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

A young woman greeted them at the door, a deer or some other hooved animal by the smell of her. She was friendly, which helped put Mateo at ease, and led them to the chief’s office. The chief himself smelled strongly of bear, and though he wasn’t magnificently broad or muscular, he somehow reminded Mateo of one. Perhaps it was the way he slowly but surely got to his feet, or the depth of his voice when he said, “I am Chief Werama, and you must be the one Tommo told me about.”


“I suppose I must,” Mateo replied. It wasn’t how the chief looked, it was how he felt. The jaguar beneath Mateo’s skin acknowledged the larger predator, and it was wary. Mateo took a meditative breath to keep himself human, at least for the time being. He didn’t want his first impression to be that he couldn’t control the beast within himself.


“He helped us to walk unknown among the fur—fake-skins,” Dazi said.


Chapter 50