Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (7 page)

Powers, it felt good to blow off some steam. Probably felt even better for Rafe. New parents were always under extra stress, even when they knew what species their kid was.

Maybe they were being a little rough on Ben, or perhaps he genuinely felt bad for lurking and spying. Before long, he rolled onto his back in a gesture of surrender. “
Sorry,”
he silentspoke.
“Curious.”
He flashed an image of a female cougar joining Jack and Rafe. Like everyone else in the village, he’d heard about the new arrival from Toronto, and like everyone else—especially the single guys—he was dying to get a look at her.

“Too old for you.”

Ben sent a series of images conveying the hope that Cara might be a cougar in the current human sense of the word. Jack cuffed him once more, a little harder this time, and shifted back to wordside form. “Go away. Rafe and I have work to do. We’ll catch up later. As for Cara, I’m sure Mom will invite her over for dinner sometime soon. Mom’s even nosier than you are.” Ben snarled playfully, but faded back into the tree line, off to find trouble somewhere else. Probably with a girl involved, if Jack knew anything about his baby brother.

Rafe shifted wordside, laughing as he brushed melting snow off his bare skin. “Powers, I needed that. Remind me to thank your bratty brother later.”

“Just smack him upside the head. He likes it.” Half-dressed, Jack gave his cousin a quick hug.

And Cara Mackenzie materialized out of nowhere—not literally, although people were known to materialize out of nowhere around here. “Am I interrupting something? Your personal life’s none of my business, but I’m supposed to be here for lessons.”

Rafe scrambled for clothes, but Jack had more important things to worry about. Cara’s tone was snippy and her aura crackled with self-righteous annoyance. Bad… Self-righteousness could be deadly for a shaman. To her credit, she looked from one man to the other several times, then to the evidence of the three-way cougar wrestling bout in the snow. She blushed as if she’d just realized why they’d been half dressed and now felt like a dork. Which she should, but the blush was pretty. And she still had that bristling self-righteousness in her aura.

“First lesson: self-righteousness is fixed and rigid,” Jack said, smiling. “Shamans by nature are fluid, flexible and chaotic. So a self-righteous shaman is creating a bad mix. Oil and water. No, oil and fire. Or fire and dynamite. Things that go boom, anyway.” Her eyes widened, and her sensuous, wide mouth actually hung open for a second at the seeming non sequitur. Which was exactly the right reaction, as long as it got her to think.

Unfortunately those red lips, parted as they were, made him ponder how great they’d feel around his cock, making him grateful he’d gotten his pants back on before she showed up. Which said something about how hot she was, because her eyes and her aura weren’t exactly screaming
I want you
. Trickster must hate him—or s/he loved him a great deal and was showing it in Trickster’s usual weird way.

“You,” she said with great dignity, “aren’t making sense.” Then she blinked. “Wait. That’s the point, isn’t it? It’s like a Zen koan, deliberate paradox to make me think. Either that or you’re being a dick.”

“Zen koan’s pretty close.”

“And he is an utter dick at times. As I am. As you’ll probably be too. Goes with the shamanic territory.” Rafe, who’d covered all the bits a human would consider naughty, extended his hand. “Hi, I’m Rafe Too-Many-Last-Names, Jack’s cousin.”

“Right. Is this pick-on-the-new-girl hour?” She shook Rafe’s hand, and her grip looked strong and sure despite the puzzled expression on her face. “The naked welcoming party was one thing—I mean, nice view, but it threw me until I figured out you’d just shifted—but I’m sure that’s not your actual name.”

Rafe and Jack both laughed, making clouds in the cold air with their hot breath, and after a second, Cara joined in.

“Seriously,” Jack said, “that’s what we’re calling him now. How many are you up to?”

Rafe showily counted on his fingers. “Six—the one on my driver’s license, my husband’s, my wife’s, my birth-parents’ English name and their Native one. I think my mother had a name in her people’s language, but I can’t begin to pronounce it. At this point, Too-Many-Last-Names is easiest. That way no one’s offended I’m not using whichever one of the names they’re attached to.”

“Obviously,” Jack drawled, “there’s a story here. But nights are long in winter up here, so I’m sure you’ll get to hear it. Unless…” His flirting instinct took over from his better judgment. “I can offer you something more exciting to do with your nights than hanging out with my cousin and the rest of the Rafe-Jude-and-Elissa-plus-baby show.” He felt like he was standing ten yards away from himself, watching himself put on his most practiced seducer’s smile and spew the ill-chosen words.

He didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved, though he was some of both, when Cara said, “I think you’re supposed to be mentoring me, not dating me, so unless your exciting nights aren’t what I’m reading into them, I’ll stick with the Rafe-Jude-and-Elissa-plus-baby show.” She turned to Rafe with a smile that Jack would have to qualify as delicious in its own right. “So, you’re the other cougar shaman?”

Oops. She’d almost committed a faux pas there. What she’d taken for two guys groping each other was two cousins giving each other one of those goofy guy-hugs. Which humans wouldn’t have done mostly naked, but duals, who had no nudity taboos to speak of, would.

Why had she been so quick to jump to conclusions?

And why would it have mattered anyway if Jack had been making out with the other guy? She didn’t give a damn about people’s sexual preferences, as long as they involved other consenting adults.

Maybe, her pussy suggested, because she’d had a little too much fun imagining Jack indulging in consenting-adult type behavior with her, and the suggestion he might bat for the other team had made her bitchy.

Jealous, even.

She blushed and hoped it would pass as a flush from the wind.

“Am I that famous?” Rafe asked.

“My grandfather mentioned you. Plus he dragged me along to breakfast with Elissa and Jude this morning, since he’s apparently conned the entire village into feeding him. Elissa and Jude were great to a confused refugee from the normy world. So hospitable, in fact, that I ended up staying for lunch as well as breakfast. Your baby’s adorable. Very alert and aware for such a new one.”

“Aw, I was hoping my fame had spread worldwide. Apparently not so much.” Rafe grinned. He didn’t look much like Jack except for the coloring and the general level of insanely good-looking, but that smile brought out their resemblance. The roguish grin wasn’t quite as convincing on him, though. There was something solid about Rafe. He came off as a genuinely nice, straightforward guy. Not what she expected in a shaman, based on her limited experience. Maybe there was hope for her sanity yet.

“My grandfather,” she said gingerly, looking in Jack’s dark eyes and trying to pretend that the heat surging through her body had nothing to do with lust, “said you’d be teaching me. It looks like you and Rafe are in the middle of something.” She opted against saying
goofing off
, but she was thinking it. “When do you want to get started?”

“We already have. You might as well hang out and watch. Later, we’ll go back to square one, just you and me.” Jack sounded about as thrilled with that prospect as he would be with taking a belt sander to his balls. “You’ll pick up a lot watching Rafe. He came to his powers late too. It’ll be good to see how your powers play with you while you’re learning to play with them.”

She glanced at the other dual. “If it’s okay with Rafe…”

“Every budding shaman in town has spent a few hours watching the crazy American set his tail on fire. At least you’re not a pimply twelve-year-old. Or Jake’s younger brother, who’s not even a shaman, just nosy.” Rafe smiled. God, he was a good-looking guy. A good-looking,
pleasant
guy, unlike sexy but abrasive Jack. Too bad Rafe was married. He’d be a good candidate for the post-trauma stupid fling that her body seemed to think was due. Jack wouldn’t be, even if her body thought otherwise.

Still, Jack was teaching her. She ought to be grateful, since his tutelage—grumpy or not—might save her life. “Thank you. And Jack, thanks for agreeing to teach me.”

“I didn’t actually agree. I mean I’m happy to do it,” he added quickly. His aura flared bright, and she thought that deep down under the grumpy exterior he meant it. “I’d hate to see Sam’s granddaughter come into her powers without someone to guide her. But me doing it? That was all decided by the spirits. You and I are just along for the ride.”

“That explains so much.” And it did. He’d been railroaded into this by forces out of his control. It wasn’t teaching her he resented, but the sense that he was being swept along by fate.

And God, she understood that feeling.

She meant to say more, but something stabbed her through her brain. She put a hand to her head because it felt so much like a huge icicle should be protruding from her skull.

No such luck that it would be something as ordinary as a freak accident. Not in her life, not right now.

“Help.” Her voice sounded faraway and squeaky, like a Looney Toons character helplessly watching the anvil plummeting from nowhere toward her.

The forest spun. Her leg snapped, a volley of agony that pitched her over into the snow.

Jack and Rafe each stepped toward her, Jack’s hands outstretched as if he offered comfort, or more likely cast a spell.

Before either man could reach her, something black and low-slung and scary burst out of the trees. They looked vaguely like wolves but not really—neither ordinary wolves or the wolfsides of duals, which looked like the animal but moved with more purpose and intelligence. These were wolves seen through a lens of acid after reading Stephen King.

Five of the things. Two more than there were of the good guys, and she was pretty much out of commission.

Jack and Rafe had already shifted, so quickly she hadn’t registered the moment when they went from man to cougar. The cat who must be Rafe was already attacking, despite the fact that a cougar in a toque looked more silly than fierce. Jack—he’d been standing closer to her, and besides, he was still wearing, more or less, his buckskin jacket and a necklace—stood guard over her. He bared his fangs, looking damned furious and not like something she’d want to mess with.

Shouldn’t Jack get busy kicking monster ass? She didn’t need to be hovered over. She was a cop, not a girly little thing who needed to be defended.

Never mind that her head was spinning and throbbing, one arm was pretty much useless between the bullet wound and the damaged wrist, she was in wonking amounts of pain, and she couldn’t stand. There had to be something she could do.

There was.

Cara hadn’t meant to bring her Glock with her to Couguar-Caché. But the first night of their travel north, she’d dug in her pack to find her toothbrush—and the gun and holster and several boxes of ammo were there, as if they’d packed themselves. Inexplicable in her old world, but as a proto-shaman, she figured the inexplicable meant something. So she’d strapped it on when she left the last vestiges of civilization behind.

And this morning, without even thinking about it, she’d strapped it on again.

Now she drew it.

Focused.

Pushed the cosmic junk in her head aside by sheer force of will. Whatever these creatures were, they looked to be flesh and blood—and flesh and blood could be shot.

Rafe looked like he could use some help with the two he was fighting, but she couldn’t trust herself to shoot into that snarling mass of fur, fangs, claws and muscles and not hit Rafe.

So she rolled over, despite real pain from her not entirely real injuries, and took aim.

And shot one in mid-leap toward Jack.

It thudded to the snow, close enough that the cougar jumped like a startled cat, his fur puffing out so he looked even larger. The wolflike creature twitched and abruptly changed into a naked—and clearly dead—man, with the half-rotted shell of what had once been a wolf beside him.

Oh shit.

She’d worry about it once she took care of the next wolf-thing. Even if it was an insane dual or something, it was attacking and needed to be stopped.

Especially since it was practically on top of them. And it had friends.

She said a quick prayer to a deity she couldn’t name and squeezed off two more rounds, then a third to be sure.

“Go…” she muttered to Jack as the creatures fell. She couldn’t tell if she’d killed them, but they weren’t going anywhere fast. “Help…Rafe.”

The forest became noisy and painfully bright. No, both were in her head. It was cloudy, overcast, and she shouldn’t have been hearing a cacophony of voices, screams and drumming. Maybe echoes of the shots and ringing in her ears, but not all this other madness.

Her strength ebbed. It took all she had to look toward where two cougars were fighting two…whatever the heck they were…and clearly winning.

Rafe still had a toque clinging to his feline head, and Jack still sported the tattered remains of his jacket. Even as a cougar in human clothing, he looked good.

The pain in her head kicked up a few notches, and her body decided this might be a good moment to pass out.