Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (25 page)

He watched her do the mud-season stomp back into the house, thinking it was sexier than any model’s catwalk slink.

At the last second, she turned and said, “Well? Are you going to help get this party on the road, since you’re the one who says he knows where he’s going? Or are you going to stare at my ass?”

He couldn’t think of any reason why he couldn’t do both.

But saying so was just wasting time, and they’d wasted enough already.

Cara reluctantly gave her keys to Jack, since he knew where he was going. She ended up sandwiched between Jack and her grandfather.

Which, under the circumstances, was curiously reassuring.

Jack peeled out, splattering mud in his wake.

“We need to prepare,” Gramps said.

Jack didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I’m plenty prepared.”

“We’re not. At least I’m not, and I don’t think either you or Cara is either.”

“Magically, I know I’m not prepared.” Cara patted her holster. “On the other hand, these guys hit the ground just as fast as anyone else if you blow off their kneecaps.” The thought didn’t make her feel as safe as it should. Her gut told her that her still-flaky powers were what she needed now, not the gun.

But she knew how to use the gun.

Jack said, “You need to stop relying on the gun. Until you learn to trust your magic and your guides, to know they’ll be there for you, they
won’t
be there for you.”

Her grandfather didn’t say anything. He made a small, sly gesture, though, and time did something funny in Cara’s immediate vicinity. How else could she explain that Gramps simply reached over, took the gun out of the holster and tossed it out the window before she could react?

“What the fuck?” She scrambled over the old man, realizing as she did that she couldn’t dive out the window after the gun, especially since Jack was showing no sign of slowing down.

Not to mention the little fact that the window was shut, though it hadn’t stopped the gun from passing through it.

“Give me back my gun.”

“Now you will rely on your powers, as a shaman should.”

Oh, she wanted to smack the old coot.

She suspected that, by his light, what he’d done was more logical than her reliance on a factory-built metal object. And she couldn’t bring herself to hit the old man anyway. But she still wanted to.

“What did you
do
with it? It looked like you threw it away, but I know you didn’t.”

If nothing else, she’d learn a handy trick.

“Don’t worry,” he said calmly. “The gun will pop back to the village. At least that’s what I told Coyote to do with it. I don’t think he’ll lose it, and he doesn’t have time to gamble it away, since he’s meeting us at the Moose-Butt.” Gramps scratched his head. “Unless he goes to another dimension for the game, of course. But he won’t. He has a crush on you.”

“Enough about that, old man. I don’t want to hear about another male thinking of Cara that way.
Any
male.” Jack’s voice was a dark growl that set off all Cara’s internal dangerous-freak alarms even while it shivered over her skin and infiltrated her clothes to tease her clit—and that set off her alarms even more.

Cara had managed, barely, to contain her anger at her grandfather, but this possessiveness, and at such an inappropriate time, tipped her over the edge into fury. “Enough. Both of you, enough! Jack, I like you and everything, but I’m not your furry soul-mate—and if I was your furry soul-mate, I’d pop claws and bloody your nose for talking to my grandfather that way. And Gramps, I understand what you meant to achieve by hiding my gun, but this is hardly the time…”

“It’s the perfect time,” Gramps and Jack said in eerie unison. “Trust the magic.”

Shouting as if she was as crazy as they were wouldn’t help, Cara told herself. But how could you deal rationally with crazy people?

By playing their own game.

“I’d be willing,” she said, her voice straining for calm, “but how am I supposed to trust the magic when it doesn’t work half the time and one of my guides is too busy leering at me to be useful?” That was true whether she meant Jack’s cougar or Coyote. All her rage and frustration—with the idiot males of all species in her life, with her own lack of magical progress, at the violence that threatened the village, with the fact that she had to worry about this insanity at all when in a properly organized universe she’d be a non-magical Toronto cop preparing for her wedding to a refreshingly sane if rather boring man instead of whatever and whoever she was becoming—bubbled out. “Am I supposed to do stuff blindly and believe it will work, and it will? This is, believe it or not, a semiserious question.”

“Pretty much,” Jack said blithely.

“Sometimes,” her grandfather countered, “but not now. One does not go into a battle an empty shell, just you and maybe your spirit guide, without the forces of the universe behind you and your magic at the ready. Stop this rattletrap, Jack.”

“Rafe, Jude and Elissa are right behind us.”

Gramps laughed. “You know as well as I do they’re doing their own preparations, and the guys will be silentspeaking you for directions as soon as their brains stop leaking out their ears from getting Elissa’s red magic charged up. Must say I envy those boys. That sounds a lot more fun than thumping magic into the heads of baby shamans. Which I really need to start doing, oh, yesterday.”

“Okay, okay.” Jack pulled over abruptly. “We’ll do it your way, old man.” His voice softened. “Because you’re probably right. We’ve pulled it off before without prepping because we had to, but it won’t hurt to prep and might help.”

“More than that,” Gramps said. “Jack, when I couldn’t finish your training, a healing shaman had to do what I could not. But Marla Whitehorse couldn’t teach you Trickster’s darker magics because she didn’t know them herself. For generations, we’ve passed on those magics without using them. When you came of age in a time of peace with no one who could teach you properly, I thought it was a sign you’d never need those magics. But we’re being pulled back into the larger world and its dangers. You and Cara will need all of Trickster’s gifts. Rafe will too, but he has manitou blood more strongly than you do, and a red witch who loves him, and he’ll find his own way.” Gramps shrugged. “You kids need to find your own ways too, but I can at least scratch you a map in the dirt.”

That all pretty much flew over Cara’s head, but Jack nodded like he knew what Gramps was talking about. “I was hoping I’d never have to go that deep,” he said, his voice more serious than Cara had ever heard it. “I hoped I could get through life without channeling Trickster through my own body. Then again, I’d hoped I’d never kill something that wasn’t edible. We know how well that’s been working lately.”

Gramps ruffled his hair. “It sucks to be an adult, Jack.”

Cara ventured to speak. “I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but it sounds ominous.”

“More lessons,” Jack said, “for both of us.”

“No time for anything but the basics now. Basics Cara probably doesn’t know and Jack hasn’t practiced enough. Follow my lead. Then follow your guides and your heart.”

Her grandfather’s words made a curious kind of sense, a sense she could approach only walking backward and looking in a mirror. That seemed to be the right way to approach anything to do with her magic, since she’d given up any hope she could beat it into submission with a stick.

“What are you waiting for?” Gramps said, opening the door and stepping out of the truck. Cara and Jack followed.

The two men drew a circle in the muddy earth.

Gramps pulled a gourd rattle from one of his many pouches and handed it to Cara. A drum appeared from somewhere. Cara wanted to believe it had been hidden in the folds of his jacket, but it seemed at least as likely he’d pulled it out of another dimension. Jack drew forth his flask of whisky and a wooden flute from the inner pockets of his coat. Gramps had tobacco, which didn’t even pretend to be there for solely mystical reasons; rolling papers fell out of the pouch as he opened it. He poured some tobacco onto the earth, lit it, then began to drum a beat that sounded like a great heart. The sound was louder than the small drum should have produced, resonating through the forest.

“What now?” she asked Jack, since her grandfather’s face was intent, his eyes focused outside the physical world.

Jack poured whisky onto the earth near the little tobacco fire but not close enough to drench the tiny flames. “You’ll know.”

That was what she got for asking.

She was about to say that too, when Jack began to play the flute.

Although it seemed to meander on its own lonely path, the music blended with her grandfather’s rhythm, forming a whole out of disjointed parts.

Cara’s hand began to move of its own accord, shaking the rattle in a way that rose up and wove in with the drum and flute, even though she was sure that in another, less magically charged setting, she would have sounded off-tempo and random.

When her grandfather started to chant, she realized she knew the words. She’d always known the words, that she’d heard her mother singing them time and again as a child. She didn’t fully understand them—she suspected a lot of the words were deliberate nonsense to loosen the grip of logic so magic could slither in.

The part she could understand was calling on the Powers for strength and inspiration and on the spirit guides for support and…she wasn’t quite sure what the right translation would be. Maybe nerve or outrageousness or chutzpah. Something Lynx could offer in abundance.

“Not that
chutzpah’s
English either, dear,”
Lynx said, only a little snark in her voice. “
But if you want outrageous, you need your other guide as well.”

She sensed a great cat standing between her and Jack, a cat connected to both of them.

No. She and Coyote had a deal. Besides, Lynx had mentioned outrageousness, and that was definitely Coyote. She turned her attention to the avatar she knew was with her grandfather.

A canine form wavered in and out of sight. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought it sported a Carmen Miranda headdress.

“Help me out,” she implored flatly, not trying to dress it up. “I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do here. I don’t know how to fight without my gun. In my old life, I almost never had to draw it, but I always knew it was there in case I needed it. And the magic doesn’t help me much. What good does it do to put moose ears on a murderer?”

She didn’t expect a serious answer from a coyote in a Carmen Miranda hat. She wasn’t sure she even expected a frivolous answer.

Instead, the fruit basket disappeared, and Coyote trotted close, standing next to Lynx, forming a phalanx of fur and power. “Moose ears humble. Moose ears shame. Moose ears make someone who isn’t fully committed to their path stop and, with any luck, think. Clown noses and oversized golf pants are good for that too. What more do you want?”

She spoke without hesitation, without thought. “Blood. I want their blood. I want their deaths.”

“For shame, dear.” Lynx rubbed up against her like a big house cat. “You’re letting your anger rule you. That’s no fun at all.”

Jack spoke out of turn. “Cara’s a cop trying to protect the innocent, to restore order the only way she knows how. How can she uphold the law in a place with no law? By eliminating the threat.”

She hated to admit Jack was right, but he was—and he put it more clearly than she could have managed.
Thank you
, she mouthed at him. “I don’t want to kill them in my saner moments, but I don’t know how else to stop them. They don’t seem the type to listen to reason, or to scare easily.” She turned, first to her guides, then to her grandfather, then, last of all, back to Jack, forcing herself to study each face. “The magic I’ve learned so far would probably get a small-time thug to run away, maybe even to rethink his choices. But these guys are way scarier than gangbangers and petty drug dealers, and they have magic of their own. Moose ears seem more likely to piss them off than to slow them down.”

She bowed her head. “I don’t know what to do here. Help me. Help me find the way to fight them like a shaman. I have a few ideas, but I don’t know if they’ll work, and I’m scared to fail and let you all down. I need to see a different way, think a different way.”

Her grandfather drew her into a hug. “You’re ready, Cara. You’ve reached the next step. You’ll be able to go farther now—and once you and Jack and I have a chance to do some real work, you’ll go farther yet.”

He smelled of tobacco and wood smoke and her childhood. Cara let herself relax.

Another pair of arms snaked around her. She stiffened, expecting Jack to do something rude, something erotic, something to disrupt the moment.

But he didn’t. He just held her. It wasn’t brotherly by a long shot, but the raw sexuality that came through every time Jack touched her was contained, buzzing inside a warm layer of affection and pride. “I’ve tried to guide you,” he said quietly, “but that only works when you’re ready for the journey. You wanted to learn, but it’s all so new to you, your brain could only take in so much. But now you’re ready for more.”

“So show me already.”

And, Coyote and Lynx leading the way, they did, in a way that Cara knew she could never put into words.