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

“How do you usually deal with this when you’re away from home?” Dazi asked.


“I wear loose clothes to bed, lock the exits, put something that smells like food in the bathroom to try to lure myself in if I sleepwalk as well, that kind of thing. I haven’t had any issues with it in the past, but I don’t know how I’ll react with others in the room.”


“I could sleep on the bed with you,” Dazi offered. “I probably smell more familiar, and I’d be more able to stop you from doing anything bad.”


“Besides, wouldn’t going to sleep already shifted be safer?” Kesi asked. “If you go to sleep human and wake up as a panicked jaguar, why not go to sleep as a jaguar instead?”


Chapter 25