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“Fuck! Fuck!” Tom cursed breathlessly as he ran. “What the hell did I just stumble upon?” A stitch formed at his side, but he ran through the pain anyway. “Fuck!” he yelled as he pumped his legs as fast as they could carry him. He swore that if he got out of this alive, he’d hit the gym more, having been slacking the last few months due to his busy work schedule.

It would be dark soon, but if he could just cut across the three miles of the forest to get to another highway, there would be lights and a gas station only about a half mile away. He could call the police.

And tell them what, exactly?

He wasn’t even sure he had seen what he had, although being of completely sound mind and not prone to hallucinations, he could not come up with another plausible explanation. He did know with absolute certainty that he was being chased. He only hoped he had put a far enough distance between himself and them to make it to that damned gas station.

Not far enough, apparently, Tom thought as they growled behind him, the sounds getting louder and louder with every thudding beat of his own heart.

Images of an injured young man on the side of the road on Route 9 assailed him. He had been heading to Waretown, New Jersey, to visit his parents in their new retirement home—a charming little community, surrounded by lush greenery, several indoor and outdoor pools, and a lake for boating and fishing. He’d been on the phone with his mother when he saw the young man. She’d been boasting about winning yet another game of Canasta as his dad was shouting in the background about misplacing his tackle box. As a doctor, it had been his duty to pull over and help. He had sworn an oath, after all. He swiftly said goodbye to his mom, with a promise to call back as soon as possible, cutting her off mid-sentence.

What he did not expect and certainly went beyond any medical training he ever had, was for the young injured man to transform into a black panther before his very eyes and then for the panther’s wounds to visibly heal themselves in front of him. The deep gashes fused together so completely that all that remained as evidence they had ever existed was the dried-up blood. Then, with pleading eyes, the young man-turned-panther, was seemingly trying to tell him something. That something turned into four large panthers, three black and one tan, approaching slowly as if toying with their easy prey, teeth bared, growling, taunting. Tom wasn’t sure if they had been taunting him or the fallen panther, or perhaps both. Calculating intelligence had shown behind their glowing eyes, the kind a human would possess. He did the only thing his fight-or-flight instincts told him to do.

He ran.

Snapping back to the present, the predators surrounded him now on all sides and despite what he thought he saw or hadn’t seen earlier, he was sure they were going to kill him. Although, it seemed, not just yet. One of them transformed into a man—a naked, muscular man, with chiseled features, brown hair, and cruel-looking, chartreuse eyes that were no longer glowing.

“What were you doing with my brother?” the man asked, practically spitting out the words.

“Your brother?” Tom asked before he let out a shaky hopeful breath. For the first time in the last surreal twenty or so minutes, he thought he might actually have a chance to live through this. He could explain that he had meant his brother no harm. “I-I’m a doctor.” His heart continued to thud loudly as the naked man’s stare pierced him. “I was trying to help him.”

“Help?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. A disgusted sneer appeared on his face before he spat on the ground. “Has he recruited human filth now to help him? As if you could. He should have stayed and taken his beating like a man instead of fleeing like a little coward.”

“You did that to your own brother?” Tom was horrified. From what he had assessed earlier—the deep gashes, copious amounts of blood, and hideous bruises on the young man’s body—an ordinary human would have most likely died of internal injuries had he not gotten to a hospital in time, and even then it may still have been too late.

The panther guy sneered at Tom. “It’s nothing compared to what I am going to do to you for interfering in pack business, human.”

An ordinary human? Pack business? What alternate reality did he just step into?

Whatever shred of hope Tom had for survival quickly dissipated as the man and three panthers stalked closer toward him. Tom held up his hands. “I wasn’t interfering in anything. I-I have nothing to do with this. I was only trying to help him.”

The man smiled cruelly at him, tilting his head to the side. Then he threw his head back and laughed. “I believe you,” he said. “But … we can’t have a meddling human running around telling people what he saw, now can we?” Addressing the other panthers, he added, “And he did ruin our fun, didn’t he?”

Tom had no time to ponder what fun he had ruined or what else they had planned to do to the leader’s brother, and before he had time to reply that he wouldn’t say anything, that no one would believe him even if he did, they attacked. He was only grateful the excruciating pain of teeth and claws ripping at his flesh were brief before darkness fell upon him.