Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (3 page)

But a letter would take too long. She’d had another attack since being released from the hospital that afternoon, not as bad as the first, but bad enough she’d woken up on the floor of the condo she used to share with Phil, her shirt wet with blood from a long-healed gunshot wound. She couldn’t work in this state, couldn’t even trust herself to drive. She needed to get this fixed, fast.

But after tearing through the condo and digging through the boxes from her father’s house, she threw herself into a chair in frustration. She didn’t have phone numbers for any of her relatives in Couguar-Caché, and the phone company had been no help. Not only couldn’t they find her grandfather, Sam Many-Winters, they didn’t have listings for anyone in Couguar-Caché.

Hell, she couldn’t even remember where Couguar-Caché was. She thought she remembered driving far north with her mother to get there. But she also remembered people speaking French when they stopped for gas, and driving into a rosy sunrise, so maybe it was out on the Gaspé? Even Google was no help. When she finally found her grandfather’s address, the PO box turned out to be in Montreal, which had to be a mistake.

How was she supposed to find someone from her ancestral line to help her when she couldn’t even find her family?

The hell with it. She’d keep trying, but meanwhile she had to do something. Figuring she had nothing to lose, she flipped the phone book to S.

Only to find a listing for Shamanic Instruction.

Probably a con artist ripping off curious normies, she thought, already dialing. She was twitching to act, to do
something
, even if it didn’t make sense, and calling this place seemed a fairly safe jumping point into the unknown.

Besides, the words on the page got bigger as she looked at them, turned first one color and then another until each letter was something different and the line of type was either an insane jumble of random colors or a glorious rainbow, depending on your point of view. Her grandfather’s magic always had a cartoonish quality to it, at least the minor manifestations he’d let her see, and this seemed the same flavor. Either that or her brain was misbehaving again, but she’d take the chance.

She had to do something.

Normally, she’d hang up after five or six rings without either an answer or an answering machine, thinking she’d misdialed. This time, she was more patient.

On the ninth ring, something answered with a mechanical click. Voice mail, she figured, and sure enough, it started out, “Hello, you have reached Spirit Drums New Age Shop…”

Then a man’s deep voice broke in, superimposed over the recording. “Cara, seek the cougar. Grand-mère’s waiting for you, and so am I.”

“Wait…” Cara’s tongue tripped over itself.
Where is Couguar-Caché?
was what she meant to ask. She got as far as “Where…” before the voice answered.

Only this time it was female and elderly and familiar.
Grand-mère.

“Dream tonight, Cara, and you will find it. And maybe you’ll also find something you didn’t know you sought.”

The voice faded out, leaving the mechanical secretary saying, “…and Sundays eleven to five. See our Web site for…”

She clicked the phone down as the first stabs of another attack hit her. As the dizziness overtook her, Cara had the dim thought that if her dreams held the key to ending this feeling of helplessness, she’d face them gladly for the first time since Phil died.

Maybe since her mother died.

She didn’t dare hope she wouldn’t dream her mother’s suicide or Phil’s murder during a carjacking. She almost always did if she managed to sleep for more than an hour or two. But if she also dreamed her answer, she could face the pain.

Cara dreamed, only she knew she was dreaming.

She smelled wood smoke, cooking venison, other scents she recognized from childhood but could name less readily.

She found herself in a clearing among majestic evergreens. The snow was hip-deep, but where she walked, it faded away, filling in behind her as she passed.

Someone laughed in the distance, a rickety old-lady laugh that was still big enough to fill the clearing.

Grand-mère.
Not in the city, an alien spirit-visitor, but in the woods where she belonged.

“Welcome home, Cara Many-Winters. Your mother said you’d wind up here eventually.” Cara instinctively flinched, but at the same time, she sensed she wasn’t about to see her mother dead and bloodied. Her own subconscious might do that to her, but Grand-mère wouldn’t, and even though she was dreaming, Cara felt she was speaking, in some sense, with the real Grand-mère. Just as she had been, she realized now, the other day in the squad room.

Even though Grand-mère couldn’t possibly be alive anymore.

“Did my mother see I’d manifest this power?”

Grand-mère nodded. “So did your grandparents. So did I. Even when you were an infant, we suspected it. But with shamans, you can never be sure until it happens, and by then it’s too late to move the breakables.”

She almost managed to smile at that. “Too true.”

“It’s a rough time in a shaman’s life, but we’ll work through it once you get home.”

Suddenly, she knew where she needed to go.

Even though she was pretty sure
there
wasn’t the same place it had been the last time she’d been in Couguar-Caché. A few days ago, that would have freaked her out a lot more, but now it almost made sense. Her mother had always claimed her hometown was hard to find but always right where you needed it to be. Maybe it had been more than a nostalgic turn of phrase.

“I’ll see you soon, Grand-mère. Now I can find the way. I couldn’t before.”

“You weren’t ready. And neither was he.”

Up until now, things had been relatively linear and sensible for a dream, but suddenly Cara found herself naked, swaddled under furs, and getting freaky with the most gorgeous specimen of masculinity she’d ever seen or dreamed.

Since it was a dream, she got a bird’s-eye look, which she couldn’t have if this had been real.

Long, straight black hair, bronze skin, the cheekbones of doom. He looked pure First Nations, only his eyes, instead of the dark brown she’d have expected, were amber.

Body of a god.

And oh my, cock of a wild stallion and the strength to just pick her up and toss her onto her back so he could sink that cock into her hard and fast. It was a claiming, but she was opening to him, rising to meet him, claiming him right back.

She arched, stiffened, cried out…

And woke to an empty bed, clutching a pillow that still smelled like Phil. She was wet, her nipples almost painfully hard, but she buried her face in the pillow and wept.

For Phil and what they’d had.

For what they hadn’t had.

For the doubts she’d never dared to express about their future, about the sense that much as she loved her calm, gentle, geeky accountant, they were growing apart. That the routine she thought she’d craved wasn’t going to work for her.

If she had expressed those doubts, would Phil still be alive? He’d been waiting for her outside an all-night diner when the carjacker got him. They’d planned to meet after her shift for a four a.m. breakfast since they’d been on different schedules that week. If he’d been single, he’d have been safe in bed.

She wouldn’t have the burden of guilt, of knowing that if she hadn’t lingered a few minutes too long after her shift, Phil wouldn’t have been waiting near the diner alone.

And she wouldn’t need to feel so wretched she felt closer to her dream lover than she now did to her dead fiancé.

Chapter Five

“So if duals and shamans are both children of Trickster, how come we’re probably the only two dual shamans in the world? You’d think there’d be more of us, including butt-loads of coyote dual shamans.”

Jack cocked his head at his distant cousin. Raised in the US as a human, Rafe Benedict was still learning how to be a dual. Discovering he was something even more complicated than a dual raised as a human had left him semipermanently boggled. The confusion made Rafe Mr. Cranky Cat sometimes, with everyone except his partners Elissa and Jude, and their baby Jocelyn. But his odd perspective meant he asked excellent questions.

It beat having Ben asking the same questions over and over again. Little brother wasn’t dumb, but he just couldn’t wrap his head around magic.

“Well, there might be three of us. We won’t know about your daughter for a long time.”

“Maybe even Trickster doesn’t want too many of us around? Scared we’ll take over?”

“Maybe scared of me,” Jack said, puffing himself up a little. Even with his furside in, he could do that. “You, not so much yet. You’re a great guy and a halfway decent cougar, but you’re pathetic as a shaman.”

Predictably, Rafe smacked him. He deserved it.

Jack poked at him. “You didn’t even have a healing crisis.”

“I was too busy dodging bullets to notice it.” He poked back. “Besides, Grand-mère says you didn’t have one either. Must be a cat thing.”

“I’ll show you cat thing.”

Jack started to let his cougarside out. Rafe took the time to slip out of his clothes.

Despite pausing to undress, Rafe was fully in cat form before Jack was. Rafe had some aspects of being a cougar down pat. He changed as elegantly as any dual in the village.

In deep snow, the two cougars wrestled and batted at each other, claws pulled in like house cats playing. They snarled, they growled, they shrieked.

Suddenly, Grand-mère stood in front of them. She didn’t even pretend to ignore them while they changed back into wordside, humanlike form and scrambled for clothes. Jack was used to it. Grand-mère was a manitou, and manitou, being nature spirits, had even weaker notions of modesty than duals did. Not to mention Grand-mère had changed not only Jack’s diapers but his father’s, grandmother’s, and several more generations of ancestors back to the long-ago part-dual, part-manitou baby that was actually her son. Rafe tried to hide behind a bush. Never mind that he was one-quarter manitou, Grand-mère’s actual grandkid; he’d been raised human.

“Children,” she said, “someone is on her way to the village. Jack, you will take her on as a student. Cara is the daughter of Lily Many-Winters, who left here for the outside world many years ago. You may remember Lily and Cara visiting when you were a cub. Raphael, you and she have some things in common, including that her heritage is coming as a surprise to her and she is fighting it. I trust you will both be kind to her, for she needs it.”

“Of course, Grand-mère,” Rafe said, all respect. He even bowed his head a little.

“Is Cara pretty?” Jack asked with a leer, knowing it would get his grandmother’s goat.

“Stop thinking with your little head, Jack. She’s coming to us because she needs our help. She’s gone into crisis, and no one around her knows how to handle it.”

He racked his brain and came up with an image of a little girl, a few years younger than him, who used to visit in the summers with her mother. Cara had dark blonde hair, which made her unique among the humans he’d met at that age. He couldn’t remember anything else about her; he’d been just enough older that she wasn’t too interesting. She hadn’t been back since her mother died.

He remembered her mother’s death all too clearly, though it happened many kilometers away. He and old Sam Many-Winters had been magically linked, with Sam trying to beat some shamanic lesson into his stubborn adolescent head, at the moment Lily died.

Lily was Sam’s daughter.

He’d been just shy of fourteen when Lily died.

That would make Cara over thirty herself, which was damn old for a shamanic crisis. At twelve or thirteen, your body bounced back, and you were so awash with hormones that a few more waves of crazy seemed almost normal. As an adult, not so much. “Right. So Cara’s taking after her mom and turning into a shaman. Why give her to me instead of Nella or Mary Running-Deer or her own grandfather or someone else who’s, oh,
human
? Rafe’s giving me enough to do.”

Grand-mère let out a big, whooping belly laugh. “Jack, Jack, Jack, I’m giving her to you because she needs your bad attitude. Even as a child, Cara Many-Winters Mackenzie was overly serious. You will be good for each other.” She laughed again. “And if her real self looks anything like her dream self, you’ll be pleased to have her around.”

Oh, great. Funny how something that would normally be good news, like the arrival of someone attractive, single and not related to him, sounded less appealing when it came with a huge obligation attached. “All the more reason to give her to someone else as a student, Grand-mère. How am I supposed to impress her with my manly charms when I’m making her life miserable like I’m doing to poor Rafe?”

Rafe, getting into the spirit of the game, tried to look hangdog and frail with fatigue. He failed miserably.

“Oh, my poor Raphael. Go home and let Elissa and Jude tend to you.” Grand-mère didn’t sound a bit sympathetic. “More to the point, tend to Elissa and your daughter. If Jocelyn doesn’t start sleeping through the night soon, half the village will wind up with insomnia, since she projects so much. Not to mention your poor tired wife is going to do something crazy if she doesn’t get some rest soon. I’m not keen on having everything in the hoop houses turn to poison oak because our green witch is so underslept her magic backlashes.”