Read Kitty in the Underworld (Kitty Norville) for Free Online

Georgetown exit and pulled off onto the frontage road, and from there to the road that wound into the mountains. Then came a couple of narrow drives, then dirt roads. I felt like I was traveling through time, from the height of civilization to some nineteenth-century village, to wilderness. I ran into patches of ice and snow, but my little car with its snow tires handled the road okay.
    On full-moon nights, we rotated between half a dozen semiremote spots in national forest land in the Rockies, or out east on the plains. They had to be close enough to Denver that we could drive there in an hour or two, but far enough away from people that we weren’t likely to draw attention or cause trouble. A set of USGS topographic maps marking service roads helped us pick our spots. The best ones had sheltered areas where we could bed down for the rest of the night, open spaces where we could run, and plenty of prey. Deer and rabbit, usually. That was the true purpose of shape-shifting and running on full-moon nights: blood. The need to let our wolf sides loose; the desire to kill that we could only restrain for so long. This one night, we had to send our howling songs to the moon, and let our claws and teeth tear into the weak.
    I found Tom’s car, a compact SUV parked on the side of the road by a pine tree. I pulled my hatchback in behind his car, then followed his scent through the trees, around a rise, and into a clearing. Tom stood on a slope patched with half-melted drifts of snow, leaning on a tree and looking out into the next valley. He wore jeans and no shirt, and went shoeless. He must have called me as soon as he’d woken up after his time as a wolf and dressed just enough to appear decent. In his thirties, he was as fit and rugged a man as a red-blooded girl like me could hope to gaze upon.
    “Hey,” I said, coming to stand beside him. I touched his shoulder, a confirmation of contact, a wolfish gesture of comfort and identity. Relaxing, he dropped his shoulders and pressed his lips into a smile. He turned his gaze away, a sign of submission to the alpha of his pack.
    “Do you smell it?” he asked.
    Stepping away from him, I tipped my face up, found a faint, vagrant breeze, and turned my nose into it. The smells here were thick, layer upon layer of vivid life and wild. I had to filter them out, ignoring the omnipresent smell of trees, forest decay and detritus; the myriad trails of deer and skunk and fox and squirrel and grouse and sparrow, no matter how they piqued my appetite; and more distant scents of mountain snow, an icebound creek.
    And there it was, acrid and alien, standing out because it so obviously didn’t belong. Wolf and human, bound together, fur under the skin—and something else. There were two distinct scents. I recognized the second one, but I understood why Tom hadn’t. This scent also gave me the tangled mix of fur and skin that indicated lycanthrope, but with a feline edge to it, both tangy and musky, making me think of golden eyes and a smug demeanor. This one was female. The wolf was male.
    “That other one’s a were-lion,” I said. “They’ve been through here, but they didn’t stick around.”
    “Were-lion,” Tom said, furrowing a brow. “Really? And they’re together?”
    “Dogs and cats—sign of the apocalypse. They didn’t mark or anything, did they? Just walked on through, like they’re scouting without being threatening. You think?”
    “No clue,” he said. “But it’s making me nervous.”
    “That’ll teach you to go off Changing and running by yourself.”
    “Give me a break,” he muttered, but his body language was all apology: shoulders slouched, making him look small and sheepish. If he’d had a tail it would have been tucked between his legs.
    That was all I wanted, a little chagrin, a little embarrassment. I might have been the alpha around here but I wasn’t much into physical domination. Tom was a lot bigger than I was—he’d beat me in a straight