Nope. Not possible.

The Shadowcats had withdrawn from society years ago, when the king had died. Sightings were few and far between. And while you'd probably meet plenty if you wandered into their territory,  they were almost unheard of down here.

The Shadowcat didn't move a muscle as I crept closer to the light switch. When the lights flickered on, I drew in a sharp breath. It was hurt ... and badly. A deep gash down one side was bleeding excessively all over our new rug.

I took a second to admire the sleek coat of fur, the pair of piercing green eyes and the long curved claws on each paw. While it was only the size of a panther, there was a sort of deadly grace about the whole thing that no normal animal could ever achieve.

Right. Time to stop admiring the Shadowcat and kill it before it kills you.

But he's injured, another part of my subconscious argued. Was it even a he or a she? As usual, my mind started going off track. I didn't think it was really appropriate to look at its butt for an answer, especially when it was nearly unconscious. As it turned out, I didn't need to. The pair of eyes flicked to mine and the look of a male trying to assert his dominance was unmistakable.

He was breathing pretty heavily. I reckoned there was a fair chance he would bleed out before I even had to decide what to do. Maybe I should just creep upstairs and pretend I didn't see anything. But then he would die ... or worse, survive and kill me out of spite.

Ah, crap. I would have to help him, if only because I wanted a Shadowcat as a friend. But how, exactly? Somehow, I didn't think a plaster and an antibiotic wipe would fix a wound that size. On TV shows they did stitches, but I didn't have the faintest clue how to go about that.

I decided that the most likely way to help him was to stop the bleeding and hope he was strong enough to heal himself. I returned to the kitchen for a first aid kit and rummaged through it, resigning myself to staying up most of the night.

A bandage and a medium-sized dressing were the most helpful things I found. Before returning to the living room I also grabbed a towel, a wad of kitchen roll and a jug of water. Almost as an afterthought, I filched a bottle of gin my parents hadn't got around to opening. Because you had to wash wounds, right? So you didn't get infections and shit like that.

The Shadowcat had twisted onto his stomach by the time he returned. He was watching me warily, the picture of feigned indifference. I knelt down beside him and hesitantly examined the wound.

"I'm going to clean it now," I warned him quietly. "It's probably going to sting."

He snorted at me, but through gritted teeth. His teeth were longer than mine were in wolf form, but maybe that was just a feline thing. His breathing was getting gradually heavier and more laboured. The wound was hurting a lot, even if his stupid male pride wouldn't let him show it.

For all I knew, I might be killing him even more, but I used the jug of water and the towel to clear a bit of the blood away and then poured the gin into what looked like teeth marks. The shifter hissed at me. Someone had ripped a large chunk of flesh out of his side. Oh great, now I wanted to be sick.

"You're going to have to give me a hand here," I said, frowning. "I don't know how to help you."

He lifted his head off the ground with a lot of effort and gestured at the dressing and the bandage. I picked them up, still not quite sure what the hell I needed to do. It would be so much easier if he was a werewolf. Then at least we could have mind-linked.

Some small part of my mind remembered about putting pressure on a wound to stop the bleeding. And if the bleeding stopped, he should be able to heal himself, albeit very slowly. I pressed the dressing onto the wound hesitantly and covered it with the wad of kitchen roll. Then I put a fair amount of my weight into keeping it in place.

The Shadowcat didn't snarl at me, which I guessed was the closest thing I would ever get to approval. Okay then. Just keep pressure on the wound. That's easy enough.

So that was how I spent the next half an hour, leaning on a Shadowcat and covered in blood. It must have been well past midnight before, to my complete astonishment, he unceremoniously stood up on all four paws. I peeled the dressing away from his side to see the skin almost completely knitted back together. I helped do that, I thought proudly.

Another part of me was freaking out. Now he was better, would he kill me? Why the hell was he in my house anyway?

The next thing I knew there was the horrible crack of bones of a shift taking place. Instinct made me turn away and cover my eyes before I saw something mentally scarring. When I heard a human voice speaking, I almost leapt out of my skin.

"Do you have any clothes?" a deep, male voice asked.

I sneaked a tentative peek to make sure it was safe to look. The boy had the bloody towel around his waist, leaving his upper half naked. I was instantly taken aback. This was not your average teenage boy. He was a couple of years older than me. But what really took me aback was that, for lack of a more eloquent way to say it, he was hot. When the abs, flawless olive skin, dark mussed-up hair and green eyes were taken into account, he was really, really good looking.

Damn.

Then I remembered he had asked me for something and stopped my shameless staring. "Huh?"

"Do you have any clothes?" he repeated in the same indifferent tone.

Now I was just mad. I had saved his life and the ungrateful little dweeb couldn't even say thank you. "What, that's it? No thanks at all, no acknowledgement that instead of getting your worthless ass arrested, I sacrificed time I could have spent sleeping to help you?"

The boy narrowed his eyes at me. "I don't see why I should thank you for acting like a half-decent human being. What's your name?"

He did have a slight point, even though I wasn't a human being and he knew it. I was thrown completely off guard. "Um, Savannah. Or Sav."

"Not that name," he said dismissively. "Your surname."

"Fairborne," I replied with sudden understanding. I gestured to the distinctive white-blonde hair and silvery eyes that ran in my family. "Can't you tell?"

On Anglesey, there were thirteen werewolf families, all with different surnames. Each one was made up of several hundred wolves, all of whom owed their absolute allegiance to their birth family. I didn't have to ask to know that this boy belonged to the Silveryn family, along with all the other Shadowcats.

Each family was a member of a larger sector as well, who all obeyed one of the more powerful forces on the island, the Davengard, Rochester and Llewellyn families. The Shadowcats were the one exception to this rule. They were loyal only to whoever sat on the throne. I suppose that made us allies for the moment, because my family was sworn to the Llewellyns, whose leader was currently our queen.

Basically, it was an overcomplicated system of packs, but you would never hear anybody admit it. Packs were considered a primitive system. To put it simply, we were split into thirteen families, which each belonged to one of three houses.

"I had to be sure," he said indifferently. "Fairborne is good. I won't have to kill you."

I subtly picked up the kitchen knife from earlier and moved a step further back from him. I knew he was an axe murderer. And why on earth would he kill me if I had been from another family?

"Were you in my garden earlier?" I blurted out.

He just gave me a flat look, like my question wasn't worth answering. I took that as a yes. I wasn't sure how I felt about it either. At that moment I was leaning towards creepy.

"Look, Sav. If you just give me a set of clothes, I'll be gone and we'll both be safer for it," he explained impatiently, adjusting the towel around his waist. I was frustrated to say the least, but he didn't seem about to tell me who had attacked him, what he was doing here or even who he was.

I stormed off upstairs in a foul mood. If I'd had the guts, I would have slapped him. Rude, obnoxious little...

I grabbed a pair of Alex's jeans and a t-shirt, left over from one of his many overnight stays. When I reached the top of the staircase again, he was waiting at the bottom. Silent and watching, he was just a faint shape in the dark.

"I can see why you're called Shadowcats," I muttered. When he stood still enough, he seemed to become a shadow himself. "Goddess, that's creepy."

I threw the clothes down at him, hoping they would hit him in the face. He caught them effortlessly. Damned shifter reflexes.

"That is not why we're called Shadowcats," he replied disdainfully.

He pulled on the dark t-shirt there and then. It was a pretty good fit all things considering, although a little on the tight side. Luckily, Alex was tall for his age, but it was the thin and lanky kind of tall. The boy returned to the living room to change into the jeans without so much as a second glance at me.

I crept back down the stairs as quietly as I could. If my mum and dad woke up, I was screwed to hell. They would give me a lecture about responsibility and stranger danger, then most likely ground me for the rest of my miserable existence. Then again, maybe they had a point.

The Shadowcat remerged fully dressed just as my feet made contact with the hall floor. He brushed past me, heading for the smashed back door. It occurred to me that he was probably leaving.

"Are you just going to run off?" I demanded. "Without even telling me your name?"

The boy stopped and fixed me with a piercing stare. "Names are dangerous."

He was right, of course. At school, having the surname Fairborne when surrounded by Curringhams or Rochesters could get you beaten up. And as an adult, it could be even more dangerous. You had to stick with other members of your family for protection. A large part of the Moon Guard's job was breaking up fights between the different families.

"I told you mine," I pointed out futilely. "And I saved your life, so you owe me a blood debt."

A blood debt was a tradition amongst werewolves, I had absolutely no idea if Shadowcats played by the same rules. In essence, it meant that if you saved someone's life, they owed you big time. Asking for his name would only be a tiny part of it.

The shifter took a few brisk steps so that his face was barely a foot from mine. His eyes swirled gold with annoyance, and his voice dropped to a forced whisper. "Nate Silveryn."

"Thank you," I replied just as quietly.

"Just know that if you tell anyone I was here," Nate continued, his voice hardening almost beyond recognition, "I will pay with my life."

If I blinked, I would have missed him leaving. One second there, the next gone and I was left standing alone in a hallway with a stained rug in the next room, a smashed door, blood everywhere and only one thought in my mind.

How the hell am I going to explain this to my parents?