She couldn’t agree more.
Cara gripped at his cock with her inner muscles. Jack made a strangled noise and moved his hips in a particularly delicious way, and Cara understood why Jack had no desire or possibly no ability to think about anything outside this moment, outside this bed. She relaxed into the moment in a way she could rarely recall doing.
She’d never had a lover with such total, fierce focus. His silent intensity contracted the world for her as well so she could focus entirely on him and on the sensations breaking in waves over her body.
Jack thrust hard, almost punishingly. His dark eyes hazed toward the cougar’s greenish amber.
Her back arched as she shattered. She cried out a sound that might have been Jack’s name in some primal language.
Then he was coming too, shaking as he exploded inside her.
He collapsed on top of her, trembling with lust and exertion.
Maybe from more than that. He kissed her, a kiss that was both tender and fierce, letting go of her hands so she could pull him into an even closer embrace. “Mine,” Jack whispered, but she wasn’t sure how he did it because she wasn’t letting him move his lips away from hers long enough to speak. “Yours. Each other’s. That’s the part I wasn’t clear about before.”
There was so much Cara could say, but she left it at, “Yeah, that,” and continued kissing him.
They were drifting from kissing and cuddling toward much-needed sleep when Jack muttered, “I went to Queen’s University. Didn’t finish. I liked the classes, but I didn’t like how normies live. All in little separate boxes, cut off from nature and from their own nature, paying more attention to some electronic thing or another than to the world around them. It doesn’t make sense.”
Cara blinked and realized, in that moment, how thoroughly she had changed from the woman she’d been in the city. “No,” she agreed, “it doesn’t.”
Chapter Forty
“How do we open this gate?” Rafe stretched as he spoke, deceptively casual, but Cara could see the wariness of one trained to watch and observe, and the skepticism of someone who’d gone through an operation or two planned by a desk jockey who’d forgotten that in police work, no plan survives contact with reality.
She recognized the look because she was pretty sure she was sporting it herself.
“We have to move a ton of energy,” Gramps said. “Different ways to do it. Certain drugs help, but for something this big, you can’t rely on just drugs. You’d need to take so much you’d just open a door in your own head and get lost inside. Dancing and drumming help, but again, it won’t be enough. Not sleeping helps—it makes you a little nutty and gives Trickster more room to work. Prayer helps. Your guides can help. But adding sex to prayer and dancing and your guides is probably the best way.” He flashed a grin that was more like a spasm. “Which is weird for me to be saying to my grandkid, thank you very much for asking, so I’m going to leave it up to the people involved to figure out the combination that’ll work best for them.”
“For this gate to work, we need Chenier around when we’re opening it. How are we going to lure him out?” Elissa asked, which Cara thought was a terribly vital question of the nitty-gritty sort that shamans tended to forget.
“We have trackers,” Jude said. “Big cats, wolves. I know what he smells like. A couple of us duals could sneak up on him.” His usually lazy, affable voice was menacing. Cara could imagine it turning to a leonine roar at any time.
“And then what? You can’t kill him; he’s protected by fae magic. But he can kill you.” Grand-mère shook her head. “If I thought he’d believe me, I would say I wanted to try to patch things up, but even his ego is not so monumental as to believe that, after so many years and so many deaths.”
The answer hit Cara so hard it physically hurt, as if Trickster had torn off the top of her skull and forced enlightenment directly into her brain, along with a good measure of cold, bracing air. It left her queasy and wishing she could pretend it hadn’t happened. But the pain, the giddiness, the sheer weirdness of it—and the way the scar on her shoulder throbbed damply—let her know it was true inspiration.
Voice shaking in a way it hadn’t since her mother’s funeral, Cara spoke up. “He’ll buy that he got his hooks into me. Trickster says he underestimates me. I’ll lure him here. And then—say good night, Gracie.”
“Good night, Gracie,” Jack obediently responded, making everyone laugh.
Which gave him time to give her a hug.
Just a quick one, but it was enough to stop the shaking.
“I don’t like it,” Gramps said.
“I don’t either,” said Jack. Before Cara could elbow him—she figured that her grandfather had a right to be overprotective, having changed her diapers, but Jack didn’t—Jack stood up and took her hands. His words were meant for the whole room, but his focus was on her. “I don’t like it because sending in either one of us alone would be going about it all wrong. Chenier knows my weakness. That weakness is Cara, and Chenier got me to stand still long enough for the fae to slip its hooks in by offering me an ugly, cheater’s way to win her. Cara gave me another chance despite my idiocy, not because of it. Only Chenier doesn’t know that.” He grinned, first at Cara, then at everyone else. Cara saw the cougar’s fangs in his human-seeming face, knew it was a smile that could rend flesh.
“I see where you’re going with this,” Elissa said out of the blue. “It just might work—at least long enough for us to do what we need to do.”
Grand-mère gestured royally. “So go to it, children. We move at sunrise.”
They were on the way back to Cara’s house when Elissa caught up with them. “I wasn’t about to say in front of your grandfather, Cara, but there’s one small problem with your plan. To eyes that know how to see it, you guys look all happy and shiny and newly in love. You need to do something to rough up the energy a little.”
“We could always have a fight. We’re great at having fights.” Jack was still grinning and holding her hand as he said it, though, so Cara didn’t mind.
“It may take more than that to throw the fae off the scent,” Elissa said. “Something that, at a quick glance, will read like darkness and violence to something from another world, something that doesn’t really understand how complicated mortals are.” She dropped her voice. “Do you think you guys could get…a little kinky?”
The laugh started near Cara’s pussy and spread from there, filling her whole body. “I think we could manage that.” She thought for a second, then squeezed Jack’s hand. “That is…I can manage that if Jack’s okay with kinky.”
“Okay with kinky?” His response was so loud Cara figured small children all over the village would be asking their parents embarrassing questions. “I was afraid you’d never ask.”
“Well then, that’s settled.” She said it calmly enough, but the lust coursing through her body was almost enough—almost—to squelch the sheer, abject terror at the thought of dealing with Chenier on his own turf.
The problem, they discovered, was that it was bloody hard to get started. Bloody hard to initiate sex, let alone kinky sex, under these circumstances.
They’d talked, even through a rising sense of embarrassment that almost drowned both desire and fear.
But they’d talked so much, they’d talked the lust out of the air. Talked around their limits and fears and what they simply wouldn’t do, not even to open a gate and save Couguar-Caché and Jocelyn from crazy fae-possessed sorcerers.
All the talk left Jack with a distinctly limp dick and a sinking sense that this would never work, that Chenier would see right through them, possess him again and force him to hurt Cara for real. He knew that wallowing in that feeling could be dangerous, but at the same time, he knew that facing that dark place was important, part of the journey to the place they needed to reach to create the gate.
But he couldn’t help wallowing.
Until Cara kissed him and said, “All right. We’ve covered t
he negatives, the fears, the things we’re scared of. But we haven’t talked about dreams and fantasies, and I don’t think this will work until it’s fun. So you know what I’ve always fantasized about? Wrestling with a guy, really getting down and dirty and putting up a good fight, and him not holding back because I’m a girl. Getting rough-and-tumble, biting and scratching and hitting and fighting dirty. He wins—and maybe I let him win for the fun of it. Because he wins, I end up getting spanked and then tied up and taken.”
“That,” Jack said, his cock stirring for the first time since they’d started the ever-so-serious conversation, “hardly sounds like losing.”
“My point exactly,” Cara purred. “We both win in the end. But if we really go for it, there should be enough bruises, bites and scratches to confuse Chenier. Sorcerers are surface, according to Elissa. They can’t read too deeply. And fae are so used to being the tricky ones, they can’t imagine being tricked themselves.”
The bright stripes of her aura, now leaning toward passionate reds and oranges, wavered a bit, as if she wasn’t entirely convinced of her own words.
But Jack was.
At least the part where she said they’d both win in the end.
Chapter Forty-One
Cara’s hair was wild. Her body ached from being flung around, and her butt was distinctly tender. The handprint on Jack’s face had faded to normal vision, but Cara could see it if she squinted with her shamanic sight. Through those eyes, it was deep red like a Valentine heart.
She suspected her own bite marks and bruises glowed the same passionate color, even the one on her cheekbone that had been completely accidental, an unfortunate collision with the bed frame while they struggled for dominance.
Good thing sorcerers didn’t read such things well.
The question, of course, was whether fae were just as dense.
They’d gone back and forth about how to approach Chenier, how to make contact again. In the end, they simply drove to the village where they’d last seen him, in Cara’s truck. They held hands all the way there, and the feel of Jack’s hand, hard and hot despite the chilly air, eased Cara’s nerves.
They would both have to be someone else for a time, someone convincingly different from the people they really were.
But at the moment, Cara felt more like herself than she ever had, solid and complete and secure to stand on her own, knowing that she didn’t have to.
She loved Jack, and Jack loved her. The thought zinged through her brain and her blood and her pussy, even though they’d talked around the words, talked about them, but hadn’t spoken them, not with everything looming before them. Still, she felt it. She couldn’t deny it anymore, and the knowledge made her stronger in the face of what might otherwise have been overwhelming fear.
“Your touch feels different,” she finally said. “Like it’s reaching inside my soul through my skin.”
He turned to her briefly and smiled the kind of smile that would melt a woman’s heart if he hadn’t done so already. “It is. Your soul is silky. I would have expected spikes, from your aura, but even that seems softer now. Still bright and clashing, but the colors shade in and out instead of having hard edges.”
She squinted at Jack’s aura. “Yours isn’t plaid anymore. It’s swirly. Like Rafe’s, only crazier colors. You’ve got colors I’ve never seen on you.”
“Red, right? A lot more red.”
She nodded. “And some dark blue mixed in with all the brightness. Just the color of my old uniform. I bet I have amber and bright green in mine now.”
Jack squeezed her hand and smiled.
About a mile from the village, Cara pulled the truck onto the muddy shoulder, and they both got out. The world was soggy from thaw, dotted with patches of melting snow, but Cara took a deep breath and smelled rich mud and the promise of green. She couldn’t begin to imagine how wonderful it must smell to Jack.
Spring had come while they were distracted by fighting evil.
And they would prevail over the evil.
Jack sniffed at the air, the cat clear under his human form. “This way. I can smell him.” He led her to a ramshackle farmhouse, its door hanging ajar, broken windows staring eyeless.
Cara insisted on going in first, gun drawn. Once inside the door, she drew a sharp breath. The inside of the house was furnished in quiet luxury, like the study of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Cara squinted, trying to see through illusion, but the beautiful room remained constant. Of course Chenier wouldn’t want to live in a hovel; the dilapidated outside was the illusion. “Clear!” she called from habit, even though Jack had followed close on her heels and they were standing together on an expensive-looking Oriental rug surrounded by warm, leather-bound books, and furniture that belonged in a museum.
“Sorciére!” Jack called.
Chenier stepped out of nowhere and said in that archaic accent, “So nice to see you again, my friend who is also my enemy, and who was not who I thought he was. I see your woman problems are solved. She is a lovely creature, though also not who I thought she was. Weaker magically than the flame-haired witch, but that is good in some ways, eh? A woman should not be so powerful she will defy you at every turn.” He laughed like fingernails on a chalkboard as he took several steps closer to Cara. “And beautiful. I have held your woman, cougar, kissed her, felt her body respond to mine. I can see the attraction.”
Jack bristled visibly, then contained himself. “Watch it. She’s mine.”
“As you say, friendly enemy. When last I saw you, you were fighting against me. What brings you here, with her?”
“I hoped that time I could send them all to you, and you’d take care of them. But they made us come along, and the damn witch was just too good. And I didn’t want to die or have my woman get hurt, so I fought. You know how it is. Figured I’d better show up and explain—and bring you a little present. She’ll go to you if I tell her to. And I know you’ve tasted her already.”
Through the spirit guides, Cara smelled the sour stench of Jack’s web of lies, but she knew Chenier could not.
As he said it, Cara was following the plan, staring at Chenier like she found him fascinating. Which she did, but fascinating the way a poisonous toad might be. She even ran her tongue over her lips, as if she were unconscious of it.
Jack turned his head, then “caught” her flirting with Chenier. He punched her in the stomach, pulling his blow at the last second so it barely hurt. “You’re mine until I say otherwise. Behave yourself.” Cara glared, a glare she didn’t have to fake.
“I thought a blonde city girl would be softer than what I was used to,” Jack said conversationally to Chenier, “but I think she may actually be meaner than a cougar woman, even if she doesn’t have fangs. And certainly sluttier. Cougars mate, you know. I forgot humans just fuck around for sport—or at least this one does. But she does it well.”
The sorcerer laughed. Magic beat on their shields. Through her connection to Lynx and Jack’s cougar, Cara could even smell it, an acrid, chemical reek.
Jack sighed theatrically. “I got the girl back. Now I don’t know what to do with her. But you did help, so I’m here to keep my side of the bargain. But first, the blonde’s yours for the next few hours. Just leave me enough to have some fun with when you’re done. After that, we’ll talk about what I can do for you.”
This part hadn’t been rehearsed, exactly. She’d expected more lead-in, but she could punt. Putting a lot of whine in her voice, and a hint of real pain, she said, “What the hell are you doing?”
“Picking the winning team, babe. You keep saying how much you hate the village. This is your chance to get out and get even.”
She punched his arm, then jerked away from him. “I’m all for dealing with the winning side, especially if they have indoor plumbing, but you can’t just give me away like that.”
“You stupid cunt!” They’d chosen the code-phrase beforehand, to signal when things were about to get rough. Cara knew it was coming and t
hought she’d braced for it.
But rehearsing while giggling in postcoital glow wasn’t the same as hearing it snarled convincingly from Jack’s lips. She cringed a little on the inside as she cringed a lot on the outside.
They’d practiced this part too, the part where Jack pretended to smack her hard enough to send her reeling, both of them using their knowledge of martial arts and energy work to make it look convincing without actually damaging her. In their practice sessions, it had worked fine. Here, nervous and slightly addled by magic, she wasn’t as coordinated as usual, and maybe Jack wasn’t either, catlike reflexes or not.
Cara saw stars and tasted blood. It didn’t take acting to raise her hand to her mouth, probing for damage, which thankfully amounted to nothing more than a bitten lip.
Probing for damage and popping a pill into her mouth. The rich taste of blood hid the bitter, musty taste of the pill Elissa and Grand-mère had concocted—so-called magic mushrooms laced with skullcap for vision, damiana for desire, which Elissa theorized would then work better with her own red magic. A bit of catnip, not enough, unfortunately, to improve the flavor or calm human nerves, but theoretically enough to act as a carrier for Jack and Rafe, who might otherwise be unaffected.
And a boatload of witch-magic to make it all hit the system quickly and dispel just as fast.
She choked it down, hiding her disgust behind real and feigned distress and pain.
In a few seconds, all she could taste was magic.
By the time she moved her bloodied hand away from her mouth and turned back to the men, the smear of blood on her hand glowed. She could see the life in it. Could see the life in everything and, more importantly, see the gaping wound where the mortal life in Chenier wasn’t.
It looked like a black hole from a science-fiction movie, a door to a dangerous place. A door that needed to be shut, but still a door.
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