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

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Her head pounded. No, something pounded her head, as if someone drove a spike into it. The air tasted thick and foul. Her old injuries, including the burns from digging in the sorcerously charged snow, all throbbed, but not enough to slow her down.

  She ran out the door, still struggling into her coat, her boots unzipped, heading toward…toward she didn’t know what, but she knew what direction it came from, knew where she had to go.

  She would have suspected she was still dreaming if she hadn’t run into Jude, Rafe and Elissa. The latter had the baby in a carrier on her chest and plaid flannel PJs peeking out from under her coat, which made the whole thing even more surreal.

  Cara felt like she should say something but couldn’t find her voice.

  A hundred yards or so later, Gramps joined them, a coonskin cap plunked down on his wild gray hair.

  Then Jack, walking with purpose but looking distinctly bewildered. Walking with purpose, but the purpose might not be his own. He was barefoot in the snow.

  So was Rafe. They didn’t seem to feel the cold—duals had the high body temperature of their feline sides—but it was eerie.

  Together they marched, a silent, mismatched, oddly dressed phalanx, toward the darkness of the woods. The air, which should have been crisp and cool, was thick instead, redolent of sulfur and blood.

  Just as they left the recently built stockade around the village, Jocelyn woke, fussing. Elissa pressed her hand over the baby’s face without slowing her stride.

  Then she halted. “Stop!” Her voice wasn’t loud but carried on the still, fetid air. “Stop this,” she repeated, and the air began to clear.

  One by one, they did, Jude first, then the cougars, then Cara, who’d wanted to stop long before that but somehow couldn’t.

  Gramps went on a little farther after the others stopped.

  Jude took the simple expedient of tackling the old man, who laughed as he went down and again as he rolled back to his feet. “Well isn’t that the damnedest… Cara, what are you doing here? What are we all doing here? And why’s the baby with us?”

  “Someone’s playing us,” Elissa said. “Probably a lot of someones working together, because it takes potent mind magic to affect a dual or a shaman at all, and I’ve trained to defend against it since I was tiny. Targeted magic too—it’s only us. Someone wanted us to leave the safety of the village and come out here. And they wanted me to bring Jocelyn.”

  “Then we’d better go back.” The old man, surprisingly spry, bounded over and took her arm. “Damn sorcerers anyway. No use doing what they want us to do. And we certainly can’t risk the baby.”

  “We’ll be all right if we go in freely, not bespelled.” Cara didn’t know how she knew that, but she did, and Elissa’s nod confirmed it. “They’ll expect victims. We’ll give them…us.”

  “But not the baby,” Gramps repeated. “Elissa, you’ve got to bring her back to town. Nella will watch her, or Mrs. Lazy-Lynx. You stay there yourself. It’ll be safer. My grandkid’s a cop, so she’ll probably be all right in a dust-up, but fighting sorcerers is no work for a green witch, ’specially not a little bitty one like you.”

  Cara stifled an entirely inappropriate chuckle. You’d think he’d know better than to treat Elissa like a generic helpless female, but with the baby snuggled against her, Elissa did look too petite and cute to be as dangerous as she really was.

  Cara took her grandfather’s arm. “I have a better idea. Why don’t you bring Jocelyn back? Elissa has a kind of magic they may not know much about, and she’s fought sorcerers before. You can keep the baby safe on the way back to the village, maybe better than Elissa could by herself, because she can’t use lethal force even if things get ugly. Besides, kids love you.”

  Elissa touched his arm. “Would you do that?”

  Before the old man could blink, he had the baby sling snapped around him, and he and Jocelyn were heading back toward the village. “I’ll stoke your stoves and start coffee,” he called as he headed out of sight.

  “All right,” Jude said. “Let’s go kick some sorcerous butt.”

  “Do you have a plan?” Cara thought to ask. “I know I don’t.”

  “We follow the magic until we find them, and then we kill them.” Jude’s tone was fierce and firm, and Cara shivered when no one argued, not even Elissa. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  Instincts told her that the best plan would be to run like hell, maybe as far as Taiwan.

  But that would leave their dead friends unavenged and Jocelyn and the village still in danger. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about either problem, but she had to do something, didn’t she?

  Despairing voices in her head urged otherwise.

  But those voices didn’t sound like anything she’d think herself. She’d prefer to consider all options and then proceed with caution—cops who barged recklessly into danger didn’t live long—but she wasn’t one to run away from a fight.

  “Make sure your spirit guide’s with you,” Jack called as they started to move.

  “How?”

  Even in the darkness, she could see Jack grimace and shrug eloquently. “Beats me. I figured she’d told you how to call her. If we had more time, we could figure it out, but we need to move.”

  If we had the time, she echoed in silent despair as they headed out. That was the core of the problem, wasn’t it? She’d come here to learn, and instead she’d been thrown into a war, let a friend’s baby sister die and found her whole world taking a turn to the weird and painful.

  And while she’d been working with Jack, she wasn’t a quick study at this magic business. She could start a fire and put animal ears on someone, a few other party tricks, but nothing useful. Now she was going into battle unprepared, without even her gun.

  She fumbled at her pockets, knowing the gun wasn’t there. She’d known she was going into danger, so why hadn’t she taken the gun? How stupid was she?

  Stupid enough to go into a fight unarmed. Stupid enough to go into dark woods without a light.

  Stupid enough to let her fiancé die for her.

  The duals, being cats, functioned well in the poor light, and Elissa too moved confidently. Cara, on the other hand, was struggling. The darkness was magnified by a deeper darkness inside her, a sense that she was lost in a metaphorical woods as well as an actual one. She couldn’t see her friends, couldn’t find her way. Maybe they weren’t really her friends, considering how easily they’d left her behind. Probably they didn’t consciously want her to die, because they were all decent people, but they might have a subconscious wish to get her out of the way. Maybe they knew how inept she was and figured she’d be most useful as bait.

  And would dying be so bad? She’d let Phil and Becky and Jack’s brother die—hell, she’d started out by letting her mother die, which had ultimately killed her father. She’d left her real life behind and could never go back to it, and she was probably going crazy. If she died, but her death somehow helped the others squash these dirtbags, maybe it was the most fitting end she could hope for.

  “And maybe you’re already maudlin, so the sorcerers are having a field day with your brain.” She couldn’t see Lynx, but she’d know that prim British voice anywhere. “It would help if you were actually shielded.”

  Oh. Right. Shields.

  She hastily imagined her dress uniform, complete with the somewhat ridiculous hat. Imagined a force emanating from them that enveloped her protectively. Jack would probably laugh his tail off if he knew how she imagined her shields, but Rafe had admitted he imagined his shields growing from a police badge. Once a cop, apparently, always a cop, even if you were now playing on the side of benevolent chaos.

  She’d gotten fairly adept at setting the shields, mostly because they had a tendency to drop if she wasn’t paying attention, so she got plenty of practice resetting them. Once they settled around her, the sense of pervasive despair fled. She had a lot to work through and a lot more to learn, but it wasn’t as bad as all
that. Nothing she couldn’t handle if she survived tonight.

  She listened. You’d think that even a bunch of stealthy felines would make some noise, but maybe one of the magic-users was doing something to mask the sounds.

  Still, she thought they’d been headed—she looked around quickly—that way. Something was prompting her in that direction. She was pretty sure it was the sorcerers’ initial spell, but there was nothing funnier than turning a trap against the people who set it.

  She took a few steps in what she thought was the right direction.

  Lynx blocked her path.

  Shit, Lynx was big enough to block her path. Real lynxes were somewhere between big housecats and medium-sized dogs. This lynx might give Jude in lion form a run for his money.

  “Why didn’t you call me when you realized you were heading into a fight?”

  Cara decided the best answer was an honest one. “I didn’t know how.”

  The giant lynx let out a hearty yet decorous chuckle. “You solid people make everything so complicated. Did you ever consider saying, ‘Lynx, I need help’?”

  That sounded way too easy, at least based on what Gramps had said about the rituals he needed to call Coyote, rituals involving booze and tobacco and drumming and dancing. “Would that work?”

  Lynx laughed again. “Smart girl. If I thought you were calling for help because you were too lazy to solve a problem on your own, I’d make you work. But if there’s an emergency, you just have to ask. And this is an emergency. You’re lost, you have sorcerers playing with your mind, you’re heading into a battle all but suicidal, and to top it off you’re wearing pajamas with sock monkeys on them, which would be fine if you were doing it with a sense of hipster irony, but you’re not. Grave emergency.”

  Cara nodded. “So why are we standing here?”

  This time the laugh was weary and sardonic—the laugh that went with the Oxford accent and the whole feline air of superiority. “Have you actually asked for help yet? Politely, mind you.”

  Lynx might be annoying, but being annoyed was clearing the dark clouds in Cara’s head. She took a deep, cold breath, mustered the patience she used to use to talk with her captain and said, out loud, “Please, Lynx? Could you help me out here? I’m lost, I should probably find my friends before the sorcerers find me, and I’ll need help to figure out what to do when we do find the bad guys.” She thought for a second. “But leave my jammies out of it. They may be dorky, but they’re warm. And Phil gave them to me.”

  If a lynx could raise her eyebrows, this one did.

  “All right, the jammies are sacrosanct for the moment. As for catching up with your friends, climb aboard.”

  When Cara hesitated, the oversized lynx nudged her with a giant head. “Time’s wasting, and they’ll need your powers in this fight.”

  It would help if she knew more about using them, but that was what the spirit guide was for, right?

  Gingerly, she mounted the cat, which was far more solid than a gigantic glowing lynx ought to be.

  Before she was properly settled, the lynx took off, bounding over the snow with such great leaps Cara wasn’t sure she was touching down.

  “Don’t be afraid to hold the ruff firmly, dear,” Lynx said out loud, the haughty English voice almost affectionate. “It won’t hurt me. It’s how our mothers carry us.”

  Puzzling over the notion of a spirit guide having a mother, because that rarified question was easier to face than ones that involved defeating sorcerers or forgiving herself, Cara closed her eyes and let Lynx go where she would.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The trip ended with Lynx dumping her in the snow at Jack’s feet with a snickered, “Next time, pay more attention.” Lynx shrank back to her normal size as Cara rolled to her feet, chuckling herself.

  The urge to laugh vanished when she saw what stood on the other side of the clearing.

  Two words for the situation, and those words were Oh and Shit.

  Three sorcerers, or so she’d guess from their gray-and-fuchsia auras, four of the wolf creatures and a wolverine that, judging from its aura, wasn’t a wolverine at all or even a wolverine dual, but a shaman in an animal disguise.

  The clearing was far brighter than the middle of the night in the northern woods should be. Someone was expending a lot of energy to give them a well-lit place to battle. She hoped it was someone on the other side, an inexperienced sorcerer who didn’t know how to muster his resources and would just keel over before long.

  “Lynx,” she said as politely and quietly as she could, “could you please pop back to the village and get my gun?”

  “What fun would that be, Cara? Magic’s more entertaining and much more instructive.”

  Entertaining wasn’t what she had in mind for these assholes. Neither was instructive. Greasy smear on the snow sounded about right. She’d do it clean, not the way they’d killed, but she’d make sure they never hurt anyone else again.

  But how?

  Rafe nudged her. “I won’t need this,” he said, handing her a well-maintained Glock. “This is too personal for a gun. They killed my parents and want to harm our baby.”

  He dropped his coat in the snow, stepped about two feet away from her and shifted. Jude was already in lion form, muscles tensing under his tawny skin.

  Jack, she noted—she told herself she was checking purely out of self-interest to be sure what her allies had planned—was in wordy form, shimmering, restless, angry energy pouring off him like a rainbowed waterfall. He twitched in place like a cat stalking prey.

  He looked incongruously beautiful. Incongruously right.

  “But of course he looks right,” Lynx said. “This is why he was born into this time and place, why you were all born. Your lives until now have brought you to this moment. Which sounds a lot more like fate than it really is. It’s more that you’re shamans, and shamans fight order that’s become corrupt, and the people you love help you.”

  Whatever. Might be fate, might be luck, whether bad or good, but they were here, and their unique conjunction of powers would stop these assholes.

  With a little help from her inanimate-object friend.

  She hefted the comforting, familiar weight of Rafe’s gun. One Glock was theoretically like another, but they all had their idiosyncrasies. Nothing like learning the quirks of a new gun in the middle of a fight, but she’d done stupider things in her life.

  Like sleeping with Jack Long-Claw.

  “None of that now, Cara.” Lynx nudged her. “Sometimes you do silly things when you’re in heat. This isn’t the time to brood on it. It’s time to fight.”

  “So why isn’t anyone fighting?” She was in no hurry for spells to fly and blood to flow, but there was something unnerving about the way the two sides stared at each other. Not just sizing each other up, but something more, something she couldn’t explain but felt she should be able to.

  “You know the answer to that.”

  Cara figured it out. The fight had already begun with the spells that lured them from the village and continued with the mind tricks the sorcerers had thrown at them.

  Now that they were face-to-face, the magic-users were testing each other’s defenses. Only she couldn’t play that game, because she hadn’t learned enough yet.

  Or had she? She might not have a lot of magical chops yet, but she knew a bit about anticipating a thug’s next move, and these guys were thugs with unusual weapons.

  She mentally tipped her hat, allowing a tiny crack in her defenses. She reached out through that crack, seeking information, weakness, doubt.

  The wolverine was psycho. His dark shamanic aura was swirled and muddled, and even through his animal disguise, she picked up an edginess she’d learned to identify as a sign that someone might lash out unpredictably. Real wolverines were vicious anyway, so combining human insanity with wolverine personality was a bad combination.

  The aura of one of the sorcerers was fainter, its dark hues a halo around a core that she’d le
arned, in the brief time she’d been seeing auras, to think of as textbook normy. He seemed more nervous too, where the others were eerily calm. Less experienced, less assured of the rightness of their cause, or less stone crazy. Good target for a head-fuck, then.

  The rest just looked bad-ass, their bad-assitude an additional level of shielding. She couldn’t gauge their power. Certainly their auras didn’t pulse and radiate the way Elissa’s did, or Jack’s, or even her grandfather’s. But cockiness poured off them in waves.

  Young gang members, then, puffed on hormones and sure they were the biggest, baddest thing around. Not too dangerous on their own, but in numbers, they developed a pack mentality. Goulding had told her that gang members were as close to a pack gone bad as you’d find among humans, thinking and moving like a unit, with a vicious intelligence far higher than that of the individual members.

  Not particularly powerful, and yet potentially deadly.

  She couldn’t tell which was the leader, the kingpin of crazy.

  Elissa moved, extending her hands. Instinctively, Cara glanced toward the witch, but a hint of movement from the enemies changed her focus.

  The wolverine leaped forward, followed by the wolves. The wolverine, though, held back, letting the wolf-creatures absorb the duals’ attention.

  Crazy but not stupid.

  The duals surged forward, a ballet of death. They were so beautiful and graceful, especially compared to the loups-garous and skinwalkers, who didn’t seem to know how to use their assumed forms. One of the sorcerers pointed and said something. Elissa gestured, and a bolt of fuchsia was shunted aside.

  Then all the sorcerers roared a word in near unison.

  A cloud of something gray and gaseous moved across the clearing faster than the wind would allow.

  It was heading straight for the tangled mass of cats and pseudo-wolves.

  Jack puffed his cheeks like a bellows and blew.

  It shouldn’t have done a damn thing other than give their side all a good giggle before they died hideously.