Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) by Teresa Noelle Roberts Page A

path. I see that in your aura. So we’re stuck together. Otherwise…”
    He didn’t need to say it, because she knew—not learning would destroy her.
    They stared at each other, the few feet between them an unfathomable chasm. “I’ve got to go,” he said abruptly. “I was supposed to be hunting with my brother anyway. Maybe I can catch up to him.”
    Halfway out the door, he added, “Remember to eat. You probably don’t feel hungry, but you are.” Before he was even out the door, he was in cougar form.
    She bet some small animals were going to meet their end tonight on the fangs and claws of Jack’s rage.
    If she had an animalside, she’d head out there herself, where she could justifiably tear something apart and eat it.
    Instead, she grabbed her clothes. Maybe her grandfather would like company. She sure as hell didn’t want to be alone.

Chapter Eleven
    Jack ran through the dark—Cara had been out cold for several hours before she woke up and things got interesting—looking for something to kill. Preferably more of the loups-garous/skinwalkers/whatever the fuck they’d run into earlier, but a deer would do, even a rabbit.
    He had no idea where Ben was. He could try to reach out through silentspeech, but right now, Jack was better off alone. Ben would smell Cara on him and ask too many leering questions, because that was what little brothers did.
    Jack needed to think, but not in a wordy way. This was deeper and scarier than his own impulsiveness getting him into trouble with Ms. Wrong. Cara had forgotten her fiancé—and the poor bastard might be dead, but not for anywhere near long enough for him to just slip her mind.
    If there hadn’t been sorcerers encroaching on the village today, he would have confronted Grand-mère about interfering with his life and Cara’s. But there were sorcerers, and he didn’t know what was going on. Someone was threatening his home, and the magic that pushed him and Cara together might be part of it. He needed to figure out what was going on there, at least put enough pieces together that he could talk about it sensibly with the other villagers.
    But if he started thinking too much now, his head would explode. He needed to clear his head of all the jumbled words and his nose of Cara’s scent and start fresh.
    So he ran, big paws crunching on frozen snow, lungs aching from breathing in icy air. He smelled deer, but the trail was old, distant.
    Then he smelled something else, something fierce and foul, like sulfur and fresh blood.
    Sorcery had happened here, not recently, but recently enough it must have something to do with the attack a few hours ago. He opened his mouth and grimaced, flehmening to let his Jacobson’s organ get into the act.
    He regretted it almost immediately as he choked on stench. Wouldn’t have bothered an actual cougar nearly as much as it did him, but the part of his sensibility that was human-influenced rebelled at the odor.
    Sorcery always had that sulfur smell, even if the sorcerer was doing something as benign as charging your solar battery on a cloudy day or “mind-controlling” you out of the winter doldrums. But this was different. Foul and literally rotten and scented with the unique copper reek of blood, this magic could only be evil.
    Cautiously, he went a little farther, then tried to summon his power-sight.
    In cougar form, it was precarious. He and Rafe, due to their part-manitou heritage, could do things no other cougar dual and no other shaman could do, but the abilities didn’t always play well together.
    For a few seconds, he saw the world, not in the crisp black and white of the cougar, illuminated by a rising moon, but in rippling shades of aura and life and magical energy. Unfortunately, he also saw only as well as a human shaman might in the dark, which wasn’t even as well as his wordside form would. He saw the energy but not what it was attached to.
    Something in the snow. But what?
    He blinked, attempting to force the