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 see me?” Mateo asked them. Though only truth could be spoken in the Spirit World, Mateo had no trueform. He was as much a jaguar as he was human, though he spent more time in his human form. When he was with family here, they saw each other as both simultaneously, but from the few times Mateo’s grandfather had guided a human to this place, Mateo knew perception of them could shift, gravitating to either see them as mostly human or mostly jaguar.


Tuku’isa said, “I see a man with skin black as night and the face and tail of a jaguar.”


Nattusu said, “I agree, except you seem more like a jaguar standing with human posture to me.”


Natiam stared at Mateo for a moment or two, his thoughts a swirl of light and shadow around his head. “I don’t know what I see. When I think of you as human, that’s what I see, but when I look for the jaguar in you, I see that instead.”


Chapter 56