Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (5 page)

Grand-mère couldn’t resist meddling. She loved romance, loved seeing her kin get paired or trioed or whatever off and, biology permitting, making lots of babies for her to dote on. Jocelyn’s birth had gotten her excited about more many-times-great-grandchildren.

Jack wasn’t averse to the idea of eventually pairing off and having a cub or two. But Trickster’s tits, he was going to pick the woman and the time, not Grand-mère. Not even if Grand-mère was, among her other many alarming attributes, a love and fertility spirit.

Someday he’d meet the right person, with no help from his meddling many-times-great grandmother.

And that woman wouldn’t be Cara Mackenzie. Even if she turned out to be everything he could imagine her to be from those hot dreams, he could never be sure it wasn’t Grand-mère’s magic pulling them together, instead of mutual desire.

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 any 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.”