Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (23 page)

“An ally. I have skills you lack; you have tricks I lack. Help me get what I seek, and I’ll help you get what you seek.”

Did the guy not realize Jack was one of the shamans who’d been fighting his minions? Maybe Chenier had been getting most of his information thirdhand through crazy skinwalkers. If the sorcerer knew the numbers of his opponents in the village but not their faces, this was interesting indeed, and something they might be able to use against them. Worth seeing what else the sorcerer might accidentally reveal. Jack would keep the bullshit flowing just a little while longer.

Jack couldn’t help wondering whether something else was afoot. Chenier
smelled
like he believed Jack’s lies. Jack had better keep on his toes in case something even spookier than Chenier was manipulating both of them—one of those demons that liked to play with power-hungry sorcerers, maybe. But the thing with demons was they died pretty easily if you wanted to play with them only like a cat toyed with prey.

“Sounds reasonable,” he said. Actually, it sounded dangerously vague and scary as all hell—and that was why Jack was going to pretend to sign on. The sorcerer was after something, and it was almost certainly something involving a way into Couguar-Caché. Violence hadn’t worked, so now they were using guile. But if the sorcerer was hoping to use him, he’d picked the wrong target. You can’t sell to a salesman, and you can’t trick a trickster. “We might be able to work something out, depending on what it is you want.”

He still didn’t take the sorcerer’s outstretched hand—but the sorcerer reached out, put a gloved hand on his shoulder and said, in a falsely hearty tone, “Welcome.”

His cougarside snarled in what Jack thought was rage and realized too late was warning. The world swirled around him, tinted with fuchsia and oily black. It didn’t feel like sorcery alone, but like sorcery mixed with something else, and he couldn’t fight his way out of it like he normally could with sorcerers’ mindfucks. And try as he might, he couldn’t squirm away from the sorcerer’s hand on his shoulder, the formerly light touch suddenly the weight of the world.

“And so it begins,” the sorcerer said, his accent now thick and ancient, not the voice of a modern Frenchman and certainly not the familiar tones of a bilingual Quebecois. “So it begins and so it will end. Your grandmother will be so proud.”

“I know you now,
cougar who should have been of my human blood,”
he heard. The voice in his head spoke French, a French that sounded different from what he knew, a French he realized was archaic but he still understood.
“I know all about you, how the gift of the manitou is corrupted by the blood of the animal she chose over me. I know the weakness in your bloodline, how to exploit it, how your mate weakens you and you will do anything to keep her. You are not the one I seek, but you will guide me to her. To them. The oldest and the youngest, the child you spawned with the human who now rightly rejects you.

“They should have been mine.

“And I will have them…with your help. And perhaps your lovely witch as well.”

The sorcerer must think he was Rafe, Jack realized, and that the woman he craved was Elissa. He didn’t have time to process that knowledge, though. He was being sucked under. Jack fought, both the wordside and the cougar, tearing with claws and magic at the web of words woven around them.

But it was too late.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Rafe had stopped by to invite Gramps for dinner and extended the invitation to Cara as well. She had no idea where Jack was and didn’t know if she wanted to know, but that wasn’t why she accepted the invitation.

It was much simpler than that. Cara, raised in a world of microwaves and takeout, was still struggling to cook on the woodstove. With the day’s distractions, she hadn’t gotten anything started and faced the gloomy prospect of oatmeal for dinner again, because she’d learned the hard way that the brace of rabbits Jude had given her would need long, slow stewing to be palatable.

Instead of oatmeal alone, though, she was enjoying an evening with friends and family, one filled with good food, good conversation and surprisingly good serviceberry wine. Elissa had made polenta, which caught the rich gravy, flavored with dried mushrooms, from a rabbit stew far better than anything Cara could have created with a twenty-first-century kitchen, let alone a woodstove. Elissa, she noticed, ate around the rabbit. The home-canned tomatoes still tasted of summer sun. Baby Jocelyn was passed from lap to lap, reveling in the attention.

A surprisingly normal evening, Cara couldn’t help thinking, considering the cast of characters and the fact that Lynx, Coyote and the cougar who wasn’t exactly Rafe’s cougarside were with them. “They’re eating the smells,” her grandfather explained.

Jack’s name wasn’t mentioned once, to her relief.

If someone asked her, she couldn’t honestly say if she was disgusted with him or with herself for not being more disgusted with him.

She was just glad no one was asking.

Cara took the baby gingerly. She hadn’t spent a lot of time dealing with kids and was always afraid she’d break them. Jocelyn, though, was a solid armful who seemed in no danger of breaking and, far from crying or leaking, giggled and tugged on Cara’s long hair as Cara leaned forward to—daringly—kiss her forehead.

Jocelyn giggled at that too. Damn, she was a cheerful kid. Except when she wasn’t, of course, and then, even next-door, Cara got to hear about Jocelyn’s displeasure with damp diapers, hunger or whatever had jarred her baby world. Nightmares, apparently, though what an infant who’d never known anything but being the little queen of all she surveyed could have nightmares about was a mystery. It was, in fact, a matter of some speculation in the village, because not only could a good chunk of town hear the wails, the psychic types could sense how scared the poor kid was. The best theory was that she was picking up on everyone else’s fears about loups-garous and skinwalkers and had no other way to let it out.

At the moment, though, Jocelyn was in happy-baby mode.

So far, so good.

Cara and Jocelyn studied each other quizzically. With her three good-looking parents, it was no surprise the baby was adorable, with honey skin and Elissa’s amber eyes and hair that was as soft and wildly curly as her mother’s but as dark as either father’s. Didn’t look like a super-powered mini-witch, though, just like a cute, bright baby.

At least if you didn’t look at her aura. It hadn’t settled into a pattern yet, nothing to indicate if she was a shaman or a witch or a dual or one of the unique combos that cropped up in Grand-mère’s bloodline, but damn it was bright and big. Way too big for such a little person.

It was disturbing, so much as-yet unfocused power in such a tiny body. Cara did her best to block out the aura, but Jocelyn was neon. Cuddly, alarming neon.

The baby stared at her so intently it seemed like Jocelyn was reading
her
aura. Maybe she was. Even though she wouldn’t know what it meant yet, it was likely the child could see the pretty colors. Many witches were born with rudimentary magics, which must make parenting baby witches extra nerve-racking.

The baby smiled a goofy toothless grin and reached out one hand to touch her cheek.

“Awww…” Cara leaned into the infant caress, enjoying the little hand’s softness and surprising warmth.

A door blasted open in Cara’s mind, and suddenly she was elsewhere.

Men were milling around in a smoky room, a bar or pub, she thought. Most of them were grubby and ill-kempt, but one man, handsome in a dangerous way, stood out for his elegant menace. Well-cut black clothing that looked to be from another era, a long black coat, an operatic scarf.

He was speaking, but it sounded like nonsense syllables. The others responded to him with cheers that sounded like the voices of the damned.

She narrowly restrained herself from cheering with them, then realized she was getting drunk on the man’s voice without understanding a word he was saying.

The room throbbed with oily power. Sorcerer, then, and it was good thing all she could make out was the rise and fall of his voice, because if that was enough to roll her, she’d hate to know what would happen if she could understand him.

In the gibberish, she made out two words:
couguar maudit
. Damn cougar.

Somewhere, a cougar—was it Jack’s cougar or someone else’s?—snarled warning.

Cara jumped and came back to herself just in time to keep Jocelyn from tumbling off her lap.

No blood, nothing obviously weird and otherworldly. It looked and sounded like a meeting where the speaker dressed like a steampunker. And yet the whole thing stank of evil. “Hell and damnation!”

“What’s wrong?” everyone but Elissa asked. Elissa merely shot her a worried look as she grabbed Jocelyn.

“I think I just saw the loup-garou leader talking to his men. But I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I’m pretty sure he was speaking French, but I only picked out two words:
couguar maudit
.” She rubbed her eyes. “I speak decent French. I’m not sure why I couldn’t understand more.”

“I can guess,” Elissa said softly, stroking her daughter’s dark hair. “You know French, but Jocelyn doesn’t. She’s heard those two words before, though—usually from Grand-mère teasing Rafe—so they make as much sense to her as anything does to a baby her age. The rest just sounds like blah-blah-blah.”

Elissa’s voice was calm and gentle, but her aura flared, spiky with anxiety.

Rafe and Jude rose from the table as one and flanked the woman and baby protectively, touching Elissa. Jude’s eyes didn’t look human.

Gramps began chanting under his breath, drumming out a rhythm on the table. The shields around the house, already thick, grew another layer, this one the virulent plaid of tacky golf pants.

“I don’t understand,” Cara said, only she was afraid she did.

“Jocelyn’s a seer.” The edges of Elissa’s aura quivered. “I suspected it, but I hoped I was wrong. I’ve felt her fright and confusion and sometimes her joy, but I never got a clear image. It seems you did, through her.”

Cara shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. “I guess there are advantages to lousy shields, because now we know the sorcerers are up to something. Unfortunately, I don’t know what, because I was seeing everything through the eyes of an infant.”

The door opened—people in Couguar-Caché didn’t bother knocking unless the house was rocking. “Who’s up to something?” Jack said cheerily. “Am I too late to cadge some dinner?”

Jocelyn burst into loud wails. Lynx bristled. Coyote whined.

Cara did a quick check of his aura, just to make sure it was really him. It was.

“Did I come at a bad time?” He sidled in the door anyway.

Over the baby’s shrieks, Elissa said, “Yes. But you need to know what’s going on.”

“I had a vision,” Cara said, not meeting his eyes. “Actually, Jocelyn had the vision, and I shared it, which is disturbing in about ten thousand ways. The point is, the gang of sorcerer-thugs is up to something. They were having a big meeting, some dude who dressed like it was still the nineteenth century ranting on and on. But I have no idea where they are, and the only words I could pick out were
couguar maudit
.”

Something popped into her head then.

She shouldn’t say it. It was too lighthearted, completely inappropriate for the moment, which was exactly why she had to say it. “I didn’t know he knew you, Jack.”

Everyone laughed, even the baby. Everyone except for Jack, who was usually the first to laugh at something inappropriate. “He’s still alive, right? Then we haven’t met.” Cara couldn’t remember ever hearing his voice so grim, not even the night Ben died.

She thought about apologizing.

Lynx butted her leg with her hard, round head. At the same instant, Coyote, who was crouched next to Sam looking for all the world like a scruffy family dog, raised his head and stared at Cara, then at Jack, then at Cara again, this time with disturbing human eyes in his canine face.

“He’s hiding something,”
Lynx said.

Jack? Impossible. Oh, not impossible that he was hiding something, but impossible that he’d be involved with the sorcerers.

“
Perhaps it’s as simple as trying to cover up how much your quarrel this morning rattled him. Males are likely to hide what they should share, yet shout what they should keep quiet.”

Lynx had a point. Jack being hurt or pissed off or just plain confused seemed more plausible than him being in league with the bad guys. Powers knew she was messed up on his account.

She wanted to go to him, put her arms around him, try to ease some of the tension in his body, but she held back. She didn’t think he owed her an apology, exactly, but certainly an explanation.

“Nineteenth century?” Elissa asked. “That just sank in. What do you mean nineteenth century?”

Cara tried to remember what she’d seen in those brief, vivid seconds. “Frock coat. Bowler hat. White shirt with a high collar and a tie. All the other men were dressed more normally, jeans and sweaters or flannel shirts.”

“Are you sure you were seeing the present day?” Jack asked. “Grand-mère says this conflict with the sorcerers and skinwalkers has gone on for a long time. Maybe this was a scene from when it started.”