Second Nature (2 page)

So now she was rewriting again. Her fingers roamed across the keyboard again until, a few sentences later, Quinn was standing in the moonlight as a majestic tiger.

Jorie stopped and stared at the blinking cursor.
How does a 140-pound woman become a 280-pound cat?
Jorie was a mathematician at heart, and something wasn't adding up here. She drummed her fingers against the side of her laptop.
You should have thought about it and done more research before you started writing
.

With all her other novels, she had done exactly that. Only after extensive research and careful plotting had she written the first word of the story.

This new project was different.

She had been so eager to write this book, to get started, that she had skipped most of her usual planning. And even some of the things that she had figured out beforehand, she had later changed because her rational mind and her instincts suddenly refused to work together and led her in two different directions.

"How about a little help from a cat expert, Agatha?" she asked the cat that had curled up next to her on the worn, comfortable couch.

Agatha was busy eyeing the laptop as if that would make the hated machine disappear from the favored spot on Jorie's lap. When she noticed Jorie looking at her, the cat licked her bushy tail, uncomfortable with Jorie's direct stare.

"What about you, Emmy?" Jorie's gaze wandered to the calico ambling toward the kitchen. "Any words of advice for your favorite can opener?"

"Meow," the cat said but didn't elaborate. She walked on, looking over her shoulder as if to make sure that Jorie would follow her into the kitchen to feed her.

"Very helpful, thanks. And I just fed you half an hour ago, so that 'I'm starving' act is wasted on me." With a sigh, Jorie saved what she had written so far and opened her e-mail program. "Procrastinating, aren't we?" Despite the admonition, she clicked on a new e-mail from her beta reader. Maybe it would cheer her up.

Hi, J.W.,

Still having problems with the story? Have you thought about putting it away for a little while? I know it works for some authors. Maybe write a short story or get started on a new project. You could even start research on the sequel to AVH that you said you might write one day. It would give you time to figure out a few things about this trouble-making story.

Hang in there, and let me know what you decide.

Ally

That was unusual. In the three years that they had worked together, Ally had never made any suggestions on what to write.
Seems she's not as comfortable with this new kind of story as she said. She wants me to return to my previous genre.

Normally, putting the story aside for a while and focusing on something else would have been good advice. Not this time. Writing this story was important to her, not just on a professional level but on a purely personal level too.

"No admitting defeat," she murmured and reopened the file.

Her cell phone rang before she had written even a single word.

Jorie groaned. "I knew I should have turned it off." She set the laptop on the coffee table and got up from the couch before Agatha could settle down on her lap. Barefoot, she padded into the bedroom, where she'd left the phone.

"Hi, Mom," she said. Looking at the display wasn't necessary. Only her mother and her agent had her cell phone number, and since Peter had dropped her when she had refused to give up on her new novel, that left one option.

"Jorie, how are you, darling?" Her mother's warm voice came through the receiver.

I have a headache as if I'm about to give birth to Athena; my nightmares haven't let me sleep through the night in weeks, and I have a serious case of writer's block,
she thought. Aloud she said, "I'm fine, Mom."

"Are you getting enough sleep?" her mother asked. They always went through the same questions, and Jorie always gave the same answers, yet her mother never stopped worrying about her.

"Yes, Mom," Jorie said dutifully. "Must be all that fresh air out here."

"Good. And have you met someone?"

Jorie sighed and looked out her bedroom window, taking in the forest at the edge of the small town. Osgrove wasn't exactly a favorite hangout for most people her age. "I'm not here to meet someone. I'm here to write, Mom." It wasn't that she hated people or wasn't good with them; she just wasn't interested in being around them for more than a few hours. The solitude of being a writer suited her. She had some contact with other people — her beta reader, her editor, some readers and fellow writers — but it was limited and on her terms.

"I know, but..."

"I'm fine, Mom," Jorie said again. "Listen, I have to get back to my writing. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?" She wasn't in the mood to answer more of her mother's worried questions about the way she lived her life. Guilt scratched at the edges of her consciousness, but she pushed it away and ended the call.

Back in the living room, the screen saver had come on. A small, red cartoon cat was chasing a ball of wool all over the laptop's screen. "That's how I feel," Jorie said and lifted the notebook back onto her lap. "Chasing the elusive ball of wool, but never quite catching it." She stroked her fingers over the touch pad and watched as the red kitten was replaced with the text of her story. "Just write. Don't think."

Her fingers found their places on the well-worn keyboard, and she started to write.

CHAPTER 2

G
RIFFIN WESTMORE prowled through the forest. Sunlight danced around her as she slid from tree to tree, from shrub to shrub. Under a stooping oak tree, she paused. Her nostrils quivered. She drank in the scents of the forest.

Blood. Deer blood.

Griffin licked her lips. She could almost taste the coppery tang, feel her canines sink deep into soft flesh, hear the snap of the deer's neck. Strong legs carried her toward the source of the scent before Griffin was fully aware of it. Her pulse quickened. The beast within rattled at the cage of her self-control. The muscles in her back and thighs quivered. She was ready to pounce.

No.
She stopped herself.
You're not here to enjoy the pleasure of a hunt.
With the iron fist of a lion tamer, she forced her instincts back under control.
Maybe tomorrow.
Today, she had been sent out to look for signs of a much smaller predator — Ouachita National Forest's bobcats. While adult bobcats had little to fear from other animals, they sometimes fell prey to hunters and collisions with cars, so the Forest Service liked to keep track of their numbers.

Hunting wasn't the only problem, though. Griffin could understand the passionate rush of a good hunt. What she couldn't understand was the human need for conquering and destroying nature instead of living in harmony with it. Sometimes, human greed knew no bounds. Their paved roads cut off the bobcats' escape routes; their tourist attractions replaced the den sites, and their buildings and parking lots destroyed the dense cover the bobcats needed to hunt and rest.

She adjusted her backpack, forcing down her annoyance at having it restrict the movement of her broad shoulders. It made her feel strapped down, trapped like an animal in a snare, even though it was featherlight, at least for her.

Her nose led her through a group of pine trees. The crisp, spicy scent of the pines tangled with the aroma of blood, creating a heady fragrance that no human perfumer could duplicate — or if they did, no one but a Wrasa would want to buy it.

Birds fell silent as she passed beneath them, recognizing her as a predator. The woodpecker overhead stopped hammering away at a red cedar.

The only sound in the forest was the crunching of her booted feet over the leaves. It sounded unbearably loud to her sensitive ears. The brogans and uniform of a forest ranger were part of her job, part of her life masquerading as human, but Griffin much preferred running barefoot, with loose silk and warm cashmere caressing her skin — or better yet, with just her own fur between her and the forest.

Maybe tonight.

She stalked up a hill, easily balancing on the uneven ground. Instinct made her avoid stepping on twigs and kicking loose stones that might have alerted whatever or whoever had killed the deer. Her nose insisted that being that cautious wasn't necessary. Even careful sniffing revealed no other predator in the area, but the wind was a fickle informant — it liked to keep things to itself by blowing in the wrong direction.

Better to keep on her guard.

Her gaze roved from tree to tree, scanning for claw marks that were too high up the trunk to belong to bobcats.

The salty scent of blood got stronger.

There.

She knelt down next to the half-eaten carcass of a young doe. Long claws or teeth had left deep, bloody slashes along the white belly, and strong canines had cracked right through the breastbone.

This is not a bobcat's dinner.
The deer had been killed by something far bigger than a bobcat.
Or rather someone far bigger.
She leaned down and drew back her upper lip to let the air brush over the roof of her mouth.
Bear-shifter?
The scent mark was already fading, so she couldn't be sure.

A twig snapped at the foot of the hill.

Habit made Griffin tense the tiny muscles behind her ears, but in their human shape, she couldn't rotate them to pinpoint the source of the sound. The wind was blowing in the wrong direction, so she couldn't tell who was approaching. The continued silence of the birds told her it was a predator — animal, Wrasa, or human.

Only seconds left until he reached her.

She clamped her hands around the deer's mangled throat, whirled around, and tossed it behind a tree, then hurried down to intercept the intruder.

It wasn't a human, nor was it an animal. Humans who spread around nonsensical werewolf stories would have said he was both, though.

Griffin relaxed when she saw Cedric Jennings loping up the hill with an effortlessness that made her think of his wolf form. Every bound threw thick, white hair, streaked with wheat-colored strands, into his lean face. When he stopped in front of her, she gave him a respectful nod, careful not to stare into his arctic-blue eyes. He returned the gesture with the confidence of an alpha male.

Their human colleagues would have frowned in confusion had they witnessed the greeting. They would have thought it impolite not to make eye contact and would have wondered about Jennings's superior demeanor. After all, Griffin was a wildlife biologist, and Jennings was just a volunteer who sometimes helped out the US Forest Service. It wasn't the volunteer to whom Griffin was paying her respects, though.

"What are you doing out here?" Jennings asked, clasping his hands behind his back in a gesture that lifted his head up high, straightened his back, and made his shoulders look broader. He silently communicated his arrogant confidence, not afraid to take up space.

Griffin grinned lazily. His posturing was wasted on her. In a fair fight of one against one, a liger could make an appetizer out of a wolf. While she respected him as her tas, a commander of the Saru, she knew that she could outsmart and outfight him anytime. Just his ambition surpassed her own. "Well, that depends on who's asking," she said. "The official version is that I'm checking up on the bobcats. But, of course, the truth is that I'm making carcasses disappear that some of our people left behind last night." She pointed at the tree, knowing that Jennings's sensitive nose could detect the hidden carcass too.

A sharp growl rumbled up Jennings's chest. "Some of the Wrasa around here are getting a little too careless. If you hunt, you do it without leaving behind traces for the humans to find."

Griffin nodded. They both knew the rules. Experienced hunters or forest rangers would need only one glance to realize that the deer hadn't been killed by a native predator, so they had to make the carcass disappear before a human stumbled across it.

"I'll have one of my men take care of it," Jennings said. "Our presence is needed elsewhere." He fanned out two plane tickets and pressed one of them into her hands.

Griffin squinted down at it. While she looked human, her eyesight wasn't. Her vision resembled more that of a cat. She could spot a moving object on a moonless night without a problem, but she needed a second to decipher the small print on the plane ticket. "Boise, Idaho?" Her lips pulled back in a silent snarl. That could mean only one thing: the Wertsiya wanted to see her — even though Griffin had no desire to see the High Council. She had hoped to have a few weeks to herself before they would give her a new assignment. "Do you know what they want?"

"No." White-blond hair fell onto his forehead as Jennings shook his head. "They just told me to take the next plane, so it must be something important." The glow of hunting fever already shimmered in his eyes. For Cedric Jennings, offspring of a long line of high-ranking saru, this unexpected mission was an opportunity to prove himself to the council, further his career, and increase the power of his family.

For Griffin, it was an interference with the life she had built for herself. Having Jennings accompany her when she was used to going on solo missions wasn't helping either.

"Let's go," Jennings said and strode down the hill.

*  *  *

"They're waiting for you," the man who greeted them in front of the elevator said.

There was something familiar about him, but Griffin didn't remember his face. She opened her mouth and drew in his scent.
Weird.
Her normally reliant nose didn't give her any clue about the stranger's ancestry, and she slowed her steps to study him. Mysteries like this always intrigued her.

It seems he finds me just as interesting as I find him.
Griffin had long since gotten used to curious glances. This was different, though. She smelled no dislike and no morbid fascination from the stranger.