This little snippet comes from the last werecat book, The One and Only. It's unedited too, so forgive any mistakes. :)
~M
Pulling
into Arches, Brier lucked out and quickly found a parking space. Sam’s restaurant employed both humans
and paranormals, but he always filled the managerial positions with werecats.
Lately Sam had focused on employing more women from the clowder, which, of
course, hadn’t gone over well with the elders. He’d bet Janelle was behind that
move.
He
walked inside, hunted down the manager, and informed her he’d be prowling around
out back. He headed to where Sam said he noticed the scent. Thanks to a weak
streetlight, shadows reached from darken spaces. Tree limbs rustled in the lonesome
breeze. Fuck, it was really isolated back there.
The
opened dumpster sat behind the restaurant in a small alley. A vacant lot with
overgrown trees was across from the back of the restaurant. The closer he got
to the dumpster, the more the hair on his neck stood up. His cat suddenly growled.
Not one to ignore such a warning, Brier expanded his senses, looking for whatever
was disturbing his animal, but there was nothing… nothing but an odd, faint scent
under a confusing melody of smells.
His
cat stalked in his mind, tail swishing.
Brier
sniffed. There was the barely-there tang
of werecat, but it was so faded, so… weak. Generic. But even that was nearly
drowned out by much stronger chemical-based notes—oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and
nitrogen… and water? What the hell?
His
nose twitched, and he mindless rubbed it. Sam was right—something was seriously
off with the odor. Confused, he stared at the dumpster. What he smelled reminded him of… dammit. It reminded him of a human, not a werecat.
Then
it nailed him between the eyes. “Holy shit, there’s no personal scent marker.
At all.”
His
cat yowled.
Reeling,
Brier stumbled backward. All werecats had a personal scent. All of them. His
own was sweet, light, and fruity. Sort of citrusy—or so he’d been told.
How
could a werecat, who had obviously been here in shifted form, not have a personal
fucking scent? He’d never heard of anything
like that. How was it even possible? Fuck, he couldn’t tell if the shifter was
male or female.
