Unlike most youngsters, when Nick Cutter was a child, he couldn't wait for his dæmon to settle. Of course, that wasn't to say he didn't enjoy the way Katya could flick from one shape to another in a blink of an eye, switching from a dog to a moth to a lizard to a falcon. It amused him, and it was wonderful to have a dæmon able to transform to whatever form they needed for any situation they were in. When he was cold, as was often in the Scottish Highlands, Katya would turn into a wolverine and cling to his back inside his coat to keep them both warm. When he had nightmares, she'd become a lioness or a she-bear and flex her claws in the darkness to warn away monsters. But he didn't want her to stay that way. When a dæmon settled in their permanent form, the shape they'd keep for the rest of their lives, it said something about them. Sometimes, the shape a person's dæmon took said more about that person than anything else could.

He could never have imagined Kitar, his mother's dæmon, being anything but a bluebird. Bright and keen and brilliant, full of song, light and airy, always fluttering around and warbling a tune as his mother whistled along. She was just the same, a beacon of light and love in his home, and whenever he came home with scraped knees and bloody noses, she'd hug him and slip him an extra sweet before supper whilst Kitar gently preened Katya's fur with his beak.

Nick's father, Alexander Cutter, worked in the fishing industry, and he always came home smelling like salty ocean air and fish, a scent that wouldn't go away even after he showered. His own dæmon, Stella, was a seagull. On the nights he got off work before Nick's bedtime, Alex would sit in an armchair that creaked at any slight weight with Stella perched on the chair back, and Nick would lie on the floor with Katya as she tried out unusual shapes, like a platypus or an aardvark or a lemur. "What do you think that Katya will settle as, Da?" he asked.

"Dunno. But when she does, lad, you'll wonder why she was ever anything else."

Nick glanced up at Stella; the steely-grey and white bird had her head tucked under one wing but wasn't asleep, merely resting. "D'you ever wish that she settled as somethin' else?" he asked curiously.

Alex lifted his eyebrows, then sat back and looked up at his dæmon in contemplation. "When I was a lad, aye, I did. I was an impetuous whelp then, though, true enough. I wanted her to be something big and powerful, like a lioness or an eagle, something other people would be right intimidated by," he admitted. "But I was discontented with myself then. By the time I was a proper man, I wasn't discontent with her no more. I learnt that the shape my dæmon had said somethin' about the kind of person I was. Stella, she's a seagull, which means I'm a bit of a seagull too."

"You like fish?" Nick had asked with the kind of guileless innocence only a small child could manage.

Alex had laughed uproariously at that. "Not quite, lad," he answered once his laughter died. "Not quite. No, I mean…I'm nothin' big or grand or splendid. Look at me—I'm not gonna be winnin' any beauty pageants anytime soon. But I'm a tough old sod, I am. I can survive anywhere and always find a bit of food an' company along the way," he explained, reaching up to stroke his dæmon's feathers with his work-callused hands. "An' your mum, well, she's a proper bluebird herself. A wee thing, aye, but full of song and happiness for everyone around her. So when Katya finds her own proper form, then you'll know the sort you are."

Nick contemplated that one for a moment, watching Katya as she tried out the form of a badger then switched to her new favourite, that of a pangolin, which looked a bit like a porcupine with a long tail and scales instead of quills, like a pinecone. "What if she settles in a form I don't like?" he wondered. He didn't like it when she looked like a rat, or any sort of bug, or a bat.

"Then you're discontented with yourself," answered his father, leaning back in his chair with a creak of old springs and wood supports. "Plenty of folk out there want a lion and end up with a poodle. An' 'til you learn to be happy with what you got, then you're always gonna fret on it. Waste of feelin', if you ask me. There's other important things to fret on."

Most expected Katya to settle in some sort of dog form. Dogs were the usual dæmons of working-class folk like the Cutters. The smaller dogs—setters, beagles, terriers, that sort—they tended to hold the more menial jobs as housekeepers, factory workers, and such. But the bigger canines—hounds, Dobermans, mastiffs, boxers, pitbulls—those were the kind of people that went into police and military. There was no hard-and-fast rule, but it was a common generality. Nick prayed she wouldn't settle as a dog. He loved his parents dearly, but he didn't want to work in a factory or on the docks. He liked science, evolution, and wanted to be a scientist when he grew up.

Often he would ask Katya what she'd settle as, to which she'd answer exasperatedly, "I don't know. It'll be a surprise for both of us, won't it?" At the time, she didn't know how right she was.

The day he turned fourteen was the day Katya settled. It was a little later than most boys, who usually settled at twelve or thirteen, but not abnormally so. He woke up with his face buried in warm, silk-soft fur. It wasn't unusual; Katya usually became something furry at night, especially during winter, so he wouldn't get cold. But this form was new for her: a leopard. Or more accurately, a snow leopard. The fur of her back and sides was silvery-grey, the colour of winter frost in the shade, dappled with black rosettes with a darker matte-grey centre, but her underbelly, throat, and the backs of her legs were purest white. At the time, she was nearly as long as Nick was tall, and she weighed more than he did. And the minute he saw her like that, it was just as his father had said, he wondered why she had ever been anything else at all, a feeling of rightness settling itself somewhere deep in the heart of him, right where his link to Katya was tethered to his core.

Katya blinked her crystalline, black-rimmed eyes, which were a paler shade of blue than his own and almost silvery. "I don't think I'll be changing anymore," she said quietly, and he buried his face into the thicker fur around her neck, smiling as he gave a muffled agreement.

He had bounded downstairs with Katya loping at his heels, eager to greet his mother—his father had taken an early shift so he would have the afternoon free to spend with Nick—and tell her. Mina and Kitar had been startled, surprised that her son, such a kind, sweet boy, had such a large, ferocious dæmon shape, but nevertheless, she had smiled as the bluebird fluttered proudly around Katya as both boy and leopard preened. When Alex and Stella arrived home, they were baffled as well but still just as proud. "A mighty fine form, boy. A pretty girl and a strong one too," he laughed, ruffling Nick's hair indulgently.

By the time he went back to school, everyone knew about Nick Cutter and his wild dæmon. Other teens' dæmons often gazed at Katya with a mixture of awe, fear, and slight jealousy, and sometimes the dæmons of children in the younger years would dare each other to go up and touch the fierce snow leopard. The former they put up with in discomfort, the latter they endured with kindly forbearance. Once, out of curiosity, he looked up snow leopards—rare creatures hunted for their beauty, solitary hunters that thrive in the cold. Well, that fit him well enough.

Still, he and Katya were the only ones of their sort in his hometown, at least until he moved to Glasgow for college and met a range of people from all over the place, saw dæmons of all shapes and sizes. Still, they always held themselves apart, falling into the habits of their nature, and the older he became, the more alike he became to his dæmon's form, stubborn and solitary, fierce when provoked and wild at heart, not one to bow to authority. Traits like that held on through their lives, even as he travelled from dig to dig in all different countries, became first a teacher then a professor, and became established at Central Metropolitan University in the midst of London. Even when he met and married Helen, things were always a bit…off, even though they tried to deny it. After she disappeared, the pain of it nearly drove them both mad, sent them both into fits of snarling fury that sent every intern and assistant scrabbling for another job, anywhere and with anyone but 'the mad Scotsman with the leopard dæmon.'

The only real friend he and Katya had in the midst of the tempest left in Helen's wake, the first assistant he'd ever had that didn't bow out whenever they growled, was a crack shot of a young man with the most impressive tracking skills he'd ever seen, with a surprising amount of brains to go with his charm and good looks, and with an acerbic wit that could match Cutter's on his worst days.

Stephen Hart.