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

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Just blood. Lots of blood, and a few gobs of tissue.

  Meat. Until proven otherwise, she was going to think of it that way. Nothing worse than that. By these little mental machinations, a cop stayed sane.

  “Also,” Jack said, his tone almost conversational, though his aura, too, looked spiky and jagged, “have you started seeing auras yet?”

  As if it was the most normal thing on earth to ask someone. In Couguar-Caché, it might be.

  “Yes, though I’m just guessing what they mean—like we all look spiky right now, and I bet that’s because we’re upset.”

  “Good guess. Now look at the blood on the snow, Cara. Really look at it. Open up and ask the spirits to help you seek clues.”

  He said that so naturally. Probably to someone raised in Couguar-Caché, it was about as ordinary as telling someone to Google something or send a text, but she didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do what he asked.

  Nothing ventured, though, nothing gained. Xang Kue had told her she had guides, but he hadn’t been able to tell her how to contact them. Said they’d make themselves known when she needed them.

  Well, guys, I need you now. Someone’s died here, and whoever did it means to do more harm. I’m not sure what forms I need to put in a petition to the Powers; it must be worse than requisitioning something from headquarters. But if you could at least let me know where the paperwork is kept, it would be a big help. Thanks.

  She squinted at the blood on the snow, concentrating furiously.

  Two things happened.

  A dome of unnatural purple streaked with oily black appeared over the bloodied area. That must be what everyone else saw. She pointed toward it. “That fugliness is sorcery? It looks like a death-metal band puked and it froze in midair.”

  Jack actually laughed. “Good way to describe it. Now see if you can pick out anything.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the point. We know what we expect to see. You don’t have preconceptions, so maybe you’ll notice something different.”

  She was still staring, frustrated that she couldn’t see anything that resembled either a physical or metaphysical clue, when the lynx appeared.

  The glowing lynx.

  It glided over to her, seeming to hover above the snow. Cara froze, unable to breathe, let alone say or do anything. She wasn’t frightened of the lynx, exactly. If it had been an ordinary wild cat, she’d have been just as quiet out of awe and fascination, not wanting to spook it.

  The glowing part, though, was freaky even on a night marked by magic.

  It came up and head-butted her thigh, for all the world like the big tomcat who’d lived with them when she was a kid. Without even thinking, she reached down to pet it.

  Impossibly fast, one snowshoe paw lashed out, claws like meat hooks extended. They slashed right through her glove and into her hand and wrist, leaving long, shallow, stinging cuts.

  She jumped back. “You little…”

  “Manners, manners. I am not your pet, and though being scratched between the ears will be pleasant in calmer moments, this isn’t a tea-and-biscuits and petting-the-spirit-guide kind of night.”

  Cara looked around wildly, trying to see if anyone else saw the talking lynx. No one else was even looking in their direction, so probably not.

  “Sorry. Meant no disrespect, ma’am. What should I call you anyway?”

  “Lynx will do, though I rather like the ma’am. Now get to work. Time’s wasting. I don’t want to have to scratch you again.”

  “What?” This time, everyone wheeled to look at her. Maybe they couldn’t see the lynx, but they could hear Cara arguing with something that wasn’t, strictly speaking, there.

  Some dim part of her brain weighed whether to feel embarrassed. Probably not. The two shamans must have guides of their own, and a witch would understand about invisible friends. Assuming this damn cat was a friend.

  “Manners,” the lynx said again. Cara had wondered what form her spirit guide might take, how it might communicate with her. Even her wildest speculations hadn’t imagined it having the clipped, precise tones of a prissy, well-educated Englishwoman.

  “Who are you calling prissy? I may not be that party-boy Coyote, but I know how to have a good time when I’m not dealing with ignorant young shamans who don’t even know to bleed on the snow to break down the sorcery. Do I have to scratch you again, girl, or are you going to do your job?”

  Cara didn’t know how to react. Part of her wanted to kick the damn beast, but she wouldn’t kick an ordinary animal and certainly not a talking one with some kind of spiritual link to her.

  Part of her wanted to hightail it back to Toronto, right now, and take her chances with going crazy. Unless she already was crazy, considering she was having a conversation with a shiny lynx with an Oxford accent and a bad attitude.

  Which was how she might have imagined a house cat talking—they always did seem to think they were smarter than you were—but not a wild one.

  “I’m not exactly a lynx, you know,” the creature said. “Or a house cat. Or a bobcat. Or Sylvester the Cat, for that matter.” She changed form as she spoke, lynx to fluffy, gray-smoke Persian to bobcat to cartoon character with mind-boggling speed, finally settling back to lynx, although a lynx with a slightly cartoonish quality. “I’m a metaphor. With claws.”

  She lashed out again, and even though Cara made sure there weren’t any body parts in easy reach, those sharp claws still raked her hand.

  Lynx head-butted her toward the bloodied snow. “You need to break the spell, Cara. Jack is doing his part, but your blood will counter the blood that was shed. The sorcerers used their own blood as well as their victims’. The sorcerers were human and so are you. Although they are particularly dubious examples of the species.”

  Blinking, confused, Cara staggered the few steps forward it took to get to the bloodied area. She smelled sulfur and rot now that she was closer. If it wasn’t so cold, the smell of blood would have been overwhelming, but it was mostly frozen. Even so, it was enough to choke her, especially combined with the sulfur. She’d been around blood before, but this seemed worse somehow. More personal.

  Speaking of blood…

  Cara crouched down in the snow, next to the dome of sorcery. She took off her ruined glove. Lynx had been gentler than it had seemed. The claw-marks were welling blood, but to get some on the snow, she had to take her wounded hand and smear it across, letting it brush the edges of the magical dome.

  Contact with the spell energy hurt worse than the scratches had in the first place, bad enough that she cursed and jumped back.

  Then she cursed again as the barrier sizzled away with a stench of burning meat. Disgusting.

  The bloodied snow began to bubble away as if it was boiling, sending clouds of rancid-smelling steam into the air. Cara stared, transfixed by the special-effects nastiness, unable to accept it as real. Jack grabbed her shoulders. “Get back! I’m not sure what’s going on, but it might be bad.” He jerked her back with such force she ended up pressed against him, her ass against his crotch. His arm tightened around her, even while he said, “Rafe, get ready to shift. I’m not sure what’s happening.” She steeled herself to elbow him away.

  Then she caught a flash of bright green visible from under the melting snow.

  Very familiar bright green.

  She’d bought a shirt just that color for Phil, and he’d been wearing it the last time she saw him. Wasn’t that just yesterday?

  She broke from Jack’s grasp, flung herself down on the unnaturally melting snow and began to dig.

  “Don’t do that!” Jack, Elissa, Rafe and her lynx all ordered simultaneously.

  She paid no heed, although the snow burned her skin, right through the one glove she still wore and even through her coat. Her bared hand she couldn’t feel at all, and she dimly thought it was a good thing.

  She felt something that wasn’t snow or clothing, threw herself into digging the blood-
caked snow.

  Curly brown hair. Pale skin. Lips she’d kissed thousands of times, torn and bloodied. Iced-over eyes that looked like they’d died seeing horrors. She knew better, knew the body shouldn’t be disturbed until they’d examined it properly for clues of who might have done this, but she couldn’t restrain herself from flinging herself on Phil and touching what was left of the man she loved.

  Phil had been here dead in the snow while she was fucking someone else.

  Wait…woods and snow? She and Phil lived in Toronto, and it was summer. Right?

  Her brain spun.

  She closed her eyes, rocked back on her heels and whimpered. Something that seemed to be a big cat nudged her, but she ignored it. They didn’t have a cat. Phil was allergic to cats. But that was definitely a cat.

  Someone stepped closer, as if to comfort her—and cried out, “Ben!”

  When the man who’d cried out crouched in the snow next to her, she opened her eyes and blinked. There was a body in the snow all right, but it was a strange teenager with long black hair, not Phil. And there was reddish fur in the snow next to him.

  Something clicked in Cara’s brain. It was late February, she was in Couguar-Caché, and Phil had been dead for months. She didn’t know why she’d seen what she’d seen, but the illusion was broken now. The poor boy wasn’t the only corpse in that mound of snow. The man who’d cried out—it was Jack, she could recognize now—had stroked the dead boy’s hair briefly, speaking softly in a language that wasn’t English or French. Now he was standing again, staring into the darkness as if he hoped to find answers in it. Trying to disturb Jack as little as possible, she went to work on the snow, tracing back the glimpse of fur.

  It was a slim, young wolf, the fur matted with blood, and for a second, Cara breathed relief. Animal sacrifice was nasty stuff, but at least it wasn’t another sentient.

  Then she looked again. The wolf wore a necklace. A gold B.

  Cara knew that necklace. B for Becky.

  Goulding’s little sister was dead because of her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jack was numb. He knew numb was bad, knew he needed to let the pain and rage burn through him so he could come out clean on the other side. Needed to experience Ben’s death fully, starting from this first shock of loss, so he could help other people when it happened to them, if nothing else. But after that initial roar of grief, he’d shut down. Calculating. Planning. Cold as Ben was lying dead in the snow, even though his animalside was whimpering in mourning, licking and nuzzling at the broken body of a little brother who’d never hunt by his side again. Cold even though his Cougar guide was batting at his heart, metaphysical claws out, trying to force him to feel.

  Someone had ritually murdered Ben and the wolf girl who lay by his side. Someone had cut out their hearts and left them inside a force-field of sorcery that pulsed like a beacon to draw him and the others in. No doubt the same bastards who orchestrated the earlier attack—this smacked of loups-garous’ twistedness. But why were they targeting his village? And why his brother and this stranger? He knew everyone in the village in both their forms, and this small reddish wolf was no one he’d ever met. But Cara knew her. That must be important.

  Grief beat on him, but he shut it out, trying to reason, forcing thoughts that wanted to run wild and wordless into some order he could share with the others. Maybe Cara and Rafe, with their police training, could find a pattern, an answer, if he added what he knew to what they might observe.

  And then he could let go and do what he needed to do, which was go a little crazy so he could put the pieces together in his own way and make them into a bomb to blow up bad guys.

  As he struggled for words, Ben’s corpse sat up and said, “Jack, help me up. I’m injured.”

  Jack stepped closer. He couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t Ben’s phrasing. It wasn’t even Ben’s voice. He sounded deeper and older, tinged with a French accent. Never mind that dead guys didn’t normally sit up and start talking, not even in Couguar-Caché, and there was a gaping hole in Ben’s chest where his heart belonged, and duals almost never hung around as ghosts so he probably wasn’t a ghost who didn’t realize he was dead. Despite all logic, hope surged, and Jack reached for his brother’s hand.

  At the same time, Cara also stepped forward, a bewildered, glorious smile on her face as if she saw someone she dearly longed to see. “You?” she murmured. “It can’t be…”

  Elissa grabbed him and threw her other arm out to block Cara. “It’s not Ben.” she shouted. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not your brother. And it’s not who you think you’re seeing, Cara.”

  Jack tried to throw Elissa off. He should have been able to, would have if Elissa hadn’t been what she was. He had a good foot and at least a hundred pounds on her, but her magic trumped his muscle. She said a couple of words in what sounded like Gaelic, and Jack was frozen to the spot. From Cara’s curses, he guessed she was too. “Sorry,” Elissa said. “This abomination is neither a ghost nor a living thing.”

  “Then it has my name on it, child.” Grand-mère suddenly zapped into the clearing. “Let me clear it up.”

  She intoned a few words that went through Jack’s gut like a spear. Jack had never seen Grand-mère’s true nature so clearly as he did now. The old woman she appeared to be shifted subtly, the planes of her face realigning so she couldn’t pass for something close to human, the texture of her skin becoming more like a tree’s bark than that of an old human, not merely leathery but hard. She was tiny as ever, but her aura was tree-tall, throbbing with power. She raised one branchlike hand and spoke one more word, with a sense of finality and weight to it, in a language that wouldn’t come easily to a dual or human tongue.

  Ben melted, turning into something hideous and fanged, something like a skeletal wolf with rotting hide stretched over its bones, and yet with a humanoid look. It howled and snapped and lunged at them.

  And Grand-mère, little Grand-mère who was maybe four feet tall, grabbed it by its bony neck, which she had to levitate to reach, and twisted. The creature collapsed into a heap of dried bones, human and animal jumbled together. The dry stench of an old grave filled the winter air.

  “A trap,” Grand-mère said, dusting off her hands. “A clumsy one, but good enough to torment us even though we knew better. And by morning, the thing would have gained enough strength to come to the village in a form we had reason to invite in.” She looked to Cara. “Child, who did you see? I don’t think it was Ben or the unfortunate wolf. Poor youngster isn’t even from around here.”

  “Her name is Becky Goulding. Her brother was my partner at work. She gave me a ride from Toronto. She wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t for me.” Cara sounded like she was talking from another planet, one of permafrost and pain. “I should have made her take the truck back, but she wanted to take her wolfside for an adventure.”

  “Who did you see, Cara?” Grand-mère repeated. Cara shook her head, wrapped her arms around her torso and looked away. Closed off. Shut down. Even her aura had dimmed.

  Jack might not be far from that place himself, but at least he knew why he couldn’t stay locked up and self-contained. Cara didn’t yet. He reached out, thinking he might literally try to shake some sense into her, or rather, less sense and more acknowledging how bad she felt. Probably he’d get slugged for his pains, but the flash of anger would jar the other bottled-up emotions loose.

  And maybe getting slugged would do the same for him, because he needed to let go just as much as she did.

  Before he could reach her, something else formed in the place where the thing had hovered. Everyone but Grand-mère and Elissa jumped.

  Translucent, wavery around the edges, it was a ghost. Not Ben, though, and not a female wolf, but a human stranger, a man with curly, pale brown hair and pale eyes and a sweet, boyish face, dressed in the kind of clothes city guys wore in summer, khaki pants and a green polo shirt. “Phil?” Cara’s voice knotted, but she didn’t move. Not tru
sting her senses, Jack figured. How could she after all that had happened?

  The stranger looked like he felt grim and serious—which made sense if he’d died in a way that caused him to linger as a ghost—but was also too happy about seeing Cara not to beam a little when he looked at her.

  Which Jack understood. Cara was worth beaming at.

  Elissa held out her mittened hands, and intoned a few Gaelic words. A warm golden glow surrounded the apparition for a second, then dissipated. “That’s a true ghost,” Elissa said, her voice puzzled, “but not the ghost of either of the victims we’ve found. We need to look…”

  “His body isn’t here.” Cara sounded way too serene. She really ought to be screaming at this point, even if that ghost wasn’t who Jack knew it had to be. “Phil’s buried in Toronto. That’s my fiancé, and he’s been dead since September. But why now, Phil? Why not before?”

  Elissa pushed her forward. “Talk to him,” the witch whispered, “but don’t touch him. It’ll be painful for both of you.”

  She might as well have kept her mouth shut, because Cara opened her arms and embraced the ghost.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was like hugging dry ice, cold burning to her bones, and when Phil’s ghost arms drifted around her, insubstantial but strong as words whispered in the dark, it got worse. Cara didn’t let go. Instead, she let the pain brace her, clear her head. It felt familiar, and she realized the cutting cold was a physical manifestation of the way she’d been feeling ever since Phil was murdered. Since coming to Cougar-Caché, she’d been letting warmth in again—heat, even, with Jack—but the bitter cold seemed safe, like she should embrace it, hold it inside her along with the memory of Phil.

  Ghost lips burned her ear, through her hat. Phil always liked kissing her on the ear when they hugged, since they were much of a height. This time, though, no hot breath ruffled her hair or tickled her ear and that, even more than the painful cold, made her pull away. “I’m sorry,” Cara whispered. “If I hadn’t been running late…”