The Cougar's Pawn

by Holley Trent

  “Shh!” He looked behind him and double-checked that there was no one in earshot. A shifter might have been able to hear her from across the building. He whispered, “Let’s just say that she keeps some very interesting company.”

  “You’re killing me.” The drawer popped open and she counted out five twenties. “I’d like to talk to her. Invite her to check out our coven. Probably not as strong as the one she’s used to, but we have good cake.”

  “Grocery store cake? That frosted sandpaper you sell two days past its natural expiration?”

  She shrugged. “It’s free. Sue me.”

  “I’ll let her know about your invitation. I’m not really ready to let her out of my sight yet, though. Hasn’t told me yes yet.”

  “Oh.” She gave a slow nod and pressed her fists to her bony hips. “Ugh. Man, good luck, kiddo. Better hope she’s as practical as your mother.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “I imagine you wouldn’t be ready to let her come, then. You could always tag along as long as you keep that cat energy of yours reined in. It disrupts the flow of magic and puts all the ladies on edge.”

  “Bingo starting five minutes late puts you ladies on edge.”

  “Be like that, then, Mason Foye, so I won’t have to tell you what I shook out my grapevine about your Cougars.”

  Oh, hell. He took one more glance behind him, and as there was no one close, he leaned in. “What happened?”

  She circled his savings on the receipt and folded the paper to wallet size. “Nothing’s happened yet, but you’d better watch your back. One of my coven mate’s daughters went on a blind date with a Cougar. She was too ashamed to say who, but he was allegedly foaming at the mouth talking about how it was time for some leadership. He got so drunk, he probably didn’t remember he’d even said it the next day. I know you think I’m paranoid, but watch your back. I’d hate for anything to happen to you, and that’s not just because you’re my godson.”

  He sighed. “What’s one more fight, Millie?”

  “You need to figure out how to make them not even want to try you, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I get you.”

  “So, see you on Saturday?”

  “No promises.” He tucked the bills and receipt into his wallet. “I’ll try to bring her to your cookout on Saturday if she hasn’t hexed my nuts off by then.”

  “She can do that?”

  “Don’t know. She’s threatened to, though. I don’t really want to push her to prove she actually can.”

  “No, I imagine you wouldn’t. And Mason?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t mean to pile on while you’re busy—”

  “Liar.”

  She stuck out her tongue and nudged her reading glasses up. “There’s some unidentified scat behind the candle store. Might be from a wild animal, but there are man-sized footprints a few yards away. Can you check it out and see if—”

  “Ugh.” Fucking out-of-towner shifters. Maybe it was the same type that had scratched up Darnell. At times, he wondered if the local groups made the place a bit too welcoming.

  He found Ellery and Nick out front on the coin-operated horse ride, but the more interesting ride at the moment was the one pulling away from the curb.

  Edgar Sheehan hit his brakes and gave Mason a mock salute through the open window of his Ford Fairlane. “Afternoon, Alpha.”

  Mason tipped his chin in acknowledgement.

  Nick squealed behind him, but he didn’t turn. He kept his gaze locked on Edgar who was now leaning onto his door and grinning in that smarmy way he did. Mason didn’t understand it, but women seemed to like it well enough. He hoped Ellery wasn’t one of those women. Had they been talking before Mason stepped outside?

  If Ralphie tipped this shitstain off …

  “Who’s your friend?” Edgar asked. “I tried to say hi to Nick and she gave me the stink-eye. I guess I can’t blame her.” He laughed and shook his head. “What with stranger danger and all. Can’t be too safe nowadays.”

  Now Mason did turn to look.

  Nick grinned and waved his arms wildly as the horse dipped and down, and Ellery just held him there, cutting a sideways glare at Edgar.

  Interesting.

  “Nice seeing you,” he said to Edgar. Mason hoped he’d get the point and go away.

  Edgar drummed his fingers on the windowsill for a few beats, twisting his lips side to side, before driving away. “See you soon, Alpha,” he shouted.

  “Not if I can help it,” Mason muttered.

  The whole fucking Sheehan family was shady. Dad had always skirted around the whys and hows when it came to the Sheehans, ostensibly because he didn’t want to taint his sons’ perceptions of them. Mason had learned plenty enough on his own through the years that he didn’t need Dad’s lessons. Everyone knew the Sheehans had ambitions to rule the town in any way they could. They hadn’t yet figured out a way to make it happen.

  Ellery gave him a pleading look when he finally turned back to the horse. “Found a quarter in your truck. That quarter has kept this thing moving for five minutes. I think it’s busted.”

  “Good luck for Nick, then.”

  She crossed her eyes.

  “Hey, I’m certain you were once so easily thrilled.”

  “I’m sure there may have been some point, though I can’t remember it.”

  “You need to let your hair down and have a little more fun.”

  “I thought I was doing that by going camping, and look what happened.”

  “Touché.”

  “So … first things first. Guy in the rust bucket is a Cougar?”

  Mason leaned against the shopping cart and forced out a breath. “Yes.”

  “He has a big energy field. Happens sometimes with shifters who have massive egos.”

  Mason opened his mouth to ask how big his was, but he was pretty sure he’d be opening himself up to a fresh insult if he did. He didn’t want to give her any new reasons to denigrate him, even if he deserved it.

  She tipped her head toward the store window. “Lady at the register. She’s a witch, right?”

  “Yep. I guess you can identify each other the same way shifters can.”

  “I can usually point out other natural witches, yes, though I may not necessarily be able to tell what kind of witch they are or who or what their power originates from. My brother-in-law has been teaching my sister and me how to tell the different power flavors apart, but that’s not exactly Witchcraft 101. It’s easy for him. He’s over two hundred years old and has been there and done that. Gail and I are still at the bottom of the learning curve, and she’s way farther ahead than I am.”

  “Two hundred? What is he?”

  She cringed. “That’s … complicated.”

  He waited for her to elaborate, but she hadn’t yet demonstrated possession of a strong urge to volunteer information, and likely wasn’t going to start. He’d have to figure out how to get words out of her soon. He wanted to know what made the witch tick. Him, not his eager inner cougar.

  “I bet having a live-in tutor helps,” he said.

  “I’d say you were right.”

  The horse stopped. Nick pouted, but evidently forgot why he was sad as soon as Ellery picked him up. No crying on her watch, apparently.

  Shaking his head, Mason pushed the cart toward the truck. “You working witchcraft on my kid?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “He’s way too calm.”

  “Is he generally not?”

  “Not that calm. You two seem to be in sync.”

  “Maybe being a witch makes me a little more intuitive than average. I try to preempt any distress. Same thing I do at work.”

  “Did you always know you wanted to be a nurse?”

  “I think since around the time I found out such things as Werewolves existed.”

  Mason opened the back of the truck and started shoving in the grocery bags. “That’s a story I’d like to hear
.”

  “It’s not a long one. My sister and I were at summer camp one year and one of the little girls in our cabin ran out into the night. We thought she was sleepwalking, so we followed her to make sure she was all right. Turned out it was her first full moon shift. It was premature for her. She writhed there on the ground in so much pain and we couldn’t do anything for her. From that point on, I’d decided I would do what I could to make people feel better in whatever way I could.”

  He slammed the tailgate shut and leaned against the bumper. “Whatever happened to the Wolf?”

  “Oh. I see her pretty regularly. Her brother is alpha in the little sliver of Appalachia they’re from, but she lives on the coast now, near my sister.”

  “You seem to hobnob with all sorts of powerful characters.”

  She shrugged. “Blame my sister. If it weren’t for her, I’d be tucked away in my quiet little witchy world and I wouldn’t know about any of the stuff I’ve learned in the past year.”

  “You miss it?” It finally settled into him that she was carrying his kid on her hip; he took him from her only to immediately wonder why he’d bothered. He needed Nick stuck there, and it wasn’t like Nick was screaming for Mason’s attention at the moment. In fact, with that jutted bottom lip, the tiny traitor seemed a bit put out at having been uprooted. Mason couldn’t blame him. She didn’t even seem to mind that Nick squished her tits. Never before had Mason so envied an infant.

  “Miss what?”

  “Your quiet little witchy world. Witches around here are the complete opposite, by the way. They’re very present in the community. Do a lot of service projects.”

  She furrowed her brow. “No. I’ve gotten so I prefer chaos. I’m used to it in the emergency room, so it’s hard going home to a quiet house. Quiet life.”

  “If chaos is what you want, I can enlist you right now.”

  “And along with that fabulous prize, a lifetime membership to the Cougar mate club, right?” She let her eyes cross again, which he was starting to think her way of expressing semi-perturbedness rather than outright pisstivity. It was cute in a frustrating sort of way.

  “Yeah, that’s the package deal.” Between the demons and his brothers’ antics, Jill popping up whenever the hell she felt like it, the Woodworks, and Cougar ranch hand shenanigans, there’d be no shortage of drama, if she really wanted it. It may have been too much even for a woman who claimed to.

  He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled out the cash he’d gotten from Millie. “If you want to go grab a couple of changes of clothes at the department store, I’ll wait here with Nick.”

  She looked at the money, then him, then the money again.

  “It’s all right. I feel bad for leaving all your stuff at the campsite. If it had been dark, we might have been able to run back for the rest of it.”

  She took the money. “Rangers will probably wonder why we abandoned the camp.”

  Shit. He hadn’t thought about that. Since neither of his brothers had yet decided on which lady they’d like and hadn’t started their countdowns, he’d have to send them to do clean-up or else convince some Cougars local to that area to do it. He hated having outsiders in his business, so Hank and Sean it was going to be. He palmed his phone in his pocket. “Twenty minutes enough?”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “No offense.”

  “And I bet everyone who works there knows you and wouldn’t rescue me if I asked.”

  “Why do you insist that you’re in need of rescue?”

  She walked away without answering.

  “I think we need to try a little harder, buddy,” he said to Nick as he punched Sean’s number into his phone. “You keep on being cute and charming and I’ll try to be less of an asshole. We’ll see how that works.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ellery squinted through Mason’s dirty windshield as they approached the ranch and tried to make sense of the spiral of dust coming off the desert.

  The engine groaned and sputtered as Mason pushed down harder on the accelerator.

  “What is that?” she asked. “You get twisters out here?”

  “No.” He didn’t bother steering around the bumps and holes in the ranch road, just gunned the engine harder and started unbuttoning his shirt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Undressing. Grab the steering wheel.”

  “Mason!”

  He let go, and she grabbed the wheel, because what else was she going to do with him careening seventy miles per hour down a dirt road?

  “Demon coming out of the hellmouth. I don’t know if my brothers have seen it yet, but I need to keep it from gaining too much strength. There’s only so much I can do. Shit, I’d hoped to have a couple of days’ peace from these things.”

  “I can help. What did you do with my athame?”

  “Your what?” He grabbed the wheel in time to steer around a sharp turn.

  “A dagger I had in my bag. Real witches don’t use wands—we use daggers, and I need mine.”

  “It’s probably at campsite, sweetie.”

  “Ugh!” She balled her hands into fists and tried to tamp down her mounting hysterics.

  She could handle chaos—had been forced to for the past year—but couldn’t do it without the right tools. She didn’t even have a steak knife this time, and she didn’t think that discarded plastic straw on the floor was going to do anything more than scratch a cornea.

  Mason slammed on the brakes and had his pants half off as soon as his feet hit the ground. “Stay here,” he said.

  Hell no, she wasn’t going to stay there. And do what, cower? Nope.

  One furry streak hurtled from the direction of Foye Woodworks. Hank, probably, as Sean was supposed to have gone out on that installation job. They were one short. She didn’t know how many Cougars they normally needed to push back a demon, but fewer didn’t sound like a good thing. She cranked down the truck window. “Agatha?” Please be outside.

  “There you are. I’ve been keeping the office windows open. The staff is going to revolt if another bird flies in here. What’s up? Is that Cougar of yours being an idiot? I may not be able to take you away, but I can make him hurt.”

  Ellery cringed. Agatha’s idea of putting a hurting on someone tended to require either plastic surgeons or undertakers at the end. Mason may have been a jerk, but he was a hot jerk, and somehow, it seemed a sacrilege to change that. “Not necessary. And he’s not my Cougar.”

  “I’m certain his goddess would disagree. What’s going on?”

  The Cougar she thought was Mason was literally running circles around the wraith-like entity and trying to push it back. Ellery had no idea what kind of demon that was, but the energy disturbance it put off was much larger than the incubus from the previous day.

  “Another demon attack, and I’ve got my hands tied. Figuratively, this time.”

  The second Cougar jumped through the demon as if it were a circus hoop and he was just a trained show cat.

  The demon seemed to break apart, and when it rematerialized, it seemed a bit slower. She had no idea how long it would take it to recover, but she was guessing not long.

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t know. On approach, it looked like a cyclone. When it’s still, it’s black and wispy.”

  “Goddammit. Give me a moment.”

  “Agatha?”

  No response.

  The demon had obviously regained some strength, as it coiled and threw itself like an arrow toward Mrs. Foye, who’d run out while Ellery was chatting.

  Mrs. Foye tossed something at it and threw herself out of the way before it could barrel into her.

  A loud, sickening growl came from somewhere within the entity as it pooled into a dark, misty glut on the ground.

  Ellery didn’t think for a moment that it was done terrorizing. The Cougars hissed and circled, and Mrs. Foye ran up and tossed at it a handful of whatever it was she had in her pockets.

/>   That just made it angry. It reared back like a snake about to strike, and Mrs. Foye ran in the direction opposite of the truck, drawing it away.

  She wasn’t very fast, but the Cougars were, and they kept the thing from getting too close to their mother.

  Agatha appeared beside the truck and yanked the door open. “Here.” She dropped Gail’s athame onto Ellery’s lap.

  Ellery gave Nick a remorseful glance and sprang from the truck. She locked him in as if that mechanism could keep an insistent demon out and ran after Agatha who was already drumming up a strong wind to pull the entity back toward them.

  “Go guard the truck!” Agatha yelled at Mrs. Foye.

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  Mrs. Foye ran for it.

  “Do you remember that sigil, Ellery?” Agatha spun the demon into a dizzying vacuum, and Ellery couldn’t tell if the ear-piercing shrieks were coming from it or the atmospheric conditions.

  “I—yes. Yes, I do.”

  “You got one chance, so make it fast. You cats keep it from trying to escape in the other direction if we can’t get it.”

  The cougars looked at each other, but soon got into place near the fence.

  “Sending it to you now, Ellery. It’ll only stop moving for a second before it starts spinning in the other direction. Get it as soon as it starts to slow.”

  “Got it.”

  Agatha tossed it as if were just the spheres of a yo-yo and she held the string.

  As it fought against the wind and dirt Agatha had bound it up in, its rotations slowed, and Ellery readied herself with the borrowed dagger.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Anywhere,” Agatha said. “Makes no difference.”

  All Ellery needed was for the lines of her sigil to cross each other, so while it needed to slow enough for her to carve it, she certainly didn’t want it to stop enough to catch its bearings.

  It slowed more, more, and she ran up close, turning with it as it moved and writing the curse into the mist that comprised its body. Its bombastic, sonic scream sent her hurtling backward a few yards and shook the ground beneath her as she fell, but she scrambled to her hands and knees in time to see the hellmouth pulling it home.

  She collapsed onto her belly and let go of the knife. “What the hell was that?”