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

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  She hoped it wasn’t actually like a real black hole, which would tear you to atoms if you got too close.

  Cara looked away, shuddering, and stared at Jack, pretending to be angry and shocked but really just fascinated. Fires of green and tawny amber flickered over him. The cat form coexisted with the wordy. Magic limned his muscles. His fur stood on end. He looked hotter than ever, and she knew without checking that he was straining against his jeans with need. Knew it because she was wet.

  Was it the damiana or Elissa’s magic or simply because all barriers had been blasted open and there was no reason to pretend? In any case, she could use this. Going through that connection, she told him to fall when she knocked him back with her magic, a showy blast that wouldn’t have done much without his cooperation. He did, sprawling onto the floor, pretending to be stunned.

  Cara then cocked her hip at Chenier, licked her painful lips as sensually as she could manage and said in a husky whisper that didn’t sound like her own voice, “Like I said, I’m all for dealing with the winning team, as long as it’s my choice. It’s not my mud-hole village anyway. I’m just there because I needed help with my magic. This asshole taught me what I needed to know, and he’s been fun in his primitive furry way, but he just hit me for the last fucking time. And I still remember your hands on me, René. You scare the piss out of me, but you turn me on. Power turns me on.”

  Chenier nodded. “Intelligent as well as beautiful.”

  “And I know the infrastructure of Toronto. Know who in the police and the legal system are on the take. Wouldn’t Toronto be more your speed than a backwater village?”

  “The village is…special to me. But Toronto has its merits.” Chenier ran his hand over the smooth, rich surface of a beautiful antique table. Cara felt the caress on her skin.

  It would have sickened her if she’d been more herself, just as it would have hurt to say the words, but it felt as distant as watching a bad movie while doing something else.

  This was what allowed her to blow the fallen Jack a teasing kiss and saunter over to Chenier, what allowed her to find the courage to put her hand on his chest, right over the gaping hole where his self should live if he’d been in any way normal.

  She put her hands there and pulled.

  It was like pulling an earthworm out of the garden, only a lot slimier. But after a few seconds, she felt others pulling with her. First Lynx and Cougar, then Jack himself. After that, and to her surprise, Coyote.

  And then, distantly, Gramps, through Coyote, and Rafe—through his version of Cougar, she supposed.

  Chenier tried to toss her aside, but Jack grabbed her shoulders and helped her stand her ground. His extra weight and muscle helped, but his solidity, his strong physical and magical presence, were what made it possible for her to hang on against Chenier’s struggling, against the writhing embodied evil in her hand.

  Just when she thought she was getting somewhere, the wormlike thing grew tentacles, reached out to grab her and Jack. Jack did something—she couldn’t see it, but could feel bracing, fresh energy, saw garish colors—and the tentacles thrashed and winced away. But doubt assailed her. How long could they hold out? This thing was strong. Stronger than she and Jack put together, even with Gramps and Rafe backing them up from a distance. They weren’t going to make it.

  Not if she didn’t block the despair that was seeping in through her hands.

  Quickly, she imagined protective gloves. They appeared instantly. They were yellow and shapeless, like those gloves people wore for washing dishes, but she felt better immediately. Better yet when she wasted a millisecond of concentration to turn them to her favorite bright red.

  But damn, even without the mind-fuck effects, Chenier—or the thing possessing Chenier—put up a fight. It retracted, dragging Cara and Jack closer. Then they’d manage to reel it out more. Lather, rinse, repeat. And all the time, black and fuchsia roiled around them, black and fuchsia and another color that had no name and that Cara was pretty sure she could see only because of Elissa’s pill. The colors were screaming invectives in a language she didn’t understand.

  Unnerving, probably a hell of a lot more unnerving if you weren’t a shaman who knew about using illusions to rattle your foes. If only Cara could spare the energy for some distracting sound effects of her own, or falling anvils or anything. But all she could do was hang on and pull—and Jack, despite his years of practice, seemed to be in the same boat.

  She was just wondering where the backup was when friendly magic surged through her, a magic that felt nothing liked her own, all heat and cinnamon, with hints of evergreen and herbs and something else…pears, perhaps. Elissa.

  The building lurched. No, reality lurched. The ancient wood began to sprout leaves. A huge black-maned lion crashed through the door. Elissa charged in behind him, and Rafe flanked her.

  Grand-mère rode on the lion’s back.

  “René,” the old nature spirit intoned. Her voice made the fabric of reality shiver in two worlds. “You’re dead, René, and the thing that animates you is not of this world. This ends now.”

  “You won’t harm me. Not after all these years of hoping I could be saved.”

  “Even your ego can’t possibly believe I still love you.” Grand-mère’s voice was the winter wind at forty below. “For years I clung to the hope that you could redeem yourself, but it’s too late for that. I have the patience of the forest, René, but even a tree’s patience fails.”

  “René doesn’t live here anymore.” The sorcerer’s mouth moved, but the voice seemed out of sync with the movement of the lips, and Cara didn’t think it was because her stoned brain was distorting things.

  Then Chenier began to laugh, and this did seem to be coming from him.

  It was a terrible sound because it was a beautiful one, rich and musical, even sexy. Yet it entirely lacked joy, even the sadistic pleasure of mocking your enemies, as if the fae creature had missed a few memos on why mortals laughed.

  Over the laugh, Elissa began to chant in Gaelic, Rafe echoing her half a beat later in English that seemed just as foreign as the incomprehensible Gaelic. The buzzing in Cara’s head, the horrible laughter—they were driving language out of her head. She focused on Jack, who was now clinging to his own part of the squirming thing, which seemed now less giant earthworm and more octopus. She focused on Lynx, invisible yet warm against her leg. She focused on the memory of Jack’s laughter, and Jocelyn’s baby giggles, so different from the frozen sound emanating from their foe.

  And as she forced her attention away from that hideous laughter, Cara truly heard it for the first time. There was another layer to it. Under the laughter, something was whimpering quietly, as if it wanted to howl with pain and rage and frustration but had long ago lost the strength.

  The mortal Chenier was still in there, and that would make the whole enterprise trickier. For all he was a murderer many times over, for all his life had been extended long past its time, Chenier still had a human soul, one that was supposed to learn and grow in this lifetime.

  From a shaman’s point of view, if they killed Chenier without giving him a chance, he might never learn his final lessons in this life. They might have to, in the end—hell, it might be the only way to get him separated from the fae at this point—but it would be less than ideal.

  And witches, at least the sort of witch Elissa was, couldn’t kill and keep their magic uncorrupted. But she was the one who had the spell whammy to do anything about this hybrid creature.

  To make matters even trickier, Cara couldn’t figure out how to tell the others what was going on without letting the fae know they knew.

  “That’s easy” Cougar’s voice said in her head. “I’ll tell wordy Jack. He’ll tell Rafe and Jude with silentspeech, and they’ll tell Elissa.”

  “Great!”

  The cougar purred in her head. “There’s only one condition. You have to admit to me that you love us. Out loud. In front of everyone else.”

  What the
…

  Every muscle in Cara’s body tensed. Every nerve zinged with strange energy. The nerve of that damn cougar!

  And then her head and heart filled with light, almost literally. Yes, it was annoying, interfering…and right. There was no certainty any of them would survive their adventure in plane-hopping with an evil fae. Jack needed to know.

  There was no point in stealth now. Chenier knew exactly what she was doing, what everyone was up to.

  “I love you!” she shouted. “Jack, I love you. Wordside and cougarside and even your annoying spirit guide. I love all of you.”

  A feline cough, loud enough that even the fae Chenier seemed to register it.

  “Our annoying spirit guide,” she quickly amended.

  Jack took his eyes off the enemy for half a second. A delirious, incredulous grin spread across his dark face. He whooped and exclaimed, just as loudly, “Cara, I…”

  Between one breath and another, Jack vanished.

  “No!” Cara screamed, losing her grip on the squirming entity.

  “Hold on!” Lynx ordered. “You can’t let it distract you from our purpose.”

  “Bullshit,” Cougar exclaimed in her head.

  And to Cara’s astonishment, Grand-mère echoed Cougar. “Follow him, Cara. Follow your heart.”

  But how…

  “He’s me,” Cougar said. “And I’m him. I can get us there. Grab my scruff!”

  “Are you coming with, Lynx?” Lynx glared at her. “Because if you’re not, latch on to the fucking tentacle with all four paws.”

  Cara didn’t know if Lynx obeyed, because she laced her fingers into Cougar’s smoky half-there fur, and suddenly Cara and the great spirit cat were somewhere else.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Somewhere very strange.

  That was all Jack could come up with, at first, to describe where he was.

  Smoke-filled and yet without the smell of tobacco, wood smoke or even diesel fumes. Dank and yet not cold in any of the many ways Jack had come to know cold growing up where he had.

  And purple. Everything was purple, but a shade of purple that was sapped of life, as if it had been left out in the rain for centuries.

  Not rain. Tears. As if it had been cried on for centuries.

  Only logic confirmed he was standing on something, because he couldn’t actually see anything beneath his feet. He could barely make out his feet, and when he held his hands in front of his face, they were dim and the same grayed purple as the emptiness around him.

  He couldn’t even use his cougarside, who saw in shades of gray anyway, to parse the monotone landscape. In this eerie realm of not-quite-there, Jack was alone. Not just by himself, but alone in a way a dual or a shaman shouldn’t be, and certainly not a shaman who was also a dual.

  His head was empty of anyone but his wordside self. No primordial spirit of Cougar protecting and opening the way for him as only a large predator could. And worse, no cougarside self, no cat awareness, no silentspeech conversation to comfort him. Not even the sense that the cougarside was taking a nap.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. His voice, smaller than usual, hollow without his cougarside to growl behind his human words, faded into the purple and vanished.

  No wonder normies always seemed so lonely, so near to breaking. They lived like this all the time. After only a few minutes of this awful hollowness—had it even been that long, or had it been much longer?—his sanity was starting to run out his ears.

  “It is the only way to give you a taste of my horror,” a deep voice with a French accent echoed in his head.

  The voice comforted and chilled him simultaneously. He knew the voice. It was Chenier, only younger and…and maybe “less evil” was overly optimistic, but at least not as rotten as the sorcerer they knew and loathed.

  Jack sensed a weary smile from the sorcerer. “You hate me and yet you are glad I am here. You would not understand how awful it is never to be alone in your own head, because for your kind, that is the ordinary way of things. For you, it has been only moments with your head silent and already you welcome even me. I am human, Long-Claw. What they term a Different in these days, to be sure, but a sorcerer is not like your animal kind, or like the shamans and witches who speak with spirits and animals as readily as with another mortal. We live alone in ourselves as humans, for the most part, always do.

  “I have been trapped inside my own body and mind and soul with an immortal power from another world for more than a century, and neither of us can be free because he has no form in the mortal realm and his own world is barred to him.”

  “So why do you want more company in your crazy?” Jack tried to keep his tone casual, though his heart pounded so hard it threatened his ribs. “Or do you figure maybe I can help?”

  He got the answer he feared. “You’re not in my head, cougar. You are not in your world nor in any place the ordinary magics of our world can reach. It’s a very special place my enemy brother prepared with my help, and I’ve been waiting for ages to trap another one of your worthless kind here. Alone. Forever. You weren’t the one I hoped to catch, the father of the Youngest, but you are still a thorn in my side. Still hers.”

  Jack reached for his magic. Something bright and colorful flickered and then dimmed out, leaving a sense of emptiness behind it. The power was there, but without his guide, his other half, he couldn’t access it.

  Maybe he could learn. Every young shaman started out without a guide and could still do rudimentary magics, although they backfired more often than not.

  Every young shaman other than Jack Long-Claw, that was. He’d never not had a guide, because Cougar was part of him.

  He wasn’t just alone. He was alone and powerless.

  Jack fought back panic and failed. There were times a guy was entitled to panic, and this was about three of them.

  And then the cavalry tumbled through a hole in the nothingness, head over heels and head over tail over paws, but all landing on their feet with a snarl and a shake, and Jack knew everything would be fine.

  Cara had come for him and brought his other side with her.

  Cougar flowed to Jack, and they became one again, the wordside and the animalside reunited. Seen through the animalside’s eyes, the blurry purple world shifted to gray yet became clearer, not that it helped much. The space curved to an eerily close horizon—but a horizon that curved toward them rather than away, a horizon that trapped them. “Like being trapped in a balloon,” he muttered.

  His cougarside sent the image of claws popping a balloon, tearing it to shreds.

  “It’s not that simple,” Cara said out loud, “and yet it is.”

  “You picked up the silentspeech. You understood the silentspeech. And you’re here. With Cougar. You’ve accepted him?”

  “I love you,” Cara said, as if it was an explanation, and maybe it was.

  “And I love you…not just because you came to rescue me.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. He closed his eyes, gave himself to the kiss. Gave himself to Cara.

  When he opened them again, the pocket world around him had colors, which he saw at the same time as the cougar’s black-and-white. The colors were off from those of the world he knew, the grass below his feet more blue than green, the sky streaked with yellow, but Cara looked perfect. He told her so.

  To his astonishment, she blushed. “Far from perfect,” she said. “Just me.”

  “Like I said, perfect.”

  “You’re making me queasy with all this love,” Chenier rumbled around them. “I should end this now.”

  “You can’t,” Jack reasoned, hoping he was right. “Or you would have already. Even in your own private little world, you don’t have the power. You are weak. Only the fae makes you strong enough to think you can take on our village, makes you think you could even get near the one you call the Youngest. But the fae always lie. You know it, and that’s why you’re such an angry man. You can’t win, you can’t die, and you can’t g
et the fucker out of your head. You probably can’t even get us out of your head. Look how Cara and company just dropped in uninvited. Pretty soon you’ll have a whole village in your skull. Then we’ll throw a loud, drunken party.”

  As he spoke, he wove a web of the sound of the words, of the slightly off colors, of the energy inherent to a sorcerer’s creation, of the energy inherent in life itself.

  And as he wove, he sensed Cara weaving as well, working with him. Cougar built the bridge between them, allowing them to work together without a word spoken. Cougar was in the weaving too, and Lynx.

  Then another cougar dual joined the mix.

  The unseen dual wasn’t working magic but adding strength and energy. Jack had no idea who he might be, but his energy felt familiar. Familiar in the literal sense, as in “like family,” like Jack’s father and grandparents, like other kin in the village—like the many duals of Couguar-Caché, who, while ordinary in every other respect, had a trace of Grand-mère’s bloodline. He caught dim silentspeech—a cougar in a trap, but still fighting.

  Then words which his brain translated automatically to “Cast it now,” but which were actually spoken—thought?—in either heavily accented, archaic-sounding French or a First Nations language Jack couldn’t place.

  It seemed like a good idea, especially when the spirit guides and his own instincts echoed the words.

  Through the Cougar-bond, he could tell Cara agreed.

  They let loose the spell.

  And the pocket world Chenier and his fae shadow-self had created dissolved into a rainbow of light.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Cara was falling. No, she was flying through a rainbowed place she recognized instinctively as being between worlds.

  She didn’t have wings, but she was definitely flying. Jack flew with her, holding her hand and laughing.

  The rainbow between worlds segued abruptly into the mud and blood of the real world. The ground approached at a terrifying pace, but Cara couldn’t bring herself to feel concern. Instead, the rush of endorphins became a frankly sexual high.