The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards)

by Holley Trent

  Lola sighed. “We’ll probably find out which ones soon enough. Give them enough time to recover, and they’ll probably be back with some new trick to try to rebuild what they lost.”

  “We’ll be ready for them,” Hannah said.

  “Next,” Steven said. He wanted them to go ahead and rip the Band-Aid off, already.

  “Well, the next parts concern Mason and Ellery or Hannah more than anyone, so I’ll skip them. Child custody stuff and threat detection info. Jill doesn’t really trust the Coyotes either. Her home pack was apparently a lot different from the one here.”

  “Interesting. Next.”

  Belle narrowed her eyes at him, and if gazes could be daggers, he would have been hamburger meat.

  He shrugged. “I’m just trying to get to dinner, sugar.”

  She ground her teeth and pulled in a deep breath through her nose, then let it out through her mouth, never taking her gaze from his. “The Sheehans ran their mouths a lot. While they were out trying to drum up support for their cause, or to at least find a glaring to take them in and protect them from Mason, they talked too much. So, there are shifter groups who are aware of the conflicts here. And while most wouldn’t threaten us because our business doesn’t concern them and theirs doesn’t concern us, there are some who would try to exploit the instability for their own personal gains.”

  “In what way?”

  “Some other alpha could come in, take over, and start collecting dues from every member of the glaring, for one thing. Some other alpha might not be so tolerant of the other shifter groups and supernatural entities in town, and keeping the peace may not be at the top of his agenda. Territory and power would be more important to him than harmony. An alpha like that would not only be bad for the glaring, but for the humans in town who live among us. Those that know about us don’t fear us, and we’d like to keep it that way.”

  Steven leaned back against the sofa and closed his eyes tight. “Fuck.”

  “So, you understand what’s required of you?”

  “Yeah, I understand that y’all are up to your chins in hot shit, and somehow, I’m a part of it. You want me to go in and hunt down those Impostores or whatever, right? Find out what kind of mess they’re plotting?”

  “That and other things. We all have our roles to play,” Lola said quietly. “Just because the hellmouth is being closed doesn’t mean we can’t still use the door. We need to, but we must be particular about who we send through it.”

  Steven opened his eyes. It wasn’t just out of respect, but because it seemed impossible to not pay attention when the goddess was speaking. His body made him act right even if his brain was behind the curve.

  “I chose to stay here all those decades ago because here, I could integrate into the kind of community I wanted to live in. For a long time, I was hands-off, as is required due to the noninterference rules we gods and goddesses abide by. I’m not leaving this place anytime soon, and I’d like my next sixty years here to be as kind to me as the first sixty. I’m not going to apologize for pulling strings and putting my chess pieces in place to protect what has become important to me.”

  “You’re saying I’m one of those pawns,” Steven said.

  “You wouldn’t be if I didn’t think you could play the game.”

  “What if I don’t want to play the game?”

  She massaged her palm with the opposite thumb and stared at some point over Steven’s head. “No sane person wants to play it, mijo.”

  It was a hard truth, and no one said anything for a long while.

  Phones were buzzing—probably folks looking for them for dinner—and people fidgeting, but nobody talked.

  Nobody had anything to say.

  “I often counsel my therapy patients to put their fears down on paper,” Lola said quietly after a minute of stillness. “Sometimes, it’ll make them seem smaller and easier to take apart. Also, if you write those things down along with the reasons you have to conquer them, you might feel more powerful. Logic may not always chase away anxiety on the first volley. You’ve got to keep bombarding it, weakening it one strike at a time. You may not feel as though you’re making any progress, but time has a funny way of showing us that we change, even if we can’t see it while it occurs.”

  Obviously, the words were directed at Steven, but everyone seemed to be chewing on them. Even Belle, who was carefully rubbing down the creases of the letter with her brow furrowed.

  What’s she afraid of?

  He didn’t know too many people—male or female—as brave as Belle. Even in the Marines, he would have been hard pressed to come up with the names of folks who stepped so boldly into conflict the way the women in that Cougar glaring did. He used to be able to do that.

  He couldn’t anymore.

  Lola stood and stuffed her hands into the pockets of her long, colorful skirt. “I’ll go quell the masses,” she said. “I’m never late for a meal. If I’m there, they won’t look for you just yet, but don’t delay. Take a moment to strategize. The list of things you’ll need to do on the other side of the hellmouth will likely grow by the day and with more information that becomes available. Because of your particular skills, I believe the individuals coordinating the missions need to be people in this room, and I believe it is up to you to convince the others that having easy access to that realm is wise.”

  She glided out the front door, and as she instructed, they all sat in their own thoughts for a moment.

  Maybe the rest looked at each other and passed some nonverbal communication along, but if they did, Steven wasn’t a party to it. He stared at his feet and twiddled his thumbs. It was a typical not me posture, and he hoped like hell they could read it.

  Hannah might have been on to something when she said that if the Fates were jerking him around that he should just hang on for the ride, but he’d never been fond of that kind of irony. The one person who couldn’t think clearly when around that portal volunteering to be some kind of hell ranger?

  Nope. Not gonna happen.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I’m actually the least reckless of the four of us, thank you very much,” Belle spat at Mason.

  Mom’s kitchen was crowded, and the energy level with so many Cougars, gods, witches, and angel types was just too high, and it was making Belle’s inner cat snarly. Well, that and other things. Steven, for one, who was standing at the far opposite of the room from her, white as a sheet and nervous as hell. She needed to do something about that, but at the same time, she wasn’t so sure he’d let her. First things first, though. She needed to get the alpha off her figurative back.

  Mason narrowed his eyes at her and tipped his chair onto its back legs. With his arms crossed over his chest like that and his teeth grating, he should have looked forbidding, but to Belle, he was just the doofus she’d known since birth who’d been getting on her last nerve since puberty.

  “You didn’t think maybe I should have been in attendance during your little search and rescue mission?” Mason asked. “I’m responsible for about half of you.”

  “Actually, we’re the handful of people you don’t need to worry about,” Hannah said. “You can’t be everywhere at once, and every now and then, Hank is going to take some decisions away from you so you don’t get distracted from other things you need to be doing. Other times, I’m going to take some. The hellmouth issue fell into my jurisdiction last night.”

  Mason looked to Ellery.

  Ellery gave him a long blink.

  “Weren’t you supposed to be at work last night?” he asked flatly.

  “I took off. My supervisor is a witch. She knows I have to change my plans on the fly sometimes. Besides, Claude was there. He wasn’t going to let anything too traumatic happen to me.”

  Mason looked to Claude who stared right back. “Do the math, Alpha. She’s my sister-in-law. Her sister would ensure a very painful existence for me if I had let things get out of hand. You haven’t seen hell until you’ve seen Gail angry.”
>
  Agatha cleared the air, so to speak, in a very wind-goddess sort of way by sending a cooling gust across the kitchen that made them all pull in a deep breath.

  “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “What’s done is done. The question now is how does that change our plans for the evening?”

  Mason fixed his gaze on Belle again and set his chair down on four legs. “Well, since Messy McReckless has appointed herself Guardian of the Hole, let’s see what her plan is.”

  “Screw you, Mason. It was a reasonable decision, and I didn’t exactly throw my hand up to be the first volunteer. Believe it or not, I came to the conclusion after giving it some thought. I’m moving back here. I’m not going to let you assholes run me off the ranch.”

  “Nobody tried to.”

  “Have you tried living with you?”

  Mason rolled his eyes.

  Ellery snorted, totally unaffected by the “traitor” glare he fixed on her.

  Belle swirled the ice cubes around in her tea glass and watched them circle. “If I’m going to be here, living and working, it makes good sense that I coordinate any future engagement with the portal.”

  “I thought we were going to close it,” Hank said, understandably confused.

  “Close it, not destroy it,” Claude said. “We’re going to stitch up the wound, in a matter of speaking, so the portal functions the way it was intended to—so that nothing goes in or out without the person trying to pass through having the right magical credentials. So, in theory, only certain people would be able to utilize it.” He crooked his thumb in the general direction of the fallen angels who were in the living room, or out on the porch, or someplace else.

  Lola had suggested they take a walk, but they didn’t go far. Belle could tell. Their proximity made her spine tingle.

  “You want to be able to go in there to play fetch,” Mason said.

  “For the time being,” Claude said. “Obviously, the goal would be to eventually destroy it when we as a group have decided we’ve done all we could to help the captives in that particular avenue to hell, but we can’t know when that’ll be without some research. We don’t know how many people are down there who shouldn’t be or how hard it’ll be to get them out.”

  “And we can’t just leave them,” Belle said.

  Mason pinched the bridge of his nose. “And you’re telling me we’ve had people trespassing on this property messing around with the thing when we had our backs turned.”

  “We’ve been pretty busy,” Ellery said. “They were probably doing it in broad daylight when we weren’t watching it as closely because most of the demons came out at night when the veil between the realms was thinner.”

  Steven passed a hand over his forehead, and Belle watched his Adam’s apple bob with his hard swallow. He was uncomfortable and agitated. He didn’t like what he was hearing, and there wasn’t anything Belle could do about that. She couldn’t hide him from it. In fact, she couldn’t do her job without him. Not only did he have the brain of a well-trained soldier, but he was uniquely qualified to travel through the hellish realm because unlike Belle, he couldn’t be possessed. She’d go back through that portal again and again if she had to, but she needed him at her back.

  Steven knew what the job was that Lola was urging him to take and just didn’t want it.

  And didn’t want her as a consequence of that. She didn’t know what to do about that. He was going to run. She knew with every fiber of her being that he was going to run, and she would have to let him.

  She’d give chase, of course.

  It was going to happen. It was just a matter of when and how long it took her to guide him back.

  The beings in the hellmouth needing rescue would just have to wait until their hero got his shit together.

  “So, we’re doing this tonight? We’re going to mend the portal?” Mason asked.

  “Yes,” Claude said. “We can push everything else to another meeting. As long as there is access, we can retrieve people or search for Los Impostores later. Once people go in, they don’t move around much. They could go in deeper, but if they do, they become trapped in their own personal hells. It’s in their minds. You may not be able to see it, but they can and it’s real enough for them. There’s no rescue for those people. Their minds would be too broken, and the best you can do is put them out of their misery if they’re not meant to be there. Give them their chance to be judged and sent where they belong.”

  Mason let out a breath and looked to Belle again. “And you have an angel in your house.”

  “Leave her alone. Please. She’s scared and doesn’t want to confront those guys yet. She’s not like them. If you need information from her, I can have Lily ask.”

  “All right. Fine. I’m not going to think about this anymore after tonight.” He dragged Ellery’s chair closer—lest she try to flee, apparently—and wrapped a possessive arm around her.

  She tittered nervously.

  “Seal the thing so I can worry about escaped Impostores and figure out what to do about the folks the Sheehans had working against me.”

  Ellery gave his forearm draped over her shoulder a little pat. “Uh. You know I need to help with sealing that, right?”

  “Shh.” He shook his head and picked up his beer. “Don’t tell me about that. You just go do it. I’m not gonna watch. I’m gonna go give my kid a bath and pay some bills. Maybe I’ll eat half a pie or something. See, this is me delegating. You come and let me know when you’re done. And if you don’t—” His fangs dropped and pupils narrowed to slits.

  Ellery sighed.

  “I will tear apart hell with my bare hands looking for you. Get me?”

  “I wouldn’t expect less from you, babe.”

  Belle rinsed her tea glass and set it inside the dishwasher. Looking toward Claude, she asked, “Who do you need?”

  “Just those angels and the witches. If anything tries to come out while we’re closing the portal, we’ll be able to banish it on our own. You don’t need to be on standby.”

  “But,” Ellery said, “if you hear any loud noises or if the earth shakes, feel free to come out and see if anyone needs to be revived.”

  At the low growl that started in Mason’s chest, Ellery patted the top of his head. “It’ll be okay, snarly. You just go give Nick a bath, and let us worry about everything else.”

  “You’re going to give me an ulcer.”

  Ellery shrugged. “I could think of worse things to give you.”

  Chair legs scraped against the floor and plates clattered on the table, and people stood and joined whichever groups they needed to be aligned with for the night.

  Keeping her gaze locked on Steven, who followed Hannah into the living room, Belle sidled up next to her mother at the counter.

  “I’ve got a problem,” Belle said quietly.

  “If you didn’t always have a problem to nurse, you wouldn’t be a Foye.”

  Mom started washing dishes, probably a little louder than usual, but Belle knew the trick. Mom did that sometimes to make conversations in the kitchen harder to overhear by people in nearby rooms who had Cougar hearing.

  “Can I borrow your credit card?” Belle asked. “I’ll pay you back after I transfer funds from savings.”

  “Yes, but what do you need it for?”

  “I need to follow a guy.”

  “Where’s the guy going?”

  “North Carolina, if I had to guess.”

  “Does he know you’re following him?”

  Belle shrugged. “He should know I’m deranged enough to think it’s a good idea.”

  Mom turned off the water and dried her hands on her jeans. “I assume you know what you’re doing.”

  “As much as any Cougar can. Unlike my brothers, I don’t try to squelch my instincts. I have them for a reason, and I’m going to listen to them.”

  “He needs time,” Mom whispered.

  Belle nodded. “I’ve got plenty of that.”

  “How’s your inne
r cougar?”

  “Peaceful, for the moment. I think both halves of me have reconciled that he’s it, but he’s not going to be easy. I think the animal part is cutting the lady part of me some slack. Some things you just can’t force.”

  Mom grabbed her wallet from the top of the bread box and pulled a card from it. “You do realize that for any normal family, this would be strange, yes? I wouldn’t condone my daughter chasing a man across the country.”

  “When have we ever been anything but strange?”

  “Yet you want to drag Lily into this.”

  “Lily’s dragging herself into it. She feels left out. If you want to be the doting aunt and try to keep her off the ranch, I won’t talk you out of it, but I think she has her mind set.”

  “I’m not opposed to the idea. I just think her father is going to be a bear about it, and to be perfectly honest, my nerves are shot.”

  Belle snickered. Her mother didn’t have to be explicit to get her point across. Belle got the gist—you children shot my nerves, and probably their father had helped to wear them out a little bit, too, before he’d died.

  Belle reached past her mother and grabbed the last of the apple turnovers from the counter. “He’s your brother. I’m sure you can keep him in check.”

  “Because you’ve had such excellent luck doing the same with yours, right?”

  “Low blow, Mom,” Belle said through a mouth full of pastry as she headed out the back door and toward the stables.

  As long as she was chewing and moving, she didn’t have to think. Logic rarely dissuaded a cat from doing want she needed to do, anyway.

  Belle wasn’t afraid of the same sorts of things Steven was. She wasn’t programmed to, maybe, but she did have fears. She didn’t want to be stifled or held back from reaching her potential—whatever that was. More than anything, she was afraid she’d disappoint people or that she wouldn’t be what they needed when they needed it.

  Everyone around her had a clear role, not just in the glaring, but in the family. As the youngest Foye, she’d always been on the fringes of the action, but she had to do her part now. She knew what her job was, she thought, but like Sean, she couldn’t do hers without her mate.