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

“Yeah, I’ve been here four years in a row and no one has noticed I’m not entirely human, or if they have they kept it to themselves because it sounds crazy to say they saw someone with a real tail at a furry convention.” Mateo tail twitched, jerking the fabric of his boxers. “Did I run around screaming, ‘Hey, these guys are shapeshifters’? Or tell any of my friends here that they could fulfil their dreams of being animals if they perform your ritual?”


Kuhma wriggled his nose. “No, you haven’t.”


“Not necessarily,” Kesi said. “We know you can be trusted, but that’s because we’ve spent nearly every waking minute with you for a day. For all we know, the moment we let you out of sight, you would tell someone, like that poor otter girl who would rather die than be human the rest of her life.”


Chapter 46