Free Feral by Sheri Whitefeather Page A

heads. He could feel her looking at him.
    She asked, “How old were you when you became immortal?”
    “Twenty-eight.”
    “That’s how old I am, only I’ll be turning twenty-nine next year and you won’t.” She went pensive. “So what’s the story? How did it happen?”
    “It was the woman in Mexico. She blazed into the cantina one night and flirted with me. I followed her outside, and we went into the woods and ravished the hell out of each other. After we fucked, she turned into a mountain lion and attacked me.”
    Jenny set her sofkee on the nightstand. “A half lion like you are now or a full-blown lion like the felids at my rescue?”
    “She was like your cats, only different because of her ability to become human.” He forged ahead. Now that he’d started this, he wanted to finish it. “It was quick and brutal, but it seemed as if it was happening in slow motion. I could feel her ripping into my flesh. I could even feel my blood streaming down my body and staining the ground. I tried to fight her off, but there was nothing I could do to stop her. I blacked out, and when I came to, it was morning and I was slashed to bits and staring at the sun, nauseous and confused.” He paused. “I passed out again, and the next time I woke up, I was being treated by the local doctor. He had a little room in his house that served as his clinic. Someone had found me and brought me there.”
    “Did you tell the doctor what happened?”
    “That the animal that mauled me was a shapeshifter? He would have thought I was delusional. Or possessed or Lord knows what else. I already looked like a monster, swollen, bruised, and broken, and my chances of survival seemed slim. I think the doctor was hoping for my sake that I didn’t make it. My body was viciously scarred, and my face was horribly disfigured. I was unrecognizable, even to myself.”
    She studied him in the silence. Was she picturing him that way?
    He carried on. “I finally got well enough to leave. I still looked like something that came out of the depths of a nightmare, but I was alive and able to function on my own.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I went into the hills and lived like a leper. But little by little, I started to change. My scars began to heal and my face turned smooth again, and I sensed that I was becoming immortal. Then other things began happening, too. Catlike things.”
    Jenny tugged her robe closed, where it gapped, exposing one of her breasts. “You started shifting?”
    He nodded. “But I never shifted all the way, not like the woman who mauled me. I could feel my body wanting to go there, to become a full-blown lion, but I fought it. I think I was able to stave it off because of my Tiger Clan affiliation. Or ‘mountain lion medicine,’ as it were. That protected me.”
    “Do you still get the urge to shift all the way? Do you still have that internal battle?”
    “No.” He finished his drink. “That only happened in the beginning.”
    She cocked her head, obviously still wanting to know more about him. “Where are you from, originally?”
    “Indian Territory. Oklahoma,” he clarified. “But it wasn’t a state then.”
    “How does Mexico fit into your life?”
    “It’s part of my upbringing, too. My family migrated to Mexico from Indian Territory when I was a wee thing. We’d gone there with a band of other Seminoles, and we lived there for about ten years. Eventually the entire band returned to Indian Territory. But as an adult, I would make trips back to Mexico.”
    “And it was on one of those trips that you were attacked?”
    He nodded. “After I became a shapeshifter, I never saw my family again. I didn’t see how I could resume my life in Indian Territory and remain young while everyone else grew old around me. So I stayed in Mexico. Of course not in the town where I’d been attacked. I couldn’t just show up looking right as rain after I’d drifted off with a disfigurement.”
    “Do you ever miss being