Morgan's Rescue (17 page)

     
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 bowl 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.