by Mary Calmes
Never in my life had I been the indecisive sort, and sometimes it had been bad. I always did something, and a lot of times those choices were selfish, but Koren was not even that guy, not even me, thorns and all. Koren was the waffling guy, and because we were so different, I was having trouble wrapping my brain around who he was.
“I figured you wanted him,” I said, looking for the man I thought I knew. “Before the feast of the valley, before I was kidnapped… didn’t you?”
“He gave me an ultimatum.” He sighed deeply, raking his fingers through the same thick blond hair that he shared with his brothers. “He said, ‘choose or leave me the fuck alone.’ I wasn’t ready to let him go, so… but being with him, I look at other people.”
“But when you’re with other people you think about him,” I said, because I knew it was the truth.
“Yes.”
“And then you want to go on the prowl the minute he’s back in your bed.”
“Yes,” he groaned. “And I know that makes me seem like a total shit.”
“It’s honest, and until you find the one person that makes you forget everyone else, you have to keep looking. I understand it, but it’s not fair to Domin, and he’s too important to the rest of us. We’re too invested in his happiness to watch you dick him around. It’s time to cut him loose, Koren.”
“I already did.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am.”
“It stopped going back and forth?”
“Yeah. We haven’t reconciled since the last time.” He sounded so sad. “He won’t let me, and now, as you saw the other night, he doesn’t really even see me. He’s over me.”
“Which is killing you.”
“Fuck yeah.” He exhaled, carding his fingers through his hair. “Because I want him back and I want to make him promises and…. But the minute I do, the minute he’s there in my bed….”
He would want someone else. “Sure.”
“You think I’m an idiot.”
I did and didn’t. “You can’t make your heart want something just because you think you should. I get that.”
“I thought when we were together when you were all away at the feast of the valley… fuck, Jin, I thought that was it. I thought I was done looking anywhere but at him.”
But he wasn’t, and Domin knew that, and his earlier ultimatum had changed to resignation. Koren would never be his, and at some point he had stopped caring. The problem was, without anyone to love him… what did Domin Thorne have for an anchor?
I studied Koren’s face for a minute before I walked back to the others.
“I have a question.” Artem said.
We all turned to look at him.
“Besides Crane,” he said, his eyes on mine, “who else goes into the pit with you and Domin when you defend Logan?”
“I can pick one other.”
He nodded. “Then pick me, Jin, please.”
“No,” I told him. “You have to stay here and act as sheseru while Yuri is away.”
“If I die,” Yuri said, his hand reaching for Artem’s shoulder, “then you’re the new sheseru of the tribe of Mafdet.”
Artem took a shuddering breath.
“You have to remain to guard Koren.”
His nod was decisive though not happy.
“Take me with you, Jin.”
I turned to look at the man who had come from Sobek with us six months ago and was now truly part of our household. “I can’t do that, Taj; you’re a member of the Shu.”
He shook his head. “I resigned my place,” he told me. “I am now a member of the tribe of Mafdet.”
“I’m sure Logan will consider you for the place of sheseru, then,” Yuri told him. “You’re much faster than—”
“But I’m not stronger than you,” he told Yuri. “And I discussed it with Logan a while back, and he said that if I stayed, he would make me a manu and Ivan a baku.”
“Ivan?” Markel was surprised.
“Me?” Ivan said, and I realized I had forgotten he was there with us. I always called him; I never left him out, as he lived in the house with us.
“Yes. Logan said that Markel and Artem would also be granted those positions when he returned from the sepat.”
I looked around the room at all four men: Markel, Ivan, Taj, and Artem. They were stunned—all but Taj, who had been the only one privy to the plan—and pleased, I could tell. Ivan and Markel were especially touched, as they had been Domin’s sylvan and sheseru when he was semel of the tribe of Menhit.
“Logan trusts you all implicitly,” Taj continued, “and the tribe is growing so fast that Logan needs his household full of those he deems most worthy.” He turned to Artem. “You’re the only one not living in the house, Artem, and you’re to move in at once.”
He swallowed hard, overwhelmed, I could tell. As they all closed in around each other, talking, I walked to the window and looked out at the snow.
“My reah.”
The room went silent behind me, but I didn’t turn to Mikhail’s call.
“I’m happy for you all,” I told him, facing the gray January sky. “But before anything else, we have to think about the sepat. Because no matter what you all think, without Logan Church, the tribe will suffer. Without him, I won’t be here; without me, Yuri won’t be himself, and so on, and so on…. The priority must be making sure that Logan comes home safe.”
“Of course,” Mikhail agreed.
“Yes, Jin,” Yuri agreed.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and when I turned, Crane was there.
“I need you to help me get strong so I can go with you.”
The fact that he wanted to go, even though I knew he had to be terrified, spoke volumes about his strength. “Okay.”
“First thing tomorrow, let’s go talk to Ray and see about resigning our positions.”
“You don’t have to do that, Crane, just me.”
“No, we both do. I just wanna be here, Jin, at the house, on the land. Yuri said he would teach me his business, he said I could go to work for him, with him. I think that would be best.”
It was strange to think about everyone outside of their roles in the tribe, but they had lives that didn’t include Logan or me.
Yuri owned and operated a security business where he installed high-tech alarm systems for commercial as well as residential clients. Mikhail had a demolition company that knocked stuff down—buildings, bridges—and then hauled the debris away and disposed of it. Markel was an artist, Ivan taught fifth grade, and Domin owned many very lucrative pawn shops, two in Reno and three in Las Vegas. Koren owned a real estate company in Lake Tahoe, and Delphine worked for her brother, for Logan, at the glassworks that he owned. She was the on-site manager. Everyone worked, and I was worried about not doing my share even though Logan said that my concern should have been him and the tribe and nothing else.
“You already have Taj here patrolling, being the guardian of the house and the grounds. I want to do my part, but I have no idea when and if I’ll ever feel like leaving.”
Which was fine with me even though I knew it was selfish. If my best friend was always where I could see him, I would never have to worry ever again. But how fair was that to him?
“Come on, come sit down and talk to me.”
I followed, as always, without question.
IT WAS hard talking to Ray the next day, with Crane. He was a good man and didn’t understand why we were leaving him. I finally lied and told him that Logan’s business needed us both, and that, finally, made sense to him. He himself ran a family business, and that loyalty clicked for him. I said I would give him two weeks to hire and train a new manager, and I felt bad when he told me it wasn’t necessary. Basically, people had been doing my job for months; he just needed to pick one of them to take over permanently. He extracted a promise from Crane and me that if either of us ever wanted back in the restaurant business, we were to call him at once. We both hugged him really tight before we le
ft.
During the following month, Yuri practiced by making himself the quarry of hunts. Artem and his men chased him down, all of them in panther form, and once they reached him, pumped up on adrenaline and bloodlust, he practiced calming them and forcing them to shift back into men. It was grueling and hard, and Yuri returned night after night bruised and bloody from his exertions. One night I saw an old face that I had been missing for a while, Andrian Basargin, and while we caught up—he had gone away to grad school in Boston—I finally realized that there had to be a reason I was seeing him.
“Where’s Yuri?”
“He’s hurt, my reah, and spending the night in a cave with Taj to watch over him, but he begs you to not come, let him be, and he will join you for breakfast in the morning. This is part of it. He has to learn to dominate others not through fear or brute force, but only by power. Please understand and grant him his time.”
I wanted to go, every impulse told me to go, but the look on Andrian’s face stifled my instinct. He was the first man I had ever met from Logan’s tribe, and the ease that he had first shown me, the kindness, had never dissipated.
“Alright?”
I nodded.
“Good.” He smiled at me. “I’m returning to them with food and water. I’ll tell them that you expect both of them in the house in the morning.”
“And you,” I told him. “I wanna see you too.”
“I would be honored, my reah.”
As promised, they were all there in the morning for breakfast, and when I smacked Yuri on the back of his head, he rolled his eyes at me.
“Never again,” I snarled at him.
“Jin—”
“Who’s going to protect me? Who should do that?”
And I realized that my safety had never crossed his mind. It shouldn’t have, not really—I was scary now; no one in their right mind wanted to mess with a nekhene cat, not after my display in Sobek, and Artem was there, and the others—but still… Yuri was my sheseru.
“No, my reah, I forgot my place.”
“Don’t do it again,” I cautioned him, my voice hard.
To have me say it, speak my need for him, I saw how his eyes filled, watched the muscles in his square jaw clench; it was what he needed, had to hear. That I counted on him, that I slept better knowing he was in the house—the confession gave him strength and filled him with his own self-worth. Mikhail bumped my shoulder on the way out, and I saw his smile. They all understood what I had done, and it was nice.
Logan’s poor parents came home to a world gone mad, and after the whole house sat down with them and explained, Eva was distressed and Peter was very proud of Logan for being chosen and terrified for me.
“He really could kill you, Jin.” He caught his breath.
“No,” I told him, utterly positive, “he won’t.”
Even then, even after everything, Peter Church could still not quite wrap his brain around the fact that two men could love as hard and as ’til death do us part as a man and a woman. But his wife could and did.
“You’ll bring us home a semel-aten,” she said as she patted my hand. “God, will I like living in Sobek?”
I squinted at her.
“Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it won’t we,” she sucked in a breath. “Now come on, tell me about Russ before I call and yell.”
“No one will ever speak to Russ again!” her husband ordered, still so angry for Russ not wanting to be a panther, so hurt, the feeling of betrayal making his temper flare momentarily.
“Logan said,” Koren chimed in gently, “that any of us may speak to him by e-mail or phone or whatever else, webcam, you name it, but we are all forbidden from visiting him. If he wants to see us, he comes here.”
“Yes,” Peter agreed, taking a deep breath, calming, walking over to me, and putting his hands on my shoulders. “Thank you for going, Jin, and protecting my son.”
It had been a trip I didn’t have to make, but I accepted the thanks from a man who felt like his sons were all alien creatures to him. I patted his hand, and he squeezed gently. My arrival had changed everything, altered Logan’s path as well as Koren’s, because if the semel-re was gay, then his brother could be as well. And even though I had nothing to do with Russ’s choices, I was still the catalyst for everything else. That he could still like me at all was a testament to the tolerance in the man. He didn’t understand Logan and me, what Koren and Domin had begun and ended, but he loved us all regardless. It was more grace than a lot of people were granted in their families.
Because he knew Logan needed help, Peter helped Yuri master his beast and offered Mikhail the resources of his personal library to help him study. Mikhail himself was all for drowning himself in the old texts, committing chunks to memory, but both Danny and Peter cautioned against that. It was better, they said, and I agreed, to have a working understanding of the text as a whole, to be able to interpret it and explain it back to someone else, teach it to another. So they took turns sitting with Mikhail, quizzing him during the day, reading to him at night, and even listening to him during meals, always just talking about one law or another. The three men had endless conversations, and Danny, who my father had been training as he had me to be a sylvan, showed him citations, Peter showed him illustrations that would spark his memory, and both men corrected Logan’s sylvan gently and patiently.
We were two weeks from leaving for the sepat when I came downstairs because I couldn’t sleep. It was getting harder and harder for me, Logan’s absence weighing heavily on me. I stopped before walking into the great room, though, because I saw them in front of the fire. Mikhail had obviously dozed off, and I watched Danny, his hands fluttering close but not touching, leaning close to the man’s lips, inhaling his scent, finally, after weeks of just looking, reaching out to lift a strand of dark mahogany hair from his eyes.
“That’s quite the crush you’re nursing,” I said as I stepped around the corner, making my presence known.
“Oh I—I just—”
“It’s okay.” I smiled at him. “I get it, Mikhail’s a good man.”
“He’s beautiful,” Danny breathed out, his bottom lip quivering. “Have you looked into his eyes? There’s so dark and deep and blue
and—”
“I’ve looked at him,” I assured him.
“He’s amazing, Jin.”
“Agreed, but what do you want from him?”
His eyes hit mine. “Everything.”
It was not my place to tell him what Mikhail was or was not. I felt that Mikhail was straight, like Crane was, and Taj, and Artem, but how did I know? The one man I could speak for implicitly was my best friend. For him, for Crane Adams, only a woman would ever be his mate. For the others… I would wait and see.
“Jin?”
“You should talk to him when this is all over,” I soothed Danny, “but not now.”
“No.” He nodded. “He would not appreciate me thinking about anything but Logan.”
“No, he wouldn’t.”
He reached a hand toward me. “May I?”
I gave him a slight smile, and he put his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ve always wanted to touch you.”
It was part and parcel of the whole reah gig.
“Your father must have loved you so much, Jin.”
Strange start to a conversation. “What makes you say that?”
“Because he hates you so much now.” He took a shaky breath. “I mean, I never told him I was gay, I was too scared of what he would do to me, and that was before what he let happen to Crane.”
And I had known, of course I had, that my father could have saved Crane but had not.
I took a breath, squeezed his hand tight on my bicep, and smiled at him. “My father is not important. Tell me where my mother is.”
“She stayed with Kei in Chicago. Both of them were accepted into the tribe of Mnevis.”
I nodded.
“Her and Kei—they just don’t under
stand who you are or what you are, Jin. Did Logan tell you that he met them?”
I caught my breath. “No.”
“I figured.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “Kei and your mother, Ayumi, they were on their knees, and Logan asked them if they wanted to see you.”
I waited for what I already knew.
“Kei said you were dead to them, and your mother told Logan to cleanse the wickedness from his house.”
I took a breath. There was a time when it would have hurt, but I was far too insulated by Logan’s love for it to touch me anymore. “And what did the semel-netjer do?” I smiled at him.
He cleared his throat. “He said how sorry he was for both of them, and the way he looked at them…. Jin, it was like they were both dying there in front of him. When he walked away without a word, like they were nothing, everyone was stunned, you know? I mean, to a panther, to have a semel look at you like that, not even acknowledge you or dismiss you… God. It was so horrible, and he did it, just removed his regard, you know? And he’s the only one, the only semel-netjer in the world, but I think it’s like Yuri said.”
“What did Yuri say?”
“He said that they cannot comprehend that you are a reah and a nekhene, and because they don’t really see you, Logan can’t fathom their existence at all.”
I sighed deeply. “Sounds like Yuri.”
“I was just floored. I mean they could have—they could live here with you and Logan, they are both related to the only nekhene cat in a thousand years.”
“But all they see is a gay man,” I told him. “And that’s fine, because gay is a word that can be used to define me. It’s not all I am, but it is a facet of the whole.”
“They don’t understand,” he said, shivering.
“And that’s okay,” I sighed, patting his hand before I stepped away from him. “Because I have a family of my own that accepts and loves me.”
“It still has to hurt Jin, be honest.”
“I am,” I assured him. “They left me for dead, and the only one who came to for me was Crane.”
“Crane?”
“Yeah. He replaced them all—mother, brother, father, there’s only him now.”
