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By Root 557 0

design. Maybe I’d spent too much time with the wereleopards in their half-forms, but I gazed up at Crispin and noticed that his chest, like theirs, was less furred and more like an overly muscled human chest. The half-form was taller, more muscular, and edged by that white and pale-chocolate-striped fur, but the skin revealed was pale and human-looking down the center of his body. The wolves seemed to be furrier in half-form than the cats I’d met, so far. My gaze traveled down his body to find that, like in every half-form, everything was bigger. Noticing made me turn my head, and fight not to blush. I might have told him to get off me, but I saw who’d been watching the show.

Chuck, Shadwell, and Rowe stood staring down at us, guns bare but not pointed at anything. Jason said, “You both screamed like you were being killed. I had to let them in or they would have busted down the door.”

I raised a hand and smoothed some of the clear, slightly thick liquid away from my forehead so it wouldn’t drip into my eyes. I wasn’t covered in it, but there was enough of it that I’d need a shower before I left the room. With as much dignity as I could muster, I said, “As you can see, I’m fine. Now get out.”

“What we just saw is a lot of things,” Rowe said, “and fine ain’t one of ’em.”

I think because I hadn’t told him to move, or maybe because things hurt, Crispin curled on top of me. He moved his much taller body down so that he wasn’t covering my face with his chest. It meant that certain things weren’t touching me as intimately as they had been through my jeans, which was fine, but it did mean that he was curled around me like some gigantic stuffed toy. A stuffed toy with a pulse that snuggled against me when I touched its furred back. But Crispin had saved me, saved me in a way that Jason couldn’t have—in fact, that no one in town could have done. I owed him, so I didn’t tell him to get up in front of the humans. I didn’t embarrass him, or react like some…mundane. I acted as if this were all just as ordinary as it could be, as if I did this all the damn time.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand; just leave so we can…” Several words went through my mind: talk, finish, do what we have to do, none of them sounded right.

Jason finished for me. “There are things we need to do, and they’ll weird you out just as much as this. You should see your faces: white, shocked, horrified. You look like you’ve been to the freak show.”

“That’s not fair,” Shadwell said. “We had no idea what was happening in here.”

“Now you do,” I said, still on the floor. “Go, just go.”

Shadwell licked his lips and glanced at Rowe. Rowe shrugged.

“I think we should give the…marshal here some privacy like she asked,” Chuck said. I wondered what he’d been about to say before he came up with marshal? Better not to know.

I half-expected the other men to argue, to say they didn’t take orders from Chuck, but they didn’t. I think they wanted out of the room, too. Sometimes the weird factor just goes too far for comfort.

Shadwell nodded, and holstered his gun. Rowe hesitated, giving the weretiger wide eyes, but a hard look from Shadwell made him holster his weapon. He didn’t like it, but he did it. Training; it will keep you alive, and out of trouble with your superiors.

“We’ll be outside,” Shadwell said, “until we’re relieved.”

Rowe said, “How do we know if there’s a problem? I mean the screaming…we really thought that was it. That you were being attacked.”

“Sorry about that,” I said, “I’ll try to be quieter.”

The weretiger moved against me in a motion that seemed to send a wave down his entire body. His tail rose up, to twitch, and then to curve back over the very human rise of his buttocks.

He turned and gave the men the full look at that half-and-half face. His voice came growling low, “I’ll be good.”

Rowe swallowed hard and began to lose the little color he’d regained. He just nodded and started for the door. Shadwell followed him, and never looked back. Chuck was the last to leave. He hesitated with his hand on the open door.

“I didn’t think you knew