Cougar's Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different) (6 page)

“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!”

Some part of Cara’s brain clung to hoary truths from a world she already knew didn’t know even a fraction of the truth about their Different neighbors. At least in Canada the ignorance was mostly well-meaning, not like the US with their bigoted laws. “But duals can’t use magic.”

“Most of ’em can’t. Jack can. So can Rafe. He’s Jack’s other student. You’ll like Rafe. He used to be a cop, in the US.”

“But how…”

Her grandfather came to her, gave her a big hug. “Trickster does what Trickster does, and shaman’s magic is a gift from Trickster and the ancestors. And you know what the duals say—Trickster gives a gift with one hand and a smack with a dead fish with the other.”

Cara had never heard that saying before, but at the moment it made perfect sense. “I sure feel like I’ve been smacked upside the head with something. But if it was a dead fish, it was a huge one.”

Another hug. “You’re home now, Cara, where you belong, where people know what you’re facing. It will get better. But for now, you look like you could use a drink.”

“But Jack…”

A glass of whisky appeared seemingly out of nowhere. “Find him in the morning. Morning’s the best time for starting new projects. For now, have some more stew and a drink.”

Chapter Eight

Jack tried to focus on working with Rafe, but today, his magic was as chaotic as his powerful, but half-trained, student’s. His problem, though, seemed to be the opposite of Rafe’s. Rafe had come to his powers literally under the gun, with some US magical police called the Agency trying to turn Jude—then Rafe’s friend and Elissa’s husband and now Rafe’s husband as well—into some kind of freakish mutant super-soldier and not caring who they killed in the process. Rafe could do fine in a chaotic situation where he had to react on instinct, but asking him to do something in a more deliberate manner, like you’d normally do to call game or heal someone, was a recipe for failure. The magic only worked when he was half-distracted and not thinking about it.

Jack was discovering he couldn’t work when he was half-distracted.

At least not when he was distracted by dangerously enticing thoughts of Cara Mackenzie.

The fourth time he totally failed to light a fire in order to demonstrate for Rafe, he threw down his drum in disgust. “What is it with that woman?” he roared, making Rafe jump.

“Which woman is that?” Rafe asked, although he must know damn well which woman, since he’d been there when Grand-mère commandeered Jack.

“Your mother!” Half a second later, he added, as close to sheepish as he could get, “Sorry, Rafe.”

“Now, which mother did you mean, exactly? Because the living mom, I’ll just beat you up over. The dead one, everyone will be beat you up over.” He did his best to be casual about it, but the deadfall both of them had been trying unsuccessfully to light on fire suddenly went up in a blaze that threatened the living pines many yards away from and above the inferno.

Great. On top of being stuck on the image of Cara naked and lithe and eager, rather than the actual woman he’d have to teach, he’d managed to piss off Rafe.

“Hey, I’m sorry.” Rafe paid no attention, but that might have been because he was desperately trying to put the fire out before, even in the snowy landscape, it got out of control. Magical fires didn’t have to behave logically.

Jack had better luck putting the fire out than he’d had starting it. He touched the web of life in the forest, encouraging a squirrel to jump here, a crow to land there, a breeze to blow in a curiously localized way, high enough to touch the snow-covered surrounding trees while passing above the ground and the fire.

The result was perfect. Great gobs of snow fell on the fire, squelching it more rapidly than the so-called laws of physics should have allowed.

Of course, a gob of snow splatted onto Jack’s head as well, soaking his hair and slithering down the back of his neck, and never mind he hadn’t been standing under a tree at the time. The same energy he’d used to squelch the fire had created the snow. Shamanic magic did that sometimes. Better than putting the big fire out but setting his jacket ablaze, which could have happened.

At least it got Rafe laughing, and that made the chill worthwhile. Boy, Jack had put his foot in it that time.

Rafe’s mother and father had been murdered when he was an infant, and while no one could be sure, Rafe believed the Agency was responsible. A shaman was as vulnerable to random thugs as anyone else if you caught him with his guard down; it wasn’t combat magic except for scaring the piss out of your enemies through bizarre illusions. But Grand-mère’s own daughter should have been tough for just anyone to kill, even if she’d been living across the border in New York, far from Grand-mère’s base of power.

She’d died anyway, but she’d used her last burst of magic to make sure her baby was safe with a normy adoption agency.

Rafe hadn’t known how his birth parents had died until he’d arrived in Couguar-Caché, but now he’d gotten obsessed with finding out the whole story and, if possible, delivering payback. It was why he was working so hard with Jack, although Jack had been the first to tell him the backlash from the magic, if used for revenge, would be bad.

Now at least he had an illustration. “See?” Jack said, pointing to the pile of snow slowly making its way south from his head inside his coat. “This is funny. But I hardly did anything, and I got paradox. You use shamanism to hurt someone, even in a good cause, and Powers know what might happen. Trickster might think it was hilarious and let you get away with it—or might not.”

“But when we fought the Agency, I…”

“You were using the magic how it’s intended. Calling game. Talking to animals to get information. Finding a safe haven. Playing tricks, and just because it was a time when a trick could save your life doesn’t make it any less a trick.”

“But…”

He drew closer, into Rafe’s personal space. “Listen, there’s got to be a reason that two cougar shamans were born in one family, in one generation, when as far as we know it’s never happened before.
Cougar
shamans. I don’t know what the reason is, but we’ve got advantages a cougar alone or a shaman alone doesn’t. So use them. If you have enemies, if your family has enemies, fuck up their heads as much as you can. Baffle them, confuse them, draw them away. Use crows and blue jays and their own house pets to track them down. Drum them up dreams that make their brains ache. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable—that’s what we do.” He put his hands on Rafe’s shoulders and literally shook him. “But if you need to kill, be the predator you are and not a fucking sorcerer wanna-be. Kill so you leave the magic clean or don’t kill at all.” He punctuated the four last words with four good shakes.

Then Jack froze. Either this had been a really good idea or a really bad one indeed.

The forest became silent, and the silence gathered around the two shamans, a palpable presence waiting to see whether this scene would end in laughter or an explosion.

To Jack’s relief, because he didn’t feel like getting into a stupid confrontation, Rafe clapped him on the back. “Makes sense,” Rafe said. “Elissa’s magic’s like that, but even stricter. She kills someone, the magic goes away forever or gets completely fucked up. But it’s so frustrating sometimes. I have this weapon, only it’s not really a weapon. And claws are only good up close and personal.”

“I know, old man. I know. Speaking of claws and up close… Ben, you can come out from under the bushes. I can see your tail. Almost nineteen and you still forget how long that sucker is.”

Jack’s brother slunk out, looking as embarrassed as he could in his cougar form, which wasn’t very. Jack cuffed him gently on one soft ear. Then he and Rafe looked at each other, grinned and started shifting, shedding clothes as they did. This time, propelled by the need to pounce on his kid brother and knock the tar out of him, Jack went cougarside first, but Rafe wasn’t far behind. They jumped on Ben, who could have gotten out of the way but good-humoredly played along. Snow flew as the three of them wrestled and cuffed. Mostly the two shamans ganged up on Ben, but since it was all in good fun, they also nipped and batted at each other.