The mountain lion sniffed the cool air. The sharp lemon scent of fir needles and deep loamy soil mingled with the scent of frigid river water and blood. His massive paws padded along the forest floor, nimbly pouncing through the undergrowth. His nose twitched in the wind. A storm was coming. A big one.

The source of the blood was along the ravine where dark earth plunged into a rocky riverbed. He pounced on a downed tree trunk and regarded the entrance of the ravine. He could smell the spray of a waterfall, the tang of a hawk, and the quivering fear of a rabbit in its den.

He dropped silently to the riverbed and stalked toward the source of the blood, human blood. There should be no humans, let alone bleeding ones, in this part of his forest. This was his territory. No hiking trails, no visitors.

Near the base of the waterfall, he saw the curvaceous figure of a woman. She lay on her side with her face buried in the ground. The acrid scent of hair chemicals and perfume bit his nose.

His lips curled in a snarl. He hated humans and their stinking chemical smell. No good ever came from them being in his forest. Humans: noisy, smelly beasts who trampled the earth and left destruction in their wake.

His ears twitched to listen for her heartbeat— thready but strong. He sniffed at the blood under her head. It had stopped flowing and was beginning to clot in her black hair. Licking at her cheek, he hope the damp contact of his tongue would be enough to wake her.

She didn't stir. He couldn't leave the woman bleeding into the riverbed. Even he had more compassion for humans than that. He sniffed the wind and sensed electricity in the air. There would be snow tonight, a lot of it, more than this part of Oregon had seen in decades.

He shifted. His body shimmered and contorted. Bones snapped and reformed in a hair's breadth of an instant. He stood tall and naked in the chill wind. His chiseled muscles twitched. The sensitive human flesh pricked from the cold, and the smooth river rocks poked into the bottoms of his bare feet.

He knelt beside the unconscious woman. Slipping his arms under her shoulders and the backs of her knees, he scooped her feminine body into his arms. Her head lulled back and he could see her face and smell the native scent of her body under the smell of blood and perfume.

Her plump red lips opened slightly, revealing her pink tongue and straight white teeth. He looked down at her form. Her round breasts rose like rolling hillsides and her wide hips tapered deliciously into her waist.

The smell of her at this proximity and the feel of her softness against his hard chest made his mouth water involuntarily. He lifted her neck to his nose and took a long, slow drag of her scent. Mmmm, intoxicating. It had been a long time since he'd smelled a woman this close, human or shifter.

He made a low groan and carried the unconscious woman down the riverbed. Carrying her all the way home would take too long in this form. In one deft movement, he wrapped her arms around his neck, flipped her on his back, and shifted into his massive lion form. Her legs fell around his back and he easily carried her down the flat riverbed.

When he reached the path toward home, he carefully pounced up the ridge. She began to slide from his back. He shifted into his Halfling form. With one hand, he held her arms around his chest and with the other, he held her legs around his waist. With powerful lion's hind legs, he charged through the wood.

He flew past the trees, moving deeper and deeper into the forest. The smell of snow pressed against his senses. A billowy flake blew in front of his path. By the time he made it to his cabin, there was already a thin coating of white over the ground.

He brought her inside and deposited her in his bed. He shifted human and placed his hand on her wrist to feel her heartbeat. She was cold. Too cold. Her red lips had turned purple, and blue circles had formed on the pale skin below her eyes.

After pulling her from her cold damp clothes, he tucked her under his blankets. His human body responded to the sight of the woman's plump fresh, and the beast inside him roared. He growled at himself and pulled on his buckskin trousers.

His cabin was equipped with both a fire place and a wood burning stove. He gathered logs from outside and built up the fires until the cabin was toasty warm.

Ronan looked at the woman in his bed. Revulsion and desire fought for dominance. He hated visitors. He didn't even like the other shifters to come to his cabin, let alone a bloody human stinking of perfume and laundry detergent.

He crossed his arms and scowled. She had a head injury.

His cabin was twenty miles from the nearest road and further from the other shifters who lived in Mystic Harbor on the coast. He wouldn't be able to count on them for help with his human problem.

Unlike many of the other shifters, Ronan Harding refused to use modern human technology. He felt it cheapened a shifter's very existence and he preferred to live off the land as much as possible. The human in him required a minimum of human comfort. The mountain lion in him just wanted to be left alone.

He didn't have any of those cellphone contraptions. He didn't even have electricity or running water. Ronan was happy to live as if the twentieth century never happened.

If he needed money for human goods, he took his animal pelts to the nearest town and hiked home his supplies. He didn't need much, a handful of rice, salt, knives to skin his pelts. That was it, and that was the way he liked it.

The woman groaned in the bed and turned to her side. He should clean the wound. Humans didn't heal like shifters, and the cut could fester. He sneered. He didn't want to touch her, no matter how good she smelled under all that chemical cologne, no matter how prettily her plump red lips puckered in her sleep.

He drew a handful of dried wild bergamot from a glass jar and threw it in a baked clay bowl. The tea kettle on the stove held hot water which he poured over the dried herbs. The bergamot infusion would fight infection and clean the wound.

Ronan covered the infusion with a plate and let it seep for several moments. When it was ready, he dipped a cloth into the green water and pressed it against the woman's skin.

Her temple was caked with dried brown blood. He rubbed against her hairline with the cloth until he could see the cut underneath. It was a long gash that ran over her ear for several inches. It was a clean cut, and it would heal well enough if looked after.

After the cut was clean, he soaked another handful of bergamot in hot water and piled it on the cut. Then he covered it with a clean cloth, and wrapped a soft strip of deer pelt around her head to keep the poultice attached.

Satisfied that he had done what he could for the woman, he turned to the window. Snow fell in huge clumps outside. Already the tree limbs were heavy with white. There would be several feet of packed snow on the ground before the sun rose.

He scratched his head. He should have taken her back to the road and left her there. She would be stuck in his cabin for who knows how long now. He wouldn't be able to get her through the snow in his human form, and revealing his true identity was out of the question.

His stomach grumbled. Following the scent of human blood had thrown him off his hunt, and he hadn't eaten. The woman would most likely be hungry when she woke as well. Damn. The snow would send most of his prey into hiding. It couldn't be helped.

He went outside and closed the door behind him. The temperature had dropped considerably since he'd gone inside. He dropped his trousers and shifted into his lion.

He sniffed the air and flicked his tail. He could smell the scent of a hare in the wood beyond his front yard. He trotted toward the forest, following the scent. If he was lucky, he could catch a hare or two before returning to the human with his catch.

He hunched into a prowl when his quick senses caught a glimpse of a creature moving in the underbrush. The scent of his meal ran down his nose like syrupy liquid. His mouth watered as he panted in the smell.

In one quick pounce, he caught the tiny creature in his massive paws. He held it still and snapped its neck so as not to ruin its soft pelt. Rabbit fur could be used for coats or hats. Some people even used them as decorations.

He wasn't always so careful with his kills. Often he would devour a small meal, but today he needed to bring it back to the woman. Might as well save the pelt.

His senses picked up the pungent sent of a buck not far from where he crouched. His ears pricked up to listen for the sound of branches breaking or the thudding of his prey's heart. He inhaled the buck's scent, sniffing the wind for direction.

He gently buried the rabbit to hide it from scavengers and pursued the deer. It stood in a clearing, scratching through the snow for shreds of green grass. Its massive antlers would impress his buyer when Ronan made his quarterly trek to town to sell his wares.

The deer's heartbeat thudded in Ronan’s ears. He licked his black lips and crouched downwind and out of view. He drew cold air into his chest, waiting like a statue to pounce. The buck looked up and sniffed the air with its twitching black nose. The creature lowered its thick neck and continued to rummage through the snow.

Ronan pounced, leaping on his powerful hind legs to fall directly on the deer's back. He sunk his massive sharp teeth into the animal's neck. The clamping of his jaw and the puncture of his teeth, brought the animal to its knees.

It let out a strangled cry but soon went still and fell to the ground. Ronan let go, panting through bloody lips and teeth at the sweet smell of his kill. The hunt, the greatest pleasure in life. The feeling of mastery over his prey as he brought his kill to its knees in supplication before him and the sense of its life force draining from its body, filling him up, was beyond human understanding.

The human need to hunt was a silly pantomime in comparison to a predator like Ronan. A predator's very existence depended on the kill. It was the meaning of his life: to hunt, to prey. He stood over his prize with grim satisfaction before his human mind nudged the animal to remember what needed to be done.

He gently gripped the buck’s neck between his teeth and dragged the carcass back through the woods to his cabin. As he pulled the heavy creature through the undergrowth and falling snow, he hoped he hadn’t damaged its pelt. Then he wondered why he was suddenly so concerned about his human income.

Usually, the human income was only an afterthought. Today, it felt almost like a primary focus. His eyes narrowed. The human woman was already infecting him with her human values. He'd have to put an end to that fast.

He dropped the deer carcass on his doorstep and returned to the wood for the rabbit. With both creatures at his front door, he shifted, pulled on his buckskin trousers, and went back inside.

In the bed, blinking like a doe, sat the black haired woman. The blanket had fallen away from her voluptuous bosom, and he could see the swell of her pale breasts inside her black lacy bra. She grabbed the blanket and clutched it to her chest, not doing a very good job of covering herself.

She touched the bandage on her head and winced. "What happened?"

"I found you on the riverbed."

"Where am I?"

"This is my cabin."

She looked around, confusion in her face. "But where am I?"

"Twenty miles from the nearest road, if that's what you mean?"

"Did you call anyone? I should see a doctor. What's this thing on my head?"

"It's a poultice."

"Is an ambulance coming?"

"No."

She looked scared and irritated and pulled her dried shirt from the back of the chair near the bed. She slipped it around her shoulders and began buttoning it. When she pulled the pants toward her and moved her legs, she winced painfully and let out a sharp moan. "Ouch! I think my ankle is broken!"

Ronan moved to the bed and threw the blankets off her. She looked at him in shock, her mouth hanging open. He ran his hand down her pretty white leg and felt her swollen ankle. He hadn't seen the swelling before.

She winced again as he dug his fingers around the bone. "Not broken," he said. "Just sprained."

"Great. I need to call my parents. Could I use your phone?"

"No phone," he said, rising from the bed to slice a long strip of soft deer hide for her injury. He carefully wrapped it around her ankle to keep it still and compress the swelling.

She watched him with her cool violet eyes, studying his motions. "You've got no phone? Who doesn't have a phone in this day and age?"

"Me."

"Can you at least give me a ride back to civilization?"

"Can't do that."

"Why?"

"No car."

"Oh for goodness sake! No car and no phone. This is the twenty first century. How do you live out here without a car or a phone?"

"I do just fine."

"Look, thank you for saving me. I'm glad I wasn't dinner for a hungry mountain lion, but I really need to be at work in the morning,” she said, looking around for her things.

"Mountain lion?"

"Yes. It trotted out in front of my car and stalked me through the woods after it made me crash."

"Damn it, Ashton," he said under his breath.

"What?"

"Nothing." Ashton was his younger brother. A more social mountain lion shifter who worked as a tattoo artist in Mystic Harbor. Most of the other shifters lived closer to civilization, even the bears and wolves. Not Ronan, he preferred to be alone.

Ashton had a bad habit of messing with humans when he was shifted. It was some kind of twisted practical joke for him. The last time Ronan had seen his younger brother, Ashton had mentioned wanting to make a video to post on the Internet.

Humans. They would make a network with machines. They were so disconnected from the natural network of life, they needed to make a fake one.

Ronan scowled but his eyes stared too long at the woman's exposed black lacy panties and the mound between her legs. He still held her foot in his hand, but she made an exasperated noise and threw the blankets over her legs.

"So, about getting me out of here? I have a massive project I must oversee tomorrow. Really, I need to go."

"You aren't going anywhere," he said, rising.

"But..."

"There's a massive storm coming. We're twenty miles from the road. Can't walk twenty miles in two feet of snow with a sprained ankle in the dark can ya?"

"Well, no. But there must be a way."

"There's not. I've got to go skin a buck."