Mated To The Ruthless Savanna King

Something rough, like sandpaper, was scraping against Franco's cheek. Over and over.

The sensation, paired with the hot, rhythmic puffs of air, pulled him from the depths of a heavy sleep.

Ugh, that stray from the alley again, he thought, his mind still thick with fog. He'd told his building's super a dozen times that leaving the fire escape door unlocked was just asking for trouble.

"Get off," he mumbled, swinging a hand to swat the creature away.

But his arm didn't move.

Instead, a bizarre heaviness anchored his shoulder. He felt a thick layer of something soft and dense covering his limb. Fur. His arm was covered in fur.

His eyes snapped open.

The African sun, a brutal, white-hot disk in the sky, assaulted him. The light was so intense it felt like needles in his eyes, forcing him to squint until his vision was reduced to a painful sliver.

Panic, cold and sharp, began to prickle at the edges of his consciousness. This wasn't his cramped New York apartment. This was... everywhere. An endless expanse of pale, sun-bleached grass under a sky too big to be real.

His last clear memory was the helicopter's controls going dead, the frantic beeping of the altitude warning, and then the sickening lurch of freefall. He had been a wildlife photographer for National Geographic, hanging out of an open door to capture the thunderous migration of wildebeest across the Maasai Mara. The helicopter had malfunctioned, rotor stalling, spinning down into the stampede below. There was the scream of twisting metal, a blur of horns and dust, and then nothing.

Now, this. This impossible body. This alien place. The air itself felt wrong—different gravitational pull, different scents, something he couldn't name. He wasn't on Earth anymore. He knew it with a certainty that bypassed logic and landed straight in his bones.

His gaze dropped, trying to focus.

Two small, fluffy creatures were perched on his chest. They were covered in spotted fur, with wide, terrified blue eyes staring right at him. Cheetah cubs. His photographer's brain supplied the information automatically, a detached, useless fact in the face of the impossible.

The smaller of the two cubs, Roy, let out a weak, mewling cry. But beneath the sound, something else echoed, a thought that wasn't his own, clear as a bell inside his skull:

Mom, I'm hungry.

Franco's brain blue-screened. What the hell was that?

But within seconds of waking—as if the crash had only now allowed his new brain to finish booting up—a flood of foreign memories surged through him. The cheetah whose body he now inhabited had been a native of this world, a place called Losa. Losa was not Earth. It was a planet where over eighty percent of the land was covered by sprawling grasslands and dense forests, and at the top of the food chain sat the great cats. Lions, leopards, cheetahs—they ruled this continent, and among them existed a class called the Evolved. These Evolved possessed intelligence rivaling