Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (36 page)

She was with Jack. And they were going to beat Chenier, this time for good. She still wasn’t clear on the details, but she and Jack and the guides had opened a gate in someone else’s place of power. Opening a gate in their own world should be easy by comparison.

On the other hand, the ground zoomed closer awfully fast.

Suddenly, the various guides were on the ground beneath them, a great mass of furred strength that, thanks to magic, was as soft as down mattresses.

They landed in a great heap of cat and humanoid. Jack shifted to cougar so he landed on his feet. Cara managed to muster her martial arts training at the last minute—or maybe it was the cougar and the lynx who lived in her head now sharing their instincts with her—so she didn’t land so badly.

The others were almost exactly where they left them, still holding off Chenier.

“About time you got back,” Grand-mère said drily. “Elissa doesn’t have all day, you know. She has a baby to nurse.”

Then Grand-mère’s eyes widened. “My love? Is that you?” She sounded just as shocked and confused as anyone else would saying that, Cara thought. Her voice quavered. “I thought he’d killed you. I could no longer feel you in this world.”

Suddenly, Cara realized there was an extra dual among them. Unlike Jack and Rafe, this one looked rather the worse for wear, bony and half-starved, his fur ragged. Chenier raised his hand and opened his mouth, obviously reacting to the new arrival, but Grand-mère interposed herself between Chenier and the stranger. “Never again, you broken spoke of a diseased machine!”

Chenier roared in frustration, “
Bête maudit!
” and lunged at the strange cougar. Sickly energy, fuchsia streaked with black, streamed from his outstretched hands.

Tiny Grand-mère morphed into someone tree-tall and glowing. She resembled the beautiful being she’d allowed them to glimpse, but the beauty was that of a wild predator or a raging storm, a beauty you wanted to experience only from a safe distance.

Power the color of pine trees emanated from her. It reached out and encased Chenier in what looked like green ice.

The ice tore at him. Blood flowed from Chenier’s eyes. His arms strained in their sockets. It looked like Grand-mère planned to tear him limb from limb, as slowly as she could.

Cara had a feeling she ought to be shocked by this, but it smelled like justice to her.

“Children,” Grand-mère said with a strained voice, “now would be a good time to open that gate.”

It should have been harder than it was, Cara thought. Maybe it was the confidence she and Jack had because they’d already opened one gate that day. Maybe Elissa’s green magic drew on Grand-mère’s raw, primal power. Maybe it was pure need.

It was probably all those things, in part. But Cara thought it had a lot to do with the way her power and Jack’s intertwined now, joined by the spirit of Cougar in both their souls, and how, with that strong link, she felt more keenly than she ever had before how the blood-kinship between her and Gramps, and between Jack and Rafe and Grand-mère, and the teaching bond between Gramps and Jack, severed though it had been, and the love between Elissa and Rafe and Jude tied them all together. That other dual, the stranger, wove in too. She saw how his energy and Grand-mère’s meshed, saw too how there was a hint of that same evergreen energy in Chenier, but it was now fading.

And she saw how each one of them connected to everything else in the damn universe, including frogs and amoebas and strange beings out in the Crab Nebula that humans weren’t even supposed to know about, but Grand-mère did, so now Cara did too.

The overwhelming force of seeing everything at once should have been enough to crack Cara’s brain open. Instead, she and Jack and Rafe and Gramps used that force to crack the fabric of time and space open.

“That’s it!” Elissa exclaimed. Cara heard it more as a great roaring of red-and-green witch power than as actual words. “Hold it!”

Elissa began to chant. Cara didn’t know a word of Gaelic, but the magic vibrated though the web, vibrated in Cara’s bones, so somehow she understood. Then Gramps, with his greater experience, changed it to a magic shamans could use.

No one had told Cara she’d see an actual doorway opening, but she did. Okay, not so much a doorway as an opening between two boulders, capped by a third slab of rock, a Neolithic passage grave. Cara suspected most passage graves weren’t lit from within with a chartreuse glow, and that tendrils of chartreuse sparkly mist didn’t ooze out of them. It never occurred to her that chartreuse and sparkly could be evil, except perhaps on a prom dress, but this looked menacing.

Elissa’s voice reached a crescendo, and the power spiked with it. Chenier’s body sagged. Grand-mère’s icy spell held him upright, imprisoned, but it was clear he no longer had any strength of his own.

“Now.”
Cara tasted the word, rather than hearing it or even sensing it through the links, or maybe the link had gotten so big, so complex and conjoined, that everyone was experiencing synesthesia. “
Now.”

Cara imagined a gigantic hand plucking out the fae, winding up and giving a good baseball pitch right into that ominous glowing opening. She pictured the green sparkly light turning into a whirlpool and sucking the fae out of Chenier and sending it to the other side of the opening.

The light whirled, but for what seemed like a very long time, nothing else happened.

Unfortunately, it tried to suck Cara’s power, and probably everyone else’s, into it. Cara’s knees buckled.

Something large and furry braced her up and filled her with a rush of new energy.

Make that two furry somethings. She couldn’t quite see them—her eyes were dazzled by the otherworldly chartreuse and the clean, sharp power of Grand-mère’s magic, drawn from one to the other and dazzled so she couldn’t see what was actually around her—but some of the energy she drew was hot and full of love, definitely the cougar’s. The other was prickly, acerbic, with a teasing laugh behind it.

Cougar and Lynx took form, though the rest of the world—the trees, the ground, the humans and duals—remained fuzzy.

She knew exactly where Jack was, though. She felt him everywhere.

She envisioned that baseball pitch again, held the image, put all her strength and all she could glean from her spirit guides into it.

Elissa repeated the incantation for the third time.

The blurry form that got sucked out of Chenier’s body was iridescent black and vaguely humanoid in shape, but Cara glimpsed both horns and wings. She couldn’t focus on it properly, and she was glad. She suspected if she could really see it, it would be too beautiful to look away from and yet so horrible it would haunt her forever.

“Shut the gate!” Elissa shouted. Her voice came out as a roar of pure power, with a force and weight to it that Cara, even knowing the witch’s immense magical resources, wouldn’t have thought possible.

The matrix of power wavered. A red-and-spring-green glow faded. It had been so much a part of the whole, so right and natural, that Cara didn’t realize it was there until it faltered.

Jude echoed her, his normal booming voice soft by comparison. “Shut the fucking gate. It’s fighting her.”

Cara didn’t see Elissa collapse, but she felt it. “Grand-mère,” Rafe yelled, “help her!”

“You fight fae magic, child. I’m forbidden.”

And the witch, the one who had some training and experience with fae magic, was out of the fight.

“Cold iron!” Cara shouted, calling on memories of childhood fairy tales, just as Rafe yelled the same thing.

Being shamans, they each did it in their own way. Cara imagined prison bars, the close-set kind used in maximum security. She figured Rafe was the one who added the heavy security door for good measure. The immense anvil blocking the opening must be Gramps’s contribution. Even in the chaos, Cara could see ACME stamped on the side. Jack blocked the entrance with a beater pickup truck, its bed filled with railroad ties, old engines and other metal junk.

Rafe roared.

He was in wordside form, but he still roared, a roar with form and substance, a roar that bounced off Cara’s skin and bruised it.

A blast door dropped down, trapping all the other cold iron behind it. Then the gate closed in on itself.

The stillness that followed was deafening.

“We won!” Jack whooped. He picked up Cara and swung her around.

“Not yet, animal,” an old, broken voice croaked.

Chenier bled from the eyes and ears, and one arm hung limp and shapeless, crushed by the force of Grand-mère’s magic, but he lived. “While I still live, it is not over. And I have survived losing my rider.”

Grand-mère smiled, a smile with teeth, a smile of wind and ice and wolves and cougars, a smile with no mercy for the weak. “Only because I have let you live until now. The children thought they saw something redeemable in you. But they are young and burdened with optimism. I look at you, and the only use I see for you is when your body returns to the soil.”

“You wouldn’t kill me, not if you haven’t yet. You lack the heart.”

The angry smile grew colder. “I lacked the heart. But my children have returned my heart to me.”

The mangy cougar shifted. It took him longer than Cara was used to seeing, and it looked painful, but when he finished, a handsome, if careworn, Native man of middle years stood by Grand-mère’s side, unintimidated by her primal power, her huge size.

“And now, I take back the rest of my heart, the part I foolishly gave to you.” She raised one tree of a hand.

Cara winced as something green and lively was sucked from Chenier’s body—through the gaping hole that appeared in his chest. Whatever it was swirled to Grand-mère and settled between her and the beaten-down dual, who immediately looked perkier.

“Children,” she said, “I’d like you all to meet my husband, Golden Panther.” Careless as the force of nature she was, Grand-mère let Chenier’s broken body—now aged beyond recognition—fall to the earth.

To Cara’s horror, Chenier spoke. “Hate to interrupt the happy reunion, but by killing me, you have finished my plan. My death sends a beacon. Your enemies know where the Youngest is. They will come for the child who should have been mine, and its witch mother and the animals who fathered it, because you rejected me.”

Then, without ceremony, he died.

Almost before his words could register, he crumbled to dust and bones, only the old-fashioned suit and coat remaining.

Jack’s arms surrounded Cara.

Somewhere overhead, a crow cawed hoarsely. The only other sound was Elissa weeping.

Chapter Forty-Four

No one actually spoke about Chenier’s threat until they were back in the village. No one dared. Finally, once the younger people and a bottle of homebrew were settled into the Donovans’ cabin, Cara spoke. “I’m pretty sure there’s no legal way to extradite a child born in Canada. You guys might have a problem, but the baby would stay with her Canadian grandparents.” She hesitated. “That is, if we can figure out how to prove they’re her grandparents, considering I’m pretty sure they don’t exist in any government database.”

“The Agency doesn’t care about legalities,” Elissa said sourly, “if they’re inconvenient.”

“The Agency can’t get here anyway. But if they try, I’ll simply move Couguar-Caché near where Elissa’s family lives,” Grand-mère announced airily, waltzing in the door uninvited. She wore her young, lovely guise and, as she had ever since her husband’s return, gripped Golden Panther’s hand as if he might vanish again at any moment. “If Elissa has a good sense of direction and knows where there’s about a hundred acres of uninhabited land we could use, you can walk out with the baby, and you’re home, or close enough to it that someone can pick you up.”

Jude sprang to his feet and loomed over Grand-mère. It wasn’t easy to loom over a demigoddess, even a physically tiny one, but in his anger, Jude managed. Attuned to feline signals now, Cara saw that his aura was puffed up, a mane that wasn’t there in the physical world standing on end. “You mean that you could have gotten us home anytime, and you didn’t?”

“Not until now.” Golden Panther’s voice was soft and rusty, his English curiously accented. “Do not be angry, lion-child. She needed me to come home first.”

Light dawned for Cara. “You hold some of Grand-mère’s power. It was why Chenier couldn’t kill you, even with fae backup.”

“But unlike the power Chenier tricked from me, I gave to my love freely and in good faith, so I can still call on it in need. When we’re on the same plane, that is. Until Golden Panther was restored to me, I didn’t have the strength to take Couguar-Caché so far. Now I think I can. Not for long, mind you, but long enough for you to go home.”

“Well, that’s solved!” Jack’s blitheness sounded forced. He looked from Elissa to Jude to Rafe and added, “Or not.”

“It will confuse the pursuit,” Cara said, “if the Agency is looking for them here and they’re hiding in plain sight in Oregon.”

“Donovan’s Cove might be harder than the village to breach, if only because the family’s so well known that even the Agency would have to be subtle about attacking us,” Elissa said. “But it’s not a perfect solution.”

“Especially since we’ll just have to get you all back here at Midsummer,” Grand-mère said drily, “for Cara and Jack’s wedding.”