Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (11 page)

“Don’t do that!” Jack, Elissa, Rafe and her lynx all ordered simultaneously.

She paid no heed, although the snow burned her skin, right through the one glove she still wore and even through her coat. Her bared hand she couldn’t feel at all, and she dimly thought it was a good thing.

She felt something that wasn’t snow or clothing, threw herself into digging the blood-caked snow.

Curly brown hair. Pale skin. Lips she’d kissed thousands of times, torn and bloodied. Iced-over eyes that looked like they’d died seeing horrors. She knew better, knew the body shouldn’t be disturbed until they’d examined it properly for clues of who might have done this, but she couldn’t restrain herself from flinging herself on Phil and touching what was left of the man she loved.

Phil had been here dead in the snow while she was fucking someone else.

Wait…woods and snow? She and Phil lived in Toronto, and it was summer. Right?

Her brain spun.

She closed her eyes, rocked back on her heels and whimpered. Something that seemed to be a big cat nudged her, but she ignored it. They didn’t have a cat. Phil was allergic to cats. But that was definitely a cat.

Someone stepped closer, as if to comfort her—and cried out, “Ben!”

When the man who’d cried out crouched in the snow next to her, she opened her eyes and blinked. There was a body in the snow all right, but it was a strange teenager with long black hair, not Phil. And there was reddish fur in the snow next to him.

Something clicked in Cara’s brain. It was late February, she was in Couguar-Caché, and Phil had been dead for months. She didn’t know why she’d seen what she’d seen, but the illusion was broken now. The poor boy wasn’t the only corpse in that mound of snow. The man who’d cried out—it was Jack, she could recognize now—had stroked the dead boy’s hair briefly, speaking softly in a language that wasn’t English or French. Now he was standing again, staring into the darkness as if he hoped to find answers in it. Trying to disturb Jack as little as possible, she went to work on the snow, tracing back the glimpse of fur.

It was a slim, young wolf, the fur matted with blood, and for a second, Cara breathed relief. Animal sacrifice was nasty stuff, but at least it wasn’t another sentient.

Then she looked again. The wolf wore a necklace. A gold B.

Cara knew that necklace. B for Becky.

Goulding’s little sister was dead because of her.

Chapter Thirteen

Jack was numb. He knew numb was bad, knew he needed to let the pain and rage burn through him so he could come out clean on the other side. Needed to experience Ben’s death fully, starting from this first shock of loss, so he could help other people when it happened to them, if nothing else. But after that initial roar of grief, he’d shut down. Calculating. Planning. Cold as Ben was lying dead in the snow, even though his animalside was whimpering in mourning, licking and nuzzling at the broken body of a little brother who’d never hunt by his side again. Cold even though his Cougar guide was batting at his heart, metaphysical claws out, trying to force him to feel.

Someone had ritually murdered Ben and the wolf girl who lay by his side. Someone had cut out their hearts and left them inside a force-field of sorcery that pulsed like a beacon to draw him and the others in. No doubt the same bastards who orchestrated the earlier attack—this smacked of loups-garous’ twistedness. But why were they targeting his village? And why his brother and this stranger? He knew everyone in the village in both their forms, and this small reddish wolf was no one he’d ever met. But Cara knew her. That must be important.

Grief beat on him, but he shut it out, trying to reason, forcing thoughts that wanted to run wild and wordless into some order he could share with the others. Maybe Cara and Rafe, with their police training, could find a pattern, an answer, if he added what he knew to what they might observe.

And then he could let go and do what he needed to do, which was go a little crazy so he could put the pieces together in his own way and make them into a bomb to blow up bad guys.

As he struggled for words, Ben’s corpse sat up and said, “Jack, help me up. I’m injured.”

Jack stepped closer. He couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t Ben’s phrasing. It wasn’t even Ben’s voice. He sounded deeper and older, tinged with a French accent. Never mind that dead guys didn’t normally sit up and start talking, not even in Couguar-Caché, and there was a gaping hole in Ben’s chest where his heart belonged, and duals almost never hung around as ghosts so he probably wasn’t a ghost who didn’t realize he was dead. Despite all logic, hope surged, and Jack reached for his brother’s hand.

At the same time, Cara also stepped forward, a bewildered, glorious smile on her face as if she saw someone she dearly longed to see. “You?” she murmured. “It can’t be…”

Elissa grabbed him and threw her other arm out to block Cara. “It’s not Ben.” she shouted. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not your brother. And it’s not who you think you’re seeing, Cara.”

Jack tried to throw Elissa off. He should have been able to, would have if Elissa hadn’t been what she was. He had a good foot and at least a hundred pounds on her, but her magic trumped his muscle. She said a couple of words in what sounded like Gaelic, and Jack was frozen to the spot. From Cara’s curses, he guessed she was too. “Sorry,” Elissa said. “This abomination is neither a ghost nor a living thing.”

“Then it has my name on it, child.” Grand-mère suddenly zapped into the clearing. “Let me clear it up.”

She intoned a few words that went through Jack’s gut like a spear. Jack had never seen Grand-mère’s true nature so clearly as he did now. The old woman she appeared to be shifted subtly, the planes of her face realigning so she couldn’t pass for something close to human, the texture of her skin becoming more like a tree’s bark than that of an old human, not merely leathery but hard. She was tiny as ever, but her aura was tree-tall, throbbing with power. She raised one branchlike hand and spoke one more word, with a sense of finality and weight to it, in a language that wouldn’t come easily to a dual or human tongue.

Ben melted, turning into something hideous and fanged, something like a skeletal wolf with rotting hide stretched over its bones, and yet with a humanoid look. It howled and snapped and lunged at them.

And Grand-mère, little Grand-mère who was maybe four feet tall, grabbed it by its bony neck, which she had to levitate to reach, and twisted. The creature collapsed into a heap of dried bones, human and animal jumbled together. The dry stench of an old grave filled the winter air.

“A trap,” Grand-mère said, dusting off her hands. “A clumsy one, but good enough to torment us even though we knew better. And by morning, the thing would have gained enough strength to come to the village in a form we had reason to invite in.” She looked to Cara. “Child, who did you see? I don’t think it was Ben or the unfortunate wolf. Poor youngster isn’t even from around here.”

“Her name is Becky Goulding. Her brother was my partner at work. She gave me a ride from Toronto. She wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t for me.” Cara sounded like she was talking from another planet, one of permafrost and pain. “I should have made her take the truck back, but she wanted to take her wolfside for an adventure.”

“Who did you see, Cara?” Grand-mère repeated. Cara shook her head, wrapped her arms around her torso and looked away. Closed off. Shut down. Even her aura had dimmed.

Jack might not be far from that place himself, but at least he knew why he couldn’t stay locked up and self-contained. Cara didn’t yet. He reached out, thinking he might literally try to shake some sense into her, or rather, less sense and more acknowledging how bad she felt. Probably he’d get slugged for his pains, but the flash of anger would jar the other bottled-up emotions loose.

And maybe getting slugged would do the same for him, because he needed to let go just as much as she did.

Before he could reach her, something else formed in the place where the thing had hovered. Everyone but Grand-mère and Elissa jumped.

Translucent, wavery around the edges, it was a ghost. Not Ben, though, and not a female wolf, but a human stranger, a man with curly, pale brown hair and pale eyes and a sweet, boyish face, dressed in the kind of clothes city guys wore in summer, khaki pants and a green polo shirt. “Phil?” Cara’s voice knotted, but she didn’t move. Not trusting her senses, Jack figured. How could she after all that had happened?

The stranger looked like he felt grim and serious—which made sense if he’d died in a way that caused him to linger as a ghost—but was also too happy about seeing Cara not to beam a little when he looked at her.

Which Jack understood. Cara was worth beaming at.

Elissa held out her mittened hands, and intoned a few Gaelic words. A warm golden glow surrounded the apparition for a second, then dissipated. “That’s a true ghost,” Elissa said, her voice puzzled, “but not the ghost of either of the victims we’ve found. We need to look…”

“His body isn’t here.” Cara sounded way too serene. She really ought to be screaming at this point, even if that ghost wasn’t who Jack knew it had to be. “Phil’s buried in Toronto. That’s my fiancé, and he’s been dead since September. But why now, Phil? Why not before?”

Elissa pushed her forward. “Talk to him,” the witch whispered, “but don’t touch him. It’ll be painful for both of you.”

She might as well have kept her mouth shut, because Cara opened her arms and embraced the ghost.

Chapter Fourteen

It was like hugging dry ice, cold burning to her bones, and when Phil’s ghost arms drifted around her, insubstantial but strong as words whispered in the dark, it got worse. Cara didn’t let go. Instead, she let the pain brace her, clear her head. It felt familiar, and she realized the cutting cold was a physical manifestation of the way she’d been feeling ever since Phil was murdered. Since coming to Cougar-Caché, she’d been letting warmth in again—heat, even, with Jack—but the bitter cold seemed safe, like she should embrace it, hold it inside her along with the memory of Phil.

Ghost lips burned her ear, through her hat. Phil always liked kissing her on the ear when they hugged, since they were much of a height. This time, though, no hot breath ruffled her hair or tickled her ear and that, even more than the painful cold, made her pull away. “I’m sorry,” Cara whispered. “If I hadn’t been running late…”

“If you hadn’t been late, they’d have gotten you. It wasn’t a random mugging. That was why the police couldn’t find any prints, any evidence. They were looking for you that night and killed me just because I was there. You’d have been kidnapped and tortured like those poor kids. That’s what brought me back here, wherever the hell here is. The blood, the ritual…and some really freaky guy talking in French about how the spell would have worked better if they’d gotten you because you’re a shaman. But you’re not one. Right?”

Despite her rising terror, Cara couldn’t help chuckling. “Lover, even dead you babble when you’re nervous. Geek. What else did they say?” She thought about explaining that she actually was a shaman, or at least a shaman in training, but it hardly mattered now. Not as much as finding out what the threat was, what the French-speaking dirtbag and his equally creepy friends had planned.

“I don’t know. My French is okay, but this guy talked weird. Not Quebec French but not foreign-film French either. I couldn’t catch everything. The other guys spoke English, but they didn’t say much.”

“How many were there? Can you describe them?” What was wrong with her? Phil was back—if only briefly—and instead of telling how much she loved and missed him, she was questioning him like she would a witness.

But he
was
a witness, the only witness they had to crimes that were horrible in themselves and might be leading up to something even worse.

“Three the night I died, I think. Two of them were white guys, kind of scruffy. Typical thugs. The third… I know there was a third guy, but it was like I couldn’t focus on him. I actually didn’t even notice the third man until after I died.”

“And tonight?”

Phil’s ghost shook his head. “Really blurry. There were guys who looked like dogs with mange, and guys who looked like guys, but they kept changing back and forth. I never saw the man who spoke French, except this vague purplish outline.” His eyes closed, then opened. “I saw the blood, though. Saw what they did to those poor kids. They would have done the same to you, Cara. Trying to open the way into the village, someone said, and the boy was too stubborn to be very useful and the wolf girl wouldn’t be any use because it turned out she wasn’t from there. At least they killed her faster. I don’t get it.” He sighed. “I’m tired, and nothing makes sense. Except that I love you. You seem different now, but I still love you.”

Cara was frozen, trying to find the right questions, but at the same time feeling her heart break, torn between the cop, the shaman and the bereaved woman experiencing her grief new and raw when she thought she’d finally reached a point where the hurt was bearable. “I am different now,” she said, not sure it made sense to do so but having to. “I’m a shaman. Like my mom and grandparents.”

Phil had known her mom had committed suicide but hadn’t known the rest. “Why didn’t you tell me about your family? That’s cool, in a weird way.”

Why hadn’t she? Fear, mostly, and trying to convince herself that she could lead an ordinary life with Phil. But the easiest thing was, “It seemed like a good idea then, and why doesn’t matter now. But now I need to know what you saw and heard tonight.”