The Cougar's Bargain (5 page)

“I'm gonna go drive this stuff down to the staff,” Glenda said and pointed to Hannah. “Don't go anywhere until I get back.”

“I'll watch the pot.”

“I'm not worried about the pot. Need to talk to you.”

Oh God. Why?
Hannah gave her braid another yank and took the seat across from Lola and then watched Glenda pull up the cooler's handle and roll the big box to the back door.

When the screen door slammed shut behind Glenda, Lola turned her dark, critical gaze to Hannah. “How are your dreams lately, Avenger?”

Slumping lower in her seat, Hannah rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms.

The dreams.

They were awful things. Hannah had been plagued by terrifying dreams since around the time she had that encounter with the bears. As a child, the dreams had played on how helpless she'd felt and how there'd been no one there to look after her. Left to fester, they'd turned into angrier things that didn't make sense. Nothing in them was familiar, and they were always so violent. On most days she woke up agitated and unsuitable for human company, but she had to go to work, anyway. Had to be around people and pretend to be functional. Lately, the dreams had changed yet again. They were still dark and angry, but now she could discern one thing—that they were about the Cougars. Those were what she'd told Lola about. The goddess hadn't seemed surprised. She knew all about them.

“Make them stop,” Hannah whispered.

“It is not me. Women with your job have always had the dreams.”

“I'm a nurse, not anyone's champion.”
Don't get too stuck on yourself,
her father might have said.

“You are the avenger, though, because you're Sean's mate.”

“For the moment.”

“You will still be the glaring's avenger, regardless of who is in your bed. You're a part of the glaring. Do you wish to separate from it?”

Hannah flinched and let her hands fall to her lap. Having someone in her bed wasn't a problem she worried much about, but being so near Lola was like being called to the principal's office to be made accountable for some transgression Hannah hadn't committed or even knew anything about. And try as the goddess might to keep her power tidily pulled in close to her body, being so near her made Hannah's head hurt as if she'd been out in sun for too long without water or a hat.

“No. I don't want to leave the glaring.” She had nowhere else to go, and certainly wasn't going to ask to have another glaring accept her. She'd prefer to stay with the devils she knew. And besides, her friends were on the ranch, and they loved her … in spite of how she was, even if they didn't know why she was that way.

It was less embarrassing for her to have them think she was difficult and inflexible simply because she was a Virgo.

“You know, I chose you for Sean because of what you are capable of.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“I don't know your future, but I know your past.” Lola pushed her reading glasses up her nose and entwined her bony fingers atop the notepad in front of her. Hannah recognized the lined, pink paper. It was the same pad Lola used at every glaring meeting.

It must be Saturday.
Hannah had been having such a hard time keeping up with the days of the week. Her days blurred for lack of things to do. There was only so much time she could spend tracking the Sheehans without having new leads.

“I know everything there is to know about you,” Lola said softly. “I know more about you than you do.”

Hannah pulled her gaze up to the goddess and tried to meet that far-too-wise stare, but she couldn't. She settled on staring at Lola's nose.

“I could ask you what you're so afraid of, but I already know. I'm not so cruel that I would tease the words out of you just to hear you say them. I get no satisfaction from making Cougars lay themselves bare and confront their weaknesses.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to accept what is best for you.”

“In your opinion, you mean. And you mean Sean, and we've already discussed this. I'm finding him someone else.”

Lola rolled her eyes. “When's the last time you fought for anything?”

“I feel like I'm fighting all the fucking time.”

“And are you winning? And when you do win, how do those victories feel? Do you feel energized, or do you feel empty?”

Hannah stared at the goddess and twirled her braid some more. Her brothers always told her she looked like a bimbo when she did it, but she'd always found it comforting. Perhaps it had become something of a tic in twenty or so years, but she imagined there were worse ones to have. The only cure for it, probably, would be cutting her hair. “I can't answer that.”

“I don't really expect you to.”

“What
do
you expect me to do? You send me those dreams, and I—”

“No, no, no. I don't send you the dreams. You have the dreams because of what you are. You're the righter of wrongs. The only thing I did was send my Cougar to find you. I didn't make you what you are. There are others beside me, you know. Gods and goddesses who don't usually concern themselves with my Cougars, but who do make it their business to intercede in my affairs when it suits them.”

“And who do you think could possibly be sending me violent nightmares inciting me to hurt people?”

“Does it matter?”

“So you
do
know.”

“Yes. Very rarely do the whims of my brother and my own intersect. As you know,
avenger
is not a role that is often filled. It was because of my brother's magic—his interference—that the role came into being. It was necessary because of something else he made.”

“What are you talking about? I read the book of your lore. There's nothing in it about your brother. What did he make?”

“There wouldn't be any information about him there, or any of my siblings.” Lola drew circles around the text on her notepad. “That was intentional on my part. I did not wish for you to seek any of them out or for you to give them any reason to pay attention to you. Gods and goddesses often treat each other's followers as if they were toys.”

“Is that what your brother is doing to me? Making me some kind of toy?”

“I doubt he sees it that way.”

“Tell me what it is that he made that would require there being an avenger in the first place.”

“I have my Cougars. He has his shifters as well, but they are less able to regulate themselves. It is harder for them to be human, I suppose, and sometimes they do inhuman things. He could not bear to destroy them, and I could not interfere because there are very old rules amongst the gods preventing it. My brother and I came to a compromise. The avenger is a balancer, along with her numerous other jobs within the glaring. She's the one who corrects any outside threat from my brother's shifters. Not everyone has the right mix of passion and restraint. You're the first one in fifty years. Perhaps he thought it was time to clean up his mess, and I should have known his shifters were nearby when I realized what you were.”

“And this balancing is supposed to be
my
job? Why me, and not Belle or some other woman in the glaring?” Hannah asked.

Belle Foye seemed like a natural choice. As sister of Sean, Mason, and Hank, she was an insider. She was brave and smart and had a good heart. Hannah was just an angry newcomer who did everything she could to stay at arm's-length from the action.

“I believe that is for you to learn on your own.”

“You've got to give me a little more than that. You can't just—”

When the door behind her creaked open, Hannah held her breath until she was certain the newcomer didn't have a Cougar's energy. She wasn't ready to deal with Sean again, arguing with Hank was going to leave her impotently angry, and Mason and his big energy always managed to make her feel insignificant without even trying.

Cinnamon rolls, green tea, and Foye.
That scent belonged to Miles.

Miles wrapped her arms around Hannah's neck and gave her a squeeze. “You did it. Have I told you lately how wonderful you are?”

Hannah wanted to believe that. Miles always knew the right thing to say, but Hannah knew what a big pain in the ass she was. “Now what?”

“I don't know the answer to that, but you've made a lot of people happy. The Foyes need Sean as much as Ellery and I need you.”

“You two have been doing okay without me.” They didn't need her. They had the guys now, and inscrutable as they were, Mason and Hank were a hell of a lot easier to make sense of than Hannah.

“Don't do that. You know it's not true.”

“Okay.” Hannah didn't have the energy to argue. She'd always been the most argumentative one the group—the most defensive. Lately, she'd come to realize it was probably because she had the lowest self-esteem. Her perceptions about how people felt about her were probably skewed, but she could only go by what she knew.

Change took some doing.

“It's going to rain, I believe,” Lola said. “That will probably move the glaring meeting indoors. Before that happens, I want to implore you to go on a mission for me.”

“Who?” Hannah asked.

“You.” Miles gave her another squeeze. “I'm the one who let her know you'd reemerged from the basement. She came right over. Mason thought it'd be a good idea to give you something bigger to do.”

“I already have something to do. I need to track down Ralphie and—”

“
Pah
. That can wait, or someone else can do that. I need you to do this.” Lola flipped through the pages of her notepad, and stopped at one near the middle. She ripped it out carefully and pushed it across the table.

Hannah turned it in the right direction to read the address neatly printed on it. “What is this place supposed to be?”

“Of Mason's many problems, the most pressing are what?”

“Um …” Hannah furrowed her brow and mentally ordered all the loose ends her alpha was constantly trying to tie off. “Closing the hellmouth.”

There was a hole to hell on the Double B ranch. The Foyes had been chasing demons back into it since it'd opened a year ago.

“Scratch that one,” Miles said. “Ellery's got that under control. She and her in-laws might get it closed off in the next couple of weeks.”

Thank the lord, we can all get some rest.
“Okay, then number two would be tracking down the Sheehans.” Obviously, Hannah had a vested interested in doing that herself. She couldn't take out her revenge on Ralphie—after all, he was still a minor—but she sure as shit could make his big brother hurt.

“I already told you to drop that one,” Lola said.

For now.
“All right. Then next would be forming some kind of treaty with the Coyotes so they'll stay out of private Cougar territory and stop attacking us unprovoked. Number four would be figuring out whether those strange shifters infiltrating the Coyotes were working for the Coyotes to annoy Mason, or if they were working on their own to some other end.”

They'd encountered the shifters at a glaring meeting the prior month. Unlike Cougars, Coyotes, Wolves, and other animal shifters, they didn't share a brain with a creature half. They could shift on demand into whatever shapes suited their purposes, and that made them the ultimate spies. None of the Cougars had recognized the two that had infiltrated the Coyotes because no one had even known such beings existed … except Lola.

Lola grunted. “Work from the bottom up. That address is the nest of some of those shifters. In Mexico, my brethren used to call them
Los Impostores
, and
they
are the work of my brother. They are why there is an avenger now. I thought they were all gone, and not following up on that belief is a mistake I regret. They must be handled, though, or they'll cause more trouble. They tend to disrupt the groups they discover and try to take whatever resources they can from them. Now, obviously, I cannot personally engage them. There has to be an additional degree of separation between them and me. You must figure out a way to lure them out, and from there, we'll figure out a way to squelch them that won't have me afoul of the rules of engagement. If I take one step out of line, it may be considered an act of challenge and other gods would come out of the woodwork to take what is mine.”

Even Hannah knew that didn't sound like a good situation for anyone involved and she'd only been a part of that world for the summer.

“Why me?” Hannah asked. “That seems like a much bigger job than I've been doing.”

“Don't ask why. Say yes or no.”

“Well, yes.” She'd do anything to get away and not feel like she was running. Anything to have a little time to think about what she needed to do to get Sean squared away. “But, what do you want me to do?”

Lola took off her reading glasses and set them atop her pad. “Do what you must, but you must do it with Sean.”

Hannah threw her head back and groaned. “And
there's
the rub.”

“Avengers don't work alone.”

“And no one else will do, huh?”

“That depends on whether or not you want to be successful. Take who you'd like,
rubia
, but know this. How will you find a suitable mate for him if you don't know who he is? Here is your chance to find out. Don't make me wait. I'm being too generous by altering the magic that binds you as it is.”

Dammit.

The goddess had a point. Hannah did need to get to know him, at least superficially.

She folded the address in half, then again before tucking the paper into her shirt pocket and sighing. “All right.”

“You'll be fine,” Miles said. “I have it on good authority that he doesn't bite.”

“Maybe
he
doesn't, but I do.”