Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Tuesday Teaser



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.