Wild Cat

“Humans. Terrified of nudity.”

“Not terror. Respecting space and privacy.”

“Right. Humans are all about their space,” Eric said, then he shifted.

He didn’t roar or howl or make strange noises like werewolves did in movies. The change was smooth, practiced, and fast.

Eric’s face distorted first, his nose and mouth elongating, his slit-pupiled eyes going from deep jade to light green. His chest became the thick chest of a big cat, his legs bent into powerful back limbs, and his feet and hands sprouted claws and fur.

The whole process took about thirty seconds, but it was a very long thirty seconds. At the end of it, Diego found himself facing a huge, exotic wildcat.

Shifter cats were a combination of all the big cats, the files said, bred together long ago—by fairies, according to the Shifters, though Diego wasn’t sure he believed that.

Shifter cats had different characteristics from family to family, clan to clan. Eric and Cassidy resembled snow leopards, but Eric was a hell of lot bigger than a usual snow leopard. He had black spots on a thick white coat, tufted ears, and a well-muscled chest, but he also had the powerhouse limbs of a lion.

Eric’s family had lived in the ragged wilds of Scotland, Diego had learned, until the family turned themselves in as part of the Shifters coming out. How snow leopards had bred in the Highlands, Diego didn’t know. But there was a lot about Shifters no one understood yet, and the Shifters didn’t exactly volunteer information about themselves.

Eric studied Diego with an almost amused look on his cat face before he turned and loped off into the darkness.

Diego switched on a lantern flashlight and hiked after him. They were far from paved roads and civilization out here on the edge of the Sierras. Towns and farms were nonexistent, and the mountains were vast.

Eric could be leading Diego anywhere—into an ambush with other Shifters maybe—but Diego wasn’t afraid. He was armed, he had his cell phone and radio, and he knew how to fight. Hand-to-hand combat was his specialty, and he was a more than decent marksman.

No, the only thing that terrified Diego Escobar was being held upside down off a balcony thirty stories up. If those drug runners had met Diego in the middle of a flat field, he’d have won the day. They’d be incarcerated now instead of running loose somewhere south of the border.

The leopard trotted along the cut of a dry wash and up a ridge on the other side of it. Eric was at least nice enough to let Diego keep him in sight.

At the top of the ridge, Eric stopped and sniffed the wind. To Diego, the chill breeze smelled like pine and dust, but Eric made a sudden, fierce growl and loped away, disappearing quickly beneath the trees.

Diego swore under his breath as he picked his way along the steep-sided hill after him. There was no path the way Eric had gone, and Diego’s feet slipped and slid in the soft dirt and pine needles. The rifle and pack unbalanced him, but no way was he going to drop them and leave them behind.

Eric was nowhere in sight by the time Diego reached a clearing in the trees. Annoying, but Diego wasn’t worried about getting lost. He had a powerful flashlight and a GPS device, and he’d noted the exact position in which he’d left the car.

No, getting back to civilization wasn’t the problem. Falling, breaking a bone, being bitten by a snake or a rabid coyote—any of those could shut him down fast. People still died out here, and quickly. The Wild West wasn’t so long ago.

Knowing Cassidy was in this wilderness somewhere kept Diego from walking to the car and leaving Eric to make his own way back. A Shifter had the advantage out here, not a human. But Cassidy…

In spite of Eric’s reassurance about guards, Cassidy’s story about being chased into the construction site by the hunter, not to mention the same hunter trying to take out Diego, worried him. A lot.

A couple of the more aggressive hunting groups had, a few of years ago, gotten the government to lift the ban on hunting un-Collared Shifters. The ban had been in place for a decade, but the hunters argued that Shifters who’d refused to take the Collar were still out there, still very dangerous.

Those Shifters could kill livestock, and worse, they said. Maybe even kidnap human women or children to do unspeakable things to them. Not that anything like this had ever been documented, but the hunters claimed anecdotal evidence.

Their arguments had finally been acknowledged, and the hunting of un-Collared Shifters again had become legal.

Cassidy was out here in the pitch dark. Would a hunter see—or care—that she wore a Collar?

Diego scanned for signs to tell him which way Eric had gone. The earth didn’t show any paw prints, but a bush had been recently broken, a larger rock moved to expose its clean underside and the bugs hiding there.

Diego climbed around a stand of trees and started over another arm of hill. To his right, the ground sloped downward into darkness; to his left and ahead of him, the earth folded into treacherous grooves, deep washes that would flood during snowmelt later this spring.

About half a mile on, Diego was rewarded with a paw print in his beam of light, unmistakable in the mud. A wildcat, but a big one, much bigger than the elusive mountain lions that lived out here.

Diego followed the direction of the print, finding another in the drier dirt. He hiked on through the wash, eyes stinging with the dust he kicked up. He came out of the trees and found himself on a wide ridge, under an outcropping of black rock.

He heard a snarl—harsh, breathy, animal-like. He raised his flashlight and saw a mountain lion standing in the shadows of the rock. A real wildcat, not Eric, and this mountain lion was seriously pissed off.