The Cougar's Pawn

by Holley Trent

  “Hannah … ” Miles scolded.

  Ellery put her hands up. “It’s all right. She has the right to be upset because she doesn’t understand—”

  “Oh, I understand perfectly fine,” Hannah said. “Personally, I’ve always needed a little more than a pretty face and a big pecker to win me over, but that’s just me. Obviously, your mileage varies greatly.” She scoffed. “Think you know a person … ”

  Ellery felt the air pressure shift suddenly, and leapt up to put her hands on her forebear’s shoulders before Agatha could do anything to harm Hannah.

  “She’s just angry,” she whispered. “She has a right to be.”

  “She doesn’t have the right to question your character. I can’t help but to take that personally.”

  “She’ll come around.” At least, Ellery hoped she would. Hannah had never let her down, even when Ellery had been a difficult friend to have.

  Agatha’s come and get me posture relaxed a hair, though her gaze on Hannah remained icy.

  “I’m going to go see if Mrs. Foye needs any help with dinner,” Miles said.

  There was silence as she left the room, then Agatha cradled Ellery’s elbow. “I need to talk to you about something. Let’s step out onto the back porch where Mrs. Foye can see us.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll just stay here.” Hannah said. “Hold down the fort.”

  Ellery sighed. “Hannah … ”

  “Like you said, let her be angry,” Agatha said.

  She guided Ellery through the cozy house, past the dining room and kitchen where Mrs. Foye and Miles were setting the table for seven, and out to the porch.

  Agatha closed the door and immediately whispered, “I thought of a way to deal with the hellmouth situation.”

  “That’s good news. Why are we whispering about it out here?”

  “Well, for one thing, I’m not certain it’ll work, but I’m hopeful it may. Second, your Cougar friends may feel threatened.”

  “Why? What are you plotting?”

  “It’s just an idea. What if we got the cambions to try to seal it?”

  The cambions—half-demons. Sort of. “Claude, Charles, and John?”

  “And throw in Mark for good measure.”

  “But, they’re not technically angels.”

  Agatha made a waffling motion. “Mark still is, more or less. He’s just not amongst the host.”

  “Claude, Charles, and John would only be half-angel, and that’s splitting a pretty fine hair.”

  “In what way?”

  “Their father is a demon.”

  “A fallen angel turned demon. Regardless of his affiliation, he was created as an angel.”

  “This seems a lot like grasping at straws.”

  “Perhaps so, but maybe we could try and your Cougar will relax his grip on you.”

  “Hmm.” Ellery rubbed her chin and stared through the glass door at Mrs. Foye dusting flour off one of Miles’s sleeves. “Have you run this past them?”

  “Not yet, but I don’t imagine they’ll say no to trying.”

  There was a good chance it wouldn’t work. And if it didn’t work, Ellery had an excuse to stay a little longer. To decide if what she was feeling that Stockholm Syndrome she’d sworn she wasn’t susceptible to or if it was true that there really was nothing to go home to. It seemed as good a time as any to take stock of her life. She wasn’t exactly getting any younger.

  “Okay. I guess it’s worth a shot.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The house was too quiet.

  Mason set down his putty knife and pulled himself up from the bathroom doorway. Sometimes, the cougar part of him made him hyper-focus on tasks, and he’d been fixated on wood filler for what was probably the better part of fifteen minutes.

  There’d been childish cackling and feminine laughter, and then it stopped. No sounds, not even Ellery’s cat scratching up yet another one of his things.

  “Ellery?” He ran into the kitchen, finding the table cleared and Nick’s highchair empty.

  If she’d left, she wouldn’t have taken Nick. Would she?

  Mason grabbed his hair and pulled.

  Shit, maybe she would. He wasn’t exactly on top of things. She probably thought she could do better, and he didn’t exactly disagree.

  “Ell?” He tried the bedrooms, hoping maybe he’d been too out of it to see them walk past him.

  Nothing.

  “Fuck!” Clutching his phone, he hurried through the front door. He turned in a circle, scanning the ranch around him, reckoning her direction. “Ell, come on! Don’t do this.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  He spun toward the direction of her voice—toward the house—but saw nothing.

  “Look up,” she said.

  She was on the roof with Nick on her lap. No ladder. No nothing.

  “How’d you get up there? And what are you doing?”

  She pointed to the heavens. “Meteor shower. Agatha told me to look for it.”

  He let out a breath, and his body shook as the adrenaline in his system crashed. “Meteors?”

  “Watching the sky always seems to remind me of just how small we are in the universe.”

  Small? Small was what he felt at the moment. Not Alpha. Small and useless.

  He scraped his hair back and let out a long exhale. “Ell, you can’t … you can’t do that, okay? You can’t just leave and not tell me where you’re going.”

  She furrowed her brow. “I told you I was taking Nick outside.”

  “Did I respond?”

  “You made an hmm sound. I assumed you heard me.”

  “I didn’t. You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you heard.”

  “You have to make sure I’m looking at you. If I don’t talk to you, then I didn’t hear you.”

  Her nod came slowly, and he realized he may have been giving away too much. Telling her his weak spot. She was smart, and she’d exploit it when she had the chance. He was under no illusions that he’d convinced her yet to do otherwise.

  “How’d you get up there?” he asked, hoping to distract her from making any immediate plans.

  She got slowly to her feet with Nick in her arms, moved to the overhang, and stepped off before Mason could stop her.

  “Ell!”

  She didn’t fall so much as float toward the ground.

  He had his arms poised to grab her waist before she’d lowered herself half a story. “For fuck’s sake, woman, you’re going to cause me to have an early heart attack. Or is that the plan? Kill me the same way my dad died?” He squeezed her tight, and Nick between the two of them.

  She laughed. “Can’t breathe.”

  “Don’t care. Is this your new technique to defeat me? Scare the shit out of me repeatedly until I just keel over dead?”

  “I think you’re made of sterner stuff than that, Cougar.”

  Mason let go when Nick poked his nose. “Ow.”

  Kid needed his nails trimmed. Mason took him from her.

  “You do much of that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Float from rooftops.”

  “Oh. No.” She folded herself onto the cast iron bench next to the front door.

  Mason joined her.

  “I didn’t know it was possible until a year ago. My sister figured it out first and then she taught me how. She’s much better at it than I am. She has more time to practice, though. I only work on it every so often when I happen to be at her house. When you live in a condo in a neighborhood with hundreds of people, you can’t exactly go leaping from rooftops.”

  “How far can your sister float, er, fly?”

  She grinned and looked out toward the dirt road. There were headlights on it. It was too soon for Sean and Hank to be returning, but ranch hands tended to come and go all hours of the day and night.

  “It’s not flying so much as moving air in around us and beneath us, but I’m sure there are witches who move in different ways. Gai
l can travel about a mile by air without getting tired. She doesn’t do it much because she can only fly as fast as she can run. It’s still easier to drive most of the time.”

  “Still, that’d be handy for some things. Being able to get into the air during a fight, for one thing.”

  “Yeah, I always forget I can do it when it matters. The safer bet is probably me staying on the ground. I’m not very agile in the air yet. You’d think it’d be easy, but you really have to pay a lot of attention to what your body is doing and keep making adjustments. Some become subconscious and automatic, but most aren’t for me yet.” She rubbed her eyes and the ring she wore on her right hand glinted in the near dark.

  He took her hand into his, small and so fucking soft, and brought the ring up to his gaze. Ornate gold band. Large, oval red stone that had flowers carved into it. It was pretty and unusual. Interesting. Kind of like Ellery.

  He dropped a kiss on the back of her hand, instinct, not planned flirtation, but he wouldn’t apologize for doing it. He liked it.

  She didn’t immediately pull it away, but she did take it back. She folded her hands onto her lap and stared at her thighs.

  “I won’t hurt you.” He sounded so damned pitiful, but he didn’t have any other words. He took the hand back, holding it gingerly in his, and this time, she let him keep it. “The ring looks old.”

  “It is, though I don’t know exactly how old. It was a gift from Agatha. The stone is called cinnabar. She’s always giving me and Gail her things. I guess she’s making up for lost time.”

  “In what way?”

  “I … ”

  He could feel her tension in the way her fingers curved into a loose fist, but he wouldn’t let go of them. The cat part of him sensed that something was wrong—that he was tiptoeing around some sort of emotional land mine. Curious cat though he was, he didn’t want to detonate it until he knew for sure she was far from the blast zone. He wanted to comfort her, calm her. Make her purr for him. Right at that moment, though, he’d settle for seeing her smile.

  He nudged her with his elbow. “I’m always making up for lost time, too. Every time I get Nick, I wonder if he’s forgotten what I look like. I’m not convinced he can tell me and my brothers apart.”

  She groaned, but there went that smile. It was the twitchy kind. He could tell she didn’t want to give it to him, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “You’re easy enough to tell apart,” she said. “I imagine it’d be easy even for a ten-month-old. For one thing, your hair isn’t as bright as your brothers’.”

  “So, you’re admitting I’m not really a ginger.”

  “I didn’t say that. How did a bunch of redheaded Were-cougars end up in the middle of the desert, anyway? Did you have an ancestor get bitten or something?”

  “No, our paternal line is pure Cougar going back to our race’s inception. People native to Central America who later moved into the Southwest. Conquistadors came along and brought fresh blood, and bada bing, bada boom. White plus brown equals tan. Keep adding white and eventually you’ll get redheaded Foyes. I imagine something similar had to have happened to have gotten an Ellery from an Agatha.” He nudged her shoulder with his own.

  She nudged back. “Yeah. Folks don’t really question Gail and me when we introduce Agatha as a relative. Everyone is mixed up where I’m from.”

  “She’s interesting.”

  “Who, Agatha? Yeah, I guess interesting is one way of putting it.”

  “I can’t say I’ve ever encountered a god or goddess before, except in dreams. They don’t seem to make themselves particularly approachable.”

  “I think they get lonely like anyone else. It must be hard for them to stand back and not respond when people they know and care about are hurting.”

  “Most don’t care about anyone except themselves.” He’d thought that was the case with La Bella Dama, but now he wasn’t so sure. She was so inscrutable, his goddess. He could never tell if he was being tested or rewarded. Maybe because it was both at once—a gift wrapped in a challenge.

  “I imagine the ones who have children with human lovers care a little more on average.” She cringed. “Well. Most of them. I’m sure there are more than enough of them who didn’t want the children, and merely tolerated them.”

  “I think that about Jill sometimes.” He’d said it so softly, he didn’t realize immediately that he’d even said it aloud. He didn’t regret it, though. She would have found out eventually, anyway.

  “What do you mean?”

  He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said it. It’s not exactly true. I know she loves Nick. I just don’t think she makes for a very reliable parent. A lot of the time, I don’t think I make for one, either.” Mason set Nick’s feet on the ground.

  Nick gripped the bench side and bounced on his flat feet, watching Mason for reassurance.

  “Do your thing, kiddo.”

  “He seems happy enough, in spite of everything,” she said.

  “Is that enough, though? Being happy?”

  She didn’t say anything, just watched Nick creep around the bench, gripping their pants as he passed on wobbly legs.

  Mason nudged her. “Answer me.”

  “I don’t know if it’s enough, but it goes a long way. I had an okay childhood, but looking back, I don’t know if I’d call it happy. My parents were strict. Conservative, as far as witches go. Gail and I didn’t have a whole lot of latitude. We didn’t figure out how to get into trouble—real trouble—until we were already adults. By then, we had responsibilities. Daddy got sick, and someone had to pay for it. Ended up being Gail and me.”

  “He’s okay now? Your dad, I mean.”

  She nodded and turned her ring around. “He’s okay. Gentler than he was before he got sick, but mostly thinks and does what my mother and grandmother tell him. I’ll never know if he has actual opinions about how Gail and I use witchcraft that haven’t been planted into his head by my mother. All I know now is that he’s at least verbally disapproving of us. Gail doesn’t care, or at least, she doesn’t let it affect her if it does.”

  “And you? Do you care?”

  “I’m … not at the point where I haven’t stopped caring yet. In spite of everything, I still want to be accepted. I’m used to fitting in, and now there’s a very important place in my life where I don’t.”

  He turned her hand over and righted the ring. “Maybe you were never meant to fit in.” He chuckled. “Mom says that’s why so many Cougar brides stick around. I guess we have a knack for picking up mates who don’t want to go home.”

  He hoped she didn’t want to go home. Hated himself for thinking it—for wanting to take her away from her family. But, if they didn’t want her—wouldn’t treat her as she deserved and value all the things she had to contribute, he’d keep her. He’d happily keep her for Nick … and maybe there’d be something for him, too.

  She leaned her forearms onto her thighs and let Nick grab her hands.

  “Dad didn’t have very far to go to snatch Mom. The Foyes lived on a neighboring property that got consolidated into this one when Mom inherited the ranch. Mom didn’t want to go home,” he said. “She’d always felt like she was a burden. Her parents had eight kids. She was second-oldest. A grown mouth to feed. With my dad, she felt needed. When she inherited the ranch, it was pretty rundown by then and no one else could afford it. She and my dad managed to keep it by cutting way back, but things were always tough. He continued to work wood when he wasn’t helping on the ranch, and that kept most of the accounts out of the red. Things got bad, though, in the few years before he died. Folks stopped buying custom furniture during the recession.”

  “And you didn’t have a buffer.”

  “Exactly. We’re trying to make sure that never happens again. He died five years ago. We’re just now getting to a place where we felt comfortable enough to spend money.”

  “Feather your nests.”

  He turned his hands over in concession. “Su
ch that they are.”

  “Waiting is smart sometimes.” The words were plain, but somehow enigmatic. As if she wanted to say something more but didn’t know what, or else she couldn’t speak in the words she really wanted to use.

  He liked that she spoke plainly. It made her change in emotions easier to intuit, and at that moment, she was low.

  “Hey.” He took one of her hands from Nick and squeezed it. “I think there’s chocolate ice cream in the freezer.”

  She smiled, but it was a small one. Unenthusiastic.

  “Not a chocolate ice cream fan?”

  “I’m more of a pie person.”

  “I don’t have any pie. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. It’s too late, anyway. Nick needs to go to bed, and if I eat after nine, I tend to have nightmares about 50 percent of the time.”

  “What do witches have nightmares about?”

  She flinched as if by him asking, she’d found herself right in the middle of one.

  He didn’t push.

  He wanted to know, though, so he could fix whatever it was, but he hadn’t earned that trust yet. He wanted her to be able to tell him anything—to want to tell him everything—but he’d only just begun peeling back her layers. If he peeled too much or too quickly, she’d retreat.

  He didn’t want that. An alpha needed his mate to trust him implicitly. The others would look to her—expect her to be heart and soul of the group they way his mother had once been. He couldn’t get her there with force or even wheedling. She had to come on her own, just like he couldn’t make her stay when it was time to choose.

  He could only hope he’d done a good enough job convincing her that there was more for her with him than at the place she thought was home.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As Ellery lay awake in the dark, listening to the hiss of Nick’s humidifier over the monitor, Mason’s words played over and over again in her mind. Mates who didn’t want to go home.

  She didn’t quite know if want was the right word, but the statement weighed heavily on her all the same. It was something she’d chewed and chewed and still couldn’t digest. Something wasn’t clicking. Some repressed memory that would be the missing puzzle piece, but she couldn’t remember the context or the time period during which she’d gleaned it.