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hills.”
    “I like that.” Mike shimmered back to wholly human form. Like all bear shifters, he had a burly build. Light brown curls fluffed around a strong-boned face. Hazel eyes glittered at the prospect of freedom. “It’s not natural living in this basement. If the fuckers are going to kill me, I’d like to see the sky again and be a bear for a while.” He made a grab for his clothes and got dressed.
    “I second that,” Joe muttered.
    “Me, too,” Tara chimed in.
    “How about this?” Mike’s jaw set in a hard line. He laid a hand on Kate’s arm. “Once it gets dark, you can show us where the food crates are. If you want, you could stay for a while. We could all shift and pretend it was like the old days.”
    “What a grand idea.” Tara draped an arm around Joe and leaned into him. He hugged her back.
    Kate shut her eyes and blew out a breath. “You may not be as safe—”
    “From what I saw on the vid feed today,” Tara interrupted, “you’re not safe here. They’ve got this new elite task force. And a drug which makes it so they can smell us. I saw bunches of us being herded off to prison.” Her voice caught.
    Kate didn’t bother to tell her about the shifters being shot.
    “Anyway, we’ve decided,” Joe said. “We were going to tell you once you got home. We really appreciate all you’ve done for us, but it’s time for us to go.”
    * * * *
    An hour after full dark, Kate crept from her house in human form. Her cat wanted out. It had been a struggle to keep it contained. “But the night hours belong to cats,” it had whined. “We never go out at night anymore.” Kate tried to reason with her bond animal, but safety wasn’t part of the cat’s vocabulary. As far as she was concerned, curving canines, sharp claws, and speed could defeat any enemy.
    Kate was dressed all in black; she’d smeared dirt on her face to hide its pale tone. Once she got to the end of the street, she whistled, faded into the nearest trees at the edge of the woods, and waited. One by one, Tara, Joe, and Mike joined her. Kate led the way deeper into the woods, using her feline senses to track her earlier path from marker to marker.
    “Here we are,” she whispered. The others’ hearing was just as acute as hers. She had no doubt they heard her.
    “Kachingo! Jackpot!” Joe exclaimed and patted a box. Apparently he wasn’t as worried as her about being overheard.
    “This is great,” Mike said. “Shit, wonder how the underground gets all this black market food.”
    Tara dropped her clothes on one of the boxes. In moments, she shimmered into a sleek coyote and took off at a run through the trees. The men followed suit. Joe nudged her with his muzzle. “Join us?”
    She didn’t think it wise, but the allure of her animal form was impossible to resist. Her cat screeched inside her head. “Take your damned clothes off.” A reluctant smile curved Kate’s lips. She loved her speed and her grace as a mountain lion. And the acuity of all her senses. Kate shucked her way out of her garments. She piled them atop the other clothes and gave her body the command to shift.
    Yesssss… Warm fur sprouted, her torso lengthened. Powerful hindquarters bunched and she launched herself after the others. Scents bombarded her. She could tap into her feline sense of smell as a human, but it was so much more acute after she first shifted, it was almost painful. Before the latest spate of governmental edicts a couple of years back, she’d taken to her animal form almost daily. Now she was lucky if she spent an hour a month as a mountain lion. Sometimes, she shifted in her house just to remember what it felt like. It wasn’t enough to satisfy the cat, though, and it had gotten progressively harder to force it into submission. It growled and snapped and told her in no uncertain terms shifters weren’t meant to spend all their time in human form.
    “You’re free, sweetie. Go for it,” she told the cat.
    “I intend