Free Here There Be Tigers by Kat Simons

shifter?” she
asked.
    “ Tigers.”
    “ Will we stay in
Baltimore?”
    “ We’ll have to move on. Cities
provide good cover in some ways. There’s a lot of anonymity. But
there are also a lot more humans who might see and report your
location to Petrov’s people. We’ll have to stay in more isolated
locations and hope Petrov is captured before he finds
us.”
    “ If others are hunting him, how is
he still able to come after us?”
    “ He’s clever and an extremely
efficient predator. He’s also wealthy, and money can buy a lot of
secrecy.”
    “ Can he bribe the people your
grandmother sent to capture him?”
    Mitch didn’t respond at first. That thought had
crossed his mind on more than one occasion. The Trackers enforced
tiger laws and went after those who broke the laws. Alexis was a
former Tracker, the only female Tracker in recent memory, and she’d
been training new Trackers since she retired, so Mitch had a lot of
respect for the office. But they weren’t infallible. A corrupt
Tracker, or Trackers, was possible.
    “ There are enough tigers who
disapprove of Petrov trying to kill you. They will want him
caught,” Mitch finally said, mostly confident he was telling her
the truth. “But he won’t be easy to find. Our only hope is that
we’re more difficult for him to find than he is for the Trackers to
locate.”
    “ You don’t make that sound
easy.”
    “ It won’t be.”
     

CHAPTER NINE

    Nila studied Mitch’s friends with a great deal
of curiosity. Maxim Rudikov was a large, well-muscled man with dark
hair and eyes. His features were broad and sharp, giving him a
rugged handsomeness. His wife, Irina Gorban, was a beautiful woman
with long, light brown hair and green eyes. She wasn’t nearly as
tall as her husband but was still several inches taller than
Nila.
    Though Mitch had told her Irina was pregnant,
the woman had only a slight bump. If she were human, Nila would
guess she was less than five months along but had no idea if tiger
shifters carried children the same nine months as humans or closer
to a normal tiger’s four months. She found herself incredibly
curious about everything to do with tiger shifter reproduction, and
having a pregnant one sitting across from her made it hard to
resist asking all her questions. This didn’t really seem like the
right time for that kind of conversation, though. They had more
important things to discuss.
    Unfortunately, they weren’t actually discussing
those things yet either.
    They’d arrived a little after eight in the
morning, driving most of the night with one break at a truck stop
to sleep for a few hours. Since knocking on Max and Irina’s door,
they’d gone through the niceties: coffee, tea for Irina, an
exchange of small talk. They settled in the couple’s comfortable
living room and chatted about innocuous thinks like Max’s new car
and their new house extension. The process nearly drove Nila
insane. She was running for her life for god’s sake.
    Finally, they took mercy on her.
    Max asked, “Okay, Mitch, what’s going
on?”
    “ You know how my grandmother’s been
researching the legend?”
    Irina and Max nodded without comment. Mitch had
told Nila the story of the ancient couple on the drive down.
Apparently, the tigers had a myth of a human woman being able to
have children with a tiger male. They’d had a bunch of kids—both
tigers and humans—and according to Mitch the story was wreathed in
romantic “crap”. His disregard of the romance had made her laugh.
The name of the couple, even the origins of the story, had been
lost to time, so most tigers didn’t believe it could really
happen.
    Obviously, they were wrong.
    “ Nila’s mother, Anaya Pujari, was
likely a descendant of that first couple,” Mitch said, “because
Nila’s father is human.”
    Silence rang loudly in the cozy room as all
eyes turned to her. Nila squirmed in her seat and set her coffee
aside. Their stares made her feel like a bug under a