Jobless and evicted from her apartment, Charlotte Ramirez has nowhere to go. Being were compounds her problem. The animal spirit inside her is a jaguar, and it’s restless. When she passes a man on the street and recognizes, via her unique ability to see the animal within other weres, that he carries within him the spirit of a wolf, she turns to follow him only to see him brutally stabbed. Because she witnessed the stabbing, she is contacted by other weres and taken to the house of a clan of weres. Has she found the home she is looking for or only more trouble? To win a place in the clan she is told that she must accomplish daunting tasks: learn whether the stabbing victim is alive or dead, discover who stabbed him and why, and locate the stabber so that he or she can be brought to justice. Charlotte wants very much to become part of the were family, so she embarks on her assigned duties without careful planning and with no idea of the difficulties and dangers she will face. As she blunders through her initial attempts, she makes enemies of some of the were household, discovers and unwittingly endangers a young were who is not part of the household, and faces enemies who are determined to destroy the weres. Charlotte quickly learns what a high price she’ll have to pay for the privilege of making the Were House her home.