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

Mopsy, his new rabbit friend, shrugged at the speech. “I don’t want to be a bunny 24/7, but if I could snap my fingers and change back and forth, that’d be nice.”


“Not me,” said Dirk the monitor lizard. “I’d gladly give up this soft skin in exchange for scales and claws, even if the rest of me looked mostly human. What about you, Mateo?”


“I—” Mateo glanced over at Dazi, who stood stock still, eyes alight with panic. “I would be fine with either, so long as I kept the tail.” He picked up his tail, which hung limply in his hand. “I like it. Wish I could graft it to my spine so I could move it.”


Dirk waggled his butt to shake his own tail, which looked like it was made from an old stuffed stocking bolstered with internal wire and a decent paint job. “Yeah, man. I could knock people out if this were real. Slap ‘em right in the face. Pow!”


Chapter 20