Crucible of Fate

by Mary Calmes

“Jin is Logan’s true-mate, you don’t just go out and—”

  “Please. All that is, is love.”

  “It’s not. They have a perfect bonding. No one gets that unless they are a semel and a reah.”

  “That’s crap. The chemical, biological pull on your body does not create love. It makes need, but that’s not what Jin and Logan have. They love each other.”

  “They love each other because of the bond. If Jin was not Logan’s reah, he’d be mated to Simone right now, plain and simple.”

  “You’re so wrong,” I said. “Bond or no bond, Logan would have seen Jin and wanted him.”

  He shook his head. “You’re being ridiculously sentimental. Logan was straight before he found out about his mate. If Jin wasn’t his reah, he’d have had no chance with Logan.”

  I would not argue and headed out.

  He called after me as I crossed the floor. “That’s it? You don’t stand and fight for what you want? The semel-aten doesn’t know how to do that anymore?”

  “You have nothing I want,” I threw out. “So why would we fight?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I stopped at the door and glanced back. “Why are you going through these motions? It’s not like you actually want to win.”

  “But I do,” he professed. “And I will.”

  I crossed my arms. “What happened? What scared you so bad that you came running halfway around the world to see me?”

  “What?”

  Oh, very defensive. I tipped my head. “Let me guess, some nice lady panther wants to have your cubs?”

  He pointed at me. “Tell me you don’t remember us in bed and what that was like.”

  I did remember. I had loved it, having him under me, but even more, I remembered how volatile it had all been, and now I had a new definition of what could go on under the covers.

  Now I ate in bed with Yuri stretched out beside me. We debated laws and decisions I had made, but… we also had long, drawn-out, intense conversations about why he liked reality shows and I didn’t, about why he thought watching Grey’s Anatomy would rot my brain and why I was refusing to watch the series Firefly, which he owned on DVD along with some movie that went with it. I was upset when my shows from the History Channel got erased in favor of some miniseries on the Syfy channel, and he said that satellite TV only had room for so much stuff.

  I had called him on it, and he had gotten lost in seeing how indignant I got. “You’re full of crap!”

  “You’re so cute when you’re pissed off,” Yuri said, pushing out his bottom lip. “Come here, baby.”

  My huff had sent him into hysterics.

  The point was, us in bed was not something I had ever experienced with anyone else.

  We talked, we played, we wrestled, we made plans for vacations to cold places, we argued. He chatted on the phone with his mother, Rosetta, who was so proud of him and happy and who always wanted to say good-bye to me. He started teaching me Russian, important things like moi lyubov, which meant “my darling,” and I grumbled that if I could only use that with him, how was that helping? But the heavy-lidded eyes, so love-soaked, made my stomach flutter, so that, too, was a gift. We laughed so much, out of bed but in it, too, and basically, I had a whole different appreciation of the place I slept these days that had nothing whatsoever to do with sex.

  “Domin?”

  “Sorry,” I said, realizing I was grinning like an idiot, before I walked out the door.

  “Domin!”

  I groaned as I stopped, and he came quickly around me, close, into my personal space.

  “For whatever reason, you’re not seeing me right now, so I’m going to hang out until you do, all right?”

  Standing there I realized again, for the thousandth time, that truly: Koren Church was a stunning man. He was also completely not what I needed.

  It hit me. “Oh. Maybe not a woman. Maybe a man.”

  “What are you talking about?” he yelled.

  “Who are you sleeping with at home that scared you to death?”

  “I- I, you, I… no.”

  “Oh Koren,” I said, chuckling. “Come on. I hit the nail on the head. Tell me all about it.”

  He walked away without another word. My laughter followed him.

  “My lord?”

  I found Kabore walking toward me. “Yes?”

  “Who was that?”

  I met his stare. “An ex-lover.”

  “Which accounts for his complete and utter lack of respect for your station. Did he have your permission to walk away?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “I should have him flogged.”

  “No, come take a walk with me through the market instead.”

  “Let me alert your khatyu.”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s just go, me and you.”

  He shook his head like he always did because I was just so trying. “My lord,” he began, so long-suffering. “Let me explain to you what—”

  “Just come with me,” I pleaded, bumping his shoulder and then walking away.

  He called after me to wait.

  Chapter 4

  I ENJOYED strolling through the marketplace at dusk and even more at night. The tents, the lantern light and braziers, small groups of people milling about, the smell of meat cooking over wood stoves, the tang of incense, the scent of desert flowers and lingering spices: all served to soothe and delight me. It wasn’t busy, but I still got the feeling of movement before it went from night to early morning.

  The people who greeted me, who waved, who came forward to touch me or hug me as I walked with five of my guards, all had the same awe on their faces. They were glad to see me, and I knew why. I was not, as played out, the rich man’s leader. I was instead more about improving the quality of life for my entire tribe. I was not interested just in the elite; I was interested in the everyman.

  I had opened the main floor of the villa to everyone. Guards stood at the bottom of the stairs inside, not at the front gates. The library, the countless reading rooms, the stacks, all of it was available to whoever wanted to do research or learn more about werepanther history. I had all the texts moved from the priest’s temple at Satis to the villa. When I had made the journey out to see the new priest, Asdiel Kovo, he was horrified that I was there to take what he considered sacred tomes from vaults that had not been opened in years. But Mikhail had come with me, and armed with his own knowledge as well as that of his new mentors—the former council of Ennead—it became clear that there was nothing Kovo could do about it. The library itself could be anywhere; there was no law that said it had to reside in the priest’s residence at Satis. So Kovo had to watch helplessly as I removed it all from the rooms beneath his home.

  As I walked with Kabore, I thought about the last time I had been to Satis before that. It had been two months before the day I put Kovo in his place. I had gone to see Hamid Shamon, the former priest of Chae Rophon. He had called me to his deathbed, and no one had been more surprised than me. I’d taken a seat in the chair beside him, and I had been pleased when he reached for my hand.

  “The road to change is perilous,” he advised. “Cleave to your path. To keep traditions alive, they must be that which people can use in their daily lives, accept and take in.”

  I realized then that I would miss his disapproving scowls as well as his gentle words and the pats on my shoulder whenever he saw me.

  “You are trying to make change for the better; you must realize that the man after me will want power. Be ready.”

  I’d had no idea how right he was at the time.

  Asdiel Kovo was Hamid Shamon’s successor, and he hated me with a passion born of a fanaticism with the law. It was beyond me. He was the one who labeled me as kadish—impure. He was the one who said that Elham El Masry should be semel-aten and not me.

  I was not from the tribe of Rahotep. I was not Egyptian. I didn’t speak Farsi or Arabic. I didn’t wear the traditional dress, and my views on education, th
e homeless, the role of women, and same-sex unions were all heretical. He considered me a threat to the tribe and a liability to the entire werepanther world. I was unholy, unclean, simply an abomination. There was an understanding between us from the day he assumed his new role. We were enemies.

  Over time, it became apparent that though I was new, I had some great people around me, incorruptible people, and that I knew what I was doing. When he realized he could not shame me or outmaneuver me, the new priest resorted to the old-fashioned way of winning: he tried to kill me.

  Before I had taken them from him, members of the Shu came for me in the night. They should have been able to kill me, but as Taj, who was my sheseru, had been a member of their number, he knew what to watch out for. When we took three of the men alive and reunited them later with their phocal—their leader, Jamal Hassan—he begged me for the lives of his men. That I had them in my possession said all that was needed about their crime.

  I stood with my own guard in the temple of Satis, waiting for the priest, and when Kovo finally appeared before me, I made it known that his phocal had already pleaded with me to spare his men. I simply needed a confession from the priest to keep me from killing them. I was not surprised that he would not, but Jamal was. I watched the phocal realign his loyalty right then and there as I made a point about who would do whatever was needed, even grovel for the lives of those beneath them, and who would not.

  “And would you beg a stranger for my life, my lord?” Jamal had questioned me.

  “I would,” I let him know, locking my eyes on his, before telling his men to rise and go stand by him.

  I allowed them to live even though, if they’d had their way, I would have had my heart torn out. Yuri didn’t have the same compulsion to forgive. He had forbidden Jamal from ever being in my presence alone. For a phocal to be so sanctioned was a grave insult.

  Jamal had rounded on Yuri, grabbed the robe he wore over his clothes, and driven him back into the wall. But before I could even open my mouth, Yuri’s voice boomed out.

  “How dare you put your hands on me? I’m the mate of the semel-aten… I could have you killed for this insult.”

  I saw Jamal shrink down into himself, his stance deflating, shoulders drooping, hands unclenching. Whatever the priest’s thoughts on me and Yuri, I had announced to the entire werepanther world that the man belonged to me, was claimed by me, and was considered sekhem, “arm of the semel” in some texts, and in others, “heart.” I had no idea that such a term existed until I complained to Mikhail that I didn’t want to call Yuri “consort,” which was the expected term.

  It was because of Jin.

  All reahs were required by law to be brought before the semel-aten on their sixteenth birthday to see if first, before anyone else, the leader of the werepanther world was their mate. The thing was—I didn’t want to know. If I had a female mate out there somewhere, and she was brought before me as a child, what was I supposed to do? The lure of a true-mate, I knew from watching Logan go through it, was impossible to resist. I would not take that chance. I didn’t want to ever find my reah. I was perfectly happy to live without the supposed other half of me. I outlawed the practice of the semel-aten seeing a reah first, because even though the first part of the law frightened me, the second part was truly horrifying for the poor reah.

  If the semel-aten decided he wanted to keep the reah in his house, he could. It was his right. Under his roof, she was his to do with as he pleased, and her eventual mate would be thankful that the semel-aten had sheltered her. If the reah never found her mate, she would remain forever in the semel-aten’s household as wosret, or consort.

  At the Feast of the Valley every year, he could parade her out and let her search for her mate in the sea of amazed eyes. Of course, the chances of anyone, much less the semel-aten, ever seeing a reah were a million to one. This was the story we had all been told, about the impossibility, and yet… I had already seen two reahs in my lifetime. One was mated to Logan Church, and the other had been wosret, or consort, to my predecessor Ammon El Masry. She had run from him, and in the end she had been so consumed with never again falling into his clutches that she had fixated on the idea and gone mad. She had lost all reason before he was killed. Even though there was no other choice but for her to die, the decision was regrettable and unneeded. I remembered her as she had last been, unhinged and vengeful. What those of my household remembered was that she, Amirah, had been the last consort in the house. I would not allow Yuri to be called by her title, called “consort.” Mikhail had found the word sekhem and affirmed what it meant. I announced to everyone that it was how my mate was to be addressed.

  Jamal Hassan had been disgraced because of his new lord, the new priest, and when he arrived at the villa, secretly, two weeks later, I met him with Yuri, Mikhail, and Taj, and I accepted Jamal’s vow of fealty. He pledged himself and his men to the service of the semel-aten. Yuri removed the ban against Jamal being in my presence alone and welcomed him as a brother. Jamal was more touched than I thought he would be, as evidenced by the way he nodded quickly, held Yuri’s wrist very hard, and didn’t speak.

  It had been fun to watch.

  Taj, too, had been overwhelmed, stunned but ecstatic to have the support of the Shu. No semel-aten had ever taken the priest’s elite guard from him. It was a coup, and I knew Kovo felt the loss and blamed me. I was simply waiting for the other shoe to fall.

  It seemed as though I spent my life in anticipation of what would come next, and not simply from a man with murderous intentions toward me. It hit me as I walked with Kabore at my side, passing street vendors and restaurants, the aromas mixing with the sticky summer air, heavy and humid, that I was always waiting for someone to leave me, fail me, or question me. It made me second-guess myself constantly. Even Koren, who had apparently come to woo me, thought I was not in my right mind. It was tiring, hearing about your failings from those closest to you and then hearing praise from strangers. The only one who didn’t do it, who didn’t second-guess me or treat me like an idiot, was Yuri. And I loved him for it.

  “My lord!”

  I twisted around and Jamal was there, his face ashen, his eyes dark and worried as he strode toward me with five of his men in tow.

  “Are you kidding? I haven’t even been gone a half an hour, what could have possibly happened?”

  “We have received word that Elham El Masry has arrived, and he has the semel of the tribe of Wepwawet with him, Rahab Bahur.”

  I waited.

  “My lord?”

  He had obviously expected a reaction. “I’m sorry. Who is Rahab whatever and why should I care?”

  “You don’t know who Rahab Bahur is?” Kabore demanded from my left.

  My attention was now on him, as Jamal had thrown his arms up, apparently defeated by my overwhelming lack of knowledge.

  Kabore was stunned.

  “Spit it out,” I ordered.

  “My lord, the tribe of Wepwawet deals in oil and natural gas, and those are the legal riches of the tribe. Rahab also has many pursuits that are not….”

  “Legal,” I finished for him.

  “Yes.”

  “So he’s a thug.”

  “No, he’s the head of crime syndicate that deals in drugs and people—”

  “You mean prostitution.”

  “Yes. He also moves guns and—”

  “He’s a criminal.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “And what was the role of the semel-aten in his life?”

  He cleared his throat. “He and Ammon had an understanding that as long as his interests did not bring any human interaction or interest he could do as he pleased.”

  “But? I feel a ‘but’ coming on.”

  “Now he is here with a champion to challenge Crane in the pit for his place of maahes. His tribe is the smallest of all, but it is the only one I know of that is not based in a town or region but more as a syndicate. Members of the tribe of Wepwawet live in every cou
ntry of the world and work as operatives, nothing more.”

  The fact of the matter was that he was not a true semel, not a leader, but the head of a crime family. His was a conglomerate; it was not a tribe, not a family in any sense. They didn’t hunt together or ever gather. They swore allegiance to a warlord, not a king who would protect them, lead them, guide and nurture them. I was right—he was a thug.

  “My lord,” Kabore almost pleaded. “You must take this challenge seriously. Why would a man like Rahab Bahur align himself with Elham El Masry? Why does he want to claim Ebere for his new friend? By killing Crane Adams, what does the man gain?”

  “Access to me,” I confirmed. “Obviously your crime lord wants Elham to first be maahes, and then semel-aten.”

  “Yes,” Jamal agreed. “That’s exactly what he wants.”

  “At least we know now.” I shrugged.

  Kabore grilled me. “And you’re not afraid of this?”

  “Have you met Rahab’s man? Do you think he can beat Crane’s?”

  “I don’t know. I have yet to meet Crane’s man,” he said. “Have you met his champion?”

  “I have not, and when I ask, he only asserts that he has everything under control. Perhaps I should go talk to him now.”

  “I don’t know how you will accomplish this, as he has gone to Cairo,” Jamal quipped.

  “Cairo? What for?”

  He exhaled sharply, obviously irritable. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Is Rahab in the villa with Elham now?”

  “No, but his arrival is imminent, as well as the men he brings with him, his sylvan and sheseru,” Kabore replied.

  I let out a deep breath, suddenly tired. “We better go welcome them, then.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “I must caution you to be very careful in your dealings with—”

  “I will be.”

  “My lord,” Jamal interrupted. “You must understand that these are two very powerful men who—”

  “I think I understand about power.” I insisted.

  He was quiet for a moment, apparently realizing what he’d said, before he bowed deeply.