The Cougar's Wish (Desert Guards) (20 page)

He snorted. “Supposed to be the other way around, sunshine.”

She let her lips sputter and quickened her pace. “Stop worrying about
supposed-to-be
s. That’s what creates more confusion in my life than anything else, right? Everyone is so hung up on what I’m supposed to be doing that half the time, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing myself.”

They passed through a stone archway, and Belle paused yet again to scan around her, brow furrowed. “You smell that?”

“All I smell is sulfur and ozone, and my tongue is chiming in to let me know it’s a phenomenally disgusting taste. I feel like after we climb out of this thing, I’m going to be scraping my tongue all morning.”

She narrowed her eyes and switched her grip on him to her other hand. “Underneath all that, there’s a note of sweetness. A—”

This time, Steven had a little warning before a thing charged at them. Unlike the last one, it had a corporeal form and was bound to the ground by its legs and mass. It ran toward them, snarling, and Steven froze, staring at its fangs, its frightening girth as it approached, and praying to his maker. He was catatonic as if his soul had left his body in a sort of
You’re on your own, fool
, flight, and it was Belle’s startled breath behind him that woke him up from it.

Belle was there, and he had the dagger.

Shit.
He drew a line across the pathway behind them and pulled Belle into his embrace. “You’re all right.”

The snarling thing slammed against the invisible wall created by the magic of Gail’s athame blade and redirected, running the other way as if to find an alternate route.

“Let’s keep moving before it finds a way around,” he said.

Belle furrowed her brow again. “You know ... I’m not really worried about it.”

“Why not?”

She gave her head the slightest shake and got them moving again. “No time for talking. In and out. This place isn’t exactly a vacation spot. I can’t believe my family has been guarding that freakin’ portal since the last time it opened.”

“When was that?”

“A few generations ago.”

“Any idea how they closed it back then?”

“They just waited for it to naturally seal itself. It’s open too wide this time. It’s like a wound that needs stitches.”

“Man, the things you learn when your sister gets turned into a Were-cougar.”

“Oh, you think it’s interesting?” Belle laughed and paused beneath another stone arch. She pressed her free hand against some engravings on it and let her brow furrow.

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t read it. It doesn’t look like any language I’ve ever seen.”

“Neither can I, but if I had money on me at the moment, I’d bet that it says,
Danger, this way
.”

“That’s the vibe I get, too.”

“And we’re going to walk right into it, aren’t we?”

Belle cringed, then nodded. “Yeah. By the time we get back to the opening, we can have our shit together and pretend we were brave the entire time.”

“You seem plenty brave.”

“I wouldn’t be if I were alone.”

He didn’t believe that. She
was
brave. She was the kind of solider he’d follow confidently into a battle, and that was high praise he reserved for few people.

“Come on.”
If she can put on a good front, so can I.
That’d been half his job when he was deployed—making the troops beneath him in his unit think that everything was going to be a-o-fuckin’-k, even when he suspected things weren’t.

Mind over matter.

“I hear her calling me,” Belle said. “There’s a cavern coming up on the left.”

“The fact she hasn’t run toward us means she can’t.”

Belle sighed. “If I have to shapeshift, I might not be able to shift back until we get out of this thing, and if that’s the case, you may need to carry the entity—whatever she is—out.”

“If I’m carrying her, I can’t protect
you
.”

“Don’t worry about me. Anything that happens to me can be fixed on the other side, right?”

“You’re too damned logical.”

“Sure, at the moment, I am. I guess fear chases away my heat, and with that out of the way, I can actually think. Who would have thunk it?”

“Hell of a treatment.”

“Not one I plan on continuing for much longer. I’d prefer to be inappropriately clingy than terrified. Let’s go.”

Again, she got them moving, and he followed, in awe of her bravery.
Or is it recklessness?

Didn’t matter. Either way, they were getting the job done. Maybe more her than him, but of course—it had been her mission all of long. It would have been stupid to cut her out of it.

“One, two, three, no pausing,” she said and pulled him into a leftward chamber that was chock-full of writhing bodies, of torment, of screaming, of—

“
Shit
.” He let go of her and plugged his ears against the loud pulsing that was surely going to make his head explode. The noise vibrated through him as if his body were some kind of tuning rod and his bones couldn’t endure the frequency. He thought his bones were going to shatter.

Belle gripped him, her face contorted with pain and blood pooling beneath her ears. “Make it stop!”

Yes, make it stop for her.

He forced himself to look—to understand what he was seeing. To be logical, even when his brain was telling him there was no way he could survive the ordeal or even to parse what was happening. He wasn’t alone, though, and he needed to consider Belle’s needs.

There was some kind of ...
thing
in the corner of the cavern, its mouth opened so wide that Steven could see the movements of its throat as it cranked out that unholy melody that could make a Cougar’s ears bleed, and behind it was movement—struggling. Feathers flying and high-pitched screams and sobs.

It was the sobs that made him move—made him act.

He gripped Gail’s dagger in his weaker hand while pulling Belle along with his other. He wasn’t going to leave her behind in a place where a few feet could make a difference in regards to safety. He wasn’t going to let her see him do anything else to embarrass himself when she’d been so brave.

He may not have had a witch’s magic, but he’d once heard Ellery say that the biggest part of casting spells was for the magic user to direct strong intent, so he did that. He slashed the blade toward the screaming thing, almost close enough to slice off its nose, and it stopped the noise.

Just for a moment, though.

As soon as Steven had concluded the dagger’s arc, the monster had its mouth open again, and this time, Steven wasn’t going to give it a chance to start up.

He stabbed the knife into what would have been the thing’s heart, if it had one at all, and ripped downward, telling it to just
die
, already. It was probably wasn’t even alive in an earthly sense, and likely very much at home, but it didn’t like what Steven had done.

It was hurting, and it didn’t want more pain. It folded in on itself and scampered out of the cavern, snarling as it went, and Belle snarled right back at it.

She looked like she wanted to chase it out—a cat unwilling to let its prey escape—but he grabbed her and pulled her up to his side.

With the monster gone, he could concentrate on what needed to be done, but as always, Belle was moving ahead.

“I’m shifting. Be ready to grab her.” Belle said, and before he could stop her, she was tugging off her clothes and removing her shoes.

She was making plans on the fly like any good leader, and though he was the one with the military rank and the medals, all he could do was follow her. He could hardly think straight, and that wasn’t like him. It was humiliating.

Get it together, Welch.

He could let himself fall apart later when there were no witnesses and there was nothing at stake.

He dragged the blade of the knife across the floor near the beasts that were scratching at the lady pinned against the wall. She recoiled and cried with each sizzle of spit they lobbed at her—with each feather they yanked from her mangled wings.

That’s ... an angel. Unbelievable.

He and Belle were going to pull a real-deal angel out of a mouth to hell, and that angel evidently had no power or ability to wrest freedom for herself.

And I’m supposed to rescue it?

Crazed laugher escaped his chest as he lurched forward with the dagger. All he could do to not think too hard about the scenario was laugh at how fucking ridiculous it was. That was all he could do to keep from coming apart.

Shit
.

Belle could generally form rational thoughts when she was in her cat’s form, even when her more primal instincts were taking over, but for the life of her, she couldn’t understand how to manage Steven.

If she hadn’t known him at all, she might have thought he was fine. He was reaching into the writhing mass of bodies and stabbing that dagger toward anything or anyone who got too close to their target, but he didn’t seem to be himself. He wasn’t talking, wasn’t communicating.

Wasn’t bossing Belle around.

He was simply making a lot of urgent movements and occasionally emitting a laugh, though nothing about the scenario was particularly funny.

Belle rolled onto her back with one of the creatures atop her and thrust her hind legs upward to kick it away.

Now that some of the beings had fled, she could see they weren’t all the same, and they didn’t
feel
the same. Some were creatures she had no names for. Others had energy of a familiar taste—monsters she’d encountered and parried with before and evidently didn’t know it at the time.

One was an
Impostore
—a kind of free-form shapeshifter, and counted among their ranks was one of Lola’s nephews. She’d banished their pack through that portal not even a month prior. They infiltrated and wreaked havoc in organized shifter groups, so that thing couldn’t be allowed out.

“Come on!” Steven shouted at the angel once he’d cleared a path to her, but she cowered in the corner, wide-eyed and with her arms wrapped around her torso and useless wings shuddering.

She was in shock, but obviously Steven seemed to be, too. If he weren’t, he would have seen the thing leaping at him from the corner before it set its teeth into Steven’s arm.

Snarling, Belle pounced on it, setting her own sharp fangs into the thing’s neck and tugging it away.

That was the only way anything in that realm could hurt Steven. They couldn’t invade his body, so they had to resort to the tricks of the human realm.

Steven could probably only see a small fraction of the beings Belle could see. In spite of the fact he held that knife and that it caused pain to the malevolent things that went near it, a few entities tried anyway.

They got close and tried to get into him, but ... they
couldn’t
. He seemed immune to it, and she didn’t think it was because of that knife.

Also surprising—those things didn’t want her. They seemed to think he was the more useful body to inhabit, and for the moment, that suited her just fine. Steven had to be feeling very crowded though, and being half wild animal herself, she knew that cornered animals didn’t always behave rationally. She needed to get him and that shaking angel out of there.

After one more vicious swipe to a creature coming at Steven, Belle shifted back to her two-legged form and grabbed the angel statue by the wrist.

“Just run toward the magic at the portal, and don’t look back. I’m going to be right behind you.”

The angel blinked big, watery gray eyes and swallowed hard.

For Pete’s sake
.

Belle scooped up her clothes, took the lady’s wrist again, and made for the door, urging Steven ahead.

“Go, go, go!” she barked.

He could be mad at her later. She didn’t care, as long as he didn’t keep his feet fastened to that floor as if they were tarred there. He didn’t belong there. He belonged to
her
, and her domain had tan carpet, central air conditioning, and shitty cable—not rock walls.

“Come
on
, Steven. If we don’t come out, Hannah’s gonna start flaying people.”

That seemed to get him moving. He pulled in a deep breath, rammed the blade of Gail’s dagger into some sort of hissing reptile-looking critter that edged toward the door, and then he waved them out of the cavern.

“Run,” he said. “I’m on your heels.”

She’d have to trust him. They couldn’t look back. The mist was swirling, thickening, and it wasn’t just smoke and steam. There were spirits descending on them, not just because they wanted a piece of that messenger angel, but because they wanted to needle at Steven, too.

Belle needed to be guarding him and not the panicking creature with the missing feathers, but they’d already made their plan and couldn’t change it midstream.

“Don’t look down.” She led the angel quickly across the narrow path and allowed herself one deep exhalation of relief as they approached the fork from which they could navigate toward the hellmouth.

“Fuck,” Steven said behind her, and she had no choice but to look.

At the trail mouth, something had caught up to him, and it tried to climb onto his back.

No, not
something
—some
things
—and they weren’t spirits.
Impostores
.

“Lola should have incinerated them when she had the chance,” Belle said to no one in particular.

She gave the angel a hard push toward the exit cavern and hissed, “Run.”

The lady let out a yip of fear, but after a moment’s delay, she went.

Belle ran back to Steven, ducking at the shifted
Impostore
who’d leaped for her head.

She grabbed the
Impostore
’s back feet as he sailed over her and threw him to the ground. There was only one cat in the glaring who was faster than her, and he was the goddess’s own son. Belle was the wrong lady to try to pull one over on.

The guy shifted out of the half-cat, half-coyote shape he’d taken and stood on two legs, feral and snarling at her, and she rolled her eyes. “Hey. Look over there,” she said, pointing to nothing in particular over one of the pits.