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

cougar and the shaman to see in sync. All it did was make his eyes ache and blur all his vision until he had a lot more sympathy for Cara’s crisis-headache earlier.
    Fine. He hadn’t wanted to do it this way, but sometimes a guy had to do what a cougar couldn’t.
    He took a deep breath, steeled himself to freeze his nuts off and shifted to wordside form.
    Fuck, it’s cold was his first thought. He’d left a light coating of fur in place to give himself a bit of shelter, but it only helped a little.
    His second thought, as his sight adjusted to the new form and took full advantage of the magic, also started with fuck. Fuck, that’s not good.
    The snow was soaked with blood. That wasn’t necessarily weird. Wolverines, cougars, and the occasional wolf hunted in these forests, not to mention the duals of the village. But this was a lot of blood and not a bit of fur, feather or bone, though he thought he made out a few anonymous hunks of meat.
    And the blood glowed fuchsia, with black and sulfur-yellow streaks, and a dome of the same colors encapsulated it.
    Something had been sacrificed here.
    Something or someone.
    Jack didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to see what he thought it likely he could, but he kicked up the power-sight a notch and at the same time flehmened again, reaching his cougarside through his wordy form. He stared at the snow, turning all his forces of magic and dual senses on it.
    Bodies lay under the snow, dead, yet still bound by sorcery. At least one was two-legged. Human, or a dual in wordy form.
    Jack probed cautiously at the magic.
    He couldn’t see the hastily concealed bodies, but he had an ugly sense they’d been tortured. The victims had died hard. Their pain lingered, flooding into Jack as soon as he let his defenses down.
    Jack fought to close the connection, suppressing a scream. Then he fell to his knees, vomiting in the snow.
    Someone had committed a ritual sacrifice on Couguar-Caché’s protected land, polluting it with evil.
    If it hurt him, it would have hurt Grand-mère far more. In a very real sense, Grand-mère was the land.
    He needed to check on her. Then he had to rally some help. If a human had been murdered, there might be ghosts trapped here, which meant Elissa needed to get involved. Her witch magic let her communicate with the ghosts and send them to the Otherside without reliving their deaths in detail, like a shaman would. Bringing in Elissa meant involving Jude and Rafe, because the three of them worked best as a team. Which was good, because Rafe had those cop instincts, and whether in lion form or as his six-foot-six, black, muscular wordside, Jude would be handy to have around if a fight broke out. And maybe a few extra people in case the sorcerers came back and needed their evil asses kicked.
    He shifted back to cougar form.
    As he shifted, he let himself scream, but it wasn’t a scream of pain. This was a cougar’s bloodcurdling cry of rage, half snarl and half scream.
    He hoped to the powers that they hadn’t killed all the sorcerers that afternoon. Bullets and broken necks were far too clean and painless for what they deserved.
    Hoping his silentspeech would travel that far, and that his friends weren’t too deeply asleep or too distracted by sex to hear him, he called for Rafe and Jude. Elissa was the one he needed most, but the guys would have to let her know. With no personal link, his silentspeech couldn’t reach her human mind.
    Just in case the guys were busy, though, he broadcast a general Help. West of the village. I’ll explain later, to any duals who might be listening.

Chapter Twelve
    After Jack left, Cara spent a restless half hour or so with her grandfather, devouring whatever food he set in front of her and trying to talk about loups-garous, but unable to string words together coherently. Finally he took pity on her. “Magic’s still got you rattled. It’ll do that even once you’re used to it, but at this point, pulling enough power