Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (10 page)

Cara expected she’d lie awake for a while, torturing herself about her bad judgment and worrying that she and Jack were under some kind of spell, because whether it was malicious or just meddling, that was super disturbing. Instead, she passed out hard almost as soon as she hit the bed.

A scream awoke her. It sounded like a woman being tortured. Cop instincts kicked in. Adrenaline flooded her body. She was out of bed, throwing a sweater and jeans over the thermals she’d worn to bed and scrambling for her boots before she was fully awake. A nightmarish sense of urgency possessed her, as though a voice screamed directly in her head, warning of danger, speaking of torture and murder.

Coat. Gloves. Gun and an extra clip.

The awful sound repeated, perhaps closer than the first scream. Impossible to gauge the direction precisely, and she didn’t know the woods around the village well enough to dash off alone. That would probably leave her in need of being rescued too.

Who would help her? Jack would, and any awkwardness be damned, but the fact was she wasn’t sure which house he lived in. Gramps might be willing, but both his body and his magic were frail these days.

The threesome next door? One of them would need to stay with the baby, but any two of the three—a lion, a cougar who happened to be a shaman, and a witch—could be damn handy in whatever trouble might be going on out there.

The screaming stopped, but she still heard a voice in her head. No, not exactly a voice, but some kind of presence. Her brain filled with images she didn’t want, and her senses were bombarded with information coming in too fast and furious for her to process. Blood on the snow. Hideous glowing colors that meant magic. Trouble. Big, big trouble.

West of the village. She could figure out west. Her sense of direction had always been uncanny.

Wool hat. Scarf. Out the door.

Her door practically knocked down the petite witch Elissa, whose red hair puffed out under a purple fleece hat with a pompom on top. She should have looked cute and harmless, but her delicate features were set into a grim, determined mask and the glow of her power extended about three feet on each side of her. Rafe loomed behind her, his aura so potent Cara saw the cat inside his wordy form more clearly than she’d ever seen in a dual. “What the…”

“Trouble,” Elissa said. “Jack needs help.”

“That scream was…Jack?” She couldn’t picture that noise coming from his big body.

“From the cougar,” Rafe explained in an urgent whisper. He was already on the move. “He’s all right, but there’s dangerous weird shit out there. Blood in the snow.”

“Blood in the snow,” she repeated, embarrassed to realize her voice was shaking. “I saw.”

Neither of the others reacted oddly, which, from them, made sense.

“Rafe says you’re a crack shot.” Elissa’s voice was as intense as Rafe’s. “If I tell you something’s a bad guy, shoot it, but don’t shoot until I tell you to. What you’re seeing may not be what’s really there. Shamans have some defenses against sorcerers’ mind magics…”

“But I don’t know how to use them.” Cara felt like she should ask more questions, but things had gotten so abruptly out of her depth that she didn’t know where to start, other than a general,
What the hell is going on?

And she didn’t even have time to ask that before they were on the move.

They were moving fast, following Rafe, who seemed to know where he was going, and who could see better in the dark than either human. Cara regretted not putting on her snowshoes, but probably not as much as Elissa did. Shorter than the others, she was having trouble slogging through the snow.

Cara stole another look at the witch. In the moonlight, she looked frighteningly pale, her eyes too big for her face. Fragile looking, Cara would have said under other circumstances, but to Cara’s new sight, Elissa looked anything but delicate. Her aura was huge and brilliant, a nimbus of green and clear red that should have looked like Christmas lights but instead looked like pure power. Cara wouldn’t want to be something that got in Elissa’s way right now. She’d heard most witches weren’t violent due to the nature of their magic, but anyone could be pushed too far.

“Jude says Grand-mère’s all right,” Rafe said out of the blue. “Shaken, but she’ll be on the job in a little while. For some reason, she’s more concerned about making sure Jude stays with Jocelyn than she is about getting out here herself.”

Elissa stopped in her tracks. Cara wouldn’t have thought she could turn paler, but she did. “Tell that stubborn jerk to stay. Take the baby to Mr. Many-Winters’s—not to Nella’s—and stay with her.” She closed her eyes, and Cara saw her aura shift as a good chuck of power siphoned off and winged back toward the village.

Protecting her baby.

Lumbering through the snow, the two women followed to a spot where Rafe and Jack huddled together.

“Blood sorcery. Oh Powers, that’s bad.” Elissa’s voice dropped to a whisper. If Cara hadn’t seen Elissa’s aura spiking, she’d have thought the other woman was unnaturally calm.

No, Elissa was just putting up a front of professional detachment, like a cop might, in the face of horrors.

Cara had a feeling she didn’t see exactly what the others did, but the pooled blood on the mounded snow was bad enough. “How do you know it’s blood sorcery and not animals hunting?”

“No tracks on the snow that we didn’t make, for one,” Jack said. It was dark this deep in the forest. Elissa had a flashlight, and Jack had apparently cast a spell that glowed above the bloodied snow. It wasn’t easy to make out details, but now that Jack mentioned it, Cara saw the snow was curiously barren, swept clear of tracks, pine needles, everything.

Just blood. Lots of blood, and a few gobs of tissue.

Meat. Until proven otherwise, she was going to think of it that way. Nothing worse than that. By these little mental machinations, a cop stayed sane.

“Also,” Jack said, his tone almost conversational, though his aura, too, looked spiky and jagged, “have you started seeing auras yet?”

As if it was the most normal thing on earth to ask someone. In Couguar-Caché, it might be.

“Yes, though I’m just guessing what they mean—like we all look spiky right now, and I bet that’s because we’re upset.”

“Good guess. Now look at the blood on the snow, Cara. Really look at it. Open up and ask the spirits to help you seek clues.”

He said that so naturally. Probably to someone raised in Couguar-Caché, it was about as ordinary as telling someone to Google something or send a text, but she didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do what he asked.

Nothing ventured, though, nothing gained. Xang Kue had told her she had guides, but he hadn’t been able to tell her how to contact them. Said they’d make themselves known when she needed them.

Well, guys, I need you now. Someone’s died here, and whoever did it means to do more harm. I’m not sure what forms I need to put in a petition to the Powers; it must be worse than requisitioning something from headquarters. But if you could at least let me know where the paperwork is kept, it would be a big help. Thanks.

She squinted at the blood on the snow, concentrating furiously.

Two things happened.

A dome of unnatural purple streaked with oily black appeared over the bloodied area. That must be what everyone else saw. She pointed toward it. “That fugliness is sorcery? It looks like a death-metal band puked and it froze in midair.”

Jack actually laughed. “Good way to describe it. Now see if you can pick out anything.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. That’s the point. We know what we expect to see. You don’t have preconceptions, so maybe you’ll notice something different.”

She was still staring, frustrated that she couldn’t see anything that resembled either a physical or metaphysical clue, when the lynx appeared.

The
glowing
lynx.

It glided over to her, seeming to hover above the snow. Cara froze, unable to breathe, let alone say or do anything. She wasn’t frightened of the lynx, exactly. If it had been an ordinary wild cat, she’d have been just as quiet out of awe and fascination, not wanting to spook it.

The glowing part, though, was freaky even on a night marked by magic.

It came up and head-butted her thigh, for all the world like the big tomcat who’d lived with them when she was a kid. Without even thinking, she reached down to pet it.

Impossibly fast, one snowshoe paw lashed out, claws like meat hooks extended. They slashed right through her glove and into her hand and wrist, leaving long, shallow, stinging cuts.

She jumped back. “You little…”

“
Manners, manners. I am not your pet, and though being scratched between the ears will be pleasant in calmer moments, this isn’t a tea-and-biscuits and petting-the-spirit-guide kind of night.”

Cara looked around wildly, trying to see if anyone else saw the talking lynx. No one else was even looking in their direction, so probably not.

“Sorry. Meant no disrespect, ma’am. What should I call you anyway?”

“Lynx will do, though I rather like the ma’am. Now get to work. Time’s wasting. I don’t want to have to scratch you again.”

“What?” This time, everyone wheeled to look at her. Maybe they couldn’t see the lynx, but they could hear Cara arguing with something that wasn’t, strictly speaking, there.

Some dim part of her brain weighed whether to feel embarrassed. Probably not. The two shamans must have guides of their own, and a witch would understand about invisible friends. Assuming this damn cat was a friend.

“
Manners,”
the lynx said again. Cara had wondered what form her spirit guide might take, how it might communicate with her. Even her wildest speculations hadn’t imagined it having the clipped, precise tones of a prissy, well-educated Englishwoman.

“Who are you calling prissy? I may not be that party-boy Coyote, but I know how to have a good time when I’m not dealing with ignorant young shamans who don’t even know to bleed on the snow to break down the sorcery. Do I have to scratch you again, girl, or are you going to do your job?”

Cara didn’t know how to react. Part of her wanted to kick the damn beast, but she wouldn’t kick an ordinary animal and certainly not a talking one with some kind of spiritual link to her.

Part of her wanted to hightail it back to Toronto, right now, and take her chances with going crazy. Unless she already was crazy, considering she was having a conversation with a shiny lynx with an Oxford accent and a bad attitude.

Which was how she might have imagined a house cat talking—they always did seem to think they were smarter than you were—but not a wild one.

“I’m not exactly a lynx, you know,”
the creature said. “
Or a house cat. Or a bobcat. Or Sylvester the Cat, for that matter.”
She changed form as she spoke, lynx to fluffy, gray-smoke Persian to bobcat to cartoon character with mind-boggling speed, finally settling back to lynx, although a lynx with a slightly cartoonish quality. “I’m a metaphor. With claws.”

She lashed out again, and even though Cara made sure there weren’t any body parts in easy reach, those sharp claws still raked her hand.

Lynx head-butted her toward the bloodied snow.
“You need to break the spell, Cara. Jack is doing his part, but your blood will counter the blood that was shed. The sorcerers used their own blood as well as their victims’. The sorcerers were human and so are you. Although they are particularly dubious examples of the species.”

Blinking, confused, Cara staggered the few steps forward it took to get to the bloodied area. She smelled sulfur and rot now that she was closer. If it wasn’t so cold, the smell of blood would have been overwhelming, but it was mostly frozen. Even so, it was enough to choke her, especially combined with the sulfur. She’d been around blood before, but this seemed worse somehow. More personal.

Speaking of blood…

Cara crouched down in the snow, next to the dome of sorcery. She took off her ruined glove. Lynx had been gentler than it had seemed. The claw-marks were welling blood, but to get some on the snow, she had to take her wounded hand and smear it across, letting it brush the edges of the magical dome.

Contact with the spell energy hurt worse than the scratches had in the first place, bad enough that she cursed and jumped back.

Then she cursed again as the barrier sizzled away with a stench of burning meat. Disgusting.

The bloodied snow began to bubble away as if it was boiling, sending clouds of rancid-smelling steam into the air. Cara stared, transfixed by the special-effects nastiness, unable to accept it as real. Jack grabbed her shoulders. “Get back! I’m not sure what’s going on, but it might be bad.” He jerked her back with such force she ended up pressed against him, her ass against his crotch. His arm tightened around her, even while he said, “Rafe, get ready to shift. I’m not sure what’s happening.” She steeled herself to elbow him away.

Then she caught a flash of bright green visible from under the melting snow.

Very familiar bright green.

She’d bought a shirt just that color for Phil, and he’d been wearing it the last time she saw him. Wasn’t that just yesterday?

She broke from Jack’s grasp, flung herself down on the unnaturally melting snow and began to dig.