My appetite satiated at last, I lay down next to the stil -warm carcass to clean my face and paws. It had been a messy meal, and I didn’t like messes. Not the figurative ones, and certainly not the literal ones.

The smel of blood and fresh meat fil ed the clearing, reminding me of what stil needed to be done. I stood, wondering what to do with my catch. When we hunted as a group, there was little left to worry about, and we donated the remains to the smal scavengers present in any forest, nature’s own recyclers. But this time I was alone, with lots of leftovers and no Tupperware. I was full and certainly didn’t need the dead deer, but instinct told me to protect my meal. I paced in front of it for a couple of minutes, undecided, then froze, focusing my ears and attention on a dry rustle from some brush to the west. The guys had caught up with me, surely drawn by the smel of my kil .

The breeze had shifted, the wind now carrying my scent toward the tomcats.

Though they could smel me, I couldn’t smel them. But it had to be them, because any other animal would run away from the scent of a large cat, not toward it.

Yet when the brush parted, I came face-to-face not with a group of agitated, hungry werecats, but with a single human. He wore a hunter’s vest, which I knew to be orange, though my cat’s eyes couldn’t identify the color, and carried a large hunting rifle propped across one arm. I had no idea what kind of gun it was. Few of us had any experience with firearms, and since we didn’t need them for hunting, we didn’t own any. But I had no doubt it would kil me at such close range.

At first the hunter didn’t notice me; he was too busy gaping at the slaughtered deer. Then something caught his attention. Probably my tail, which I couldn’t seem to keep still when I was nervous. His eyes widened in comprehension, and the skin pulsing over his jugular vein jiggled faster. He was as scared of me as I was of the gun, and maybe more so. Unless he’d been to Africa, he’d never seen a cat my size outside of a zoo, and he was clearly terrified.

I could smel his fear, sour like sweat, thick like smoke, and tangy like blood.

The scent cried out to something exhilaratingly primal in me, something that answered to the proverbial cal of the wild and was completely beyond my control.

All at once, I understood that stalking from the trees had been a mistake; it hadn’t satisfied the bloodlust. The deer hadn’t even had a chance to run from me.

I’d wanted a chase, or at least a little excitement, and al I got was dead meat. But this man was alive, his pulse beating so invitingly in his throat. And I was confused and angry, which translates to the cat brain as something completely different.

Something more like carnal aggression, intoxicating and irresistible.

I watched him carefully, wrestling with instincts I’d never been at odds with before. Excitement tingled through me. My fur stood on end and my eyes dilated.

My tail whipped back and forth behind me, stirring an almost palpable cloud of danger in the air. And even as my body prepared to do what came natural y for a cat, some smal human thought nagged at the back of my mind, warning me about capital crimes, of al things. I swatted it away, irritated. My feline brain was too narrowly focused to deal with more than one issue at a time. The most pressing issue at that moment was the hunter, simply because he was there. And because the bloodlust wanted him.

I took a single step forward. My whiskers arced forward as I sniffed in his direction, just to see how he would react. His eyes flicked to my tail. A bead of sweat trailed down his nose to dangle in the air above his considerable gut. His muscles tensed. He was preparing to run. Oh goodie.

My ears lay flat against my head. I hissed, showing off two-and-a-half-inch top canines. The pungent stench of human urine saturated the air. Some hunter, I thought. He’d probably been tracking my deer, thinking he was the only predator around. Oh, well, he shouldn’t have wandered onto private property. At least, I thought I was stil on Daddy’s acreage. But maybe not. I hadn’t been paying that much attention.

I settled back onto my rear paws and lowered my chest to the ground, preparing to pounce, because that’s what cats did, and because I was long past the ability to think with human rationality. I wiggled my hindquarters, getting comfortable, and was seconds away from attacking when dead leaves crackled to my right, drawing my attention away from the hunter. Marc padded out of the undergrowth and growled, his eyes flashing at me in warning. He was growling at me, but the human didn’t know that.

After one look at Marc, who was half again my size, Mr. Fierce Hunter remembered he had a gun. He swung the barrel toward Marc’s head, in a movement much too slow to seem real. His finger wrapped around the trigger. From somewhere at my back, a dark shape flew past me. It landed on the hunter, knocking him to the ground. The gun went off. The cracking boom echoed in my head. The acrid stench of gunpowder burned my nose.

Movement on my left caught my eye and I turned to look. Leaves swung in the foliage inches above Marc’s shoulder.

It had happened too fast for me to react. Another second, and Marc would have been dead. Hell, another three inches, and Marc would have been dead. And it would have been my fault.

I blinked and shook my head, trying to shake some sense into myself. The bloodlust drained from my body like hot water from a bathtub, leaving me cold, exposed, and in shock. Shaking, I turned toward the hunter, stunned to realize that mere seconds had passed since the gun went off. It felt like much longer.

Parker stood on the man’s chest, and as I watched, he sat down, swatting the gun aside like a kitten with a ball of string. It landed with a metallic thunk in a nearby drift of leaves. Parker lowered his head slowly toward the hunter’s face, sniffing as if he smel ed something interesting. It was probably fear, the same aroma that had sent my common sense fleeing in the face of instinct. But Parker stil had his head on straight. He huffed, blowing the man’s hair back and making him blink. Then he stepped gracefully onto the ground, between the man and his gun.