Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (29 page)

Suddenly, a cat hung off his tongue by its claws, tearing and stretching. Ten pounds or so of claws and fury, and Jack couldn’t do a thing about it.

And he wasn’t sure he would if he could. Maybe put his hands under the cat’s butt so his tongue didn’t get torn out by the roots, but that was the extent of it. He’d need his tongue to be able to explain—if he ever figured out what had happened—but he figured he deserved the pain.

Cara let out a tight, choked laugh, the kind that happened because it seemed marginally better than crying. “Gotta remember that one, Gramps.”

“Nice work with the fire hose, Cara. Very Warner Brothers, but effective. What are we going to do with this asshole? In the old days, we’d cut his dick off and leave him for the crows, but you and Rafe are cops, and I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”

“Enough.”

Elissa’s voice rang with authority. Her aura puffed up, filling the room with the green and musky smell of her magic. Elissa’s power usually felt friendly and sexy, but now it loomed, pressing on him, smothering him.

Figured a red witch would react appropriately—and he couldn’t deny that it was appropriate—to sexual assault.

She gestured in Jack’s direction, said a word in Gaelic.

He collapsed to his knees, gagging on blood and clutching at a frantic cat that wasn’t actually there.

“Lose the cat. He can’t talk, and we need answers.”

“You’re no fun,” Gramps muttered, but he obeyed. He didn’t, however, fix the lacerations on Jack’s tongue and chest.

Jack figured he didn’t deserve such courtesy.

He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, but dim memories were starting to swirl in his fogged brain. “The sorcerer….the one in the hat….René Chenier, he said his name was.” He spat blood and noted with only vague interest that it didn’t actually hit the floor in a red glob. An illusion, but a damn effective one. Even knowing that it was illusion didn’t make it stop hurting. “I remember his voice in my head. I met him before the fight. We talked. He tried…” He spat more illusory blood. “To get information from me and I from him. Somehow he got to me. I think he thought I was Rafe.”

Gramps scowled. “No sorcerer’s magic in your aura, boy. Good try. Besides, you’re dual. Everyone knows sorcerers’ magic is word-based, so you should have thrown off the effects the first time you shifted, if not before.”

All true. Jack hung his head. And yet…and yet something was going on. He knew he hadn’t been in his right mind just now and might not have been several times in the recent past.

“What if this Chenier wasn’t exactly human?” Cara said suddenly. “I touched him, remember?” She shuddered, and Jack shuddered with her, remembering all too vividly how she’d been forced to touch the sorcerer, kiss and caress him. “He’s alive, but whatever keeps him that way isn’t a human soul.”

Elissa spat out a Gaelic word that was definitely nasty. “And you didn’t say this before why?”

Cara laughed a little wildly. “Let’s see. First we were fighting for our lives. Then we were trying to fix Gramps’s hip enough we could move him. Then we were running like hell back to the village, and getting Gramps healed, and tucking Nella in because she was played out. And then we were dealing with Jack turning into psycho sexual-assault boy. Been a little busy. Besides…” She hung her head. “I figured if it was obvious enough for me to figure out, you’d all noticed it too.”

Elissa put her arm around Cara’s waist. “Everyone’s magic is different. We all pick up on different things. Also…” She shuddered. “You were the one unlucky enough to touch the sorcerer. He tried with me, but you can’t sell a salesman or can’t seduce a red witch with magic. Kind of a shame it didn’t work. Jude would have just eaten him, and it would be over except for Jude’s sick stomach.”

Jack worked his mouth a few times before he actually spoke. “But he can…sell a salesman, that is, not seduce a red witch. Trick a trickster. I tried to con him into revealing some information, but he got to me instead. I’m not making excuses for my behavior. He met me when I was frustrated that Cara and I keep fighting, and he found a way to use my feelings against me, to twist them. I remember now that he tried, but I thought I’d blocked him. Guess he got sneaky somehow.”

Jack turned to Cara. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Cara, I’m sorry. I know that’s inadequate, but I don’t know how else to put it. What happened just now was my responsibility. I wasn’t strong enough to keep him out of my head, and he managed to manipulate the rough, possessive part of me. But, damn it, you know I don’t want to harm you. You’re my mate, and I love you, even if there are a million reasons you may never accept that.”

He shrugged, realizing how terribly inadequate his words were, how Cara’s expression grew more remote the longer he talked, as if she couldn’t even be bothered anymore to be angry with him, just wanted him gone. “I know I’ve fucked things up.” Anger surged, and the cougarside snarled with rage—not at Cara, but at the sorcerer and at Jack’s own foolishness. “But damn it, that wasn’t me just now. You were saying no, and I didn’t stop, and I’ve never done that in my life. The things I was thinking…they weren’t me. I can be a jerk sometimes and think with my dick instead of my brain. But I’d never force a woman. And I love you. So why…”

He stopped abruptly, looking at the faces staring at him. Condemning him. He couldn’t blame them for condemning him, but they knew him. Sam Many-Winters had seen him grow up, had been magically linked to him for years. Elissa didn’t know him that well, but she’d had no reason to distrust him until now. And Cara…Cara was his mate. Shouldn’t she know his heart?

Then again, why should they understand him when at the moment he didn’t understand himself?

Chapter Thirty-Five

“He’s your mate, whether you’re ready to admit it or not.”

“Lynx,” Cara hissed under her breath, “drop it.”

“Not that humans have mates, exactly, but he’s yours and you’re his. Not to mention sharing a spirit guide. Which you do, even though Coyote and Cougar teamed up to convince you otherwise so you didn’t just run off in a panic.”

“Don’t want to talk about this. Not now. Not ever.”

“You can see into his heart, child.
So do it. End this drama. Either he’s telling the truth and dark magic has interfered with him, or he’s gone rabid. Either is dangerous, but the first we can fix. We can fix the other as well, but it gets messy.”

Cara allowed two words to sink in,
dangerous
and
fix
. Jack wasn’t a danger simply to her right now. He was potentially a danger to the whole town, and certainly to himself. He needed to be stopped. To be cured, if possible.

And her spirit guide said she—not Gramps or Elissa, who knew a lot more than she did about magic—could help.

The rest, the stuff about mates, the morass of emotions she didn’t want to touch with someone else’s ten-foot pole, were details.

This was protecting the public, guarding the innocent. It was what Cara Mackenzie did and what Cara Many-Winters wanted to do.

She made herself look at Jack, really look at him, with the magic of a shaman. He looked as normal as an insanely gorgeous man with a plaid puma-shaped aura ever did. But something didn’t feel or maybe smell right.

“Open your heart as well as your eyes,”
Lynx said. “
Touch him.”

That was the last thing Cara wanted to do. What if it set Jack off again?

But so far, Lynx hadn’t steered her wrong. Her spirit guide had been supercilious, cryptic and annoying, often all at once, but when things got dangerous, she’d had Cara’s best interests at heart. And unless this sorcerer was powerful enough to suborn a spirit guide, Cara doubted Lynx would steer her wrong now.

“Lynx says I can see the truth if I touch you, Jack. I’m going to do it. It’ll be easier if you cooperate.” Best cop voice. You couldn’t tell she wanted to cry.

Jack bowed his head, a clear gesture of submission. His thoughts beat against her but couldn’t get in.

She pulled down her carefully constructed shields. Mentally stripped off that imaginary uniform, removed the imaginary gun, removed the real one for good measure and tossed it back onto the table where it had been waiting when they returned. Gramps’ house was shielded. She had nothing to fear from the outside.

Only from what was inside Jack—and for that matter, inside her.

She placed her hand over his heart. It didn’t burn the way it had when she’d communicated with Phil’s ghost, but she was aware of Jack’s energy pulsing around her, twining with hers. It felt far better than it should have. Sensual. Erotic, even.

He
felt
like Jack, but Jack in a jumble, Jack in a jam, Jack guilty over the way he’d treated her and desperate to make it right somehow because he loved her. Jack frightened not of the outside forces they faced, but of himself and the darkness he believed the sorcerer had awakened in him. He believed what he’d just told them, believed the sorcerer had influenced him somehow. Yet she couldn’t find any of the telltale fuchsia-and-black traces she’d learned to recognize.

Just a patch of blankness.

No, not blankness. Something was hidden, something she couldn’t see or touch with her magic. Something she could poke around but not feel directly. It didn’t seem like any magic she’d ever encountered, less evil than bizarre, alien.

“Elissa,” she said, “there’s something in him that doesn’t belong, but it’s not sorcery, and I don’t know what the hell it is. Maybe you will.” She pulled her hand away from Jack and fought an urge to wash it.

Her eyebrows screwed with concentration, Elissa placed her hand where Cara’s had been. Her aura expanded to surround Jack as well as herself. It pulsed green and red, faintly streaked with the blue that marked psychic powers.

The room grew silent.

The silence took on weight and form. Cara had to force herself to breathe. It seemed to go on for a very long time, but in reality it was probably less than a minute before Elissa let out a bloodcurdling shriek and pulled her hand away.

“What is it?” Cara ran to the other woman but hesitated, afraid to touch her as instinct prompted.

“Unseelie fae,” Elissa said through clenched teeth. “There’s a taint of unseelie fae on him. Thank the Powers it was just a brush, already fading on its own thanks to Jack’s damned, blessed dual stubbornness, and thanks to fae not understanding mortals too well. I suspect the spell wasn’t as strong as it might have been. Fae can’t comprehend how a mortal can be angry with someone and, at the same time, love them and be loyal to them.”

“Which means?” Cara and Jack asked simultaneously.

“The good news is that Jack really
isn’t
responsible for attacking you. He was under some kind of fae compulsion that was supposed to suborn him to the sorcerer’s purposes and apparently harm Cara in the process. Basically, we were set up by something very big and scary that we had no reason to expect to be here. Fae magic can twist the entire fabric of reality. Twisting a mortal’s thoughts is nothing to a powerful fae, and if Jack didn’t know what he was dealing with—and there’s no reason he would, because he was expecting a human sorcerer—he’d have no way to guard himself.”

Jack raised one eyebrow. “If that’s what qualifies as good news, I’m not looking forward to the bad news.”

“The bad news is we have to deal with a fae as well as sorcerers and a bunch of were-assholes. Oh, and the way the spell was set, I think the fae thought Jack was Rafe and Cara was me, which adds another level of terrifying.”

“Are fae really that powerful?” Sam said.

“Like manitou, mortals thought of them as divine beings because they were so mighty.”

Sam shrugged. “I’d rather hear they were like wussy Disney fairies, but at least we know. And we have a manitou on our side. Any idea why it’s in Canada? The fae are Old World beings.”

“They’re otherworldly beings,” Elissa corrected. “They don’t belong on this plane at all, but some of them like to visit. For the seelie fae, the neutral to good ones, it’s like a resort. They’re virtually immortal and easily bored, so they’re always looking for new things to see and do.”

“But even the good ones can be trouble. Altering reality because they don’t understand it might be a problem, stuff like that,” Cara said. “Official police policy is that if there’s the slightest suspicion of fae involvement in anything, even a traffic violation, you refer it up to the RCMP Paranormal Division without investigating it any further. The unofficial policy is you do that and then take a long leave, because you’re probably seeing dancing elephants in corners. Not that it happens much, but that they even have that policy…” She shuddered. “And from what I understand, we mostly run into seelie fae.”

“I would guess the unseelie are the bad ones, and we’re dealing with one of those?” Gramps asked. Elissa nodded.

“How do they see this world?”

“Like a buffet.”

Gramps shook his head. “Damn, girl, I was hoping you wouldn’t say that. But I sort of knew you would.”

“Another fucking unseelie working with another fucking sorcerer.” Cara jumped at the harshness and layers of pain in Elissa’s voice. “And I bet this one’s been around a long, long time.”

The door blew open. “An embarrassingly long time,” Grand-mère’s voice said on the breeze. “At least the sorcerer has.”