Keller nodded. “No doubt about that. Not with ’em pissin’ on every tree and rock for ten square miles.”

My father cleared his throat to disguise a smile, but Jace wasn’t so fortunate. He choked on a gulp of coffee, spewing it across the table and down the front of his shirt. I bit my lip to keep from laughing, and Marc grabbed a pile of paper napkins from the counter behind him, dropping them over the mess on the table.

“Could you tell anything else from their scents?” Uncle Rick asked, while my father glared at us from the living room. I shrugged at him in apology, while Jace tossed the soggy napkins across the room into the trash can. “Were they Pride or stray?”

Keller stroked his beard again. “Can’t say as I know the difference.”

My father nodded, as if he’d expected that very reply. “A stray is a werecat who was born human, then infected by being scratched or bitten by one of us in cat form.”

I squirmed in my seat, uncomfortably aware that nearly every eye in the living room had just focused on me. Always in the past when the topic of strays came up, Marc became the unwilling center of attention. But that was no longer the case. I was now infamous for having created a stray. In fact, I was the only Pride cat in living history to admit to such a thing. No one else was that crazy. Or stupid.

But things were different for bruins, as Elias Keller had just reminded us. His species wanted nothing to do with the human population. Or with each other, for the most part. Unlike werecats, bruins lived alone, typically in rough cabins in isolated mountainous regions virtually untouched by civilization. They were the “mountain men” of legend, reclusive giants in huge flannel shirts, fur hats and colossal boots, stomping through the forest with an ax over one shoulder and a dead deer over the other. They were likely the source of the Paul Bunyan stories. Hell, in one form or another, they were probably also Bigfoot, almost never seen, because there were very few of them to be seen.

Bruins weren’t rare only because they bred slowly, though that was certainly part of it. The rest of the problem was that like thunderbirds, they could only be born, not made. Being mauled by a bruin would not turn a human into a “werebear.” It would kill him or her. Period. Which was why the concept of a stray was completely lost on Keller.

“And there’s a difference between the smell of a stray and a…Pride cat?”

Malone nodded. “We’re all Pride cats. This cat you…buried? Did it smell like us?”