make it stop hurting. “I remember his voice in my head. I met him before the fight. We talked. He tried…” He spat more illusory blood. “To get information from me and I from him. Somehow he got to me. I think he thought I was Rafe.”

  Gramps scowled. “No sorcerer’s magic in your aura, boy. Good try. Besides, you’re dual. Everyone knows sorcerers’ magic is word-based, so you should have thrown off the effects the first time you shifted, if not before.”

  All true. Jack hung his head. And yet…and yet something was going on. He knew he hadn’t been in his right mind just now and might not have been several times in the recent past.

  “What if this Chenier wasn’t exactly human?” Cara said suddenly. “I touched him, remember?” She shuddered, and Jack shuddered with her, remembering all too vividly how she’d been forced to touch the sorcerer, kiss and caress him. “He’s alive, but whatever keeps him that way isn’t a human soul.”

  Elissa spat out a Gaelic word that was definitely nasty. “And you didn’t say this before why?”

  Cara laughed a little wildly. “Let’s see. First we were fighting for our lives. Then we were trying to fix Gramps’s hip enough we could move him. Then we were running like hell back to the village, and getting Gramps healed, and tucking Nella in because she was played out. And then we were dealing with Jack turning into psycho sexual-assault boy. Been a little busy. Besides…” She hung her head. “I figured if it was obvious enough for me to figure out, you’d all noticed it too.”

  Elissa put her arm around Cara’s waist. “Everyone’s magic is different. We all pick up on different things. Also…” She shuddered. “You were the one unlucky enough to touch the sorcerer. He tried with me, but you can’t sell a salesman or can’t seduce a red witch with magic. Kind of a shame it didn’t work. Jude would have just eaten him, and it would be over except for Jude’s sick stomach.”