Second Nature Read Free

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