After they ended the call, she went home to make chicken soup. That was the nice thing about working in Ely at this job. She was always on call and if anyone needed to get in touch with her, they texted or called her so she didn’t have to stay in the office all the time.

  She pulled out the frozen chicken tenderloins and threw them in a saucepan with chicken broth. Then she began to add vegetables and seasonings. After she finished making the soup, she drove to Rowdy’s cabin to see how he was doing first. And then she’d call for assistance if she felt he was too sick to go with her. She just hoped he wasn’t sound asleep when she arrived.

  She got out of her car and before she could knock, he was at the door. She smiled. “I guess you heard me coming.”

  “I did. I slept for a while, and then woke and couldn’t quit thinking about the case.”

  “How do you feel?” She carried the soup inside the cabin, and he shut the door.

  “Better.”

  She looked doubtfully at him.

  “I do. I don’t have a fever. You can check.”

  She put the soup down on the kitchen counter and then reached up to place her hand on his forehead. “Good. It does feel like it’s gone.”

  “Everett called.” Rowdy set some silverware out for the meal and brought them some ice water.

  “Oh?” She should have known Everett would so he could check on him, probably to make sure he wasn’t too sick. And maybe to make sure she didn’t go on her own to check out the lead she had.

  Rowdy smiled at her, waiting for her to fess-up.

  “I was going to tell you Everett had a lead for us to check out, but I wanted to make sure you weren’t feverish.” She frowned at Rowdy. “Do you have any urge to shift?”

  “No, I think I’m a hard case.”

  She chuckled. “It shows you have a great immune system—for being human.”

  “So I’m going with you.”

  “Yes. You are. You’re not feverish. You’re not getting out of work that easily.”

  Rowdy was glad Justine hadn’t planned to leave him behind. But he still saw the surprise in her expression when she learned Everett had called him—mostly concerned that he was really sick because he never took off from work otherwise—and a kind of relief, like she was glad he knew about it. And he was relieved she hadn’t gone straight over to Barney’s house after talking to Everett.

  “This is great.” Rowdy had to have seconds.

  She smiled. “You can’t be too sick if you’re eating more.”

  “I’m doing great. I’m ready to speak to this friend of the jaguars when you are.”

  “Let’s go.” She put the remaining chicken soup in his fridge. “You can eat it later.”

  But then they got a call from the surgeon at the clinic and Justine put it on speakerphone.

  “I think you might want to get over here. I’ve just reset a jaguar’s broken leg that had begun to knit together, and I had to break it again and then I sewed up his wolf-inflicted wounds. He might just be the jaguar you are looking for. The wolves were picked up an hour ago by the bear shifters who are transporting them to Houston, thankfully.”

  “We’re on our way,” Rowdy said, hoping this was the guy they were looking for.

  As soon as they got into her car, Justine asked, “Did you tell Everett why you were sick?”

  “No way. Not until we know if this works. Well, even then, I wouldn’t tell him I ended up with an infection from your bite. Some things are just not meant to be shared.” Here she was the first person to even offer to turn him and he was thrilled about it. He would never say anything negative about it. “Oh, and he hinted that I might not be returning to the Houston area.”

  Justine’s cheeks turned a little red. “Uh, yeah, well, I told him you might not be returning. I mean, if I’ve turned you, you’re my responsibility.” She smiled at him.

  “Hot damn. I think my Christmas wish came true.”

  “That’s only if I turned you.”

  “No way. I’m loving the snow and working with you, no matter what happens to me as far as the wolf genetics go.”

  “Okay, good. We might still need to hire another shifter to work here, if the workload for our region gets to be too much. I just hope that the jaguar is the one we are looking for.”

  At the clinic, they hurried inside, and the receptionist directed them to one of the clinic rooms. They entered the room and saw a jaguar still in his fur coat lying on a bed, his left hind leg wearing a short cast. Rowdy was surprised, expecting to see him in his human form. He guessed the doctor was trained in taking care of veterinary cases too.

  The jaguar’s eyes were closed, and he appeared to be sleeping, maybe sedated like the wolves had been.

  “I would have preferred treating him as a human,” the doctor said, “but he must be having trouble shifting because of the pain.”

  Then the jaguar’s nostrils twitched and so did his ears. He suddenly lifted his head and twisted around and to everyone’s surprised he jumped from the bed.

  “Holy hell,” Rowdy shouted as the jaguar growled and bit his arm.

  “Ohmigod, no!” Justine shouted, sounding horrified.

  Rowdy fell back against the wall and the doctor shouted, “No! He’s with the United Shifter Force!”

  The jaguar sat on his haunches, staring at Rowdy. He didn’t look contrite in the least.

  Justine wrapped her arms around Rowdy and her eyes were filled with tears. “He is mine.”

  The doctor said to the jaguar, “You, get back on the bed, damn it. And, Rowdy, you come with me, and I’ll take care of the bite.”

  Rowdy felt his whole world cave-in with that one bite from the jaguar. The jaguar hadn’t bitten that hard—not like he could have, but to turn him, Rowdy figured, just to break the skin so Rowdy wouldn’t tell the rest of the world about them. He didn’t want to be a jaguar. And poor Justine seemed just as desolate.

  The jaguar hobbled back to the bed, leaped onto it, and laid down, sufficiently reprimanded, but it was too late. The damage had been done.

  If the jaguar’s bite did what Justine’s wolf bite couldn’t, Rowdy would finally be a shifter, but not like her, and he couldn’t be her mate. She just hoped the jaguar’s genes weren’t stronger than hers. She wanted to bite Rowdy again, give him more of her saliva, give her wolf a fighting chance because despite having only known him for such a brief time, she wanted him for her own.

  “Should I bite him again?” Justine asked the doctor.

  The doctor shook his head.

  “Yeah, do it,” Rowdy said.

  “My way again,” the doctor said. “Poor Rowdy has suffered enough bites already.”

  The doctor cleaned up the jaguar bite and bandaged it while Justine stripped out of her clothes and shifted. “I’ll be right back,” the doctor said.

  “I love you, Justine. I know you can’t mate me if I turn into a jaguar, but I want you to know I love you.”

  There wasn’t any unwritten shifter law against a wolf and a jaguar mating, she realized, though she figured she could never have any kids. She was counting on them. Her parents were eager to be grandparents. It truly was a wolf condition of needing a family, a pack, to continue their species.

  But she realized she’d give that up to keep Rowdy as her partner, her mate, if he even wanted to be with her if he was now a jaguar.

  The doctor returned and did the transfusion again and patted Rowdy on the shoulder. “If I were your boss, I’d give you the rest of the day off.”

  They weren’t done. They needed to speak with the jaguar, but if he wasn’t shifting, they’d go to see his friend Barney.

  She shifted and dressed. “We need to speak with a jaguar who knows this one. This one is Mason, even though he can’t tell us so. But he was the one who left the fur behind at the scene of the fight.”

  “Yeah, I’m ready to learn more about this case,” Rowdy said.

  She admired that about him. He was always ready to do what had to be done.

  “Let me know how this all turns out,” Doc said.

  “We will,” Rowdy said. “And thanks for all your help with this.”

  “I would have sedated the jaguar, if I’d known he was going to bite you,” Doc said.

  But it was too late for that. Justine thanked him and then she and Rowdy returned to her vehicle. “If you turn into a jaguar, I’m still keeping you.”

  Rowdy smiled.

  “I’m serious. Someone has to look after you. And we’re human too.”

  “You want to mate me?”

  “Yeah, don’t you want to mate me?”

  “Hell, yeah, but if I’m a jaguar—”

  “No kids. We wouldn’t be able to have any.”

  “Your parents wouldn’t be happy about that, would they?”

  “They’ll be happy that I’m happy. If I haven’t changed you, maybe the jaguar bite will. But there is another scenario. No one can change you. And I still want you.”

  “But you’ll have to give up so much.”

  She smiled at him. “I won’t have given up anything.”

  Rowdy wanted to be with Justine, but he didn’t want her to have to give up so much—mated to a human who would age so much faster than her wolf kind, or being a jaguar and not having kids. Not having a shifter to run with or play with. He couldn’t ask her to give up all that, no matter how much he wanted her for his own.

  They finally parked at a little white house where smoke was coming out of the chimney and a red pickup was parked out front.

  “No yellow Nissan Altima,” Rowdy said.

  “No, it was bashed up pretty good, the boys said.” Justine got out of the driver’s seat and Rowdy left the car.

  They walked up the driveway and didn’t see any movement at the windows. Hopefully, no one suspected their arrival and the man they needed to question was still at the house. Which made Rowdy wonder what he did for a living.

  Justine knocked at the door and finally a man answered it, wearing a sweater and jeans, his feet bare. “What can I do you for?”

  Justine and Rowdy showed him their badges.

  Rowdy wondered if the guy was a jaguar or if he was human and clueless that his college friends were jaguars. “You’re Barry Browning, correct?”

  “Yeah.” He frowned at Rowdy. “How can you work for USF?”

  So he was a shifter or he wouldn’t know about the USF.

  “We’re trying to learn more about some friends of yours. Mason Talbot and Elan Powers. Their family said they were up here visiting with you,” Justine said, ignoring Barney’s question. “We met Mason at the clinic, being treated for a broken leg and wolf bites, but he’s still in his jaguar form so we couldn’t question him.”

  Barney sighed. “Okay, look. I know we should have reported this, but we weren’t sure who to report it to. It’s not like we could just tell the police.”

  “Where is Elan?” Justine asked.

  Barney cleared his throat. “Elan went home. Come inside and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  They joined Mason in the living room and took seats on the black leather couch while he sat in a recliner opposite them.

  “I got a call from Mason in a panic. He said some fanatics were trying to push him off the road. He was on Bluetooth when I heard the crash. It sounded bad. I asked where they were, figuring I had to come and help my friends out. He told me the location and said the maniacs were getting out of the car, screaming obscenities at them. I told them to stay in the car and just wait for me to help. I figured if they stayed in their vehicle, they could avoid more of a confrontation.

  “Mason said that Elan had been knocked unconscious in the car crash. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and he’d hit the windshield hard. Mason was all torn up about it. So was I. We’d been friends for years. I got in my car and told him I was on my way, just don’t get out of the car. But I could hear breaking glass and the men telling him to get out of the car. I thought they sounded drunk. Mason said they’d already badly injured his friend, to chill, but the men were so worked up, they wouldn’t listen. I was afraid I’d be too late. I was. Mason said to me he was going with them to give Elan a chance to come to and heal up and then Mason would shift—he had no weapons on him other than his teeth. And they were wolves. Two against one and Mason told me he’d broken his leg in the accident.”

  “So they all went out into the woods, shifted, and fought?” Justine asked.

  “Yeah. It was strictly self-defense. Mason was fighting for his life, injured, but he had one advantage—a jaguar’s thicker neck and much bigger, stronger bite. He injured both of the wolves, but he held back enough that he didn’t kill them. I arrived and I wanted Elan and Mason to go to the hospital, but Elan was conscious by then and said he didn’t want to. When he returned home, he did go in for tests and was fine. Mason said he’d live, and he didn’t want to be treated either. But he had to go in finally because we couldn’t set the bone in his leg properly and we knew it was knitting back together wrong. At the time of the fight, I had checked on the wolves myself and I knew they were in bad shape, but they’d live too. I swear I didn’t know what to do. I had my friends help me tow the cars and take them to a junk car dealership.”

  “You destroyed the evidence.”

  “I didn’t want anyone to think Mason was the bad guy because he had injured the wolves. He hadn’t wanted to attack them. He hadn’t had any choice.”

  “The wolves said Mason was at fault,” Rowdy said, exasperated.

  “The wolves were at fault in all this. I have their license plate number, if that will help. Hold on. I’ll get it for you.” Barney left the living room and retrieved his phone from the kitchen. He gave them the name of his friends who helped him and the place where they had hauled the totaled cars. “My friends are jaguars. We didn’t know the USF had a branch here now. I guess you’ll want to arrest me.”

  “No,” Justine said. “We had witnesses who said they saw the accident, that the wolves were the cause of it, and we have to keep things like this from the police. In the future, if you have shifter issues—”

  Rowdy gasped and Justine and Mason glanced at him to see what the matter was now.

  11

  Suddenly, a weird sensation was slipping through Rowdy’s whole body—his blood heating as if his fever had returned, his muscles tingling and he said, “Oh, damn.” He was praying if he’d been turned, he was about to shift into a wolf and not a jaguar.

  “What?” Justine looked worried that he had a new revelation about the case.

  “I…I think I need to shift.”

  Mason raised his brows. “You’re…” He lifted his nose and frowned. “Human.”

  Rowdy began tearing off his clothes in a frenzy, and then stood naked before them. Justine’s jaw dropped in surprise, maybe worried he would be a jaguar. He just stood there after that, not doing a damn thing. False alarm?

  Mason chuckled. “Man, either do it or put your clothes back on.”

  Rowdy yanked on his boxer briefs. “I don’t know what happened. One minute I was burning up, my muscles were twitching like crazy and then—you’re a jaguar.”

  Mason’s lips parted. “Uh, yeah, I’ve been one the whole time.”

  “I can smell he’s a jaguar,” Rowdy said, sounding like a newbie shifter, which it appeared he was, without the shifting part down pat.

  Justine frowned. “I’m taking you back home and then I’ll check out these other stories to get confirmation of Barney’s version of what had happened. Oh, and the eyewitnesses said they didn’t see anyone in the wrecked vehicles.”

  “Elan was lying down on the seat, so if they didn’t actually peer into the vehicle, they wouldn’t have seen him.”

  “Okay.”

  “I need to go with you,” Rowdy said.

  She arched a brow. “And do this again while interviewing folks? I think not. I warned you there would be consequences.”

  “Yeah, but that I would actually shift, not just strip and get naked, thinking I was going to shift.”

  “What do I know? I’m a royal.”

  “You should have been a jaguar, dude, no shifting issues ever,” Barney said.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that one already.” Then Rowdy’s outlook brightened. He wouldn’t have shifter issues as a jaguar? He was a wolf then? He felt the heat spreading through his body again and he was going to ignore it and pull on his shirt when everything happened so fast, he was a human in one instant and a wolf in another, wearing boxer briefs.

  As serious as the discussion had been, both Barney and Justine laughed. And tears filled her eyes as she hugged him before pulling off his boxer briefs.

  “We need to confirm all that you said was true,” Justine said. “Come on, Rowdy.” She gathered up his clothes and took them out to her car and let him into the front passenger seat. “All right, since everyone we have to see is a jaguar, I’ll take you along with me. They’ll realize you’re a wolf, probably with shifting issues. I’ll take your clothes with me in case you shift back. And if you didn’t know it, you’re mine.”

  He woofed and it sounded so strange to his ears. But he wanted to let her know in the worst way she was his and he was thrilled. As soon as she made a stop at a stop sign, he felt unsafe sitting in the care without wearing a seatbelt. He wanted to tell her not to make any sudden stops.

  It wasn’t long before they were at the friends’ house and the jaguars confirmed everything that Barney had told them, though they kept looking at Rowdy as if they were afraid Justine had brought a wolf with her to make sure they spoke the truth.

  Last, they went to the junkyard and examined the cars.

  “It’s as Barney told us,” Justine said. “I think with Andrew and Kenny confirming that was the story before Barney even explained what had happened, that we have a clear case of the wolves being at fault, and the jaguars were victims of circumstance. Though I’ll call Andrew and Kenny to confirm that they didn’t actually look in the car and see the other injured jaguar in there.” She called them then and asked about the wrecked vehicles. “Okay, so you didn’t actually look inside the vehicles…all right. You heard the fighting and that took your attention. Thanks.” She glanced at Rowdy and smiled. “No, he doesn’t want to be a bear, but thanks for asking. He’s a wolf right now. Is he happy about it?”