Morgan's Rescue Read online

  At first Culver became violently ill, his spasming stomach muscles contorting his body. As again and again he was sick with great shuddering heaves, he worried that he’d been poisoned. But gradually his body calmed, and he began to have the urge to lie down. He’d heard many things about ayahuasca, and the Peruvian agents swore by it. Culver noted the reverence with which the other agents, his friends, treated the experience. He knew shamans’ powers were held sacred here.

  The shaman began to whistle and sing again shortly after everyone had drunk from the cup, three of the other men getting sick as Culver had. The singing seemed hypnotic, and Culver finally gave in to the urge and lay down on his back, staring up at the sky. A warmth began to permeate him, starting in his toes and working slowly upward. In his mind, he knew it was impossible—at midnight, the jungle would be growing cooler, the inevitable, shroudlike fog appearing between the layers of tree canopy that covered its vast reaches. Still, the sensation of warmth was pleasant and lulling. The Shaman’s singing was rhythmic, and soon Culver felt himself drifting into a state of deep relaxation.

  Whatever it was, this altered state felt good. Warmth crested like small ocean waves toward the top of his head. As soon as it entered his skull, he felt a terrific whirling sensation, as if he were being sucked into a powerful whirlpool. The shaman’s singing changed, growing higher pitched, and Culver felt his body changing with it, lengthening here, shortening there. Beneath his closed eyelids, lights began to flicker like blinking dots of sparkling color. At first they had no form, but soon they began to coalesce.

  The lights throbbed, gathering intensity and purpose, and Culver felt a power radiating from the golden glow as it slowly took shape. He watched, mesmerized, as a female jaguar formed from the light and walked out of the radiance down a jungle path. Culver felt her incredible power and purposefulness as she trod silently on the huge pads of her feet. Her coat glowed like the sun, the thick, black crescent markings speaking of her silent, deadly power.

  He found himself standing on the same jungle trail, directly in the path of the jaguar. Culver knew he should feel fear, for he’d seen a jaguar kill a man once. This cat was thickly muscled, low to the ground and unquestionably deadly. But as he awaited her approach, an incredible calm filled him. When she saw him, she halted about six feet away. Lifting her magnificent head, she studied him in the building silence.

  Culver felt hypnotized by the jaguar’s intense gaze. Suddenly, her nearly black eyes turned gold, the black becoming a mere pinhole in the center. As soon as that happened, he felt himself being pulled forward, hurtling toward her at a terrific rate of speed. He started to scream, but it was too late. Everything went black. At first he felt cramped, almost suffocated, but as he adjusted to the darkness, he felt the powerful beat of a heart against him, then the thick bone of curving ribs. In that moment, he realized he was inside the jaguar. Somehow, he’d become her! He was the jaguar. The power he felt was unlike any other he’d ever experienced. This feeling was wild, primeval—untrammeled animal power of the highest degree—and he felt the jaguar’s confidence as she began walking again with her languidly graceful gait.

  Somewhere in his distant mind, Culver remembered what the natives had often told him about the jaguar: how she would hypnotize her chosen prey simply by looking at it with her mesmerizing eyes, pulling its spirit out of its body, rendering it incapable of movement. And that was how he’d felt when she’d looked at him with those stunning eyes—paralysed.

  Darkness fell over him again, and Culver felt himself being propelled out of the jaguar. In the next moment, he was back in his own body, staring at her on the jungle path. The jaguar switched her tail, blinked slowly at him and turned away, dissolving into the glistening clouds she’d originally come out of. He stood watching the golden clouds as they began roiling, shifting in new and different ways.

  The face of a young, beautiful woman appeared. She was laughing and dancing naked by a dark green pool surrounded by grasses, and wild, colorful orchids hung from nearby trees. She was the jaguar, Culver somehow knew, but in human form. Her hair was long, almost to her waist, and shone like sparkling moonlight on water. Her graceful arm movements reminded him of the hula dancers of Hawaii. Her body was slim, untouched and virginal, and each sway of her hips stoked a fiery heat building in his loins. He no longer cared if she really was the jaguar. He moved toward her, wanting to mate with her, wanting to expend this deep, animal feeling that possessed him, that he had become.

  When she turned and saw him, she laughed, the low, throaty purr of a jaguar greeting her returning mate. Her eyes were ebony, shining as brightly as a thousand full moons. Her lips curved in welcome, and she opened her arms to him as he approached. Walking into them, wrapping his around her, feeling the moist, sensuous heat of her body collapsing joyfully against his made him growl—like a jaguar. He guided her down onto the thick, luxuriant grass and found himself naked beside her. Wherever she touched him, purring, her fingertips roaming searchingly across him, tiny, volcanolike fires seemed to erupt. He’d never ached for a woman this way before. He was tied in knots of fire, wanting to bend double with the pain of his need.

  Her eyes danced with joy and she began to kiss him from his chest downward. He lay on the carpet of grass, its cool dampness a stark contrast to the branding heat of her lips as they reverently caressed his skin. He wanted her on a primal level, and yet, as she stroked him, rubbing sinuously against his body, he felt that something sacred was taking place between them. Culver had never experienced the hunger of desire combined with the sort of spiritual fire that seemed to surround them. Sex was sex. Or was it?

  As the jaguar woman moved on top of him, allowing him to enter her, he felt a terrific shift within him on so many levels that he had no words for it. He could merely feel, with a purity that was much more than sex. Whatever power this mystical woman possessed was something so sacred that he’d never, in all his life and travels, encountered it before. He felt tears leaking from beneath his closed eyes as he reveled in the juxtaposition of animalistic need and purity in their consummation—two separate souls being brought into a sacred oneness that left him in awe of their magical coupling.

  The golden clouds enveloped him, and suddenly the woman was no longer beside him. The clouds roiled again, turning dark and threatening above him as he lay naked and sweaty on the grass. Lightning bolts ripped from the churning sky, striking him in the chest, in the region of his heart. Blackness engulfed him, and he felt himself tumbling wildly through the storm’s grasp like a leaf ripped from a tree during one of the jungle’s powerful afternoon thunderstorms.

  Though he was being buffeted by the clouds and lightning, Culver felt a horrifying sense of loss. Never had he felt such grief and such a soul-deep deprivation. The sense of abandonment, of being torn from the woman who had made him feel whole, became a well of grief tunneling through him, making him gasp for air.

  Culver was gasping, his heart pounding, sweat running off his brow in rivulets, when he felt a hand on his chest. His eyes flew open. Don Gonzalez was squatting over him, his bony hand laid gently over Culver’s heart. The shaman studied him in silence.

  “You have walked the path of the jaguar people,” he said in a low, gruff tone. Removing his hand, he took a wooden bowl and flicked droplets of water over Culver. “You have taken on the power of the jaguar. It is very dangerous, but it can bring the rainbow, too. The jaguar is our most powerful spirit guide. Many pursue that power, and most are killed by it. You are a Norte Americano, and you are ignorant of her ways.” He nodded and slowly stood as he continued to sprinkle the water.

  The water cooled Culver, and his heartbeat began to slow and grow steady again. His breathing went from rasping gasps to deeper lungfuls as he felt himself return to the here and now, no longer caught up in the vision vine’s storm.

  “You will discover the power of the jaguar, my son. Once you know it, it will be up to you to integrate it into yourself.” Don Gonzalez set the b
owl aside and came and squatted once more by his side. “It is female energy—the most powerful on Mother Earth. We are her children. All of us.” He waved his finger at him. “You will meet a woman who is a jaguar priestess to our people. If you love her, you will become her.”

  Stunned, Culver lay, still caught up in the remnants of the winds of ayahuasca. What was real? What was not? His body vibrated with the memory of what he’d experienced, with the jaguar and then with the beautiful, virginal maiden.

  “And if I don’t love her?” he croaked to the shaman.

  Don Gonzalez smiled benignly. “No man can resist the offer of jaguar medicine. She embodies all of the positive and negative of the feminine, my son. She is part seductress, part destroyer. You will experience both. The question is will you survive? And if you do, what then, I wonder?” His smile increased knowingly. “I have seen shaman apprentices actively hunt jaguar medicine, only to be killed by a jaguar in the jungle. They are found, torn apart and partially eaten.” With a shake of his head, he murmured, “You come by the medicine honestly. Those apprentices who pursue her are in search of egotistical power, not the integration of the power to create a more-balanced human being.” His eyes sparkled. “You achieved that state, that integration. Now that you know this feeling of wholeness, you will search for her, and when you find her, you will mate with her as you did in your vision. Then—” he opened his hands and looked to the sky above “—only the Great Mother will know your destiny.”

  Culver felt cleaner and lighter. Despite the many times he had vomited, then felt caught in a dizzying inner tornado, he felt amazingly good—almost buoyant. “And can I integrate this power?”

  With a shrug, Don Gonzalez said, “If the jaguar came to you, yes.”

  Culver looked deep into the man’s dark eyes. Somehow, he knew Don Gonzalez already had knowledge of his eventual success or failure, but the old man wouldn’t reveal what he knew. “And if I don’t?”

  “Then the jaguar goddess will destroy you.” He touched his own chest, where a necklace of colorful macaw feathers rested. Tapping his heart, he said, “Jaguar medicine is about integrating the female energy within yourself. It is an inner marriage. It is also the journey to the fullest opening of your heart. No other medicine tests you this strongly. It asks that you open your heart fully, with trust. You must stand completely naked and vulnerable to the jaguar. If you do not, you cannot accept the unconditional love she will offer you. There is no chance for he who hesitates, my friend. Trust. Stay receptive. Remain vulnerable. This priestess is still far away. You will meet her in the summer—a year from now, north of Lima. She will save your life.”

  Culver shook his head sharply, emerging from his powerful memory into the bright sunlight of Pilar’s village. At the time of his vision-vine experience, he had silently laughed at the shaman’s prediction. However, when he’d met Pilar, it had been at exactly the time and place the old man had predicted. But Culver hadn’t had any idea Pilar was destined to become a jaguar priestess until just now, when Don Alvaro had mentioned it. He absently continued assembling the radio, scowling. “Does Pilar know she’s a priestess?”

  “Of course. That is why she wears her spirit guardian’s hair in the medicine bag around her neck. It is a sign of her destiny.”

  Pilar came up to her grandfather smiling in greeting. Leaning over, she kissed the old man’s parchment-thin cheek. “I see you have met Culver?”

  “Yes,” the patriarch said, gesturing for her to sit in another rocking chair not far from his own. “Sit, mi nieta,” he said, using the Spanish words for “my granddaughter.”

  Pilar saw the scowl on Culver’s brow increase. Should she sit? Or should she disappear and leave them alone? Don Alvaro’s long, strong fingers wrapped around her wrist, tugging her toward the rocker. Hesitantly, Pilar sat. Rane beamed at her.

  “Mama, look! Culver said I could help him. Look at these radios! I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  Pilar held her daughter’s light brown gaze, and her heart ached at the sight of her sitting so close to Culver. If he minded her daughter’s presence, he didn’t show it. She saw him look at Rane, his features softening. A vague hint of a smile played at the corners of his compressed lips. A fierce longing for Culver swept through Pilar, and an odd ache centered in her womb.

  “Culver knows a great deal about mechanical things,” she told Rane softly. Pulling the towel off her shoulders, she carefully folded it and placed it on the fallen log beside her rocking chair.

  “He has been showing me so many things!”

  Pilar caught Culver’s gaze. He seemed amused by Rane’s spontaneity, but how could anyone not be swayed by her daughter’s sunbeam beauty and loving nature? No one could remain impervious to Rane’s heart-centered love. But then, Pilar reminded herself, Rane had been created out of the heat and passion of the greatest love in her life, so it was not surprising.

  “Perhaps,” Don Alvaro said to Pilar with great seriousness, “we should have a ceremony before you leave to attack Don Ramirez’s fortress in the jungle?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I would like to receive the blessing of you and Grandmother Aurelia before I leave.” She glanced at Culver. “Do you want to partake of a ayahuasca ceremony?”

  He shook his head. “No way. Once was enough.”

  “You have tasted the winds of ayahuasca?” she asked, surprised.

  “Yes. A long time ago,” he said rather abruptly.

  Pilar studied him in the intervening silence, feeling the tension radiating around him. “You don’t have to take the drink with me. You can take it alone, if you don’t want me around. I understand.”

  Culver’s head snapped up, his eyes narrowing on her. “It has nothing to do with you being there or not.”

  “Do not push him, mi nieta.” Don Alvaro patted her arm gently. “You leave tomorrow morning, no?”

  Culver’s mouth tightened, and he glared at Pilar. “Just how much have you told them about our mission? We’re on a strictly need-to-know basis, in case you didn’t realize it.” He knew he was snapping unnecessarily, and he hated himself for sounding so petulant. He saw Pilar’s face mirror hurt from his verbal assault.

  “I’ve told them nothing, Culver.”

  He stared at her. “Sure,” he said mockingly. This was the first time Pilar had lied to him so openly. Usually her lies were subtle as a jaguar noiselessly stalking her prey through the jungle. Her blatancy angered him.

  Her lips parting, Pilar stared at Culver, then at her grandfather. “Listen to me, Culver,” she said in a low, firm tone. “My grandfather is a shaman. So is my grandmother. You have lived in Peru long enough to know that they possess a knowing far beyond our own. My grandmother told me last night when we arrived that they had been expecting us. They travel in the other dimensions, the worlds of the past and future. They know what is happening around us.”

  “Really?” he said condescendingly. “Then ask them the outcome of our little jungle hike. Is Morgan alive? Will we successfully rescue him?” He snorted. “Better yet, ask the old man if either of us will survive. On second thought, I can answer those questions myself. Do you know what the likelihood of survival is on our mission? About ten percent. Which means we’ve got a ninety-percent chance of buying the farm. I don’t need a shaman or an ayahuasca ceremony where I heave my guts to find out that answer.”

  “Don’t you dare make fun of my grandparents! Just because they’re shamans from a culture you don’t accept or believe in doesn’t take away from what they know!”

  Rane got up and moved away from Culver. She slid into Pilar’s lap and linked her long, slim arms around her mother’s neck as she rested her head against her shoulder. Pilar tried to control the feelings in her voice, aware that their argument was upsetting Rane. “For your information, people who drink ayahuasca during a ceremony for a valid reason do not have to heave their guts out. The cleaner a person is inside, the less vomiting he or she experiences.”

  “
I see,” he growled, placing the radio back in its protective plastic. “So I’m not clean inside. Well—” he looked straight at her “—you’re the jaguar priestess around here. Go ahead and go to your grandparents’ ceremony. I’m staying out of it.”

  Tabling her anger, Pilar gaped at him. “Jaguar priestess? What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, come on,” he drawled acidly as he leaned over and picked up a revolver, preparing to check it over and clean it, “You know damn well what I’m talking about.”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Pilar, you keep surprising me, you know that?” Culver pulled the safety off the Beretta and studied the weapon critically. “Here you are a jaguar priestess for your people, and you never told me. In fact, you said so little about your real parentage—”

  “At the time, it wasn’t important,” she snapped. No, at the time, she thought ruefully, they’d fallen into each other’s arms, loving hotly, without regret or apology.

  Culver’s mouth twisted into an ugly line as he broke down the revolver piece by piece to begin oiling it against the jungle’s humidity. “A hell of a lot of things weren’t important except surviving.”

  Stung, Pilar held Rane more tightly, feeling her daughter tremble at the amount of anger in their exchange. She stroked her long, dark hair, flowing loose around her shoulders. All her life, Pilar had worked to keep her daughter from the violence of the world. Rane sighed and closed her eyes, nestling her face in the curve of her mother’s neck. She relaxed, and Pilar was grateful. Too bad her touch didn’t have the same mollifying effect on Culver; but too much bad blood had passed between them, Pilar admitted. She could hardly blame him.

  “My grandparents have been telling me for as long as I can remember that I had a special responsibility to fulfill with my life,” she explained in a low, controlled tone. “But I wasn’t aware until you just told me that it was as a jaguar priestess.” She glanced at her attentive grandfather, who she knew was listening with his heart. He didn’t know much English, but from experience, Pilar knew that the revered shaman could understand on another level exactly what was being said. “That is something I will have to speak to them about now, on top of everything else that is going on.”