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So what did you and Landon do this afternoon?_ Minka asked, her soft voice dragging him back to the present.Angelo looked up to see that Minka had already polished off two fajitas. Damn, the girl could eat. __andon gave me a tour of the DCO complex. I did some target shooting and blew up a few things. He even let me play with the expensive surveillance toys. I swear, it felt more like a recruiting pitch to get me to work there than anything.__inka__ eyes flashed green, her full lips curving slightly. Damn, why the hell had he said it like that? Now she probably thought he was going to come work for the DCO. Even if he wanted to, he couldn__, not after just reenlisting for another five years. The army wasn__ the kind of job where you could walk into the boss__ office and say, __ quit.__hinking it would be a good idea to steer the conversation back to safer ground, he reached for another fajita and asked Minka a question instead. __hat do you think you__l work on next with Ivy and Tanner? You going to practice with the claws for a while or move on to something else?__ngelo felt a little crappy about changing the subject, but if Minka noticed, she didn__ seem to mind. And it wasn__ like he had to fake interest in what she was saying. Anything that involved Minka was important to him. Besides, he didn__ know much about shifters or hybrids, so the whole thing was pretty damn fascinating.__hat do you visualize when you see the beast in your mind?_ he asked.__efore today, I thought of it as a giant, blurry monster. But after learning that the beast is a cat, that__ how I picture it now._ She smiled. __ot a little house cat, of course. They aren__ scary enough. More like a big cat that roams the mountains._ __akes sense,_ he said. Minka set the other half of her fourth fajita on her plate and gave him a curious look. __ould you mind if I ask you a personal question?__is mouth twitched as he prepared another fajita. He wasn__ used to Minka being so reserved. She usually said whatever was on her mind, regardless of whether it was personal or not.__o ahead,_ he said.__he first time we met, I had claws, fangs, glowing red eyes, and I tried to kill you. Since then, I__e spent most of the time telling you about an imaginary creature that lives inside my head and makes me act like a monster. How are you so calm about that? Most people would have run away already.__ngelo chuckled. Not exactly the personal question he__ expected, but then again Minka rarely did the expected.__ell, my mom was full-blooded Cherokee, and I grew up around all kinds of Indian folktales and legends. My dad was in the army, and whenever he was deployed, Mom would take my sisters and me back to the reservation where she grew up in Oklahoma. I__ stay up half the night listening to the old men tell stories about shape-shifters, animal spirits, skin-walkers, and trickster spirits._ He grinned. ____ not saying I necessarily believed in all that stuff back then, but after meeting Ivy, Tanner, and the other shifters at the DCO, it just didn__ faze me that much._ Minka looked at him with wide eyes. __ou__e a real American Indian? Like in the movies? With horses and everything?__e laughed again. The expression of wonder on her face was adorable. __irst, I__ only half-Indian. My dad is Mexican, so there__ that. And second, Native Americans are almost nothing like you see in the movies. We don__ all live in tepees and ride horses. In fact, I don__ even own a horse._ Minka was a little disappointed about the no-horse thing, but she was fascinated with what it was like growing up on an Indian reservation and being surrounded by all those legends. She immediately asked him to tell her some Indian stories. It had been a long time since he__ thought about them, but to make her happy, he dug through his head and tried to remember every tale he__ heard as a kid.