Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (18 page)

“Yes, and because he was able to use a real bond, it worked far too well. I’m still not sure why it worked on you as well as it did, since you didn’t know Ben. Sorcery works in odd ways, and if Jack’s teaching you, maybe you got an echo that way.”

“Must be that,” Cara said quickly.

“Powers, though, there’s a powerful sorcerer involved here, and I don’t think it was necessarily the guy who set off the spell. I saw Jocelyn and even though I can still feel her, I believed. I’m pretty sure the guys saw me. Don’t know who Jack saw, but he looked shaken too.”

“Ben.” Jack blatantly lied. “Only they’d tried that once before, so it didn’t work.”

“It was designed to break us,” Elissa continued. “Luckily, Jack’s too much of a trickster himself to be fooled, and thank the Powers for that.”

That and his subconscious made us both see someone who was actually here…but I’m so not getting into that.

“No point in standing here in the cold,” Jack said. “Let’s get back to the village and warm up.” He glanced at the two humans as he said it. Cara felt a rush of gratitude. He probably wasn’t cold, though he
was
probably looking forward to getting back to a peaceful, shielded place, but he obviously guessed that she was.

“Good idea,” Jude agreed, pulling Elissa and Rafe close. “I want to brush my teeth. Skinwalkers taste disgusting.”

One foot in front of the other. That was how she got back to the village. Walking took all of Cara’s concentration, and she was grateful for that.

“Warm,” she said, not realizing until Jude and Jack smiled that she’d spoken out loud.

“Come on,” Jack said, putting an arm around her waist as if she were a child. “Let’s get you home to your woodstove.”

“Hope Gramps checked it.”

“If your place is too cold, look around for signs of life. Someone’s bound to be awake. It’s nearly dawn.”

“It’s dawn?” Damn, no wonder she was tired. She was still enough of a city girl that she found it hard to keep track of time without a watch or a phone, but people here went by “dawn” and “dark” and “I’m hungry; let’s eat” rather than a number on a clock.

“Yeah, and see? Winter ends, even here,” Jack said. “Look at the sky.” The stars were fading, and the eastern sky was paler. It looked as though there might be a proper day instead of the minor respite in darkness that passed for winter daytime in the far north.

“It’s still a long way to spring,” she said. Her half-frozen feet and icy hands would remind her of that if nothing else did. Still, the light at the horizon meant something. Meant hope, although she couldn’t manage to find any for herself.

“Until warm weather and grass and stuff, yeah, but now that the Equinox is past, we’re starting to see actual sunlight again. We’ll have leaves and birds and flowers sooner than we can imagine. Only first we’ll have mud, a lot of mud.”

She hesitated with her hand on the door. She saw smoke rising from her chimney, and the warmth called to her, but she couldn’t let the conversation go.

That would mean being alone with her thoughts, and she couldn’t bear that yet. “Others won’t see spring because of this night’s work.” God, where did that bleak thought come from?

“I know, and it sucks. But they seemed hell-bent on dying if they couldn’t be killing.” Jack shuddered. “It’s like they wanted to die… Oh shit.” He looked around as if he expected to see enemies in the shadows. “Can I come in, Cara? There’s more to tonight that we need to figure out, and I don’t know what might have ears and eyes, even here. And you’re shivering.”

She thought about saying no. She wasn’t quite ready to face that temptation, and after a night when she knew sorcerers had been toying with her mind, she couldn’t trust herself to know whether her thoughts and fears, the shattered, bloody images of the night’s battle and what she felt for Jack were real or not. Then she thought about being alone, and she felt a cold all the woodstoves in the world couldn’t thaw.

“Come on in,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jack didn’t pick up his interrupted train of thought until he was sitting at her little table, a steaming mug of coffee warming his hands. “So they’d hoped to kill us, but when they couldn’t, they reverted to Plan B, which seemed to be to cause as much death as they could, and it didn’t matter much who was dying. The leader is harnessing power for something big.”

“And why were we targeted? I get trying to lure someone into bringing him Jocelyn—we know he wants the baby—but it seems risky to take us all on at once.”

“Because killing the lot of us would not only weaken the village but be a real bonus for a sorcerer doing blood-magic. Rafe and I are rarities. Neither of us has extra-special mojo, but dual shamans are almost unheard of. And Jude has an incredible amount of life force.”

She nodded, seeing what he meant. “Elissa’s super-powerful. I knew a few witches in Toronto, and she makes them look like normies. But why Gramps? And especially, why me?”

“Trickster’s tits, do you have any idea how powerful your grandfather is?”

“He said he’s almost stopped doing magic, that Coyote deserted him when Grammy died.”

Jack shook his head. “Worse than I thought. I knew Sam had been lying low since your grandmother passed, but if he says he can’t do the work anymore, he’s lying to himself. That’s a deadly thing for a shaman. Coyote’s still with him. I can see him sometimes, and I bet you could if you squinted right.”

Gramps? She’d never thought of him as being extremely powerful. She’d seen him drumming and playing tricks, making the world around them seem brighter, but in her childhood memories, Gramps was mostly this goofy, sweet old guy who took nothing seriously except his family and Saturday morning cartoons.

Which he watched on a TV given to him by Coyote, a TV that didn’t plug into anything.

Yeah, there was more to Gramps than met the eye.

Then she stared at Jack. “But again, why me? I don’t suppose you’re about to tell me I’m something powerful and unique, because I’ll know you’re lying. I have the makings of a half-decent shaman, but I’m not there yet.”

“Honestly, I have no idea. You’re right about your power level, and it’s good that you accept it, but that does make me wonder why you’re part of this mess. Maybe they have a hook in you because they killed Phil, or because you’re connected to Sam and to me, and snagging one more shaman wouldn’t hurt their plans.”

She shrugged. “Might be as simple as I haven’t gotten the hang of shielding yet so I’m getting sucked in without them even trying.”

He sighed and stretched his hand across the table and brushed hers.

It was a friendly gesture, a little contact after a terrible night, but the touch heated her, and she clenched deep inside.

She yearned to lean across the table and kiss him, feel the heat of his mouth against hers, his tongue sliding between her lips. To move across the table, the hell with the coffee, to crawl into his lap and wrap around him, then take it from there. But after the way sorcerers had been playing hockey in her head earlier, she didn’t know whether to trust the sudden rush of lust.

She gave his hand a quick squeeze, then pulled away and distracted herself with the coffee. She was too aware of that hand, of the life energy and magic flowing through it, calling to the energy and magic in her own body. She kept talking, trying to make herself think of anything except her raw need. “So I’m not super-powered. That’s good. I think my mom was, and I saw how that ended.”

He nodded. “The more powerful you are, the closer you are to Trickster, and the harder it is to operate in consensual reality. Bad when you’re practicing, worse if you don’t.”

A sudden fear gripped her. “Is Gramps in danger?”

Jack’s silence lasted long enough that Cara knew the answer before he spoke. “Yes. If he hasn’t been doing magic since your grandmother passed on, I’m surprised he’s still as sane as he is.”

“Shit. We have to warn him…”

“He knows, Cara. He’s the one who taught me that. I’d just started as his student at the time your mom died. We were working together, connected, when she pulled the trigger.” She saw the shudder rack his body with the breath he took before he spoke. “That was the last lesson he beat into my head before handing me over to Marla Whitehorse.”

“Can’t we… I mean, shamans are supposed to help people. Can’t we do something to help him not want to destroy himself?”

“We can try, but Sam’s a tough case. He’s a shaman of great wisdom and power who’s chosen to turn down Trickster’s gifts. He hasn’t made this choice lightly. His wife and their only child and many of his friends are in the Otherworld. Maybe he’s just had enough.”

Gramps wanted to die.

She supposed that would be his right, if it meant quietly fading away. In his case, though, it wouldn’t be quiet.

Insanity in someone with his powers would not just be tragic but dangerous.

And the power she’d been given, the blasted power that had torn her from her old life, the power she kept waiting to find a reason not to curse, seemed to be useless.

Again.

“We can’t just let Gramps die. We have to do something.” Phil had died because she hadn’t known he was in danger. But she was here for her grandfather.

It had to work. If he died—if she lost him too because she couldn’t reach him with love or magic—it would break her. And maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Maybe then she’d stop accidentally harming people.

The cabin turned dark. Frustrated tears burned in her throat and welled up behind her eyes. She fought them back, dug her fingers into her palms, hoping the distraction would bring her back to control.

Jack saw the convulsive gesture, but more than that, his own palms stung as if he was the one clenching his fists so hard he was threatening to break skin.

“Help her. Touch her,”
his cougar indicated.

Jack questioned that prompting. The cougarside liked touch, communicated with touch, but Cara might just smack him. As he hesitated, the cougarside bombarded him with images: a male cougar licking the wounds of a battered female, then standing guard as she sank into a healing sleep. Two cougars, male and female, supporting a frail old male. Two cougars, male and female, walking side by side.

“Cara’s not a cougar, stupid!”
he reminded his furry half.

“You see things your way. I see things my way. We’re both right.”

On the other hand, she needed all the help she could get, and so did Sam. Maybe the cougarside didn’t know a better way to get the point across.

He leaned closer and flehmened, letting himself get a good whiff of Cara’s scent. Her unique, attractive, but definitely human scent.

Some underlying note called to both sides of his nature.

The cougarside purred and sent images of protecting and mating.

The wordy side tried, for about half a second, to analyze that faint, tantalizingly familiar, scent. Almost feline. Lynx?

Cara began to shake, subtly enough that a human might not have noticed.

Jack’s wordy and cougar agreed that the time for thinking was done. Jack closed his hands over Cara’s, pried the tight fists open.

Brought her hands to his lips and kissed the angry half-moons she’d marked into her palms, gently and quickly, like a father kissing his daughter’s boo-boo better.

He braced for protest but none came, though her mouth opened once, then closed, without her saying a word.

A few tears escaped her rigid control.

His cougarside prompted, and he listened. He leaned across the table and licked them away, tasting her salt, taking in her pain.

Lord love the Lady, what a weight of guilt she carried—not for just Phil and the wolf girl, not just for the people she’d been unable to save in the line of duty and the loups-garous and skinwalkers she’d killed tonight, but for her mother and father as well. As if a little girl could have prevented a lost shaman from ending her torment. As if a daughter, even a grown one, could save an alcoholic from his demons.

He let go of one hand so she could slap or punch him if she needed the release of violence. She pulled her hand back, and he braced for a blow.

Instead, Cara placed her hand gently but firmly on his face and moved him so their lips met. “Just one kiss,” she breathed into his mouth.

His cougar snarled approval.

Her lips tantalized his. They were soft, slightly parted, like a teenage girl who was just learning the magic of kissing.

He felt that kiss shudder all the way through his body, though—that kiss or an echo of the devouring ones they’d shared the night they’d made love. Fucked. Whatever you called it when you were magically controlled to do something you wanted to do anyway.

The hand he hadn’t released gripped his hard, as if she wanted more, craved more, but couldn’t ask for it.

Powers knew he wanted more. That little taste was enough to jolt his cock to life, make his cougar prowl restlessly, seeking his mate.

No, his cougar thought he’d found his mate, in the woman who was now pulling away from him, shaking like they’d done something far edgier than share a soft, almost innocent kiss.