The Cougar's Pawn (18 page)

“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.”

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?”

Agatha’s expensive Ferragamo pumps appeared in Ellery’s periphery. The woman could probably cross a desert in those things given how much she wore them. She bent and picked up the athame. “You all would call it a genie. This kind isn’t very nice. They adhere themselves to the unsuspected and make them do their bidding. They’re quite fond of children. They’re very difficult to get rid of once they make a link with one. A child could go through the rest of his or her life, however short it ends up being, doing its dirty work.”

“I’ve never seen one of those,” Mason said.

He’d obviously shifted back into his human shape while Ellery had been busy eating dirt.

“And if you’re lucky, you won’t see many more,” Agatha said. “They’re not especially abundant, and crossing into this realm is very difficult for them. It probably caught the tailwind of the demon you dealt with yesterday.”

“Who is that?” Hank sauntered over holding his hands over his junk.

“Ellery’s mee-maw," Mason said.

Hank furrowed his brow. “Her
mee-maw
?”

Agatha sighed and turned to Ellery. “Gail may need her athame back before you use it again, so I’ll return it to her. We’ll try to replace yours soon.”

She handed it back grudgingly. “I can’t believe I managed for so many years without a suitable one.”

She’d learned in the past year that the ceremonial dagger she’d had for most of her life wasn’t good for much besides warding off the occasional mugging attempt. Athames were like familiars—they had to be suited to the witch who used them, and cheap stainless steel off an assembly line wouldn’t cut it. Figuratively speaking. An athame had to be suited for a witch’s particular power—it needed to be charmed so it magnified and cleansed it. A good athame made it easier for a witch to direct her power. Sure, a steak knife would do in a pinch, but controlling the magic would be ten times harder.

Mrs. Foye walked over carrying a crying Nick on her hip. She must have had a copy of the truck key and gotten him out.

Instinctively, Ellery took him. The sound of his plaintive whimpering wrecked her heart. In the emergency room, she’d seen again and again that the best medicine was sometimes a bit of assurance. Fear tended to magnify pain. She didn’t think Nick was in any pain, but he was scared, and maybe those were just two sides of the same coin.

“Hey, baby.”

He pressed his face against her dirty shirt, and quieted.

“It’s okay. Bet you’re not used to it.”

“Witchcraft,” Mason muttered. “She’s using witchcraft on my kid.”

Ellery rolled her eyes and nuzzled Nick’s head.

“Hank, what’s the ETD for Utah?”

Hank gave up on trying to blow his long hair out of his face, quickly tucked it behind his ears, and covered his junk again. “Waiting on Sean. We’ll leave as soon as he gets back. Wanted it to be good and late when we got there so we could get in and out of the site without too many witnesses.”

Utah?
Ellery turned to Mason, her out-of-the-blue anger rendering her practically impotent. “Why are you going to Utah? On the hunt for replacement mating prospects?”

His blank expression devolved into a scrunched one marking his evident confusion. “What? No. Have you forgotten that quickly I don’t get to call in an alternate? It’s you or no one. My brothers are going to go fetch your things, if they’re still there. Hopefully anyone milling around will just think you went out hiking on one of the longer trails and left things be.”