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

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  “Jack!” Cara called instinctively, gripping his hand tighter.

  “Pull yourself together,” Jack shouted. That was about as useful as Lynx’s “Control yourself,” had been. She was sinking fast.

  Think solid.

  No, bad idea. The muck started to harden into wood around her feet.

  Think free from the floor.

  “I don’t really want to sink into the floor!” she exclaimed, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt, “or to be stuck in the floor even if I’m not sinking,” she added quickly.

  Jack was on his feet now, tugging her hands so frantically it hurt. He pulled her so she was standing, but her feet remained trapped, and she was sinking fast. Her grandfather was laughing and so was Lynx, so she suspected that nothing but her self-esteem and her boots would be hurt in the long run.

  But she had to figure out how to get out of this mess.

  “I’m not sinking,” she tried. Instead of stopping her descent, she sank so she was below floor level halfway up her calves. Her heart galloped in animal panic. Surely if this was really dangerous, Lynx or Coyote or her grandfather or Elissa would intervene. Hell, Trickster might, since Trickster’s presence had probably made the level of weirdness in the area that much higher. “I am not sinking,” she repeated. “No more sinking.”

  “Think it in positives,” Jack urged. “The magic can get screwed up on negatives and conditionals.”

  “It’s not that clever about words,” Lynx added. “It thinks in pictures, like Cougar.”

  That penetrated her panic-addled brain, though it took her an agonizingly long time to frame the sentence the right way, long enough for her knees to wind up level with the solid part of the floor. Finally, Cara said, putting all her will behind it. “I am rising back to the level of the solid floor.”

  She started to rise as if on an elevator, but more slowly than she sank. “I am free from the floor and able to move about.”

  She tried to lift her foot. It worked. “Jack, give me a hand!” With him steadying her, she was able to step up onto more solid footing.

  “Now that I’m out of the sinking area,” she added, slogging over to solid ground with her hand on Jack’s arm, “the floor will become as it was. And my boots and clothes will dry off and be as they were before I started sinking,” she added rapidly, lest the literal-minded magic decide to turn the muck on her jeans back to wood.

  A round of shattered applause broke out as the floor restored itself to normal. “Good work, girlfriend,” Trickster said in that androgynous voice. “I knew you could do it. If you could do that, you can figure out what to do about the gate and the godling. That’s why you ended up here, you know, because something about you will help solve that problem. Can’t tell you what, except that the sorcerer underestimates you.”

  The stars vanished, leaving a bewildered, exhausted-looking Coyote behind.

  Jack pulled her close and kissed her before she could protest. Not that she really wanted to after her first startled gasp.

  His hands were hard on her, possessive, grasping, but his lips were tender. In her head, she got a vague, blurry image of a cougar narrowly avoiding a trap and felt an overwhelming sense of relief. “Be more careful,” she heard, or more accurately she felt an overwhelming wave of emotion that conveyed those words without the words being actually spoken. Sharp-scented fur that was warm but smelled of cold, fresh air surrounded her. A giant, throbbing purr embraced her.

  She leaned into Jack’s arms, into the great feline presence as well, the one she could sense but not see. Arousal shot through her, worked in her veins like a drug.

  But weaving in with the arousal was a great sense of rightness. Perhaps it was just exhaustion and relief after escaping so many sticky situations in a short time, from a sorcerer trying to take over her will to a floor trying to devour her, but being in Jack’s arms felt right. Not comfortable, not like being with Phil had been comfortable. She could guess with almost one hundred percent accuracy when Phil would get annoyed, when he’d scold, when he’d coddle and fuss, when he’d be tender and romantic. And she could certainly guess when he’d get passionate and sexy, because he tended to plan it in advance, thanks to their being on different shifts.

  Jack would continue to surprise her. She knew that. If they managed to be together in their nineties, he’d still manage to confuse and confound her. To piss her off one minute and turn her on the next. To lead her into trouble and then help her out of it. To challenge her, goad her, provoke her, infuriate her, arouse her.

  Maybe there was something to that mate notion of his after all. She still disliked the word and the notion of a destiny beyond their control, but maybe it was just his cougarside’s way of putting that they made a good pair. Being with him would be a constant wild ride. Certainly it wouldn’t be anything like life with Phil would have been, not as safe, comfortable, and predictable, but a lot funnier and sexier and more exciting too.

  Why had she thought she wanted safe and comfortable anyway?

  “Because you feared to wind up like your mother,” Lynx said. Another cat-presence echoed with fewer words and more images. It had to be Jack’s cougar talking to her, because the message seemed to transmit directly to her skin, to her lips.

  She jumped back, couldn’t stop herself. “I look forward,” she said with great dignity, even though she was about two millimeters from Jack’s lips and wanted to attach herself to them again, “to the time when I’m blasé about voices in my head. Bored, even.”

  Jack grinned at her, one of those lazy, sultry grins that made her feel like they were alone in the room, even though they couldn’t even be alone in their own heads. “Nah, you don’t want that. Boredom will kill you faster than crazy sorcerers, evil fae or even Cara-eating floors. But stick with me and you’ll be safe from boredom. Maybe not from anything else, but from boredom.”

  She flashed to her mother trying to be the perfect suburban housewife and rotting inside, cut off from magic, her marriage drying up—literally dying of boredom. Would that have happened if she’d married Phil?

  She didn’t want to believe it. But she remembered what she’d seen when she’d merged with his ghost. It might not have been as bad as it had been for her parents. But Phil wouldn’t have been able to handle her magic, and things would have gotten really bad, really fast.

  “Maybe,” Lynx said, “it’s time to stop fighting yourself and admit you love Jack. Or if it makes you happier at the moment, that you like him and want him and think you could love him if you gave it a chance. Phil was sweet, and without the magic, you two might have been all right—not amazing, but all right—but you and Jack are electricity and chaos and things that explode, and that’s what you need. And just to remind you, Chenier killed the poor man, not you. He was in the wrong place and Chenier saw an opening, that’s all.”

  “You know, Lynx,” Cara mused out loud, “life would be much simpler if everyone had a super-smart talking feline to tell them what’s what. But I think we humans are supposed to figure these things out on our own.”

  “But you’re so damn slow sometimes!” came from both Lynx and Jack’s cougarside.

  That comment fried what few brain cells Cara had left. “I need a drink,” she said loudly, thinking hard as she did. Her grandfather’s flask whisked into her hand, and she took a slug, shuddering as the whisky burned down her throat. “And I need to be alone with Jack for a while, because I think we need to get a few things straight between us before we do any more death-defying magic. And with any luck, then we’ll need more time alone.”

  “I’ll second the being alone with the men in one’s life,” Elissa said. “I used a lot of energy today…or yesterday…or whenever that was. Does anyone know what day it is, let alone what time?”

  “Tuesday,” Jude said firmly. “Tuesday at ‘time to feed you some breakfast and take you to bed.’ To sleep—at least at first.”

  Cara was pretty sure it was Wednesday, but she didn’t both
er correcting him, because Jack took her hand and waltzed her out the door.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  He waited until they reached her cabin to sweep her into his arms.

  “Why the change of heart?” he whispered fiercely in her ear. “And why now, after all the shit I pulled?” As he asked, he unzipped her parka, and she shrugged it off her shoulders so it hit the floor with a soft thump.

  “I felt your regret when I touched you. Felt your horror. More than that, I felt how much you cared, that you’re not just having some macho possessive attack brought on by good sex and bad magic.” She tossed his hat aside and eased him out of the deerskin coat he hadn’t bothered to fasten. He wore only a thermal shirt underneath, stretched oddly from shifting while wearing it.

  “No. It was brought on by once-in-a-lifetime sex and our magic.” Jack’s voice was muffled by the shirt over his head, but his cold hands were still infiltrating under her sweater and long-underwear shirt. “Help me out. We’re going to have to let go for a few seconds.”

  She tweaked the shirt off his head, then obliged by wriggling out of her layers he’d started to lift. “Not once in a lifetime. Maybe if we’re lucky the start of a lifetime of even better sex and crazy arguments with our shared furry astral friends. But seriously…back at the Moose-Butt, when I thought you were dead, I started to figure…”

  He kissed her hard and deep, the kind of kiss that robbed her of breath and will and of any desire to talk except in dirty words and throaty gasps.

  They didn’t need to talk, anyway. Now they had other ways to work out the unresolved tension between them.

  They were shamans. If they could open gates between worlds, and apparently they could, even though neither of them knew how yet, they could certainly open gates between each other. And that would be a lot clearer than words, wouldn’t it?

  Cara let down her shields and let Jack in, all of Jack, both the wordside and the cougarside. Apparently, Jack had the same notion, because suddenly they were both there, in her soul and heart and mind. Jack’s wordside didn’t even try for words, just revealed his heart—humbled by the weight of need and love he felt but at the same time ready to take on the world and the Otherworld for her sake. The cougar purred and to Cara’s astonishment, the throbbing went both to her racing heart and her already throbbing clit and caught their rhythm.

  She hadn’t known until then that she’d been afraid of the cougarside—no, not of the cougarside but of the way she recognized Jack in the cougarside’s animal shape. It wasn’t that she wanted to fool around with a big cat, even a sentient one. But the cat was part of Jack, was why wordy Jack was who he was, was there inside the gorgeous human-looking body she was running her hands over. They were one.

  “Except when I’m an avatar of the ancestors and Trickster. Then we’re one and we’re not, which is a Trickster thing I’m not even going to try to put into human words. Getting wordy about simple things is hard enough when…other things are hard enough and…I’m just going to shut up before I get my poor wordside hurt again. You hit hard.” The cougarside’s startling speech broke off into a roar that normally would have made Cara freeze in panic, thinking rage or pain or even rabies.

  Except that Jack was clearly not angry or in pain, and if he was foaming at the mouth, it was purely metaphorical. Apparently, that was the sound a male cougar made when he was about to get lucky.

  That would have freaked the old Cara out, the Cara who’d tried so hard to cling to the normy world even when it was clear she’d never fit in there again. But it seemed perfectly reasonable now.

  The kiss thawed the last bit of ice Cara had kept in her heart to protect the idea of a life with Phil, a life where she might have a house and two-point-five children and a dog, even though she didn’t especially like dogs and wasn’t sure she wanted kids.

  She’d still feel a pang whenever she thought about Phil—for his senseless death, if not for a shared life that wouldn’t have worked out in the long run—but she didn’t need to live in that pain. She could live in the now, and the now was Jack. Jack’s strong arms around her. Jack’s lips ravaging hers. Jack’s feline-hot skin against her. Jack’s hands on her breasts, caressing and molding, drawing her nipples to hard, sensitive peaks, sending shudders throughout her body.

  Jack kissed his way down her neck, each kiss making her shiver. She pressed her pelvis forward against the denim-encased length of his cock. Her heart raced, and she raked her nails down his back, hard enough she pictured welts in their wake.

  Jack growled like the big cat he was.

  Cara drenched her underwear, thinking about him growling that way when he was inside her. Her body arched, pulsing with lust.

  “Need you in me,” she whispered, her voice almost as throaty and animalistic as his growl.

  They broke apart long enough to take off boots and peel off socks and jeans, a mad rush that made their fingers awkward. Even while they fumbled with laces and zippers, they kept kissing and touching.

  They tumbled onto the unmade bed. Jack was on top, his weight and greater size trapping her in the most wonderful way possible. Jack made her feel small, almost dainty. Funny, she’d spent a lot of her life trying to avoid that vulnerable feeling. But with Jack, she wasn’t vulnerable. He valued her strength, would back it up by just about any means necessary, didn’t see her as lesser because she was smaller, or weaker because she yielded.

  Maybe it was a cat thing. Cat sex was all about the bite at the back of the neck, the rough taking (though she’d draw the line at a barbed cat-cock, thanks) but female cats, small or large, had no trouble biting and cuffing and generally cowing an overly rambunctious male the rest of the time.

  And so she could relax and enjoy being tossed around, playing rough, pretending to fight back against Jack in a way that they both knew was actually a way of asking for more.

  She clawed at him and was rewarded by a sharp intake of breath, a tighter grip, his nails raking her flesh in the most delicious way. When she scratched again, he collected both wrists in one big hand and pinned her hands over her head. She could have broken away with only a little more effort than she put into her mock-struggles—but why would she want to? The illusion of force, the pretense of being trapped, set a fire in her belly that pulsed down to her sex, pulsed up to her heart.

  She bit and nipped, and he growled that dark, sexy growl and sank his teeth into her shoulder. She thought for a second that he’d partly changed, that the cougar, not the man, was biting her, but quickly realized it wasn’t the case. The swift pain, and the swift pleasure that followed while the pain still throbbed, was just that intense.

  She wrestled and squirmed, using just the strength of her legs, and managed to flip Jack over, forced him to release her hands. She knew he’d let her do it but she felt a nanosecond of chortling glee as she straddled his hips and looked down at his ruddy, handsome face, the snarled silk of his hair, his sculpted body.

  Carefully, teasingly, she grazed his hardness with her dripping pussy. Once, twice, three times, each jolting her with pleasure. Some day in the very near future, she’d tease Jack that way for a good long time, hours, maybe. But that was for another time, a time when there hadn’t been violent death and dark magic and anger and reconciliation and reconnection and meeting an actual deity all within the past few hours.

  She poised herself over his cock, ready to sink down and ride him to glory.

  Jack grabbed her hips, entwined his legs with her. Flipped her onto her back and impaled her before she was fully onto the bed.

  He thrust deep and hard, without mercy. His steely hands imprisoned her wrists again. She dug her heels into the thin old mattress and pushed up, meeting each fierce stroke with the force of her body. She nipped at his shoulder, the only place she could reach, and tasted salt that might be sweat or blood.

  “Stop running away from me, Cara,” he muttered, the words in rhythm with his strokes.

  “Stop being an asshole, and I’ll stop runni
ng.”

  “Can’t stop being an asshole. Goes with the shaman job sometimes.” Jack paused at the top of the stroke, supporting his weight on his arms. All his muscles quivered with tension. It wasn’t that warm in the cabin, but sweat slicked his skin. His eyes were black with need. “But I can tone it down, and you can smack me upside the head when it gets too bad. That’s part of a shaman’s job too—calling people when they’re being dense.”

  “I can do that. I’d like to stop running, Jack. But there’s so much scary shit in my life now that sometimes I’m going to balk and think you’re the problem when I’m just overwhelmed. We’re going to fight sometimes, and it won’t always be for a good reason.”

  “That’s one of the things that mates do,” the cougar opined. “Along with watching each other’s backs, making the beast with two backs, etc., etc.”

  She blinked. “Your cougar knows Shakespeare?”

  “The part that’s cougar-me remembers the stories from college, but not the words. The part that’s an avatar of Trickster probably knew Shakespeare personally. A lot of writers are Trickster-touched, especially the really good ones.”

  Cara shivered involuntarily. She loved Jack, or at least was well on the way to love, but the whole aspect of Jack being Jack’s cougar being Cougar the spirit-guide was going to weird her out for some time to come.

  “Ain’t it cool?” Jack said, picking up on her thoughts. “Our lives may be strange, Cara, but they’ll never be boring.”

  “Where did you go to university?” she asked suddenly, the fact that Jack had attended college just filtering through her distracted brain.

  “Later,” Jack said and kissed her, probably as much to silence her as to enjoy it.

  Maybe he was getting to the point where duals found it hard to talk, or maybe he was just trying to change the subject because it wasn’t nearly as interesting as sex.