Wild Cat

The wolf’s front claws tore open Diego’s skin, raising welts of pain. Diego ducked and came up under the wolf, jabbing a hand into the wolf’s throat. It fell back, choking.

Cassidy’s Collar shocked and arced in the darkness. She howled as another wildcat and bear joined her fight to keep Xavier safe. Xavier was firing now, Shifters screaming as he hit them.

Diego dove for his shotgun. It was snatched out of his reach by a bear, who half shifted and rose to his full height. The thing smelled like urine.

Diego rolled into the darkness. Like hell he was getting shot in the stomach twice in his lifetime by the same kind of gun.

The Shifter brought the gun around like a club and caught Diego on the temple. Diego ducked in time to keep the blow from doing full damage, but the world spun around him.

Shane knocked the half-shifted bear away from Diego, but Diego felt himself losing consciousness. The last things he saw before he passed out were at least a dozen Shifters dragging his brother away, followed by Cassidy’s wildcat sprinting after them into the darkness.

“Shifter woman, I claim you.”

The speaker was a bear Shifter, in human form now. The gigantic man’s skin was covered with tattoos, his shaggy hair and beard touched with gray. At least he’d put on a pair of pants, tattered BDUs.

All the Shifters in the abandoned building wore clothes of some form or other, but none had offered clothing to Cassidy. She’d chased them and tried to get Xavier away from them, but she’d been beaten down by five Lupines and a Feline, plus the shocks from her damned Collar.

The Collar was silent now, and Cassidy sat cross-legged on the dirt floor, holding in the Collar’s aftermath pain. Xavier lay on a blanket next to her, unconscious, his head caked with blood.

Cassidy looked up at the bear Shifter, meeting his eyes. It was difficult to lock gazes with him, because he was definitely the leader here, and he had dominance. Plus he was just so tall, and her neck hurt. But Cassidy knew that if she looked away, if she betrayed any submissiveness to him, she was done for.

A male might hesitate to force an alpha female who was not afraid to fight him, because she could do him a lot of damage. But he’d not hesitate to force a submissive. A feral wouldn’t anyway.

“When my alpha comes for me, you’re not going to be happy,” Cassidy said. “Trust me.”

“Your alpha has to be a thousand miles away,” the bear said. She’d heard one of his trackers call him Miguel. Whether that was his true name or one he’d taken when he’d come to Mexico, she didn’t know. “You have a Collar,” Miguel said. “That means you don’t live nearby. No one around here is Collared. They wouldn’t dare take a Collar.”

Cassidy clasped her knees to her chest, but she kept her voice nonchalant. “Felines, Lupines, Ursines, living together in the wild. Unheard of.”

“We’re just doing what you did,” Miguel said. “Coming together, putting aside differences, only we didn’t bow to humans to do it. The humans bow to us. No Collars. Just Shifters.”

Living in a half-ruined building in the middle of nowhere in Mexico, terrorizing the locals and hiding like fugitives. No access to any stashes of wealth, it looked like. They either killed their food or had the local eateries give it to them free.

“Looks… cozy,” Cassidy said.

“You’re pretty strong. When you’re my mate, we’ll get that Collar off you, and you can be my second. Or third. Depending on how well you fight my alpha mate.”

Cassidy rolled her eyes. “I reject your mate-claim. That’s a no-brainer.”

Miguel laughed. The two Feline trackers who were sitting as his bodyguards did too. The only other Shifters with them at present were another bear and a wolf guarding Xavier and Cassidy.

“Females around here don’t reject mate-claims,” Miguel said. “There are only so many females to go around, and you’ll be mate-claimed by more than one male. But the first cubs are mine. After that, you can fuck whoever you want.”

Cassidy wrinkled her nose. “Way to romance a girl.”

“Romance is for humans.”

Cassidy thought about how Diego whispered beautiful words as he made love to her. She’d take human romance with Diego over Miguel’s disgusting statements any day of the week.

“I’m not standing up with you under sun and moon,” Cassidy said. “Forget it.”

Miguel laughed again. “None of those rituals exist here. We just mate.”

“Taking off my Collar might kill me,” Cassidy said. “Then I wouldn’t be much good for producing cubs, would I?”

“I’ll let you push out a few first, just in case.”

Cassidy pretended to ignore that. Her heart was pounding, but she tried to suppress all emotion. No rage or fear. Miguel would be able to scent her fear and use it to break her.

Cassidy glanced around the barren room again. Wind blew through chinks in the ceiling high above. “This works for you, does it? Coming together, living in harmony, all Shifter races as one. Are you having more cubs, then, a better rate of survival? If so, where are they all?”

The slightest flicker of Miguel’s eyes told her much. They weren’t having the number of cubs they thought they would.

Because they’d gone feral. Feral didn’t mean the same thing as wild. It meant the animal instincts taking over, the human side being suppressed until the animal ruled, no matter what form the Shifter was in. Shifters were half beings, at their very best when each aspect of them worked in balance. Going too far in either direction wasn’t good at all.

These Shifters had probably found each other after humans started forcing Shifters to take Collars. They’d have escaped before Shifters were put into Shiftertowns, choosing to stay wild, thinking they could beat the humans at their own game.

Nice idea to try to make it together. Shifters taking the Collars had found, to their surprise, that living in communities, even restricted ones like Shiftertowns, let them stop fighting for survival and learn to live. Shifters together had gotten stronger, their fertility rates higher, the incidence of losing females in childbirth much lower. Cubs had safe places to grow up now.

These Shifters had tried the same idea, but without Collars to keep the fighting down. Different species instinctively fought each other, but Collars, Shifters had found, let them live side by side in some kind of peace. That way Shane and Brody and their mother could be friends next door instead of Eric and Cassidy having to fight them every time they walked out the door.

The dominance fights in this Shifter enclave must be horrific. And ferals were even worse at reproducing than Shifters who’d lived alone in the wild. Life was hard on a female Shifter, as was childbirth.

“This is how you introduce fresh blood, is it?” Cassidy asked, as though simply curious. “Kidnapping females and mate-claiming them?”

“We went out to defend our town against incomers,” the bear said. “You were an opportunity.”

Cassidy had been trying to save Xavier’s life. The last thing she’d wanted was for Diego to watch his brother die.

She glanced around surreptitiously, taking in the floor space, the exits. Windowless walls rose around them, with only one main doorway leading out into the night. The ceiling soared above her, pieces of it missing. It had to be a sixty-foot climb to the top. The light came from battery-operated lanterns, and the cooking fire was a gas camping grill. All stolen, she surmised.

A dark doorway stood beyond Miguel and his guards, the farthest point from Cassidy. The smell behind it was stuffy, enclosed, and it was also filled with pungent fear. Cassidy’s hackles rose, instincts telling her she did not want to go in there.

Miguel nudged Xavier with his foot. “Who’s the human?”

“My pet,” Cassidy said. Shifter females in the wild had sometimes taken human male lovers, referring to them as pets. She figured Xavier wouldn’t mind the lie if it kept him alive, if he were even awake to hear it. “You don’t get to have him.”

“Maybe I’ll just kill him,” Miguel said.

Cassidy coolly met his gaze. “If you let me keep him, I’ll consider the mate-claim.”

“You don’t consider anything, Feline. I mate-claim you, and that’s that.”