Book 3: Leopard's Mate

Chapter 1

The leopard was crouched low watching the small group of animals before it. Not a muscle twitched. The grey and white fur blended in with the snow and rocks around it perfectly. It was a large leopard for its kind and had an eerie unnatural intelligence to its green and grey gaze.

Suddenly it just exploded forward and the small goat like animal didn't have a chance. The leopard was on it and its teeth sinking into the throat. The rest gave a panicked run fleeing over rocks and jumping to new ledges. The animal died quickly and the leopard used its powerful jaws to carry it off finding a better place to have its meal.

After it ate its fill the leopard turned and ran hard and fast. It looked like it was on a mission all of a sudden. After a bit it started to slow and lopped into a crevasse. A moment later the leopard was no longer a leopard but a full grown man. There was an odd tattoo looking item on his back, a sickle with a curved line through it. There was an edging to it that looked like it shimmered as if the tattoo was alive rather than ink in sink.

He was near six foot, with black hair that had a swirl of white and grey in it. It looked like a detailed dye job, but was just his natural hair color. His eyes were the green grey of the leopard. His body was muscled, stronger in the chest but his arms had a roping muscle the same as his legs.

Cole reached down and grabbed some clothing items sliding them on and gave a sigh. He looked around the small cave like area where he'd been camping out for the better part of a year. Mostly because it was so remote that hunters would be stupid to climb up to this elevation to get him. Second there was a small little town a couple miles away that he could get stuff from.

He was currently in Bhutan, a country that was in the Himalayan mountain range. Right in the heart of the snow leopard range. But he'd really chosen it because it was cold here most the time. He liked that, plus it was out of the way. With the help he'd gotten blocking the tattoo on his back, he could live how he wanted. Well for the most part. Reclusive was nice, he enjoyed it just as the rest of his kind did.

Besides if he really wanted to see someone, all he had to do was picture them in his mind. Imagine where they lived and he'd appear there. Cole was a shifter, one of maybe a few thousand left in the world, and maybe a few hundred leopard shifters if that, He knew that he had to be one of a handful of those that turned into a snow leopard. The rest were normally the African or Asian spotted leopard, but that wasn't really relevant unless you met one that was snobbish about their heritage. It was just an odd quirk to the type he was.

Which was the reason that he was in the predicament that he was in. Why there was a tattoo on his back imbued with magic to find him. Cole could transverse space, jump to any place as long as he'd seen it prior or given an image. Something that had been passed to him by someone in his line. His family however was long dead, his mother and twin sister killed before him. Then he'd been kept like some pet and used against his kind for the sick whims of hunters.

He'd been rescued and now he had those that he'd call friend. They had helped block him from the hunters as best they could. Though it wasn't full proof, the tattoo was part of him. The magic used was something they weren't sure about. He'd even met an uni, the rarest shifter in the world. He had come up with the blocking on the tattoo but how to remove it he was at a loss.

So Cole had thanked them for their help and he'd gone three years with only one hunter incident. That was saying something since it used to be nearly once a month they'd find him. He was enjoying his freedom and solitude like most his kind seemed to enjoy. Leopards weren't all that social to began with. Though he enjoyed a bit of company now and then. He'd made friends with a pride of lion shifters. Now that was a social group, he'd never seen a lion alone. They didn't tend to shut up, liked to talk a lot. However he cared for them and what they'd done to help him. Hence why he stayed away from them.