The Cougar's Pawn (8 page)

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 edge 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.

“Shut it, cat.” She clucked her tongue a few times to get the demon’s attention. “Here, boy. Come here, boy. Fresh witch for ya. I know you like that.”

It darted toward her, gaping mouth-hole first, and she jumped sideways.

“Blech. If you ever want to retire from the demonizing gig, maybe you could take up a career in wallpaper removal because your breath could certainly peel it, bud.”

It had gotten way too close, and she knew better than to have let it. She didn’t want that thing’s head anywhere near her nose or anything else on her body ever again. So many distractions, though, with her friends watching and That Cat giving her skeptical stares.

Think, think
. She danced around a bit, teasing it from side to side while she thought. The other two Cougars fell in line behind it as if ready to force it back if it tried to retreat.

She’d learned the hard way while out with Gail and Agatha in the past couple of months that noncoporeal demons could start pulling energy off a person without even touching them. He just had to get close. The energy was just an appetizer, though. He’d have her soul, if he had his druthers, but unfortunately for him, she was attached to her soul and wanted to keep it a while longer. Like, forever.

It swooped down at her again, screaming wordlessly like a banshee, and she carved an easy sigil into its chest as it flew over. It wasn’t the symbol she needed to do to send the thing back from whence it came, but it would slow him down … she hoped. And she kinda-sorta needed to remember how to do the take-no-shit sigil soon, if she could even do it with a fucking steak knife. “Ugh. What would Gail do?”

Gail probably could use a bendy straw if that was all she had. She’d learned how to harness her power and push it out through whatever means, but Ellery was still in the down-and-dirty witch learning curve. Agatha was usually the one to finish their demonic assailants off, which was all well and good because it was half Agatha’s fault that the fuckers were out in such high numbers in the first place. She’d kind of picked a little fight with some petty gods and demons, and Ellery and Gail were not-so-innocent bystanders caught up in it.

The Cougars circled around the flickering being, leaping on it when it tried to flee their barrier. It couldn’t get the height to get out of reach now.

Ellery slipped in between two of the cats and stabbed the demon in what would have been its back, had it been solid.

She drew a cross. A circle.
Shit.
What else?

It turned, dead eyes locked on her and mouth opened wide as if to swallow her whole.

Oh. Right! Toothy thing.
She swerved around him and added a point-side-up triangle to the sigil. And there was one more thing …

“Ellery? Your cat is going crazy. What’s going on?”
came Agatha’s voice on the wind.

“Uh. Busy right now. There are apparently demons in the desert. Don’t get mad for me asking, but … what’s the last part of that banishing sigil?”

She heard the goddess’s sigh all the way from North Carolina. “
Seal it with your element. Wind.
”

“Right.” Ellery feinted left, went right, and made the appropriate squiggles.

It froze. Stared at her with those odd, hollow eyes.