Unfortunately, the fluffy critter in question had made a beeline straight for Unicorn Lane, and so it took me a few hours to find it. And I let my sixteen-year-old bouda intern come with me, because he could track the beast by scent and I couldn’t. Ascanio wasn’t bad in a fight. He was physically powerful and fast, and he had a strong half-form, a meld between a human and animal that made the shapeshifters incredibly efficient killers. Raphael, the alpha of Clan Bouda, had been whittling Ascanio down into a decent fighter over the past months. Unfortunately all that training didn’t do anything for his common sense.

I had finally cornered the small creature, hiding in a crevice. While I tiptoed toward it making quiet nonthreatening noises, Ascanio decided to help by snarling “to flush it out,” which caused me to nearly fall into a hole in the floor and sent the panicked beast straight to the top of the precariously standing building. Which is how I ended up with a rope around my waist, trying to maneuver on a foot-and-a-half-wide beam protruding twenty feet over a sheer drop, while the exotic and rare pet shivered at the very end of it.

“Please let me do this,” Ascanio said. “I want to help.”

“You’ve helped enough, thank you.” I took another step along the beam. If I fell, with his shapeshifter strength he would have no problems pulling me to safety. If he fell, getting him back up to the top of the building would be considerably harder for me. The deadweight of a human being was no joke.

“I’m sorry I scared it.”

“When I grab it, you can apologize.”

The small beast shivered and tiptoed toward the other end of the beam. Great.

Ascanio growled under his breath.

“I can hear you growling. If I can hear you growling, it can hear you, too. If you scare it into leaping to its death, I’ll be really mad at you.”

“I can’t help it. It’s an abomination.”

The abomination stared at me with large green eyes.

I took another step. “It’s not an abomination. It’s a bunnycat.”