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

Under other circumstances, the best thing for both of them would be for him to keep far away from her. She was just too attractive not to want and too tainted with ugly possibilities of interference to touch.

  But one thing Grand-mère wouldn’t lie about was whether he was the right teacher for Cara. The woman was a powder keg of magic waiting to explode, and Grand-mère must know it. She wouldn’t risk Cara on an unsuitable teacher just to throw temptation in Jack’s way. She’d still throw the temptation in his way, but she’d make sure Cara was assigned to the right mentor.

  He wasn’t about to let some innocent woman’s head blow up because he was mad at Grand-mère. So he’d teach Cara what she needed to know, and he’d do it well.

  And he’d keep his hands off her.

  Damn it.

  Jack caught up with Cara after about ten minutes. No surprise, she supposed, that a cougar could move quickly even in human form. They exchanged a few pleasantries, no more. Still, it felt companionable moving through the snowy woods with him. Phil had had no interest in winter sports more active than watching hockey, so for several years her winter adventures were girls-only. She wouldn’t need to worry about outpacing Jack. And damn, having Jack around would certainly have made the hot tub at the lodge more interesting…

  No, she was so not going there. Her heart wasn’t ready to get involved—or even just horizontal—with someone new, even if her body had other ideas.

  At that moment, she caught a glimpse of Jack’s face and got the strange feeling he was thinking something similar, having a brief illusion that companionable snowshoeing might, but shouldn’t, lead to other kinds of companionship.

  Good to know she wasn’t the only one who felt a spark—and equally good that she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t or wouldn’t pursue it. A light flirtation with a good-looking man might be just the thing for her wounded heart, as long they both knew it was only that.

  Once they reached the village, he deposited her in a one-room log cabin. “Hope it’s okay,” he said gruffly, with an undertone that might have discomfort or shyness or the strong-silent-type behavior natural to the big carnivore duals with people they didn’t know well. “It’s a little run-down, but Grand-mère thought it might be good to give you some privacy, since it’s been a while since you’ve dealt with the way we do things here and you’re a bit combustible right now.”

  For a second, she considered taking offense. Then she realized in Couguar-Caché, shamanic crises must be far from unusual. “Yeah, you might say that. I’m just glad I’ve made it up from Toronto without another incident. I was scared to death the broken leg would reactivate when I was snowshoeing in here.”

  “Broken leg?” He sounded less gruff now, genuinely concerned.

  “Every once in a while, every major injury I’ve ever had decides to come back for a few minutes. A Hmong shaman I met said I was supposed to learn from them how to help others. But when I’ve fallen down because one leg won’t work and my wrist’s swollen and I’m bleeding, and it’s all I can do not to pass out from pain, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to learn other than that I’m scared and angry and I hurt.”

  “That, exactly. Being sick or hurt sucks, and what’s going on your head may be worse than what’s going on in your body.”

  Then, abruptly, he turned and stalked away.

  He moved like a cat even in human form. Even on snowshoes, which wasn’t easy.

  Probably it was a good thing for her sanity that he was also a bit of a jerk.

  Chapter Seven

  She threw her pack down near the door and surveyed her new home. Bare-bones, for sure: wooden walls, wooden floor, rag rug, no decorations. It was one room, divided into two by a curtain that more or less hid the bed. A table and two chairs, both rustic and handmade. A rocker, ditto, with a fur draped over the back and a pillow that looked to be made from an old T-shirt. The sink had a hand pump, and there was a big old metal cooler, but no refrigerator. The place, for a wonder, was toasty warm from an old-fashioned wood cookstove. Even though she hadn’t known a way to call, they’d known she was coming with enough lead time to start the fire and get the cabin warm.

  Somehow she wasn’t surprised.

  The woodstove presented one more challenge she’d have to overcome. If handling magic wasn’t tricky enough, she’d have to figure out how to heat and cook with wood. Luckily, if her memories of this place held true, someone would feed her for the moment and teach her what she needed to know, like how to use that old blue-and-white enamel coffeepot.

  In Toronto, she’d expect someone to show up and tell her what the plan was, when she’d start her lessons. She knew better than to think it would be that straightforward here. She’d have time to explore. After she used the outhouse she’d seen on the way in, her first order of business would be to find her grandfather.

  When Cara ventured out of the cabin, it was dusk. She hadn’t realized how late it was. Both her watch and the time function on her phone had apparently stopped around the time she left the paved road, and her previous life. This should have freaked her out more than it actually did. But she’d been in the village before, even though it had been a lifetime ago. What passed for normal around here definitely wasn’t by the standards of the rest of Canada. Her memories were dim, but she had a feeling spectacular technology fails were part of the norm in Couguar-Caché.

  Weird as it was, it felt oddly comfortable, more comfortable, in some ways, than Toronto. She’d loved the responsibility of her work, loved Phil and the peace he gave her. The little nest she’d built with Phil had been almost too cozy, though, like a cocoon she was afraid to burst from and fly. But here, she felt a sense of belonging.

  Couguar-Caché still bustled with activity. With no street lights, shouldn’t people be huddled inside, by fires and oil lamps? The impression she had of life in pre-industrial societies, and Couguar-Caché was pretty close, was that you stayed inside after dark as much as possible, because the dark was full of wild beasts and boogiemen.

  Then she laughed. Her new neighbors were the boogiemen, and some of them were the wild beasts as well. Almost none of the people who waved to her as they went about their business in the dusk had simple, single-colored auras like those she’d almost gotten used to seeing in Toronto. About half of them looked human but had auras shaped like animals, like the Gouldings and Jack. Others had brilliant auras, either glorious rainbows of color or, more commonly, clashing plaids and wild geometrics. And why hadn’t she realized, as a child, how many of the people in the village didn’t look quite human? Some of her new neighbors were much shorter than most adult humans, a bit oddly proportioned, and she swore some of them didn’t have pupils.

  Just like Grand-mère, she realized, but she’d never thought about it until now. She’d literally forgotten, each time she left the village, that Grand-mère looked like no one in the outside world.

  No one seemed slowed down at all by the gathering darkness. Maybe the darkness was less of a problem when your other senses were different than the human norm. Even Cara found the darkness less intimidating than it once was. Who needs light when you can squint and see the energy moving in all things? It gave her a headache, but at least she wasn’t likely to walk into a tree when the freaking thing glowed.

  Before she’d set out from her cottage, Cara couldn’t consciously recall where her grandfather’s house was. The village was small, though. If necessary, she’d ask some likely stranger—preferably not a shockingly hot cougar dual with an attitude problem—where Sam Many-Winters lived. But as she walked, she realized that as long as she didn’t think about it too hard, her feet knew where to go, as if the ground was giving them information.

  The house, when she reached it, didn’t look like she remembered it, and yet she knew the small traditional home—she didn’t know what it was properly called, but it looked kind of like a shrunken-down longhouse—was really the small dingy-yellow frame house from her childhood memories.

  And if there had been a
ny doubt, her grandfather was standing in the doorway smoking a pipe.

  She hadn’t seen him since before her mom died, had been nervous about seeing him again, but as soon as she saw his dark, crinkled face, his long braids—iron-gray now, not the salt-and-pepper she remembered—two decades fell away, along with all her fears. She yelled, “Gramps!” like a little girl and ran the rest of the way. He didn’t have time to do anything with his pipe before she caught him in her arms, so the smell of tobacco embraced her along with his wiry arms. In the city, Cara had come to hate the smell of cigarette smoke, but Gramps’s pipe filled her with nostalgia.

  For a long moment, neither of them spoke, and Cara wondered if, like her, he was trying to figure out a way to sum up the lost years, or just bypass them. The first words Gramps spoke were purely practical. “Let me set this down before I set us both on fire. Would be funny once the flames died, but you’re not going to be able to replace that nice jacket out here.”

  Cara laughed, knowing the odds of a normal person setting someone on fire with a pipe were pretty slim—but her and Gramps? Who knew what his strong powers and her own nascent ones might do?

  He guided her inside.

  It was all one room, dark and low-ceilinged, smelling of wood smoke and coffee and what Cara could only describe as “old man,” all overlaid with the rich scent of some sort of meaty stew. A vintage TV sat by one wall, with a pair of broken-down loungers in front of it. Its sound turned off, the TV showed a Bugs Bunny cartoon in grainy black and white.

  Gramps must have a generator or solar panels and a battery, Cara thought, since there were no power lines in the village. Then she saw the plug for the TV, lying on the floor, not attached to anything. She pointed at it. “How…” Her voice fell off.

  Gramps shrugged. “Can’t really explain it. Coyote set me up so we could watch cartoons together, a long time ago now. He doesn’t come around much anymore, but he let me keep the TV.”

  “Coyote. That almost makes sense.” They’d covered the Trickster figure in a required class on “Intercultural Relations with Duals and Other Different Populations” when she was getting her criminal justice degree. The instructor and most of the authors they read were normies who treated Coyote, and Trickster him/herself, as dual folklore. Even back then, with only dim, normalized memories of Couguar-Caché, Cara thought that sounded patronizing and ignorant, the kind of thing normies said back in the day when magic was assumed to be either evil or imaginary.

  Now she remembered why the class had bothered her. Her grandparents had this “friend”…and it had made sense, as long as she was in the village, that the friend sometimes had ears and a tail and sometimes didn’t, and wasn’t always exactly solid. People in the village weren’t like the people at home, after all—they were a lot more interesting and varied and didn’t always stay the same shape.

  “Why doesn’t Coyote come around anymore?”

  Gramps shrugged. “Got bored, maybe. Maybe your grandmother was the one he really liked, and once she passed, he wasn’t interested in hanging out with my scrawny old-man ass. Maybe he lost track of mortal time. It’s not like he really lives in it, just visits now and then.” He sighed, a sigh weighted with years and loss. “People like Coyote, spirit-people, do things for reasons that make sense to them, but not to us. But I suppose spirit-people are why you’ve come home.”

  Tears—hot, acid, unwelcome—welled up in Cara’s eyes at the word home. The village had never literally been her home. She’d only visited. But she’d never really felt at home anywhere else either. Comfortable enough, content enough, but never fully at home, not even with Phil. “Yeah,” she said, her voice raspy and hoarse with the effort not to cry. “Seems I take after this side of the family. Do you know your aura’s lime green and orange plaid with purple polka dots?”

  “So’s yours, only it’s lime green and red with dark blue dots and gray sparkly swirls because you’re confused.” He held out his arms again, and she went to him like a little girl. “Welcome home, child. I’m so sorry.”

  Her heart sank. Was it really that bad to be a shaman? “Nothing to apologize for, other than a trick of the genes,” she said with studied casualness.

  “Not an apology, just regrets. Your grandmother and I saw the shaman under your skin, even when you were small. We tried to keep you here that last summer, so you could grow into your powers in a safe place, not in a normy town with all the steel-and-concrete energies that would hurt a young shaman. Lily wouldn’t hear of it, said she wanted you to fit in to your father’s world, said she’d found a way so you’d grow up normy like your dad. There’s no such spell, so we figured she’d be back in a few years for our help in training you. Guess she did figure something out, though, or you’re a late bloomer because of your father’s heritage.”

  “Maybe I was just too scared to let the magic get close,” she admitted. “I had memories that only made sense as magic and Different stuff. I knew Couguar-Caché wasn’t like anyplace else. But I kept telling myself I was a normy, that Mom was as crazy as Dad said she was and you and Grammy were just super-traditional in some ways and eccentric in others. But here I finally am. I can’t say I’m happy about it, especially the spontaneous bleeding. But at least it gives me something to think about other than the fact the man I was supposed to marry in the spring is dead.”

  Gramps covered her hand with his big, gnarled one. “I’m sorry about your young man.”

  “Yeah.” Cara choked on emotion, trying to find something about what was happening to her, other than being with her grandfather in a place she felt curiously at home, that didn’t utterly suck. A sudden memory returned to her of her grandparents creating indoor fireworks from twigs to amuse children on a day of torrential cold rain. “It’s been a rough few weeks on top of a rough few months, but now that I’m here and you can teach me what to do with these crazy powers, it’ll get better. Hell, it might even be fun to be a shaman, once I know what I’m doing.” She’d said it as a way of keeping a brave face, but remembering those fireworks, and her grandfather sticking rabbit ears on a riled-up neighbor to get him to laugh and calm down, she found herself grinning, half believing it.

  “Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s terrifying, trying to mediate between the worlds or deal with something that could kill you if you handle it wrong. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking, because there are times all the magic in the world can’t help someone, and sometimes it’s frustrating, because your magic could help, but the person’s head is so far up his ass he can’t see it. But at the end of the day, it’s worth the pain. Kind of like police work, right, Officer Mackenzie?”

  “Sounds like it.” Then she hesitated. “How did you know I’m a cop?”

  Her grandfather was fussing with something on the wood cookstove—the house was an odd mix of fully traditional elements, old-fashioned but newer ones like the stove, and a few things, like the magical TV, that didn’t fit at all. “Grand-mère, of course. Scary little meddling woman.”

  “Grand-mère’s still alive? She must be ancient by now.”

  “Of course she is. Manitou are the next best thing to immortal.” Then he looked at Cara. “You’d forgotten she was a big-time nature spirit, not a human, hadn’t you? Happens when people stay outside too long.”

  Cara nodded weakly. “I remembered once I got back here that she was a Different—but I’d forgotten how different. I kept dreaming of her, but I didn’t know…”

  “Of course you didn’t. And those weren’t exactly dreams either. More like two-way visions. That’s how you know Grand-mère likes you, when she butts into your head.” Gramps shrugged and added, “You hungry? Got some venison stew Mrs. Whitefang made, and there’s coffee and whisky.”

  Cara had millions of questions, but the offer of food distracted her. The stew smelled wonderful, and now that she thought about it, she was ravenous. As they sat with steaming, fragrant bowls of stew and cups of coffee that looked suspiciously like motor oil, she asked, “So, when do we
start lessons?”

  Her grandfather didn’t answer, just continued eating.

  “I’m game to start now, if you’d like,” she continued.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Maybe you not answering is some kind of annoying Zen master thing and you’ve already started.”

  Silence.

  She concentrated and managed to zing a tiny bolt of energy—it was wobbly and a bilious green—in her grandfather’s direction. Her grandfather jumped. “Hey, you’re good,” he conceded, “for someone who hasn’t been taught.”

  “So teach me.”

  There was a long pause before her grandfather spoke. When he did, he sounded ancient and sad as an abandoned house. “I’m not teaching you, Cara. I’ll support you as best I can, but I stopped taking students after your mother died.” A little of his usual humor came back to his eyes as he added, “Jack Long-Claw will teach you.”

  Cara blinked, trying to make sense of what her grandfather was saying. There was something deeper going on here, something her cop sensors picked up beneath the surface of his words but couldn’t parse, so she focused on the off element she could identify. “Jack’s a dual. I remember him learning to shift.”

  She tried very hard not to think about him shifting now, as an adult—especially not about the clothing-destruction aspects, which were hilarious to a ten-year-old but led to thoughts of nakedness that weren’t nearly so humorous now.

  Cara felt herself flushing and turned her head away, ostensibly to study a drum hanging on the wall.

  “He’s a cougar all right. Big one too.”

  Her brain immediately went places she was pretty sure her grandfather didn’t intend. Pretty sure, though she glanced out of the corner of her eye and thought she caught a naughty grin. Thank you, Gramps. That was not the image I needed. Especially not from you.

  “Then how’s he going to teach me to be a shaman?”

  Her grandfather slammed his coffee down so hard the revolting substance splashed on the beat-up table. Cara flinched, but quickly realized he wasn’t angry but clumsy because he was so racked with laughter. When he was able to speak, he choked out, “Because he’s a shaman. Duh!”