The Awakening - Paperback

A nonstop action-packed adventure, set in the hidden world of feline shifters.

For tens of centuries, dual soul magic has endured, harnessed by an ancient king who sacrificed himself to the jaguar god. But conquest and extermination have crippled werekind. Feline shifters live in hiding, mostly solitary, and some are quietly uniting to avenge the atrocities of the past. The wereshaman, who know the sacred ritual to awaken the feline soul, are few, as are suitable subjects. A human must have a blood link to one of the five feline-worshipping tribes that now exist only in archeological artifacts and colorful myths. Feline shifters are on the brink of extinction.

None of this is known to Jacks Dowd, a twenty-one-year-old college senior who has never been able to put his finger on the reason he's always felt so separate from other people. It's something deeper than his gayness, though that made him an outsider in his papermill hometown in Pennsylvania and aggravated the dysfunction of his Evangelical family.

When he joins his roommates for a wild weekend in Montréal, he meets Benoit, a handsome drifter with magnetic charm and red flags galore. Their chance meeting plunges Jacks into the secret world of feline shifters, where he realizes he's connected to ancestors who understood the power of cougar mysticism. But the world of dual soul creatures is fractured, violent, and constantly at risk of discovery by humans who would lock them up as freaks of nature. Jacks must learn how to survive, and as he's pulled deeper into the struggles of his kind, he embarks on a breakneck adventure that will determine the future of both his shapeshifting brethren and humankind itself.