by Holley Trent
As if that weren’t enough, now Hannah was a Cougar, too. During a recent fight, a young Cougar who’d needed to make a distraction had accidentally infected her. She’d become a kind of monster she never knew existed up until two months ago, and the learning curve had been unkind.
At least she didn’t hurt anymore unless she tried to shift, and she avoided that at all costs. She was made to do it the first time so she could force her body to rest in its animal form, but there’d been nothing restful about that shift. Her new alpha had had to hold her down as her bones slipped out of their natural positions and curved into new ones. She’d wanted to die, and even when it was over, it still hurt. She wasn’t as strong as the born Cougars.
It’d been nearly a month since she left the hospital with a cheek and jaw full of stitches and with so many people looking on with pity. She didn’t want pity. She just wanted to be left alone, really, so she could make sense of this thing she was now.
The animal in wait inside her frequently muddled her thoughts and slowed her reactions. She was no longer comfortable in her own skin because she didn’t know what she was anymore. She’d been trying to accept herself as she was for almost thirty years, and thought she was starting to get somewhere.
Now she had to start all over again … but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
She put her hand to her face and rubbed the scar, watching the animal in the corner watch her.
He bared his fangs and a low growl resonated from his chest, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to move. She’d been in his basement for a day and a half, and he’d hardly moved, not even to eat.
He’d been growing increasingly erratic in his prowling, and his brothers Mason and Hank worried that Sean’s consciousness was currently on the wrong end of the cougar-human spectrum. Usually, a shifter thought like both man and beast at the same time, but the longer he stayed in his animal form, the more his impulses changed. The more memories he suppressed.
He would tamp down everything he knew about being human so his conscience didn’t get in the way of primal practicability—of survival.
They needed to bring him back.
Worried he would soon be too far gone, Mason and Hank had jumped him out in the desert and forced him downstairs three days prior. As he hadn’t eaten what they’d tossed down, the big cat was probably famished.
Hannah wasn’t sure if it was the man inside looking at her through those cat eyes or if it were some wild beast that didn’t care about the man’s memories, but it didn’t matter either way. It didn’t matter which form he was in. The curse’s cure was non-discriminatory.
She wrapped her long braid around her thumb again and again, twirling it while plotting her move. She hadn’t had a plan when she’d entered the basement, and had only known that she couldn’t leave until she brought the man back out with her. To get him up and going, she had to accept him as her mate. She didn’t want that any more than she had two months ago, but she had to live amongst his brothers now. Whether she liked it or not, she was a part of their clan, and she couldn’t look at them without feeling so fucking guilty. Sean wasn’t a fate worse than death, but she didn’t want him. Didn’t want anyone.
So, she’d made a bargain with his cunning deity who was now her goddess, too.
“Find him someone more suitable,” the Were-cougar goddess La Bella Dama—informally, Lola—had said before Hannah had descended into Sean’s basement. She’d stared down her nose at Hannah and said it in a quietly terrifying tone that Hannah had known meant she’d be making no further concessions. She’d made too many already.
Lola would let Sean and Hannah off the hook permanently if Hannah found him someone else. For the time being, she’d have to claim him—accept him—and pull the man out of the cougar’s shell because she couldn’t market a man who wasn’t technically a man anymore.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” she whispered to herself.
He bared his fangs again, sharp and frightening, but of course they were. Sean was a Foye and the Foyes were all big, beautiful, scary cats. They were only slightly less imposing on two legs. If she ever told anyone how scared of them she was, even now that she was also a Were-cougar, they wouldn’t believe her. She’d been doing too good a job of pretending to be unbothered.
At the vibration of her phone in her borrowed flannel shirt’s pocket, she sat up straighter and silenced the sound before it agitated the watchful beast. She didn’t want him to pounce, because even if she shifted, she wouldn’t be strong enough to fight him off. Even in his weakened state, he would have been stronger than Hannah at full capacity, and she was tired of picking fights she couldn’t win. In spite of what her father believed, sometimes it wasn’t just a matter of trying hard enough. A lady needed to know her limits. If that made her a coward, so be it. She was a fraidy cat. Literally.
“How’s it going?” her friend and fellow Cougar mate Miles asked when Hannah whispered, “Hello?” into the phone.
Hannah locked her gaze at the snarling cat across the room and swallowed hard. He’d lifted his head and the fur on his neck stood up.
Oh. Shit.
“Um, about as well as could be expected,” she said.
“Hang in there. It may not seem like it, but Lola says Sean’s still inside that cat.”
“I guess Lola would know, huh?”
Sean snarled at her again, and she resisted the urge to grab the sprayer from the nearby kitchenette sink to hose the hissing cat down … if that even worked on cats his size. Were-cougars had the lengths of their human counterparts and all muscle mass expected of powerful cats. The reddish hulk in the corner had to be over two hundred pounds. Hannah had already been scratched up by one Cougar, and didn’t plan on adding any new scars to her collection.
The white jags on her left cheek would probably never completely fade. The first time she’d shifted into her brand-new cat self, they’d healed some, but there was a limit to how much her weak magic could do. When she’d been pitying herself in the hospital after the attack, she wouldn’t let the one person who could do her scar any good touch her. Sean’s brother Mason was her alpha now, but in her opinion, he was just one more man in her life who’d make her feel like she wasn’t enough. It was easiest for her self-esteem to just stay out of the intimidating cat’s orbit.
“Are ya hungry?” Miles tried to put some sunshine into her voice.
Ever the optimist.
Miles had always had optimism in spades, though. In the ten years since they’d met in college, Hannah had never really seen the woman down in the dumps, and Lord knew she had the right to be. Miles had no family, and for a long time, had no one in her corner. Now she had a Were-cougar for a mate, the favor of La Bella Dama whom Miles acted as ear and emissary for, and an adopted family comprised of witches, shapeshifters, and a demigod or two. Hannah envied Miles for her family-by-choice. Hannah’s family-by-blood paled in comparison lately. They’d always been dysfunctional, but the funny thing about space was how it made perceptions change. The longer she stayed away, the less she blamed herself for relationships not working. In the past, every negative family exchange had seemed like her fault.
Now, she knew they weren’t her fault, but that didn’t make her feel any better about how they were.
“I’m a little bit hungry, yeah.” Hannah put her head back against the wood paneled wall and watched Sean settle onto his belly. His heavy eyelids drooped, but she knew he wouldn’t sleep. Neither of them had slept since she’d gone downstairs, which was just as well. If she didn’t sleep, she didn’t dream. She was tired of the nightmares. They’d been sporadic up until she was attacked—and had been that way since she was a child—but something about being a Cougar and Lola’s so-called “avenger” made them worse.
Some avenger.
Hannah hadn’t asked for the job. It had apparently become hers the moment Sean kidnapped her. She was supposedly the Cougar group’s—the glaring’s—righter of wrongs.
&nbs
p; She thought that was wrong and that Lola got the wrong lady.
“Is the door still unlocked on your side?” Miles asked.
“Yeah. Sean doesn’t have thumbs at the moment, so I didn’t see the point of bothering with the locks.”
“Okay, we’re coming down.”
“You and who?”
“Both Hank and Mason. They don’t want a repeat of last night.”
Hannah pinched the bridge of her nose. During the previous night’s meal delivery, cat-Sean had knocked Ellery on her ass trying to bolt up the stairs. There were few things more terrifying than having a pissed-off witch in an enclosed space. Ellery had sent Sean flying across the room with a gust of wind that would have knocked the furniture over if it hadn’t been that heavy, high-quality Foye Woodworks stuff.
“Coming down.”
Hannah disconnected as the basement door creaked inward.
Cat-Sean got to his feet and started toward the exit as heavy footsteps sounded down the stairs.
“Nope. Back, dude,” Mason barked.
The hairs on the back of Hannah’s neck stood on end as his alpha energy flooded the room. She pressed a hand over the prickling hairs and concentrated on breathing normally, in spite of Mason’s disruptive presence.
He didn’t affect the stronger Cougars so much. She knew that for a fact. It was a wonder lesser Cougars didn’t fall to their knees when he entered a room.
He and Hank formed a wall of flesh to keep their brother in his corner.
Miles hurried down next with the cooler and made a beeline for the secondhand fridge in the kitchenette. “Help me unload this.”
Hannah got to her numb feet and shuffled over to the kitchenette. The cooler was loaded with enough food to feed a couple of people for two or three days. She’d gotten pretty good at discerning that after she and her friends had embarked on their nationwide camping adventures the previous year.
“It’s a lot of food.” She cast a glance over her shoulder and saw Mason kneeling next to Sean with his arm slung over the cat’s shoulders. Whatever he was whispering to him had stopped the snarling that had become the soundtrack of the past day.
“If Sean comes around, he’s going to be hungry. We can’t let you out until he’s got his faculties in order.”
“How long will that take after … well, you know. After I say yes, or whatever.”
“We have no idea. Lola says it’ll take as long as it takes. She’s not feeling particularly sympathetic toward either of you right now. She thinks you both made it harder than it needed to be.”
“She was the one who set the two-week deadline for him to court me and for me to say yes. What did she expect would happen? People don’t fall in love in two weeks.” Hannah stacked the majority of the meat packets into the freezer and put the rest on the fridge shelf.
“You didn’t have to fall in love. Nobody expects that. You just had to accept him, and you didn’t even try.”
“Why do you make this sound like my fault?”
“That’s not my intention. I just wish you would have given compromise some thought before now, and that your compromise wouldn’t have been—” She glanced around to the men, then finished in a whisper, “Pawning him off on someone else.”
“Give up my life for a man I don’t know, who kidnapped me, you mean.”
“No, to add the man to the life you had. You would have both had to make changes, but you didn’t even stop to consider that.”
“You’re right that I didn’t consider it, because I didn’t want it.”
“I know you didn’t and that you still don’t.” Miles sighed and opened the cabinet over the counter. “I love you for doing this for him, but I gotta tell you that you drive me nuts.”
“Feeling’s mutual.”
They put away bread, meat, condiments, and snacks, and then Miles snapped the cooler lid shut with finality. “I’m going to call you in a couple of hours to see how things are.”
“Okay.”
Miles, whose driver’s license was probably being overly generous in stating she was five feet tall, stretched up onto her tiptoes to give Hannah a one-armed hug, and then hurried up the stairs. Hank followed her, but not after casting an inscrutable look in Hannah’s direction.
She put her hands up in concession. Hank was aggressively protective not only of his mate, but of his family. He and Hannah had had it out in words a couple of times, but for the most part, they understood each other pretty well. She was hotheaded as hell, and he was excessively practical. But they weren’t just arguing for the sake of it. They couldn’t help but to argue. He was the Cougar second-in-command, and she had a job that had gone unfilled in the glaring for several generations. Nobody knew what to make of her. And not only was Hannah in a body she no longer felt at home in, but she had a job predicated on her belonging to a man she’d refused.
“Hannah, if you really want to do this, you need to try to get close,” Mason said softly from the stairwell, jogging Hannah out of her mental meanderings.
“I’ve been trying,” she said mildly.
“Ignore the hisses. He’s not going to do anything to you. Even if he nips you, it’ll be a warning he won’t follow through on.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s not going to hurt his mate. You’ve gotta touch him to get through to him.”
His mate. She let out a sputtering breath. “Okay. I’ll try.”
Mason’s overlong stare had enough skepticism in it that she didn’t need to ask if he had faith in her.
“Mason, I will,” she said. “Just go. Please.”
He likely thought she’d drag her feet—and that was indeed her inclination—but she’d meant it when she said she’d try. She wanted to get out of that basement, and for so many reasons.
“Are you sure about this?”
She tried to put on a smile and nodded. “Yeah.”
Mason shifted his weight, and after a few more seconds of staring—and one more glance at his brother—he started up the stairs.
Her life was a mess, her identity no longer clear. Pulling Sean out meant she could go figure things out without having someone constantly on her damn heels watching her as if she’d do something rash. She could get some space from all the Foyes and from her friends who looked at her with that frustrating mix of pity and annoyance.
She could confront her demons in private instead of in front of people who thought she was angry all the time just because she’d been kidnapped and scratched up. There were so many other reasons to be angry that had nothing to do with them.
And she could have her revenge on the little snot who’d scratched her up, and his brother, too. Ralphie Sheehan may have scratched her accidentally, but his family had been churning up trouble in the area for as long back as anyone could remember. They’d wanted to run things, but met resistance at every turn—not just within the glaring, but in local politics amongst the humans in town, too.
Ralphie’s brother Edgar was the thorn in Mason’s side, and had been promoting alpha challenges between his friends and Mason frequently in the five years since Mason’s father Floyd had died. Edgar never won. His friends never won. They kept at it anyway, likely assuming that eventually, Mason would get frustrated and step down voluntarily.
Mason wouldn’t. He was the rightful alpha. Edgar must have realized that, but he’d changed tactics. He’d tried to snatch Ellery to prevent her from being able to accept Mason as a mate. She’d obviously gotten away, but not without a scuffle, which in the end sent the Sheehans on the run. They were still out there somewhere, stirring up drama from afar.
Hannah had no choice but to give chase, not only because they’d hurt her friend, but because she was programmed to avenge the glaring. She didn’t see where she had a choice.
The heavy basement door thundered shut, and the lock on the other side clicked into position. Sean could make a run for it all he wanted, but he wouldn’t get far, even if he did have the opposable thumbs ne
eded to turn the knob. That door was heavily reinforced; she’d learned that firsthand after spending a fair amount of time locked into the basement last month. Sean hadn’t been able to let her leave until he’d had his fair chance to woo her. After all, she would have run to the first phone she could find and called the authorities and her family.
She’d obviously lost that inclination. Exposing the Foyes would be putting herself at risk, too. Knowing her luck, her body would end up in a refrigerated morgue drawer and the subject of an X-File. She could imagine just how colorful those case notes would be.
Subject is a twenty-eight-year-old white female observed taking a full twenty minutes to shapeshift while cursing a blue streak.
Yeah, she kind of sucked.
She made herself a sandwich and settled back into her corner. Again, she watched Sean watch her. His gaze dipped and rose with every movement of her hand with her food. “Are you hungry?”
Sean put his head down atop his paws and closed his eyes.
“I guess that’s a no.”
All the same, she stood, and slowly made her way across the room. She needed to take advantage of the moment of calm—of his sleepiness. Try as he might to stay awake, even Were-cougars had their limits. He had to be exhausted. Between the nightmares and staying up watching him, she certainly was.
He lifted his head slightly as she neared.
She made her steps smaller and held her breath, approaching him in a sort of roundabout way by walking a wide arc. When she was three feet from him, his head was down, and he opened his eyes. She couldn’t even remember what color the man’s eyes were; she was so used to the cat’s green.
She made herself as small as she could against the wall near him by pulling her knees up to her chest.
His eyelids drifted shut, and she pulled in a much-needed breath.
As an emergency room nurse, she’d dealt with her fair share of patients who didn’t want to be helped, or who just didn’t want her kind of help. She was tasked with providing them with medical care in spite of their misguided distrust of her. She’d learned how to compartmentalize those slights because people in pain didn’t necessarily have the best instincts.