Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) Read online

  Dedication

  This is a work of fiction, set in an alternate world that resembles ours, but isn’t. I drew on many cultures as inspiration but did not attempt to depict any one Native American culture or any particular strain of shamanism. I’d like to dedicate this book to the real Native peoples of North America, to real shamans from all cultures, and to respectful anthropologists and scholars of folklore who attempt to see through stereotypes to the heart of cultures not their own.

  Chapter One

  “Officer Mackenzie?” The voice sounded like her captain’s, but Bell wasn’t known for his stealthy tread. Had Cara been that lost in thought?

  Cara jumped a little and looked up from the incident report she was struggling with, the words dancing behind a rising headache and the pervading sense of anger and uselessness she’d been fighting since Phil’s death five months ago. She expected to see her captain’s bulky, blue-clad form looming over her with that awkward no, I’m not checking up on you expression that was way more annoying than open concern would be—and open concern had gotten annoying sometime before her fiancé’s grave was filled in.

  Instead, she saw a totally unexpected person, a tiny, wiry old woman with long white braids, no taller than most ten-year-olds, who bristled with energy.

  Cara’s rational brain took in a few things. Normally, civilians didn’t get into the squad room without an escort, but the elderly lady was alone. Maybe someone had dropped her off, said something about why she was there, and then left? If that were the case, that was bad even for the mess Cara had been for the past five months.

  The visitor wore a pale buckskin dress ornamented with beads and porcupine quills, not a fashion statement but traditional Native clothing, and no coat despite the frigid February weather. Her silvery braids were fastened with rawhide strips. Not something you saw every day in Toronto. Maybe the old lady figured serious business like a visit to the police station merited her version of a weddings-and-funerals suit or dress uniform.

  “May I help you, ma’am?” The unusual visitor had roused her curiosity, which could only be good.

  “No, but I can help you, Cara.”

  How did she know Cara’s first name? Her name plate just said Mackenzie.

  The elderly woman extended a small, bony hand, and Cara instinctively took it. She expected it to be icy. Instead, it was hot. As soon as they touched, Cara felt like she was focusing properly on the other woman for the first time. She blinked and recognized her visitor at last. “Grand-mère? Is that you?”

  It couldn’t be. Cara had been ten the last time she’d seen the elder of her mother’s village, and the old lady must have been over eighty then. But the woman nodded and smiled. It was an odd smile, like a tree smiling, serene in a way that you didn’t normally see on a human face. “Of course it is, silly. Who else would I be? It’s time to come home, Cara. Come to Couguar-Caché before it’s too late.”

  Couguar-Caché—“hidden cougar” in French—her mother’s ancestral village. A place so remote Cara had never been able to find it on a map, even though she knew she’d been there as a little girl. Yeah, just where she wanted to visit in the depths of winter.

  As the old woman spoke, the room closed in, leaving only Cara and Grand-mère. The rest of the squad room was still out there—Cara could hear voices, a ringing cell phone—but they were hidden somehow, masked by a fog. Grand-mère had been seated, but suddenly, with no transition Cara noticed, she was standing in an archway made of snow-weighted evergreen boughs. Behind her, where Cara should have seen Dalhousie’s chaotic desk and the captain’s neat one, was forest and snow, woodland twilight and the corner of a log cabin. A cold, bracing wind blew through the archway, smelling of snow and pine and wood smoke. Somewhere in the background, she could make out a tall man with long dark hair. He turned and looked through the weird portal straight at her with intense amber eyes. He was movie-star gorgeous.

  That proved it. She’d dozed off at her desk—it wouldn’t be the first time since Phil had been killed, seeing that the busy squad room felt safer and less lonely than her empty bed—and was having a particularly vivid dream. It had to be a dream, right? Because no one else in the squad room was even glancing at her unusual visitor, when normally, on a quiet, snowy afternoon, Goulding, who was a wolf dual, would have been literally sniffing the air and the others would be leaning in, hoping for something interesting. It was the first time Grand-mère had joined the cast of beloved dead people who romped through Cara’s mind whenever she closed her eyes, but unlike the others, Grand-mère was cheerful. And she’d brought a very decorative man with her.

  But Cara shouldn’t be dreaming about handsome imaginary men. In some ways, that was more disturbing than dreaming about bloody dead ones. The involuntary surge of interest reminded her of the real man she’d lost.

  Cara jumped to her feet, hoping the movement would bring her back to reality. As soon as she moved, pain drove an iron spike into Cara’s head, blurring her vision so Grand-mère appeared transparent and blended oddly with the tree behind her. The wrist Cara had sprained playing hockey in college swelled and stiffened. One leg buckled, screaming with pain—the one she’d broken as a kid.

  And blood began to pour from the place she’d been shot two years ago in a domestic gone horribly wrong. More people she hadn’t been able to save. Like her mother and father. Like Phil.

  She leaned against her desk, frantically trying to stay upright, but the pain was too much. As she collapsed to the floor, faces swam around her—Phil, both as he’d been in life and with a great hole in his chest and a look of shock on his death-pale face; her mother, talking to the trees in the backyard as if they were answering; her red-faced, angry drunk of a father in his own Toronto police uniform, and in his coffin. The wife and children a perp had murdered before shooting her, then turning the gun to his own crazy head.

  Suddenly, she was in that crazy head, the dead man’s life crashing on her like a wave. He’d tried to be a good, gentle man, but he’d fought a lifelong battle with the monsters in his head, and in the end he’d lost. She knew things about him she’d never read in any of the reports, horrible secondhand memories that made her wonder how he’d lived that long before putting a bullet to his head to stop the pain and made her comprehend, a little, why to him, killing his wife and babies seemed like saving them from an ugly world.

  On the floor by her desk, bleeding, in shattering pain, Cara began to cry as she hadn’t been able to cry for Phil.

  Grand-mère touched her cheek. “It’s time, Cara-child. You’re ready. He’s ready. Go to Couguar-Caché. Or share your mother’s fate.” The old woman knelt and kissed her forehead, then stepped back through the doorway of evergreen branches and vanished.

  The squad room popped back into focus, the electric lights bright and jarring. Someone was leaning over her—Goulding, she thought, but her eyes couldn’t focus through the tears. She brushed him away and pushed to her feet.

  For about half a second. Then her leg buckled again and the world turned black. The last thing she was aware of was Goulding’s strong arms catching her as she fell, and someone shouting to call for an ambulance.

  Chapter Two

  Jack Long-Claw was in cougar form, hunting a deer, when he smelled trouble.

  He stopped bounding through the snow, flehmened in hopes of catching that elusive odor. Only it wasn’t an actual, physical smell, just a sense of urgency. Someone else’s fear and need, and a trace of human blood, but far away, out of normal scenting range. A sense that things were about to explode.

  Shaman stuff, most likely, magic making itse
lf known to his cougarside as a scent, but to be sure, he silentspoke to his brother Ben. “Smell anything funny?”

  Predictably, his brother sent back Jack’s own image.

  Jack head-butted him. “Focus.” Ben was the baby of the family at eighteen, more than fifteen years younger than Jack, so concentration wasn’t exactly his middle name. But when he did focus, his senses—his normal, in-this-world senses—were often sharper than Jack’s.

  Ben stilled, and Jack swore he could hear the kid concentrating. Maybe he could. Sometimes the magic got in the way of the mundane, providing a distracting amount of input that masked the panoply of scents, sounds and sights already available to his cougar dual senses, but it also allowed him to do things like hear Ben thinking.

  Though just the whir of his brain, not his actual thoughts, thankfully. Jack had been a teenager. He could guess what a stew of hormonal daydreams Ben’s brain was more often than not.

  Not now, though. Now the gangly young cougar—mostly grown but still skinny, his paws out of proportion—stilled and sniffed the air. His ears twitched as he listened for subtle sounds their wordside—human—ears wouldn’t have picked up. Jack held his breath, waiting for an answer. The smell of panic was building, and with it, his own adrenaline surged. Something was coming. He didn’t know what. He didn’t even know it was definitely something bad for him personally, though it was bad for someone, somewhere. But it would shake up his world. He could smell it, could hear it on the wind.

  But could Ben? Or should he be asking his spirit guide? Cougar, the ancestral spirit to whom his magic and his cougarside both connected, was silent on the subject at the moment, but that didn’t necessarily mean his spirit guide didn’t know what was going on. He might be hunting in his own spirit realm, or maybe partying. Cougar got lucky these days more often than Jack did in either of his forms.

  “Owls hunting,” Ben finally silentspoke. “Dead rabbit under the snow, too far gone to eat. Plenty of deer passing through, but none nearby. More snow coming.” He didn’t actually ask why Jack was asking him, but the series of images he sent—silentspeech was as much pictures and impressions as words—were increasingly sketchy, indicating the question.

  “Nothing funky?”

  Again, an image of Jack.

  Ben didn’t sense anything. And that meant whatever Jack was picking up was magic.

  Jack wanted nothing more than to pounce on his brother, play-wrestle for a while—he might be over thirty, but roughing up your kid brother never got old, especially when they were both in cat form—and then keep hunting until they had a nice, fat deer to bring home to the village. Distance himself from that nagging smell, that sense of urgency and trouble.

  But something was going on, something he needed his wordside to figure out, because his wordside could cope better with the demands of being a shaman, could walk into crazyland and come out again able to sort out what he’d experienced.

  “Heading back,” he sent to his brother. “Shaman shit.”

  Even in cougar form, Ben managed an exaggerated, exasperated teenage sigh.

  Any other time, Jack would have shifted long enough to give his brother the finger and maybe set his tail on fire—just an illusion, but an effective one.

  Tonight, though, he paid no attention. He raced back to the village.

  He needed more information. Maybe this was nothing; maybe it was something only he had to worry about, someone who needed his special brand of help.

  But if it proved to be something bigger than that, something that might affect all of Couguar-Caché, Grand-mère needed to know as soon as possible.

  He heard his spirit guide’s distinctive laughter, a sound halfway between a human laugh and a snarl. “She already knows. But she doesn’t know all of it. Neither will you until it’s too late. That’s half the fun.”

  Despite prayers and pleas, though, the spirit-cougar wouldn’t elaborate.

  Jack tossed the gourd rattle aside in disgust. Nothing. He’d danced and made music, offered whisky and sacred tobacco, meditated, called upon both his cougarside and his cougar spirit guide, but he had no more concrete information than he did before, just a sense that someone, somewhere needed his help, not in Couguar-Caché but outside in the mundane world. Which was pretty damn useless to know, because outside was huge and probably full of people who could use either a shaman to jolt them onto a different path or a big guy with an inner cougar to kick someone’s ass. And something big was coming—something that might be good and might be bad, but was definitely major, at least for him.

  Not enough to take to Grand-mère. Not even enough to bounce off old Sam, or Rafe and his partners. Nothing.

  Jack raised the glass of whisky to his lips, with no sacred intention this time. Frustrated, he wanted to feel the harsh, seductive burn of the Canadian Club going down his throat. With a dual’s fast metabolism, a few good slugs wouldn’t blur his perception or slow his reflexes, but the act of drinking, the ritual, might take the edge off his nerves.

  As he drank, he looked into the fire and saw a woman’s face.

  No one from Couguar-Caché. Blonde, for one thing. No blondes here. The woman’s face was hauntingly familiar, but he couldn’t place her, and damn, he should remember meeting someone that gorgeous. She looked like she was in pain and frightened, but at the same time determined, as if she was looking not for rescue but for answers and maybe backup.

  Jack tried reaching out to her with his mind but got nothing. Damn species barrier! A human shaman might have been able to get through, at least enough to figure out who and where she was. A dual could silentspeak to another dual, but the woman was apparently human.

  He needed Rafe’s wife, Elissa. A human witch might know what to do…

  But the fire flickered and the vision vanished, leaving Jack troubled but no wiser.

  Though Jack usually had a cat’s gift for falling asleep easily any time the opportunity presented itself, that night he lay awake for a long time, pondering what to do. His guide was silent on the subject—suspiciously silent, in a way that made Jack think Cougar knew something but wanted Jack to figure it out for himself.

  And his cougarside offered nothing more useful than one word, “pretty”, and an image of what, to a male cougar, was a hottie—a long, lean drink of cat with fur the color of pale honey. Great, his cougarside had a crush on the mystery woman.

  And maybe he did too. At least he was intrigued in a way that wasn’t entirely because of the mystery she represented.

  That night, Jack dreamed.

  He was no stranger to sex dreams, but usually they were scattered, episodic in the way of dreams. He’d be doing one thing, anything from chopping firewood to saving the world like a superhero, and the next thing he knew, he was doing the horizontal mambo with…someone. A faceless stranger, an actress from a movie he’d seen during a foray outside, someone totally inappropriate, like his cousin Sadie or worse yet, Grand-mère.

  But this was different. He was with the woman from the fire vision, only he knew her, knew her intimately. Loved her, maybe. Certainly they had the comfort of long-time lovers as he took her, hard, not indifferent to her pleasure, but knowing instinctively that she needed it fast and hard and a little rough this time, knowing from experience just how to touch her to bring her off quickly.

  He woke from the dream embarrassed to realize he’d shot off in his sleep like a teenager. But more important than the embarrassment was the realization that the whole dream, not just the sex, had been vivid and specific. He could visualize the woman’s body as if she was a long-time lover, and it wasn’t the flawless body of a fantasy woman, all perfect curves and hollows. This woman was tall, probably close to six feet, and more lanky and muscular than curvy. She had lovely breasts, neither too large nor too small, and the lean, strong legs of an athlete, but her torso was short and her ass, though firm and shapely, wasn’t the perfect, rounded bubble butt he’d have given a fantasy. Her well-defined biceps and broad shoulders looked
good naked, but he somehow knew she always ended up settling for shirts that were baggy through the torso to accommodate her muscles. She had a scar on her right knee from a childhood accident, and a far worse one from a bullet wound in her left shoulder. She liked biking and cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. Her preferred beverages were black coffee and single-malt Scotch.

  She was real, he was sure. Real as he was. And as hot as the fire where he’d first seen her.

  Too bad Jack still had no idea who she was or what she might need from him.

  Chapter Three

  Cara woke from jumbled dreams—deep snow in northern woods, her mother saying, “See you later, Cara,” and putting the gun to her head; Grand-mère dancing with a good-looking, middle-aged man; her grandfather drinking with a coyote; Phil, waxy as he’d been in the coffin and bleeding from the wound that killed him, standing next to her in wedding clothes as she said “I do” to the walking corpse—to find herself in a hospital bed.

  She blinked, hoping the hospital and the people around the bed were just another fucked-up dream.

  They were still there when she opened her eyes again. Having a doctor standing by when you woke up was a bad sign, she suspected, and she had a few of them: her GP Dr. Patel, a white male doctor she didn’t know and an older Asian one with a white medical coat over a loud, striped shirt, plus a female nurse.

  And they were all surrounded by shimmering halos of color. The nurse and two of the doctors had a reassuring, rosy glow around them; the nurse’s mixed with a tired-looking grayed brown. The Asian man was surrounded by many brilliant colors in stripes and checks, reminding her of some kind of bright ethnic fabric.

  Cara refused to believe it was real. She knew about auras, but like most normies—the non-Different human majority—she couldn’t see them, and she refused to start now. Must be painkillers or something having a weird side effect. “Let me guess,” she said, pleased to find her voice was strong and steady, “I got shot again. I think whatever happy pills you have me on are too strong, though. You all look funny.”