Aztec Treasure

Maria Meztli’s POV

Arrowhead Pack Clinic

Possum took me back to the exam room and started my physical workup. Vital signs, weight, height, urine sample, blood sample, and medical history were all taken down on paper. “No computer?”

“We don’t want werewolf data shared, so no,” she told me. I liked her from the moment I met her; she reminded me of the old ladies in my Club. She didn’t take shit from anyone. A young woman came in to take the samples. “We don’t have the equipment to do the analyses, so we run them to a lab in Duluth under Doc Olson’s account. We’re using a fake name on the samples, so don’t worry.”

“It won’t matter. Mom told me that our DNA is the same as human DNA.” We used human doctors and clinics while I was growing up, though I rarely got sick.

“Now for the embarrassing part. Are you sexually active?”

I laughed. “My father would kill any man who touched me. Hell, I couldn’t even get a date because the Club sons and daughters put the fear of God into the boys at my school. So, no, I’m still untouched.”

“Are your cycles regular?”

“They haven’t started yet,” I told her. “What do you know about werejaguar mating?”

“Nothing,” Possum replied. “I’d assumed you had monthly cycles like humans.”

We were interrupted by a knock on the door. Chase entered with an older man with grey hair. “Maria, this is Doctor Olson from the Oxbow Lake Pack,” he said. “He’s been a Pack Doctor for almost two centuries now.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said as he shook my hand. Possum handed Doc the notes from the workup, and he took a moment to review them before he patted the exam table. “Please strip to your underwear and hop up here.”

I stripped down to my bra and panties and got up onto the paper-covered table. Doc went through the physical checks and pronounced me healthy. “Any issues or complaints?”

They had no way of knowing, so I had to tell them what my mother had taught me about coming of age as a jaguar. “I have to tell you about jaguar reproductive practices.”

“Do you want me to leave,” Chase asked.

“No, because this affects you as well. Lance told me a little about how werewolves do it, but jaguars are a lot different. When the Goddess passed down our animal portion, she didn’t give us the lifespan that you enjoy. Werejaguars have the same life expectancy as humans, though violence often takes us before then. We don’t heal any faster or have better immunities than humans. If you didn’t see us change, you wouldn’t know we had a cat.”

“How does that affect your sexual maturity,” Doc asked.

“I went through puberty at thirteen, with the growth and physical changes, but I never had a menstrual cycle. Like you, our cycles are a mix of human and cat. How much have you read on wild jaguars?”

“I looked at a little when we first started encountering your kind,” Chase said. “Jaguars are solitary, with males and females establishing a territory. They only come together for reproduction. The female goes into estrus or heat, she calls for males to find her, and the males fight each other and the female over the right to mount her. The heat can happen at any time of year when food is plentiful but is more likely in spring. The male induces ovulation during the mating process, which involves multiple times mounting over a day or two. Once the coupling is over, the male leaves the territory, and the female births and raises the cubs alone.”

He was well informed. “Once a female werejaguar is fully mature, around my age, they may go into heat once or twice a year. The estrus scent strongly attracts the male werecats, and their cat side takes over. If we are among multiple males, they will fight to the death for the chance to impregnate the female. The female fights too, wanting the most dominant male, and sometimes gets hurt in the process. That is why my family wanted me paired off before I turned eighteen; they wanted to ensure I had a male to get me safely through my heats. When we marry off, our dual nature recognizes the pairing, and he takes the female far from any other cats when the heat starts.”

“So it would be highly disruptive to have a female in heat in the clubhouse.”

“That’s an understatement,” I said with a laugh. “The humans would be sexually attracted without knowing why, while the werejaguars would fight. My parents had arranged for me to be married to Jose Correria in New Orleans before my birthday.”

Chase looked up, his eyes filled with anger. “Jose? That little…”

Jose was the young man who had attacked the Orlando Steel Brotherhood chapter and started the war. Someone killed him, probably Arrowhead Pack, and his body never turned up. “Yes. I’d met him a few times when we visited Los Angeles. He was a second cousin, and we were both children of Club Presidents. Politically it helped, and our offspring would be strong. Is this going to be a problem between us?”

Chase let out a breath. “Not if you can promise me you knew nothing of what he was doing with the Ryder family or the Brotherhood.”

“I was a Club princess, but they never allowed anyone without a Patch into Church. I had no idea what he was doing, just like I had no idea what my father did. All I had were rumors and news articles that Mom told me to ignore.” Chase nodded for me to continue.

“My father and the other US Presidents were betrayed and killed by the Cartel, and the Feds took out the rest. With so many of the Club leadership gone, the remaining jaguar families were sent down to Mexico to regroup with the Club. Before the drones killed everyone, I became a sister wife to Maritza’s mother. I survived was because I was watching her while moving my bags to his car.”

Doc nodded as he worked through the information. “Because you needed a male to repopulate your species with.”

“Yes.” I got up and paced for a bit, thinking over how to say the next part. “For females, heat is a literal bitch. It lasts up to three days and turns you into a sex-starved madwoman. If you have a male, you mate for a full day with little rest, as the male remains erect and inside the female almost the whole time. The barbed end of the male penis in cat form is what stimulates ovulation. That’s why I need a male werejaguar to get pregnant. The male can ejaculate a hundred times in me, but I can’t get pregnant without ovulation triggering in my cat.”

“Can a human do it?”

I shook my head, no. “You seriously think a human is going to stay mounted to a sex-starved werejaguar for a full day?”

Possum laughed. “Roadkill would try, but he’d never make it.”

“Exactly. Now for the fun part. The heat drives the female to seek out the male, and not finding one can be painful. The fever spikes, your body aches, and no amount of masturbation can sate your body. Females have died without relief, either from the fever or going over a cliff in their delirious state. If no male is around, the only alternative is sedation for the duration while keeping the female isolated from males. I don’t know how my heats will affect your wolves, but…”

That had Doc’s attention. “Better safe than sorry.”

“Yes,” I said. “Even after all that fun, most heats don’t take. It’s not easy to have a big family. I don’t want my people to die out, but two females with no males? I don’t see how we do it without Julio.”

“And Julio is not important for his DNA, but because you need his panther form to trigger your ovulation,” Chase replied. “This sucks.”

Chase was thinking and linking, so Possum asked the next question. “Can you change humans into werepanthers?”

“Like you, our bite in panther form is fatal to humans.”

“And you don’t have mates, so there is no bond to use to pull the human through the shift,” Doc finished. “I wouldn’t want to be the first volunteer. We don’t have a stock of panther blood.”

“Our curse is passed from mother to child, not with blood,” I replied. “Our bite is deadly because the Goddess gave that to us to slay our enemies.”

“Wonderful,” Chase said. “You’ve given us a lot to think about.”

“I’d like to examine your cat form,” Doc said.

I took off my underwear and shifted into my cat, stretching out before walking over to Chase and putting my head by his leg. He was the Alpha and the one I had to submit to while I was here. He scratched my ears, then he and Doc started examining me from snout to tail. When they finished, there was another knock on the door. “Come in,” Doc said.

The door pushed open, and Rori came trotting in, her tail high and wagging as she came over to sniff me. I rolled onto my back and remained still as she scented me, finally coming around to lick my face. Maritza had shifted into her cub form as soon as she saw my cat, and she ran in and started climbing on me. Doc and Chase did an exam on her before he asked me to shift back so we could talk. When I changed, Maritza followed. “Fascinating,” Doc said. “See how the neck muscles have adapted to the larger head of the werejaguar form?”

“I’m more impressed with these murder mittens,” Chase said as he scratched her belly with one hand while the other held up a paw. “Can she climb?”

“She’s learning,” I said. “Jaguars are excellent climbers and swimmers. We haven’t had much practice while we were in hiding.”

The two finished checking my baby while I got dressed. “I should get your lab results later today, and I’ll call Chase with them. You’re a healthy female, and Maritza is hitting all the marks for a human child. If anything comes up, Chase can get ahold of me. Meanwhile, I’ll think about what you told us and see if I can figure a way out of it.”

“Thank you, Doc,” I said. Maritza let out a yawn, and it was time for her nap. “Lance, let’s put her down for her nap, and we can take that ATV ride.”

“I’ll get some volunteers to ride with us,” he said, reminding me of the five-person-minimum to leave the Pack House area. We returned Maritza to day care, and headed to the garage to get geared up.