by Holley Trent
CHAPTER FIVE
If Ellery’s lazy-ass cat wasn’t going to get her rescued, she had one other thing to try.
As she walked slowly behind Mason and Nick from the truck to the house, she whispered her forebear’s name on the wind.
The wind goddess Agatha would always respond to her true name being called out, but Ellery didn’t know Agatha’s true name. Didn’t want to know it. Knowing a goddess’s true name was dangerous business because there was power in names. Agatha had left the offer on the table to tell her the name whenever she wanted to know, but Ellery hadn’t yet taken her up on it. Years ago, she’d thought it’d be improbable that someone would kidnap and torture her for that kind of information, but given her life as of late, she didn’t want to take the risk. Agatha’s name-for-the-moment would have to do.
“Agatha, it’s Ell. I need some help,” she whispered.
The wind brought the message back almost immediately. “Where are you? I can’t feel you nearby.”
Agatha must have been listening out for her. When Ellery wasn’t hunkering down in the middle of nowhere inside a saggy tent, they usually talked every night … usually by more conventional means.
“Went camping. Got kidnapped,” she whispered. “I’m on a ranch in New Mexico, owned by some Were-cougars named Foye. Can you come get me and my friends?”
“Cougars. Huh. Mate-hunters. Are you safe?”
Of course Agatha would know about them. She’d probably seen everything in her thousands of years. Ellery stared at Mason’s plaid back as he reached for the doorknob. “Yes. He claims he’s not going to hurt me. I believe him.”
“I don’t imagine he will. Is he awful?”
“He’s an attractive asshole. That’s all I can say.”
“Cougars usually are, at least the males. Hang in there. I’ll get to your cat and see if we can track you. Need to get you out of there before his cougar settles. You might be able to talk him into letting you go if it hasn’t.”
“What do you mean by settles?”
“Deciding to keep you.”
“Too late, I think.”
“Damn, that was fast. I’ll figure something out.”
“Ellery, why are you muttering to yourself?” Mason asked from the open doorway. “Are you putting a hex on my balls? If so, please stop. I can’t exactly rely on my knucklehead brothers to ensure the continuation of the Foye line, so I really need those.”
“Did you just make a joke?”
He had the temerity to grin, but there was so much animal in that crooked smile, she couldn’t be completely sure he’d said it in good humor. “Come inside,” he said.
She followed him into the living room, where he dropped Nick’s bag on the coffee table and strode toward the kitchen. “I’m going to call my mother and let her know we’re back. And see if she cooked.”
“You do that.” Once he’d passed through the kitchen entryway, she turned to the door. She needed to finish that conversation with Agatha and see if the goddess could home in on her.
“Come in here,” he said.
“Shit.” She joined him in the kitchen and pulled a chair out from the table.
He held Nick in one arm, had the phone pressed between his ear and shoulder, and with his free hand, rooted through the cabinet over the sink.
“Well, well. Who ever said men couldn’t multitask?”
“Not like I have much of a choice.” He brought down a sippy cup at the same time he said into the phone, “Anything happen when I was gone?”
He half-filled the cup with tap water and set it on the counter. He mouthed “formula” to Ellery.
She crooked up an eyebrow.
“Please,” he added. “It’s for Nick, not me.”
“Ugh, fine.” She went into the living room to fetch it from the table near the door. Her gateway to outside was right there, and he couldn’t see her. She’d be stupid not to try. Setting the formula down, she wrapped her fingers around the doorknob, and turned it slowly. The catch clicked softly within, barely a whisper.
Thank God.
“Ellery, I have a cougar’s sense of hearing. Don’t forget that. Get away from the door unless you want to play chase. Trust me that if you’re it, you’re gonna lose.”
Dammit.
She scooped the formula canister up and returned to the kitchen, catching Mason on the end of his call.
“Yeah. That’s good. I’ve got to get up early to finish up that Danville order. Had some problems with the moldings. I’m going to hit the hay as soon as I can.”
She hoped he slept like a rock—deaf and unmoving. Even if he slept with his back to the front door, he was pretty screwed. There was another door, and desert outside or not, she was going to take her chances and hope Agatha snatched her up before the buzzards did.
Ellery looked at her watch. Nearly eleven. That child should have been in bed hours ago.
“Did you cook?” Mason pressed his thumb over the sippy cup’s spout holes and shook the cup. “Nothing left, huh? Don’t worry. We’ll manage. Nick ate in the truck. He should be okay until morning. Gotta go shopping tomorrow.”
“What guy doesn’t have food on-hand for his kid?” she muttered.
“See you in the morning,” he said into the phone. He handed Nick the cup, pulled the cordless phone from his ear, and set it in its cradle. “I wasn’t expecting him.”
“So you just assumed your mother would feed you? I would have thought you’d grown out of that expectation already, at least by the time you became a daddy.” Her stomach let out a beseeching growl and she sighed. How intimidating could she possibly be if her stomach was doing the talking?
“She’s a damned good cook, and she happens to enjoy it. It’s either we eat it or she throws it out.”
“Convenient, I’m sure.”
Ellery opened several cabinets and found a large pot, the noodles, and a dusty—but not yet expired—jar of spaghetti sauce. She got the water set up to boil, and turned to Mason, hands on hips.
“Are my friends okay?”
He grunted and switched Nick to his other arm. She had to concede the kid looked comfortable enough there, and Mason seemed equally relaxed in holding him. Maybe he didn’t play daddy regularly, but he seemed to know the basics. “I’m sure they’re fine. You gotta remember that Mom was once in your shoes. She’ll say all the right things to them and keep them calm. Your friends are probably happier than you are right now.”
“I’m sure they are, if your brothers aren’t sniffing around.”
“They’ll keep their distance until they work out who gets which. That may not be immediate.”
“So, Hannah and Miles stay in lockdown with your mother until your brothers figure it out? What are they supposed to do about their jobs and families? They’re going to be looking for them. For all of us.”
Nick held his cup out to her.
“Aw, thank you, but you keep it. You need it more than I do.” She could certainly use a drink, but it needed to have a much higher proof than what was in that cup.
“You’re a long way from home,” Mason said. “I imagine it’ll be a while before anyone finds you. It was dark, and we didn’t leave many tracks.”
“That slipped off your tongue so easily. I’m not licensed to practice psychology, but I’d bet my new car that you’re a sociopath.”
Nick leaned his head against his father’s chest and gnawed on his sippy’s spout.
Mason let out a long breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am not a sociopath,” he said in a hushed tone, likely not wanting to frighten the tiny kid. “But I do share a brain with my cougar half, and my cougar is a hunter. My point was only that we probably have a little time before anyone realizes you’re gone. The goddess sent me a dream, so we knew where to go looking—where we’d have the highest odds of success.”
“And you knew to take us three specifically.”
“Yes.” He dropped his hand from his nose and opened bloodshot eyes.
Exhausted.
Pity and opportunism warred inside her. She shouldn’t care he was tired—he was the cause of her own tiredness, after all—but there was something so damned pathetic about a tired man holding a tired kid. She wanted to take care of them.
She sighed. “Care to elaborate?”
“Sometimes, a Cougar has to wait for the right sign to know which mate is supposed to be his.”
“How did you know I was the one?”
“Because you grabbed my ass.”
His delivery was so flat and his expression so blank, she couldn’t be sure he was joking. Is he joking? She tried to remember grabbing him. The heist was something of a blur.
She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t grab your ass.”
He bobbed his eyebrows and curved his lips into something that almost resembled a smile. It could too easily be mistaken for a grimace. He shifted his weight again and again, ostensibly to lull Nick whose head was lolling precariously to one side. “Yeah, you did. I threw you over my shoulder. You tried to scratch me up. But then you grabbed my ass.”
“You decided I was the one because I grabbed your ass?”
“No, I’m just fucking with you. I knew it was you because of a dream I had before the hunt. My brothers don’t have goddess visitations in their dreams, so they don’t know for sure which mate to take, and all I know is that they’re supposed to pair off somehow with Hannah and Miles. And you did grab my ass.”
“I don’t remember,” she muttered under her breath, and peered into the stockpot. Not boiling. Boil, dammit.
“Shame. I think you enjoyed it.”
Knowing herself as well as she did, she was almost certain she had.
He walked toward the hall where the bathroom, and probably the bedrooms, were situated.
She stared down into the water pot yet again. Still not boiling. Her stomach gave an insistent growl. Nothing to be done for it at the moment, and with him being wide awake, sneaking out was pointless, so she headed toward the light in the hall and found Mason in a room that appeared to be half nursery, half office.
A heavy, scarred wood desk was pushed against one wall and a lovely crib against the opposite one.
She approached and let her fingers feel the smooth edge at the front of the crib. Gorgeous. Had a beautiful cherry stain and carved insets. Looked like …
She bent to squint at the wooden figures and grinned when she realized what it was. Leaping cougars, one after the other, going all around the crib. “This isn’t mass market.”
“No,” Mason said from the dresser. He opened one drawer, closed it, then tried another. He pulled out mismatched pajamas components and set them beside the changing pad. “Hank and I made it in a hurry the first time Nick stayed over.”
“I hate to admit it, but it’s a damned fine piece of furniture to have been made in a hurry.”
He chuckled. “You can’t see the mistakes. They’re all on the underside and in the back. We’d never made a crib before and somehow got the measurements wrong. It was too narrow for the mattress and we had to rip it apart and make it deeper.”
“It’s nice that your brothers help you.” Psychopaths wouldn’t help each other like that, would they? Building a last-minute crib sounded like something Gail would do for her, if either of them had been at all handy with tools or even reading instructions. They’d stay up all night, probably whining and blubbering all the way through the chore, but they’d get it done. Gail would chastise her for waiting until the last minute and scold her for getting herself into the mess in the first place, but she’d help. That’s what sisters did, and both she and Gail were reasonably normal.
Ellery sighed. If she’d stayed home and taken Gail up on her offer to ambush their grandfather and talk some sense into him about wild magic, she wouldn’t be in this mess. But she’d been tired of arguing with her family. Gail’s patience was inexhaustible, but Ellery was at the point where she just assumed they’d never get it. They’d never welcome them back into the fold. So, why was she the one who felt guilty? She hadn’t done anything wrong besides deciding, like Gail, to stop suppressing what she was. “Witch” wasn’t a curse word. It didn’t need to be sanitized, and the people who called themselves witches shouldn’t have to fit anyone else’s ideal of respectability. Either they were respectable or they weren’t.
It seemed so much easier for the shifters. The only time the concept of respectability came into play was when they cheated in fights.
Mason set Nick into the crib, pulled a pair of socks onto him, and blew a massive raspberry on his distended belly that started Nick’s legs to kicking in that froggy way babies did.
Sociopaths probably don’t put duckie socks on their laughing babies.
Maybe Mason had it worse than she did on the family front. She only had herself to worry about. No kids. Just a cat.
And Nick was such a sweet kid. Her mothering instincts had clicked on the moment Mason knocked on that truck window, and she couldn’t find the off switch. She might have been trying her damndest to avoid Nick’s father, but she couldn’t resist reaching into the crib and smoothing back his hair, listening to that gurgle while she did it. Poor little guy.
“Do you have a humidifier?” she asked.
“I don’t. Mom might.”
“Go get it.” She’d meant to sound matter-of-fact, not nasty, but given the aggressive jut of his chin, he’d obviously interpreted her tone as the latter.
She put her hands up in concession. “If you don’t mind.”
“Minding’s not the issue.”
“Then what is?”
“I’m Alpha.”
“And?”
His cheek twitched.
Oh. Right. She’d given him an order. She rolled her eyes. He’d have to get over that shit, just like the E.R. doctors did. “You’re not my alpha. Don’t get your knickers in a knot. I’m sure the rest of your cat pile is perfectly respectful.”
“The glaring.”
“What?”
“A group of cougars is called a glaring. And don’t make too many assumptions about how they behave or don’t behave.” He turned for the door, then stopped. “Stay here. I’ll be right back, and I’m taking the phone with me.”
She leaned her forearms against the crib rail and glared at him.
Yeah, she was going to run when she had the first chance, but she wasn’t going to leave a baby unattended. She wasn’t cruel.
Mason left.
Ellery looked down in the crib at Nick struggling to push onto his hands and knees.
“You’re tired. Go to sleep.”
He put his head down, thumb into his mouth, and stared at her.
“Don’t mind me. I won’t be here long. You don’t even need to memorize my face.” He’d be just one more fleeting encounter—a child she’d tend to for a while who’d forget all about her soon enough.
“Mah.”
“Nope. I don’t know where your mama is, but I’m pretty sure I don’t look like her unless your momma has more hair than a sheep has wool.”
She sighed and batted out a few of the larger tangles. Apparently, hair gel and camping trips didn’t mix. She was fairly sure she had a tumbleweed or two tangled up in that mess. She just had to confirm it. The OCD part of her demanded it.
“Be right back.” She padded down the hall to the bathroom and flicked on the light. One glimpse in the mirror told her what she already knew.
“Sweet baby Neptune.”
She smacked the light switch and sobbed into the darkness. How many people had seen her looking like that? She’d gone into the store like that. Yeah, the clerk had given her a bit of the skuzzy eyeball treatment, but she’d assumed it was because it was fifty-five degrees outside and Nick was dressed for a day at the beach. Hell, she didn’t know which was worse.
She walked to the kitchen to check the status of the boiling pot. The water had just started simmering. Groaning, she leaned against the counter’s edg
e and stared out the window at the movement in the distance. She made out one human shape and two, no three, things on four legs. Cats. Big ones.
“What the fuck?”
It didn’t look like they were just playing around.
Nick coughed—a dry expulsion of air she knew from experience had to be painful.
“Just hang in there, baby.” She squinted at the flickers of light behind Mrs. Foye’s house.
No, not lights. The way they moved—undulated—darting between one cat to the next marked it as something sentient. Calculating.
Spirit? “No, too aggressive. That’s a fucking demon. Unbelievable. I go halfway across the country and still can’t catch a break.”
She opened drawers until she found knives. “Shit. Shit.” She didn’t know what kind of demon it was, but did know they couldn’t let it roam. She’d been assaulted by enough of the noncorporeal beings in recent months that she rarely left her house without her athame—her ceremonial dagger—but as far as she knew, it’d been left at the campsite. She grabbed a wood-handled steak knife and called out to Nick as she ran to the door, “Be right back. I hope.”
She couldn’t believe she was running into the shit, but her friends were at Mrs. Foye’s place, and there was a baby to think about. They couldn’t protect themselves.
An amber-eyed cat snarled at her as neared the triangle.
“Ellery, dear, I believe that’s an incubus. Don’t get close,” Mrs. Foye called. She stood with her back against her side door which Hannah and Miles stood behind, gawping at the spectacle.
Ellery ignored her, and for that matter Hannah and Miles, too. She had an ex-incubus as a brother-in-law. If he weren’t an ex-incubus, she would have stabbed him just like she was about to do to the swirly glowy thing.
She grimaced. “Ew, they’re ugly when they don’t have bodies.” When they did have bodies—whether stolen or born into them—they tended to be irresistible. The demon at hand was probably out to find a body for himself.
That damned cougar growled at her again, and she rolled her eyes. Has to be Mason. The three cats were of similar build, but their colors were all a bit different. The one nearest her had the darkest fur and brownest eyes. If their Cougar colors reflected their man colors, chances were good Mason would be the darkest.
