Sneak Peek: Cats Never Fly!

---

Here is the first chapter of Cats Never Fly (Willow Lake Supernaturals Book 4)!

1

SIMON

EARLY SUMMER DURING THE HEAT WAVE (takes place just before Hellhounds Never Lie)

I’d always been comforted by the knowledge I had nine lives.

That was particularly true now when things in Willow Lake were getting a little tense. Mama said this tension in the air was nothing new, that things had been like this since the wolf pack split in two, but that made little sense to me—although I’d never ever tell her that. I mean, sure, I’d grown up thinking of one as good and the other as evil, but the pack broke apart years and years ago. Why would something that happened when I was a kid bother me now?

Maybe this crazy heat wave was messing with me. The longer it lasted, the more people got antsy. But whatever was causing it, I’d be okay. I was still on life number one, after all. And Mama always said Mother Magic, who almost everyone else called the Eternal Magic, liked cats, which was another blessing in my favor.

Really, who wouldn’t want to be a cat shifter?

Sure, the three wolves I was observing—from a safe distance and downwind—would likely disagree, but they weren’t the nice wolves. They might smell a bit like our alpha Hayden, but they weren’t our wolves. No, these could only be from the half that’d broken away from the Willow Lake pack, the ones who were a bunch of jerks. So what would they know?

At least they hadn’t noticed me.

I wasn’t keen on losing one of my nine just yet, and I didn’t like my odds if they discovered me out here on my own. They’d think I was spying on them. I wasn’t. Not really. It was an accident that I’d seen them at all.

My brothers would call them prickholes or something like that, but I tried to keep the language, even in my head, to a PG rating. When I remembered, anyway. Mama was merciless about pinching our ears whenever we swore. It didn’t matter that we were all adults now. I didn’t know how the others could stand it.

Which is one of the many reasons they called me a mama’s kitten or a scaredy cat.

Whatever.

I was just smarter than the rest of my brothers.

Take now, for instance. It made sense to stay hidden and safe. Anyone with half a brain would do the same if they saw the scruffy trio who had appeared out of nowhere a few minutes ago.

Although, I doubted my brothers would hide like me. Did that mean they had less than half a brain?

Mama would disagree with that conclusion. She was ridiculously proud and protective of all her kittens, even the reckless ones who refused to protect their nine.

The wolves were in their human form, but that didn’t stop one of them from tipping his head back and howling at the night sky. The noise was meant to intimidate, and it was doing an excellent job. Icy fear skated down my spine. I held my breath and prayed they wouldn’t find me.

Not for the first time, I was thankful for my black fur. It was perfect camouflage on nights like this. And right now, I was banking on my coloring to keep me concealed in the shadows of the leafy tree branches. We were far enough from the lake here that the trees were further apart and more aspen than pine. Mama always complained that this area looked grubby and untidy with all the scrubby bushes, but I liked it.

Really.

It was… um… pretty. Sure.

I sighed.

Okay, fine. It might be because large predators often stalked their prey closer to the water, but no one needed to know that.

“That was too easy,” one wolf said to his buddies. His gruff voice carried across the sleepy landscape. Apparently, he didn’t see the need to whisper, even though it looked like he’d been up to no good, as Mama liked to say.

“They say Ulric’s grandkid ain’t a supe. Don’t even know about us. Wouldn’t think to watch his shit or have wards or nothing,” another wolf said as he lumbered toward an old clunker of a pickup truck hiding behind a scrubby shrub.

The truck was more rust than anything else. I bet even a human with their weak eyesight could see how bad it was. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. Nope. It was the bag—its bulging sides and contents clanging and clinking with each step he took—that one wolf had hoisted over his shoulder. My ears twitched and my nose wiggled as I tried to figure out what they were hauling.

The scene reminded me of those old cartoons with a robber and his cloth bag of stolen stuff I used to watch as a kid. The only things missing were the dollar sign painted on the side of the bag and black masks covering the top part of their faces.

And yes, maybe I still enjoyed cartoons on Saturday mornings. Cats needed time to relax and chill. It was a thing. But that wasn’t what was important right now.

I watched, unblinking, as the guy lifted the bag higher to toss it in the back of the truck. And—

Oh!

What was that?

My breath caught.

Something dropped out of the bag. It caught the moonlight on the way down, looking all shiny and golden. I didn’t know what it was, but it was pretty. Even from this distance, I could tell that much.

I know, I know. That dead human poet talked about glittering things not always being gold or whatever… but I didn’t need gold. I just needed that thing, whatever it was. Something in my gut said mine, mine, mine. My tail trembled, and I clenched my teeth to keep from chirping at my prey… my prize.

Please, please, please… Don’t let them see it.

I desperately wanted to know what had dropped out of that bag, but it would be stupid to look right now. Particularly when these three looked hyped up on adrenaline from their heist of the Willow Lake Inn—because that was the only place they could be talking about.

I should report the robbery to the police.

It was the right thing to do.

Probably.

Although, after growing up in a houseful of cats, all of whom, except maybe Mama, saw the world in varying shades of gray—not the fifty sexy ones, but the morally ambiguous kind—I had a bit of an aversion to snitching on anyone or anything. I might work in security, but when I wasn’t at work, I kept my whiskers out of other people’s business. My brothers taught me being a tattletale was asking for trouble.

And would it actually harm anyone if the wolves got away with whatever they were doing?

Ulric, the former owner of the inn, had been a mage of some kind and had collected all kinds of magical junk. He died almost a year ago and left the place to his grandkid, so it wasn’t like anyone was using the stuff.

I’d always found him creepy—Ulric, not the grandkid. The grandkid, Jake, was weird, but kind of cute too. If Jake was the least bit supernatural, I might have asked him out. Or, rather, I would have daydreamed about asking him out. I hadn’t ever been on a date, and I couldn’t imagine starting with a guy like Jake. He was out of my league, like every guy in town. Because Ash was pretty cute too—and he was supernatural, so he fit my hypothetical dating criteria—and I hadn’t asked him out either.

Being a scaredy cat might protect my nine lives, but it could also make life pretty boring. It was worth it though. My nine weren’t going anywhere if I could help it.

But coming back to Ulric, the grandfather, now he had been creepy, like a fictional wizard brought to life with scraggly gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and grotesquely long and thick hairs protruding from his nose and ears. I swear those things—the hairs coming out of his orifices, not the rest—twitched and writhed around like skinny little worms with every breath he took. It was disturbing.

I’d had nightmares about those worm hairs… or would they be hair worms?

Whatever.

Mama always said I was being silly when I told her about them, but that hadn’t stopped me from avoiding the man when he’d been alive, which meant I didn’t know much about Ulric except what the town gossips said. For years, there’d been rumors about all the creepy things he had squirreled away in his private chambers at the inn. And now it looked like the wolves had stolen them. But how? Willow Lake Inn was miles away, and I hadn’t seen or heard them walking through the woods until now.

“What about the cat?”

I froze. Had they found me? Did they know I was watching and listening?

“I didn’t see it.”

“Me neither.”

They shrugged in unison.

“Whatever. We did it once, we can do it again.”

Phew. Okay. They weren’t talking about me, although my heart felt ready to pound itself to freedom outside my body anyway.

And the cat they were talking about wasn’t any normal cat shifter.

Paws lived at the inn and had been there ever since the werewolf pack had abandoned it years ago. Some people thought he was a god doing penance for some mischief he’d caused. Others speculated he was a plain old cat shifter who’d been cursed by a mage to never change out of his cat form. There were also the people who believed he was once a beloved pet who belonged to a Norwegian goddess. And then there was the theory about him being a Scottish fairy creature.

Speculating about their neighbors was the one thing the people in Willow Lake liked to do. Honestly, why hadn’t someone asked the cat what he was?

Well. Not me. I wouldn’t ask. That cat was almost as freaky as old Ulric’s hair worms. But someone else could have and probably should have.

Anyway, it didn’t matter if I didn’t know exactly who the cat was or where he’d come from. What I did know was that being near him made my tail puff up and twitch like the inflatable tube man thing my boss Levi had installed outside the Tarbeck Motel last week.

Each time the tube man collapsed down, it reached right for me before the air filled it and it went shooting up again. Just thinking about it made my fur puff up more. The thing was freaky. I swore it spied on me as I did my rounds every night.

Now, you might think working security at the motel was a bad career choice for a scaredy cat like me, but no one ever did anything in Willow Lake, especially not to a place that a minotaur owned. The job was boring, like me. Just the way I liked it.

I never expected to come across a robbery like this before.

Without another word, the trio of bandits hopped into their old truck. The engine started with a cough and a sputter, then the truck peeled out of sight, leaving behind a cloud of dust that settled quickly in the still night.

My claws dug into the tree branch I was clinging to. I itched to jump down and go for my treasure, but were they really gone? I didn’t see another truck, so I figured it was a pretty safe bet that no one else would pop up out of nowhere, but what if those wolves realized they’d dropped something? What if they came back to get more stuff from the inn tonight?

No. It was too risky to act too quickly.

My mama always told me the best way to live was to treat each of my lives like it was precious. “You might have nine, but that doesn’t mean you should squander them.”

I didn’t know how many times she’d told my brothers and me that when we were growing up. It was usually after one of them did something stupid, like when Clive jumped off the roof of the house, convinced he could leap farther than a flying squirrel could fly.

Yeah, that brother wasn’t the smartest kitten in the litter.

Cats were not meant to fly.

Mama said he might have been okay if he’d stayed in his cat form the whole time, but for some crazy reason he shifted into his human form when he realized he wouldn’t make it. But even after breaking both his legs and losing one of his nine, he hadn’t learned his lesson about what cats should or shouldn’t do. I was pretty sure he was down to about five lives now, although Mama thought he still had seven.

I’d found the whole thing educational, though. I’d written an essay about cats and their ability to survive falls for one of my biology classes in high school and everything.

If I was ever in that situation, I wouldn’t make the same mistake as Clive. Of course, I never ever planned to be in that situation, so there was that. I was the only one of my brothers who still had all nine. And yep, you guessed it. I’d been called a scaredy cat my whole entire life.

It was fine. Really. There were worse things.

And I wasn’t about to rush over to that shiny bit of temptation and risk losing one of my nine now.

I was patient. I could wait.

As pinks and oranges streaked across the eastern sky hours later, I cautiously descended from the tree branch I’d perched on for most of the night. My cat form was small, so I was pretty agile, even if I was a little on the chunky side. As soon as my paws hit dirt, I paused again and listened. Nothing. I inhaled and found no fresh scents in the air.

I slunk toward the treasure, my furry belly close to the ground.

My ears swiveled with each sound. My muscles coiled, ready to sprint if I needed to make a quick getaway. My steps were silent.

As I neared the place where the wolves had been, the scent of wet wolves grew stronger. Disgusting. My nose twitched and threatened to sneeze. How was that smell possible when it hadn’t rained in at least a week?

I inched forward.

There, glinting under the new day’s warm rays of sunlight, was a shiny lump on the dusty ground. I padded a little closer. It looked like a whistle made of some kind of gold-like metal. Ornate curls and swirls, which reminded me a little of both fire and waves on the water, covered the surface.

It was wonderful.

It was mine.

I pounced and covered it with my body.

The smells of ozone and lightning and licorice, all mashed together in a distinctive blend, hit my nose. The sneeze that threatened to come a moment ago exploded out of me. Once. Twice. Three times. Mama said sneezing three times in a row was lucky. I hoped she was right because that smell could only be one thing: magic.

My brand-new little whistle was drenched in it.

What did that mean? What did it do? Was this a trap?

Normally, I’d have abandoned the prize at the first hint of magic, but… I just couldn’t. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Mother Magic herself was screaming at me to take the whistle. Hide it. Protect it. As long as I didn’t start calling it my precious I’d be okay, right?

Mama always said we should trust our instincts. And I trusted my mama.

I looked left. Then right. Then over my shoulder.

Nothing seemed out of place. No one jumped out at me.

I shifted into my human form, my clothes reappearing with the magic of my shift. When I’d left home last night I hadn’t known I’d need pockets, but I was glad I’d worn my hoodie with the zippered pockets now.

I reached for my whistle.

Then I froze before my human-shaped fingers touched it.

Would the magic hurt me?

Nah. It wouldn’t, right? I’d touched it as a cat, and it hadn’t bothered me. Although, a shifter was always stronger and more immune to magic in their alternate form. But those wolves had all seemed okay. One of them had to have touched it when they put it in the bag, right?

Decision made; I plucked the whistle from the dirt.

It was lighter than I’d expected. Dust dropped away from its surface without me having to do a thing. The whistle was the length of my hand, from the tip of my middle finger to the bottom of my palm. Cradling it like a newborn kitten, I turned it to get a better look at the etchings. I still didn’t know if the marks were supposed to be waves or flames, but it didn’t matter. I loved it.

I curled my fingers around it as I looked around to see if anything else had dropped out of the bag. Nothing but faint footprints and tire tracks marked the dirt. That was okay. My prize was enough. I tucked the whistle into my pocket and zipped it up. My hand wrapped around it through the fabric. Just to make sure it was still there. Safe and secure.

And then, because I couldn’t curb all my cat-like impulses, I let my curiosity take the lead. Those wolves didn’t have the magic to create portals, like some of the supernatural beings did, so they had to have done something else to get to the inn from here. I sniffed and followed the trail.

A few steps away, concealed by more scrubby shrubs, was a disguised doorway of old weathered wood and rusted hinges. The wolves had left it slightly ajar. I peered through the crack and found a tunnel. I bet it led right to the inn. That place had been an old pack house once upon a time. This had to be a secret escape tunnel from way back, likely built during the Shifter Wars.

So freaking cool.

I stepped toward it, ready to explore it for myself.

But then the whistle shifted in my pocket.

Right.

The tunnel opening was tempting, but I already had a prize from tonight. I’d come back and explore the curious passage later, after I knew the wolves were done with it. There was no reason to go in there, especially when the wolves might come back. I would be trapped inside. I doubted there’d be an escape route from the tunnel since it was the escape route.

I was too protective of my nine to risk it.

I tightened my grip on the whistle and turned away from the intriguing door.

As soon as I moved away from the tunnel, the whistle filled my thoughts again. I wished I could ask someone about it, but what if someone recognized it as something belonging to the inn? I mean, yes, I probably should return it to Ulric’s grandkid, but he hadn’t been using it, I was sure of that. Like the wolves said, everyone knew Jake wasn’t a supe.

The other locals found it strange he wasn’t a supernatural being considering who his grandfather was—they even had a bet going at his pub about when his magic would show up and he finally discovered magic was real—but I figured strange things happened every day. Why couldn’t a non-supe be born in a supe family?

According to my high school biology teacher, genetics did weird things sometimes. Of course, that didn’t mean I hadn’t put some money down on the bet. The chances of winning were much higher compared to the human-run lottery.

And wasn’t finding the whistle almost like winning the lottery too?

Yes. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure the whistle was better off with a supe—me specifically—than with Ulric’s mundane grandkid.

But was it weird to feel a connection to the pretty whistle? I hoped it hadn’t cursed me. Mama would have my hide if I let something like that happen. Still, I knew, right down to my polydactyl toe, I couldn’t give the whistle over to someone who wouldn’t appreciate it.

No. I’d figure out what the whistle did all on my own. Because this was no ordinary whistle. Magic wouldn’t cling to it like it did if it was no different from the shrill whistles police constables used in those historical mysteries Mama liked to watch on Netflix.

First, though, I had to get back to the house before Mama threw my breakfast in the garbage because I was late. Since neither my siblings nor I were kittens anymore, we didn’t live with her and Pops, but she still insisted we all come for breakfast every day. She called it family bonding time and the most important meal of the day. The time when we all talked about our lives and what we’d gotten up to during the night.

Today was the first time I wouldn’t be completely honest with my family as we chatted over bacon, eggs, and smoked kippers. I didn’t want to tell anyone about my whistle, not even my mama. Not yet anyway.