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

“It’ll take more than my voice to make them listen,” Dazi said. He looked into Mateo’s eyes. “You’ll tell them, won’t you? If—If they ask you, as in, if they interrogate you about the furries, since you’ve spent so much time with them, you’d talk to them, right? Tell them about yourself and them and why…why things aren’t as bad as they’ll think it is?”


Mateo nodded emphatically. “Absolutely I would.”


Dazi smiled, though there was a sadness in his eyes that Mateo couldn’t understand. He wanted to help Dazi get rid of it, in any way he could. If that means standing trial for fraternizing with furries, I’ll do it.


They went for a short walk around the convention center until Kesi texted to say they were out of their panel. Mateo had the layout of the buildings memorized, and the four of them met up within a few minutes. Mateo noticed right away that the tone of Kuhma’s stoicism had changed. There was a melancholy to his expression and a slump in his shoulders.


Chapter 42