Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (22 page)

Coyote trotted over and nuzzled him, head-butting like a German shepherd trying to get his master’s attention. “Old friend,” Gramps said, “I’m glad you’re back.” He put his arm around Coyote.

“Silly shaman. Your shadows got so dark you couldn’t see me, but I was still here, waiting for someone to slap some sense into your head.” Coyote raised a forepaw, put it on Sam’s shoulder. “About time someone finally had the guts. She’s a good kid.”

Something in the gesture made Cara squint at the avatar.

The shaggy canine form was definitely there, but superimposed on it was a straggly old man even skinnier than Gramps, his gray hair in braids, a Stetson on his head, wearing an ancient Coyote-and-Roadrunner T-shirt similar to one Cara had seen her grandfather wear often.

He had a hand on her grandfather’s arm, doing one of those slightly awkward guy hugs. She couldn’t see Coyote’s face, but the air around him trembled with moisture, like it did when Grand-mère wept.

“Your grandkid’s okay,” Coyote said gruffly. Then he turned, staring at her intently through two sets of superimposed eyes, almost canine and not really human.

The effect was creepy. She suspected it was supposed to be, because he had to know she could see both forms.

But both faces were friendly, and both looked a little teary-eyed. “Come here, kid,” he said in that raspy old voice of his.

Gingerly, she obeyed.

He extended a hand/paw for her to shake. “You still have a lot to learn about magic,” he said, “but you’ve got the spirit to be a shaman, and the ability to think on your feet and come up with a way to turn a situation to your advantage. This is going to be great!”

“Think Cara has any idea what she’s in for?” her grandfather asked, a bit hoarse from laughing, a bit sniffly from crying.

Coyote literally howled. “Not hardly,” he choked out. “
I’m
not sure what I’m in for, except it should be funny, and by funny I mean funny telling the story afterward but occasionally painful and embarrassing while it’s happening. But I promise you, Sam, I’ll take good care of her. And you.”

She found Coyote’s honesty oddly comforting.

At least if she was confused, she wasn’t alone.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Jack ran, not bothering to shift because he wanted the advantages of his wordy brain.

Okay,
want
might not be the correct world. He’d rather go cougarside and find some tasty animal to kill and eat, which would relieve his frustration, but he needed the advantages of the wordy brain.

Running wasn’t the right response, but he didn’t know what was.

Things had gotten fucked up beyond belief.

Cara had rejected him, both as a guide and as a mate.

Then again, what kind of asshole tries to beat up Coyote? What sensible woman would want to associate herself with someone that dumb?

Bad enough if he’d taken a swing at some random old guy who’d perved on Cara. Cara was perfectly capable of deciding for herself if some flirty old man was offensive or funny and kind of charming. She was a cop and a shaman, not a helpless flower, and she’d take offense at him beating up his elders.

But taking a swing at Coyote surpassed any stupid thing in the history of stupid. It took a lot to get Trickster pissed off at you. He/she definitely had a sense of humor and could see the funny side of most mistakes. But this time Jack had gone too far.

You just didn’t go around fighting with avatars, even if they were saying crude things to your mate.

Especially if your mate might not actually be your mate.

The cougar was firmly convinced Cara was his. Part of Jack’s wordy self liked that idea, but he figured it wasn’t the smartest part of him. His smarter parts could get behind seeing where things might go with Cara. She was sexy, smart, tough, magical—everything he’d figured he wanted in a girlfriend. But from “friend with benefits and potential for more” to “mate” was a big leap.

Now that he had some distance from Cara, from the smell of her skin still imprinted with his scent, he sounded like a nutcase to himself and could only imagine how he’d sounded to her. They’d both experienced a certain amount of lust at first sight. Maybe they had the potential for more, but between her recent losses and the whole thing about possibly being her spirit guide—not to mention the attacks on the village—he should count himself lucky she was giving him a chance at friends with benefits.

What the fuck had possessed him to claim her in that crude, rough way?

He was well outside the village’s protected territory now, running on the side of the main road toward the next town, and his wordy body was begging for mercy, but he couldn’t get out of his own head.

He’d blown it with Cara, as a lover, as a teacher, as a guide. Forget being her mate. He’d be lucky if she ever spoke to him again.

And he’d beat on Coyote, which mean he’d be lucky if his magic didn’t backlash for the next twenty years. That would be annoying in any case, but with the attacks on the village still an unsolved threat, it was potentially deadly.

Although Coyote had laughed and didn’t seem all that upset. After all,
Coyote had his own history of doing crazy things because of females (not to mention males and the occasional watermelon, lake or star). Maybe it would be okay with Coyote.

But Cara might never speak to him again.

He got the oddest thought image from his cougarside, something he could only interpret as
“Relax. Everything’s under control.”
His wordside couldn’t quite see things that way, but with the cougar so relaxed, some of the sick tension eased up. Maybe his animalside had seen or smelled something his wordy side had missed.

Either that or the cougarside was drunk on mating hormones. Natural enough, but Cara had every reason to be freaking out, and she’d figured out a way to break the spirit-guide bond to create space between them. He’d wanted that space too, wanted a chance to think, but realizing they were mated changed everything. How could he get Cara to understand what it meant to be mated when it wasn’t something humans normally did? How would he get her to forgive him and give him another chance?

“Get her alone,” a deep voice said somewhere to his left. “Don’t give her any choice except to listen to you. Women appreciate a firm hand.”

Jack stopped running so abruptly that he flailed like a cartoon character.

A man walked toward him through the tangled bushes that lined the side of the road. Dressed all in black, from his bowler hat to his wool coat, which looked like something that belonged in a museum, to his boots, except for a soft, expensive-looking gray scarf, he looked like he should be strolling in a cemetery smoking a clove cigarette and collecting inspiration for lousy poetry.

His eyes were older than his twenty-something face, though. Way older, not Grand-mère ancient, but not just a young man bitter beyond his years. Definitely a Different of some kind. But what kind? Reading Jack’s thoughts smacked of sorcery, but sorcerers lived normal human life spans.

Unless they dealt with demons or other dark powers.

Grand-mère had said her struggle with the unknown sorcerer had started centuries ago. This had to be the asshole in question.

The one who’d tortured and killed Ben. And he didn’t seem to recognize Jack.

Jake thought fast. He could go on the offensive, shift to cougar, which would like as not end up with one dead sorcerer, one damaged cougar, and no information.

Or he could try another tactic. This guy must be grasping at straws; he couldn’t possibly be dumb enough to believe for long that anyone from the village would cooperate with him. But Jack might be able to keep the sorcerer talking rather than fighting long enough to get some answers. After that, he could try the shift-and-attack idea.

“You might have a point,” Jack said, trying to sound casual, as if he had no idea the guy was trying to manipulate him, “with a different kind of woman, but girls with magic aren’t so easy to control. Besides, no woman is worth that kind of effort. I mean, she’s hot, and it was going well for a while, but if it doesn’t work with her, another one will come along.” He let out a disgusted sigh. “Easy to say now. You know how it is.”

The sorcerer chuckled. “The world is full of lovely women, but we all let ourselves get worked up over a particular one sometimes, and I can tell you’re fixated on this woman. Nothing but misery when that happens.”

Jack shook his head, his sorrowful expression not entirely faked. “No kidding. But what can you do? Joking aside, you can’t just kidnap a woman and force her to want you.”

“Of course you can! I can tell you have powers by the way you didn’t find it strange that I knew what you were thinking. I can help you get what you want.” The sorcerer leaned closer, pitched his voice to a silky, intimate whisper. “She’ll be putty in your hands, my friend. Putty in your hands. Imagine it. Every fantasy you’ve ever had, even the most depraved and dangerous, she will yield to. Take her in cougar form, tear at her flesh… She will come on your cock as she bleeds for you.”

The voice slithered under his skin, stroking places inside Jack that he had always refused to acknowledge, opening doors he’d always kept firmly locked.

The scene the sorcerer described played out in his mind, simultaneously disgusting and arousing him. Feline sex was rough, full of biting and take-downs. And he was a predator, keyed to the scent of blood. The thrill of the hunt coursed through him strongly, playing on both cougar and wordy so that he might end a hunt turned on, his blood-lust morphing to desire. The sorcerer’s voice dove into his mind, found every place where blood and sex coincided and played on them, weaving them into a fantasy that wasn’t his but careened through his body as if he’d dreamed it up to enliven a lonely night. He tasted Cara’s sweet juices and the coppery tang of her blood, smelled the sharp scent of fear mingling with the musk of arousal, felt her body tensing to flee but yielding bonelessly, too stunned by a combination of panic and lust to fight anymore.

Yielding.

Even when he’d been inside her, she’d never yielded. That was one of the things he liked about her, that sex was a battle they both won. Cara liked to play rough. She’d liked it when he’d bitten her, but she’d broken skin on him too. He bet that, given the right circumstances, she had a kinky streak about a mile wide, but he couldn’t imagine her being the kind of submissive who just caved. She’d fight until the pleasure became overwhelming. Then she’d want to switch the next night and see if she could take him down.

The thought of the real, gritty Cara returned him to clarity between one breath and another.

Damn, Grand-mère was right. He thought way too much with the little head, and it let him get drunk on a sorcerer’s words like a normy.

But two could play the manipulation game. For all that this one was clearly a powerful sorcerer, he didn’t seem to understand people very well. And when it came to trickery, no one could possibly beat one of Trickster’s own chosen people who also happened to be a shaman.

He smiled at the sorcerer, not his own real, predator’s grin that made normies nervous, but the anxious half smile of a man at wit’s end over a woman.

It didn’t hurt that he really was at wit’s end over a woman. Evil or not, the guy was perceptive.

“
Sorciére,
” Jack said, “tell me more.”

The man laughed. This time, all his defenses back in place, Jack could actually feel the slick hipster laugh trying to insinuate into him, seeking a weakness in his shields, a dark place in his soul.

“
Sorciére
?
You see clearly. You are what I thought you to be, a man unlike the ordinary dull run of humanity. A man who understands that men such as ourselves are not to be trifled with. Yet a man of these times also, one who has some reservations about using the power for such ends. Pity.”

The stranger adjusted his cashmere scarf as he spoke.

If Jack hadn’t been aware he was dealing with a sorcerer, he might not have noticed the ritual gesture concealed by the movement, might not have seen the flare of fuchsia power around those long, leather-clad fingertips.

The nice thing about being a shaman was that other magic-users might recognize your power but found it extraordinarily hard to gauge, confounded by the auric rainbow. And sorcerers didn’t read auras well anyway.

Jack envisioned a cast iron skillet bouncing the sorcerer’s spell back upon the caster. He whiffed it as it came near. Smelled like something to fuck with his head further.

“I don’t think so,” he said genially. “I’m not some hick hedge-witch you can confound with a few spells, and, woman trouble or not, I’m not a horny boy. You want me to play your game, play straight with me. No one wanders out of the woods and offers a man a way to win back the woman of his dreams out of altruism, so what’s in it for you?”

The sorcerer roared. No spell in the laughter this time, at least none Jack’s magic could detect, although his cougarside still growled at the bowler-hatted stranger. “You’d be amazed,” the sorcerer finally choked out, “how few remember to ask that. I like you.” He extended a hand. “René Chenier.”

Jack didn’t take the hand. He wasn’t that dumb. “Good to meet you, Mr. Chenier. But again I ask, what’s in this for you?” Not that he expected anything like a straight answer, but maybe he’d be able to deduce something from whatever bullshit the sorcerer tried to feed him. Or it might mean something to Grand-mère if he couldn’t figure it out.