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

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  Then memories flooded back.

  At first they made no more sense than fragments of a nightmare. Then, abruptly they did, only she didn’t want to admit it.

  Like Mom. Just like Mom.

  “Do you remember what happened to you yesterday?” the unfamiliar white doctor asked.

  Cara stretched tentatively and decided she wasn’t ready to talk about the bits she did remember. Either they were the garbled effect of medication or they were real, and neither was good. “Last thing I remember, I was talking to an old woman who’d come into the station. I don’t remember getting a call out or anything. I have no idea what happened next.”

  That wasn’t quite true. She remembered. She just didn’t want to remember. Given that both her parents had lived and died with mental illness, she always feared it might happen to her. But losing her mind at work, the one place where she could find a little contentment these days? The universe had a peculiar sense of humor.

  She heard a voice, clear and distinct, but not coming from anyone in the room. “Once you start laughing with the universe instead of fighting it, everything will be easier.”

  Oh shit.

  That was one of her grandfather’s sayings. Hell, it sounded like her grandfather’s voice, or the way she remembered her grandfather’s voice, though she hadn’t heard it since her mother died. And the crazy didn’t just run on her mother’s side of the family—it galloped, boogied and moonwalked.

  Or at least her father claimed that, but he was a few bricks short of a load himself.

  “What happened?” she repeated, refusing to believe that what she remembered—a conversation with someone who couldn’t possibly have been in the squad room, followed by bleeding from a wound that had healed two years ago—was the truth. “I’m going to be embarrassed if I got taken out of commission by a little old lady.”

  “You weren’t shot, Ms. Mackenzie,” Dr. Patel said. “You were bleeding and had a broken leg when you were brought in, but the wounds healed spontaneously, the same way they appeared.”

  Cara knew what that meant, knew it deep in her bones. The same kind of things had happened to her mother sometimes toward the end, dizziness and phantom pain and seeing things that weren’t there. Old injuries recurring and then disappearing, or so she claimed, though no one ever saw them.

  Her mother said it was a shamanic thing. Her father said it was a symptom of mental illness. When she killed herself, that pretty much proved him right, or so Cara always figured. But… “Wait a minute! I was actually bleeding and healed spontaneously? What the hell is that all about?”

  Dr. Patel smiled, but her dark eyes looked anxious, and her aura, if that was what it was, developed gray storm clouds among the pink. “The good news is that, physically, you’re fine now. Almost weirdly fine. Your body doesn’t show the normal wear and tear we’d expect in a woman in her early thirties, let alone damage from injuries I’ve helped treat. We should be able to release you later today.”

  “So what’s the bad news?” There had to be bad news with “The good news is…” as a lead-in.

  “I’ll let Xang Kue explain. He understands far better than the rest of us.” Dr. Patel nodded at the Asian doctor, then at the white doctor and the nurse, who withdrew.

  “Ms. Mackenzie,” Xang Kue asked, “what is your ethnic background?”

  “I’m Canadian.” Her father had always told her to say that when someone asked what he considered to be a rude question.

  “True. As is Dr. Patel, whose parents are from India. As is Dr. Murphy the neurologist, whose ancestors came from Ireland. As am I now, according to my passport.” The old man spoke perfect English, but with a Southeast Asian accent. “But I need to know your ancestry, Officer Mackenzie. Do you have any First Nations in your background?”

  She knew what he was getting at. She’d been trying to deny it.

  Shamans could turn up in any ethnic group, but they seemed to be more common in some, including the First Nations.

  She’d rather be mentally ill. There were treatments for that. But magic was forever—and it could kill you.

  “Yes,” she said softly, turning her face away from the old man’s shrewd black eyes. “My mother was Micmac and Algonquin, maybe some Abenaki.” That was an oversimplification, but explaining Couguar-Caché, a conglomeration of First Nations people from many tribes who didn’t want to live in the dominant culture, intermarried with shape-shifting duals and other Differents, all living in a village so remote it didn’t appear on most maps, wasn’t a challenge she could handle at the moment.

  “One’s tribe doesn’t change, as a rule.” The old man’s tone was wry, but something told Cara he was trying to get her goat.

  Unfortunately, her mother was a touchy subject at the best of times, and this wasn’t the best of times. “My mother’s dead. She killed herself when I was ten because she couldn’t stand the voices in her head anymore. Are you satisfied?”

  The old man’s bright rainbow aura dimmed. “I am sorry for your loss, Officer Mackenzie, and even sorrier because you have just confirmed my diagnosis and you will have good reason not to wish to hear it.” He reached one age-spotted but steady hand toward her. He didn’t actually make contact, but Cara swore she felt his gentle, soothing touch.

  “Officer Mackenzie…Cara…you are not ill in any way the doctors here can help treat. You are suffering a shamanic healing crisis. Your body and spirit are responding to the magic awakening in you, reliving all your old traumas so you may learn from them. It is painful, and you are vulnerable both to the spirit world and to any darkness in your own heart. It’s perfectly normal for a person like you or me.”

  “What in hell are you talking about, Doctor Kue?”

  “I’m not a doctor. I am a shaman who works with the Hmong patients at this hospital. So I’ve experienced what you’re going through now. It was frightening enough for me, and I grew up in a culture that honors its shamans and treats the crisis as a rite of passage. Ordinarily, it happens during puberty. Unfortunately, you come to it late, your young life was marked by tragedy, and you are in a profession where you’ve likely seen more than your share of ugliness. Your crisis will be more challenging than most, and your body and mind will not be as resilient as a child’s.”

  “So I’m a shaman?” She tried to keep her voice calm. It wasn’t working too well. “Now what?”

  Xang shook his head. “You learn, and you learn fast, because you are not a shaman yet. You are becoming a shaman, all at once and in a jumble. Until you accept and learn to use your new powers, you are in grave danger, both from your own mind and body, which will continue to have these episodes, and from the spirit world.”

  She looked around wildly, hoping against hope to see denial on Dr. Patel’s face.

  Dr. Patel nodded gravely. “I can’t speak for the spirit world, Cara,” the doctor said. “I’m a normy. But I’ve seen a couple of similar cases, and the dangers to your health are real. Even in early adolescence, the strain can be deadly. You’re in great shape, but you’re nearly two decades past the average age to have a shamanic crisis.”

  “To make it even more fun,” Xang Kue said, “the physical manifestations are only the beginning, and the good doctor’s drugs will not help you once the spirits begin to speak. Nor can I help you much. Your ancestors and spirits are not mine, child. You need to find a shaman of your mother’s line to help you through this transition.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  She already knew the answer, knew it in her bones, knew it from her darkest memories.

  “Then I fear, Cara Mackenzie, you will end up like your mother.”

  Chapter Four

  There was only one path open to her.

  The problem was, she didn’t know how to get to that path. After her mother had died, her father had cut all contact with her mother’s relatives, refusing to let her visit her Many-Winters grandparents, denying he even knew how to contact them. Cara had a PO box for her grandfather, becau
se he’d written when her grandmother died a few years ago, and, despite numerous changes of address in the intervening years, the letter had somehow found its way to her.

  But a letter would take too long. She’d had another attack since being released from the hospital that afternoon, not as bad as the first, but bad enough she’d woken up on the floor of the condo she used to share with Phil, her shirt wet with blood from a long-healed gunshot wound. She couldn’t work in this state, couldn’t even trust herself to drive. She needed to get this fixed, fast.

  But after tearing through the condo and digging through the boxes from her father’s house, she threw herself into a chair in frustration. She didn’t have phone numbers for any of her relatives in Couguar-Caché, and the phone company had been no help. Not only couldn’t they find her grandfather, Sam Many-Winters, they didn’t have listings for anyone in Couguar-Caché.

  Hell, she couldn’t even remember where Couguar-Caché was. She thought she remembered driving far north with her mother to get there. But she also remembered people speaking French when they stopped for gas, and driving into a rosy sunrise, so maybe it was out on the Gaspé? Even Google was no help. When she finally found her grandfather’s address, the PO box turned out to be in Montreal, which had to be a mistake.

  How was she supposed to find someone from her ancestral line to help her when she couldn’t even find her family?

  The hell with it. She’d keep trying, but meanwhile she had to do something. Figuring she had nothing to lose, she flipped the phone book to S.

  Only to find a listing for Shamanic Instruction.

  Probably a con artist ripping off curious normies, she thought, already dialing. She was twitching to act, to do something, even if it didn’t make sense, and calling this place seemed a fairly safe jumping point into the unknown.

  Besides, the words on the page got bigger as she looked at them, turned first one color and then another until each letter was something different and the line of type was either an insane jumble of random colors or a glorious rainbow, depending on your point of view. Her grandfather’s magic always had a cartoonish quality to it, at least the minor manifestations he’d let her see, and this seemed the same flavor. Either that or her brain was misbehaving again, but she’d take the chance.

  She had to do something.

  Normally, she’d hang up after five or six rings without either an answer or an answering machine, thinking she’d misdialed. This time, she was more patient.

  On the ninth ring, something answered with a mechanical click. Voice mail, she figured, and sure enough, it started out, “Hello, you have reached Spirit Drums New Age Shop…”

  Then a man’s deep voice broke in, superimposed over the recording. “Cara, seek the cougar. Grand-mère’s waiting for you, and so am I.”

  “Wait…” Cara’s tongue tripped over itself. Where is Couguar-Caché? was what she meant to ask. She got as far as “Where…” before the voice answered.

  Only this time it was female and elderly and familiar. Grand-mère.

  “Dream tonight, Cara, and you will find it. And maybe you’ll also find something you didn’t know you sought.”

  The voice faded out, leaving the mechanical secretary saying, “…and Sundays eleven to five. See our Web site for…”

  She clicked the phone down as the first stabs of another attack hit her. As the dizziness overtook her, Cara had the dim thought that if her dreams held the key to ending this feeling of helplessness, she’d face them gladly for the first time since Phil died.

  Maybe since her mother died.

  She didn’t dare hope she wouldn’t dream her mother’s suicide or Phil’s murder during a carjacking. She almost always did if she managed to sleep for more than an hour or two. But if she also dreamed her answer, she could face the pain.

  Cara dreamed, only she knew she was dreaming.

  She smelled wood smoke, cooking venison, other scents she recognized from childhood but could name less readily.

  She found herself in a clearing among majestic evergreens. The snow was hip-deep, but where she walked, it faded away, filling in behind her as she passed.

  Someone laughed in the distance, a rickety old-lady laugh that was still big enough to fill the clearing.

  Grand-mère. Not in the city, an alien spirit-visitor, but in the woods where she belonged.

  “Welcome home, Cara Many-Winters. Your mother said you’d wind up here eventually.” Cara instinctively flinched, but at the same time, she sensed she wasn’t about to see her mother dead and bloodied. Her own subconscious might do that to her, but Grand-mère wouldn’t, and even though she was dreaming, Cara felt she was speaking, in some sense, with the real Grand-mère. Just as she had been, she realized now, the other day in the squad room.

  Even though Grand-mère couldn’t possibly be alive anymore.

  “Did my mother see I’d manifest this power?”

  Grand-mère nodded. “So did your grandparents. So did I. Even when you were an infant, we suspected it. But with shamans, you can never be sure until it happens, and by then it’s too late to move the breakables.”

  She almost managed to smile at that. “Too true.”

  “It’s a rough time in a shaman’s life, but we’ll work through it once you get home.”

  Suddenly, she knew where she needed to go.

  Even though she was pretty sure there wasn’t the same place it had been the last time she’d been in Couguar-Caché. A few days ago, that would have freaked her out a lot more, but now it almost made sense. Her mother had always claimed her hometown was hard to find but always right where you needed it to be. Maybe it had been more than a nostalgic turn of phrase.

  “I’ll see you soon, Grand-mère. Now I can find the way. I couldn’t before.”

  “You weren’t ready. And neither was he.”

  Up until now, things had been relatively linear and sensible for a dream, but suddenly Cara found herself naked, swaddled under furs, and getting freaky with the most gorgeous specimen of masculinity she’d ever seen or dreamed.

  Since it was a dream, she got a bird’s-eye look, which she couldn’t have if this had been real.

  Long, straight black hair, bronze skin, the cheekbones of doom. He looked pure First Nations, only his eyes, instead of the dark brown she’d have expected, were amber.

  Body of a god.

  And oh my, cock of a wild stallion and the strength to just pick her up and toss her onto her back so he could sink that cock into her hard and fast. It was a claiming, but she was opening to him, rising to meet him, claiming him right back.

  She arched, stiffened, cried out…

  And woke to an empty bed, clutching a pillow that still smelled like Phil. She was wet, her nipples almost painfully hard, but she buried her face in the pillow and wept.

  For Phil and what they’d had.

  For what they hadn’t had.

  For the doubts she’d never dared to express about their future, about the sense that much as she loved her calm, gentle, geeky accountant, they were growing apart. That the routine she thought she’d craved wasn’t going to work for her.

  If she had expressed those doubts, would Phil still be alive? He’d been waiting for her outside an all-night diner when the carjacker got him. They’d planned to meet after her shift for a four a.m. breakfast since they’d been on different schedules that week. If he’d been single, he’d have been safe in bed.

  She wouldn’t have the burden of guilt, of knowing that if she hadn’t lingered a few minutes too long after her shift, Phil wouldn’t have been waiting near the diner alone.

  And she wouldn’t need to feel so wretched she felt closer to her dream lover than she now did to her dead fiancé.

  Chapter Five

  “So if duals and shamans are both children of Trickster, how come we’re probably the only two dual shamans in the world? You’d think there’d be more of us, including butt-loads of coyote dual shamans.”

  Jack cocked his head at
his distant cousin. Raised in the US as a human, Rafe Benedict was still learning how to be a dual. Discovering he was something even more complicated than a dual raised as a human had left him semipermanently boggled. The confusion made Rafe Mr. Cranky Cat sometimes, with everyone except his partners Elissa and Jude, and their baby Jocelyn. But his odd perspective meant he asked excellent questions.

  It beat having Ben asking the same questions over and over again. Little brother wasn’t dumb, but he just couldn’t wrap his head around magic.

  “Well, there might be three of us. We won’t know about your daughter for a long time.”

  “Maybe even Trickster doesn’t want too many of us around? Scared we’ll take over?”

  “Maybe scared of me,” Jack said, puffing himself up a little. Even with his furside in, he could do that. “You, not so much yet. You’re a great guy and a halfway decent cougar, but you’re pathetic as a shaman.”

  Predictably, Rafe smacked him. He deserved it.

  Jack poked at him. “You didn’t even have a healing crisis.”

  “I was too busy dodging bullets to notice it.” He poked back. “Besides, Grand-mère says you didn’t have one either. Must be a cat thing.”

  “I’ll show you cat thing.”

  Jack started to let his cougarside out. Rafe took the time to slip out of his clothes.

  Despite pausing to undress, Rafe was fully in cat form before Jack was. Rafe had some aspects of being a cougar down pat. He changed as elegantly as any dual in the village.

  In deep snow, the two cougars wrestled and batted at each other, claws pulled in like house cats playing. They snarled, they growled, they shrieked.

  Suddenly, Grand-mère stood in front of them. She didn’t even pretend to ignore them while they changed back into wordside, humanlike form and scrambled for clothes. Jack was used to it. Grand-mère was a manitou, and manitou, being nature spirits, had even weaker notions of modesty than duals did. Not to mention Grand-mère had changed not only Jack’s diapers but his father’s, grandmother’s, and several more generations of ancestors back to the long-ago part-dual, part-manitou baby that was actually her son. Rafe tried to hide behind a bush. Never mind that he was one-quarter manitou, Grand-mère’s actual grandkid; he’d been raised human.