Mateo, a jaguar nagual descended from Mayan shamans, attends the Northern Nevada Con-fur-ence furry convention to hide in plain sight. Who will look twice at a long, black tail and inhuman yellow eyes when there are neon huskies and dancing dragons around? There Mateo meets Dazi, a mountain lion skin-walker who is at the con with friends from his Shoshone-Paiute reservation. They want to find out if the furries are close to stumbling across their tribe of shifters. When these two big cats rub up against each other, their cultures collide in a way neither Mateo nor Dazi could predict. But Mateo has trouble being entirely human around his alluring new companion, and Dazi puts his tribe at risk when he reveals their secrets to an outsider. Can Mateo and Dazi overcome their natural secretive and bestial instincts to find their purr-fect ending?

Beasts Like Us

“Wait,” he pleaded. “You’re right, I’ve never been alone like that. In my tribe, even though we’re all different, we’re all family. That’s what this is: a tribe made up of many who share a common…feeling. If I were the last of my kind, I would take solace where I could as well.”


Mateo blinked at him. “I’m not just here because I’m the last, or at least might be. I don’t care that I’m the last. My mother says if keeping our kind alive means living in constant fear, she would rather this end with me. She was ecstatic when I realized I was gay.”


Every other statement out of Mateo’s mouth was filled with some strange new wonder. “You are?”


“Yeah. Is…is that not a thing that happens in your tribe?”


Chapter 11