Welcome to Weekend Writing Warriors, the blog hop where writers from a wide variety of genres share from their work in excerpts of ten sentences or less.  I missed last week due to an urgent need to not sit at the computer for a while. No, I didn’t go out and party on a crowded beach. I stayed home and worked in my yard/jungle, making it slightly more habitable for humans. I’m assuming someday I’ll be able to have friends over to the patio/oasis to enjoy adult beverages and re-learn how to socialize.  Until then, I loft a glass of wine to you in a toast to sanity and safety.

On to the snippet: I’m sharing from my soon to be released cat shifter romance, Wild, #4 in the Jacqui the Cat Mysteries series. In this opening scene, Jacqui is ruminating on the hardships of being a cat shifter in a world that doesn’t know they exist, and worrying about the villains he encountered in book #3, Roam (might be a little spoilery if you haven’t read Roam and intend to).

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And then there were the dreams. The Dog Men dreams in which he relived the horror of being trapped in a cage and watching the evil vet, Casey Vandel, shift from dog to man. Why oh why did the first shifter he met have to be a husky? And not only a husky, but a husky who was running some sort of dog fighting ring in the rural woodlands of San Juan?

After he fought his way out of the dreams, the night terrors took hold and the impossibility of his situation stabbed at him with sharp-edged persistence. The urge to leap out of bed and shift became nearly unbearable.

Shifting was a survival mechanism. As Cat, Jacqui had claws. He could climb trees in a few bounds. He was quick, lithe and one fierce, kick-ass little predator.

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Roam is the book in which Jacqui encounters the Dog Men, who are not nice to him at all. Just click on the cover to go to the Amazon info page.

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Wild: Jacqui the Cat Mysteries #4 coming soon! Blurb-in-progress-

Jacqui Corleone has finally met his fated mate (Newsflash: it’s Wyatt), but unlike a romance novel, reality has other plans. The dog men are back, and along with their slobber and bad manners they bring new danger to Jacqui’s life, and to Wyatt’s.  Jacqui meets other cat shifters for the first time and is tantalized by a glimpse into their strange new world.  Only cats aren’t much nicer than dogs, and soon Jacqui must choose if he’s going to run again, or stand and fight against an enemy more powerful than he ever imagined. And that’s saying a lot.