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

“I want to go to the introductions event,” Tommo said. “I’ve always wondered how these people admit what they do in their spare time to regular people.”


A muscle in Mateo’s face twitched. He didn’t want to spend the afternoon scolding Dazi’s friends for their insensitive comments, but if the Mukua’poan expected to blend in for the weekend, they couldn’t go around saying stuff like that. Tommo did look younger than the rest, but only by a few years. He was definitely old enough that he should have more sense than that.


“I’ll go with Kuhma,” Kesi said. “We have the best ears, so we can pick up the little conversations in the crowd. Tommo, you and Dazi can go with…uh…Mateo.”


“That works for me!” Dazi said enthusiastically. “Think there will be any other mountain lions at this event?”


Chapter 15