Abandoned Treasure
A Wolf Among Cats

Nathan Storm’s POV

Grand Street Home, Alameda, CA

Wednesday, January 6, 2015

It was cloudy with light rain and forty degrees out as the school bus arrived at the stop two blocks from our house. I heard Khoi, our eldest daughter, thank the bus driver before jumping down the steps into a big puddle of water. I stepped back, avoiding the splash from her yellow boots, then moved forward with the big umbrella after she was on the sidewalk. “How was school, honey?”

“Good,” she said. She looked so cute in her Catholic school uniform and backpack. “I have a piano recital in the morning.”

“You can practice later,” I said as she took my hand. “The other kids want to play with you.” Khoi’s name had a dual meaning in Vietnamese; it meant ‘precious stone’ after her mother and ‘leader’ because she was the first of her kind. She was in second grade now. Our twin daughters, Bao and Chao, were eighteen months old and wearing their grandmother out with their energetic antics. In Vietnamese, Bao means ‘treasure’ while Chao means ‘gemstone.’

Clouded Leopards were dying out because the werecats had trouble reproducing due to the shallow gene pool. Luna solved that problem by tossing a wolf into the mix, resulting in a new breed. Three girls in five years was unheard of.

The only question was if they would be fertile or sterile when they reached maturity. It wasn’t an idle question; in human captivity, cross-breeding of tigers and lions happened. Ligers, the product of a male lion and a female tiger, grow huge because they inherit no genes limiting their size. Males grow to over a thousand pounds, twice the size of Siberian tigers, but suffer from low sperm counts. Females can breed with tigers or lions, but their offspring are weak and sickly.

Tigons, the offspring of a male tiger and a female lion, inherit growth-limiting genes from both parents. They rarely weigh more than three hundred and fifty pounds. Like their Liger cousins, they are often sterile.

Mother Nature didn’t like mixing the species, even with two similar cats!

I had no idea what Luna was doing with us.

Jade’s pregnancy was carefully monitored, with werebear midwife Georgina Biggs coming to live with us starting at Jade’s 32nd week. In her weekly ultrasound checks, Khoi was in the 80th or higher percentile, which meant Jade was blowing up like a beach ball. Thankfully, labor hit at 38 weeks! Fifteen hours of back labor, five threats of imminent personal harm to my person, and untold numbers of ‘you did this to me, you bastard’ later? Our eight-pound baby girl was born.

Isra had her own and Jade’s growth data in their family history. Isra was a purebred clouded leopard, a small werecat of a hundred pounds. In human form, she was barely five feet tall. Jade’s father was a mountain lion with a cat twice her mother’s size. Jade inherited her mother’s unique coloring and flexibility but grew taller and more muscled thanks to her father. She was six inches taller and more muscular than Isra.

Thanks to my genetic contribution, Khoi’s growth rate stayed ahead of them. At seven, she was already four feet tall. If the percentiles held, she would be five-ten when she stopped growing. She was no string bean, either. The twins came by C-section, each of them almost five pounds. Like their older sister, they grew fast, catching up to the averages by month eight. They were slightly behind Khoi’s marks, but that lead was shrinking.

Isra opened the dining door as we reached the top of the front stairs. She hugged her granddaughter and kissed her head before telling us to “get out of the rain and don’t drip on my floor!” She went back to the kitchen as the two toddlers grabbed at our legs and asked for kisses. Khoi took off her rain boots, then took their hands and led them to the stairs leading down to her bedroom.I closed the door and put the umbrella into the stand, then doffed my shoes by the door.

A young female snow leopard got up from the jumbo dog bed in the living room, her housecat-sized son staying under her and between her legs. She was a medium-sized cat, two feet tall at the shoulder and about forty inches long. Her thick, puffy tail was almost as long as her body. Black dots on the dull white fur of her face grew to rosettes on her back and sides. The spots were closer to those of a jaguar than the distinct markings of a Clouded Leopard. Her wide paws are well-adapted to deep snows and climbing.

The Sons called the Oracle five years ago when one of their men scented a werecat inside a shipping container from China. They didn’t want to draw attention to the docks, and she wasn’t a jaguar, so it was up to us. Jade and I trailed the truck to a warehouse in San Jose. While I broke in that night, Jade hacked the alarm and surveillance systems to hide me. I cut the cage lock and carried the sedated juvenile werecat back to our car. On the way home, we called in a tip. The Customs raid the next day shut down the animal smuggling operation.

Her captors had abused the wereleopard, and she shook with fear the whole way home. She didn’t calm down enough to shift until after both Jade and Khoi shifted and started to groom her. Her name was Dahla, named after the Tibetan Moon Goddess. She was an orphan; her father died when she was young, and her mother died protecting her thirteen-year-old daughter against the poachers.

We brought her into our family that day. Jade created an identity for her, and we homeschooled her for a year before putting her in our public high school. She thrived in America, starring in dance and concert piano.

During her senior year, she went into heat. We called another Snow Leopard, a Chinese exchange student at UCLA, and sent them to a mountain cabin. We were all surprised when the heat ended with a pregnancy. Dawa’s name means ‘Moon’ in the Tibetan language. He is now three months old and can walk around in cat form.

All Werecats can shift as babies, which created a problem for us. Our jobs required us to live in the Bay Area. Real estate is very expensive, homes are small and close together, and private yards don’t exist. The young cats need to shift and play daily for their development, and it is a long drive to a place safe to play outdoors in animal form.

Isra solved the problem by selling the Wyoming ranch and moving in with us. We bought a fixer-upper two-story house with five bedrooms and four baths across the road from the Alameda waterfront. Frosted windows let light in while hiding us from the neighbors, and wall-to-wall commercial carpeting gave us a grippy floor that could hold up to big cat claws. The ground floor had a two-car garage, two bedrooms, and a rec room we turned into a jungle gym. The kitchen, dining room, living room, and three bedrooms were upstairs.

With all the fur, the central vacuum was a must!

The two cats stopped at the entrance to the kitchen, as claws weren’t allowed on the wooden floor. I scratched the big cat’s ears, making Dahla purr with pleasure. “Why don’t you take Dawa downstairs to play? I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

She rubbed her head against my leg, then walked towards the stairway. All the doors had levers and pull ropes, so Dahla had no trouble opening the door before picking up her cub in her jaws. “What time is dinner?”

“Six-thirty,” Isra replied. “Don’t be late.”

“You’re making Pad Thai, Mom. Nothing would keep me away.”

She waved me off. “Go wear the children out.”

I left my work clothes in my bedroom before trotting downstairs as my black wolf with the white star on my chest. I heard hisses and grunts from the girls as they chased Khoi around. Our basement held the feline playground, made from thick lumber, logs, and plywood platforms covered in carpeting. If you scaled up a cat tower from the pet store into an entire room, you had the idea.

In the center of the room was a treadmill built into the padded floor. I yipped at the kids, chasing them around as they leaped and climbed to get away. When I would turn my back, the young ones would ‘ambush’ me from above, and I’d wrestle them to the ground and pin them. They loved the active play.

Dahla decided she was done, effortlessly leaping from a standstill to a platform seven feet up and fifteen feet away. Snow Leopards are jump masters, able to leap up rock walls twenty feet tall and jump horizontally over fifty feet. My Clouded Leopards are better in the trees. Wolves are better at running, so I smacked the treadmill button with a paw and got on.

I ran hard for forty minutes while the girls played under Dahla’s supervision. Dawa was already sleeping next to her shoulder by the time I finished. I shifted and pulled on a pair of shorts from the shelf. “It’s almost time for Khoi’s piano lesson. I’ll take over here.”

Dahla jumped down and shifted. When she did, Dawa instinctively did the same. I put a diaper on him and sat in the chair while she slept on my chest.

The twins were busy climbing the branches over the foam pit when the message alert on my netbook computer went off. It monitored the Oracle message board and my private messages, alarming on emergency messages.

Something was happening at Bitterroot. Dozens of warriors from nearby Packs joined by Council Enforcers had arrived, and they were taking Pack members prisoner.

I’d have to wait for more information if not for Jade’s expertise. Instead, I used her backdoor to access the Council’s communications.

Alpha Todd Blackstone and the Bitterroot Pack Leadership were under arrest for murder, and the Council and Alphas were flying out for the trial.

I’d run out of time to get my revenge.

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