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

Kuhma muttered, “I’m not surprised…” under his breath in Shoshoni. Louder in English he added, “Maybe we should check out this Therianthropy panel while you do that. We won’t participate much, just sit back and listen, make sure no one is being too extreme.”


“I’d still rather stick with Mateo,” Dazi said. “That panel does sound too weird for me. Plus, I have always been curious about how animation works. This way I can finally answer some of my questions.”


“So we’re splitting into the usual groups, then?” Kesi asked, giving Dazi a sly smile.


At this point, Dazi didn’t care if his friends teased him for spending time with an Outsider. For all he knew, this was the only time he would ever get with Mateo, and he wasn’t about to waste it. “We can at that point. What is there between the parade and those panels?”


Chapter 29