by Mary Calmes
“Oh,” Katrina gasped, and we all heard the groan of metal at the same time.
The roar of panther was next, followed by snarling that made my blood run cold as six werepanthers came running into the pit.
We couldn’t shift and flee; I couldn’t turn to my own werepanther form and fight if I was cornered by anyone that wasn’t my semel. The only form that we, as mates, could take as monsters descended on us was human. To disregard any rule was instant death for the semel and his mate.
I ran to the side and saw Yusuke do the same, putting a brazier between any werepanther and her. My brain screamed at me to shift, the nekhene sensing danger and flooding my senses with adrenaline, ready to attack. I looked for Logan and saw him running fast, sniffing the air, searching for me. He had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. He had been a panther for two months, living as an animal, eating as one, been caged, beaten, run, and hunted. He had been tortured by Amirah, tantalized with her closeness, and then, finally, minutes ago, had been ordered into his werepanther form and released into the arena. I had no idea if he was even sane. Only my faith in him as my mate, as a man, kept me on my feet.
The first yareah killed was Juliet. She went to her knees, arms open to receive her mate, only to scream seconds later as his claws closed on her throat and punctured her jugular. I had never seen so much blood. Her mate, Wallace, drank some of it before running toward Amirah. She received him joyfully as he tore the robe from her body. I looked away before the final violation of faith and trust between him and his dead yareah was committed.
Kushi Oyuun was next, her mate tackling her to the ground, shifting to panther as he mauled her. I looked away, her screams dying fast as she drowned in her own blood.
Logan was circling Amirah and Wallace, not sure if he should fight the other semel for the reah or not. She called to him, arms out, but he stepped back, lifting his head, looking, inhaling deeply, unsure.
Calling him would be a mistake, and I knew that. Words were meaningless, and adding my pheromones to the already saturated-with-adrenaline and sweat-scented arena would only confuse him. Running would draw others, so I waited and made myself small.
Logan’s presence was too distracting for Wallace, and he turned from Amirah and launched himself at my mate in a frenzy of tooth and claw. The two semels went down in a tangle of snapping jaws and bloodlust, and I followed them before my attention was drawn to Katrina as she ran by them, sobbing.
She flew toward Amirah, who had been shoved up against a wall by another semel who was preparing to bury his cock in her. When she reached him, she leaped, but he caught her in mid-arch, savagely grasping her face, twisting it sharply, snapping her neck like a doll’s. She was dead before she hit the floor.
Another semel leaped at Katrina’s mate, hurling him to the ground before he lunged at Amirah, who was laughing.
“No!” Yusuke yelled. “I forbid it! Narae Hiroshi, remember who you are!”
His head turned, and he ran at her. I saw her change her stance, prepare to defend herself, but my vision was suddenly blocked by a huge werepanther towering over me.
It was a dream. Everything had all happened so fast, the entire scene playing out in minutes; all the savagery and carnage had become a blur. As the clawed hand shoved me back, lifting at the same time, I found myself pinned against the wall, held immobile several feet off the ground.
“No,” I growled, and the nekhene in me braced for battle.
There was a loud roar of warning, and before I could process the motion, I was on the ground, dropped hard, confused for a second as I was grabbed a second time and slammed into the stone wall, the impact rendering me breathless with pain.
The rock cut into my back, and my vision swam as every gasp of air was torn from my chest. As I was still reeling from the first attack, I wasn’t able to respond like I wanted to the panther/man hybrid who held me immobile in his grip.
“Come to me!” Amirah screamed at the semel who had released me as well as the one who was holding me now.
But she wasn’t getting the one who was looking at me hungrily; never would she claim what was mine.
I coughed, my lungs on fire, as I focused my eyes on the man I loved.
In his werepanther form, Logan Church was still beautiful. He was covered from head to toe in fine gold fur. His face was larger; all of him was huge and massive, his head that of a panther, with ears flattened back, eyes, nose, and mouth transformed to feline. The muscles were pumped big, but even in this form, Yuri still would have been bigger. The shift altered features but couldn’t add size or weight, just lengthened some muscles and bulked others. I was the only cat who changed completely, and no one knew why, the answer always being the same: nekhene.
As my eyes ran over my mate, I calmed, dragged in air, and finally lifted my hands to his face.
He shivered, taking a step back, and I fell again as he dropped me down the wall, abrading my robe, scraping skin as I crashed to the ground.
“Logan,” I got out, even as he was on me, claws driving into my shoulder as he held me trapped in his grip.
I heard a snarling growl close, and he turned his head and moved, giving way to the other panther, allowing him close. It was the way of cats, the dance of dominance. Another cat would growl at Logan and bare his teeth, and Logan would retreat, allowing the other cat close until he decided he wanted to investigate me again and would drive the usurper away. I had seen it at many gatherings, with panthers, the circling, the flash of fang, the swipe with claws. It would go back and forth, because Logan wasn’t certain of me, wasn’t sure who or what I was. So he retreated and let the other dominant male near. It would go on as each semel struggled to realize what he could claim, what was his, and who belonged to him.
Normally Logan knew me at all times, but he had been an animal too long and been allowed to shift back, only partway, to his werepanther form. So now he wasn’t sure of me, and the noise and the smell of blood and Amirah’s suffocating, cloying pheromones… all of it swirling together was driving him mad.
Scrambling to sit up, I sat there, frozen, as the other semel leaned forward to sniff me. It was hard to smell anything in the chaotic pit, but he tried, pressing his nose against my throat even as I turned my head away.
Seconds later, the semel flipped me over onto my hands and knees, and I made a noise that I wasn’t proud of, part anger and frustration, part sick, cold terror. In my human form there was no fighting whatever he had planned. I was completely at his mercy unless I shifted—but if I became a nekhene, I would lose everything. But to be raped… Logan would hate himself, hate that it had happened to me, that he had allowed it to occur, and so I would lose him anyway. I wasn’t sure what to do, and I had seconds to make a choice that would affect the rest of my life.
It turned out I didn’t have to.
I had never heard a noise like the one that followed my own. It was a strangled, roaring cry, almost a howl, and it was filled with pain and outrage and fury. The sound blew through me, made me shiver with dread. I was released instantly, and the entire room went silent and still. No one moved, not even Amirah.
The hush was almost as frightening as the sound had been. When I turned my head, Logan was crossing the floor to me, eyes huge, mouth open, snarling low as he came so all I saw were fangs and claws and his hard, obvious erection. The semel who had thought to claim me scuttled away, and I was aware that the space was frozen around me. No one was even breathing as Logan dropped down, crouching on the ground beside me, panting, heaving, nostrils flaring as he inhaled me.
I understood at once, because he smelled like her.
He had been on the other side of the room, prepared, from the looks of him, to fuck Amirah, the scent of arousal clinging to him, when he had heard me whimper.
The sound he knew, my resonance, coupled with my familiar posture of submission when he turned to look for me, had combined to clear the fog from his brain. For a split second, he had been the semel of the tribe
of Mafdet, and he knew who I was, what I was, knew I belonged to him and that another was about to claim me. He had warned the other semel fast that to touch his mate would bring swift death. I would remember the sound for the rest of my life and pray that he would never have to make it again.
I rolled to my knees and faced him. “My semel,” I said softly, leaning forward, my lips parting, finally releasing my pheromones. I wrapped him in the aroma that was mine alone, letting him taste my desire, my overwhelming, devouring need.
He reached for me with a clawed hand, and I slowly, gently touched the underside of his wrist, my thumb sliding back and forth over the pulse-point as his eyes slowly narrowed and his mouth closed.
There were sounds around me; life resumed, but I was only vaguely, peripherally aware. This was my mate in front of me, and he had to claim me and I had to tame him.
“Do you know me?” I murmured, reaching back, moving my hair, baring the side of my neck so he could see skin, smell skin.
He was thrumming with power and sizzling heat and was, as always, a gorgeous specimen of male beauty. I wanted to eat him. The whine I released was deep and throaty and full of longing as I squirmed in front of him. When the clawed hands grabbed me, hauling me forward into his lap, I wrapped my arms around his neck and held on.
It was his turn to whine.
His engorged, leaking shaft was caught between us, wedged against his ripped, muscular torso, and when he began to pant, I reached down and stroked him. He shuddered beneath me, pushing up, trying to get more of his cock into my hand, and I fisted the long, hard, thick length of him, beginning the slow, tight pull and slide that I knew from experience would bring him release.
As I watched him, I realized that I would let him bury himself in my ass, even dry, even though it would have torn me up, because my logic had drowned in emotion by that point. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t even lift to maneuver him beneath me; the sharp, clawed hands anchoring me to his thighs left me no wiggle room. And he could still hurt me, even inadvertently, by slicing through an artery if he gripped me too tight. So I tugged and slid my hand over him instead, opening my robe to reveal my own throbbing shaft dripping with precome, pressing it along the length of his, using both hands now to jerk us off together.
The velvety hardness of Logan’s dick next to mine, the smell of him, of me, of us together, made me writhe in his lap, buck against him, and ache to be filled.
He moved fast, leaning forward, his jaw open before I realized it, coming for my throat. And the thought leaped into my mind that if I died in his arms, it was worth it to have loved him at all.
The sandpaper tongue grazed my collarbone, licked up the side of my neck, and then tasted the spot behind my ear. His long, sharp fangs came next, pressing to the spot where my shoulder joined my neck before he nipped at the skin and trembled under me.
I squeezed and yanked, felt his cock swell further in my grip as I pumped harder, faster, and felt my own release build.
One hand moved from my thigh, his right tangling in my hair, yanking my head back as I cried out, just that much of his dominance bringing me to orgasm. I cried his name as I pumped out thick streams of semen onto his muscular, taut abdomen. I shot over my wrists, my fingers, and over the purple head of his swollen shaft a second before he found his own roaring release.
We shuddered through our aftershocks together, and when I lifted my hand to my mouth, he watched with heavy-lidded eyes as I began to lick semen from my fingers. He leaned forward, tongue out, wanting to taste, and I pressed light fingertips to the sandpaper surface, smiling, purring at the same time. He whined in the back of his throat, and I extended my own tongue, rubbing it along his, slowly, decadently, over and over until he leaned forward, wanting more. I opened my mouth, and his tongue slipped in and explored. He whimpered as his hands returned to my thighs, yanking me forward, needing me closer, tighter.
I wrapped my legs around his back, my chest now plastered to his beautiful sculpted one. Even under golden fur, the definition was still there, and as I closed my lips on his questing, thrusting tongue and sucked hard, I lost myself in the taste of him. He growled and clutched at me, one hand on my ass, kneading, squeezing, the other holding the back of my head, cradling, but his claws trapped me, rendering escape impossible. Not that moving even flickered through my consciousness.
I licked and sucked and wriggled in his lap, and when he winced at the contact of my stomach pressing against his sensitized, flagging penis, I took that moment to take a breath and nuzzle my face into the soft fur at his throat. I sighed deeply, and I heard him begin to purr. He was content, and I let the feeling flood my senses.
We were safe because we were together. Always.
Finally, I lifted my head and took in the blood and gore in the pit but also the beauty. On my left, Yusuke held her semel as he lay draped over her, heaving with aftershocks of what had to have been a bone-numbing orgasm from how exhausted he looked and how scarlet her face was. The quivering smile she gave me was embarrassed and sated at the same time.
On the opposite side of the room, Gavin Medina was in his mate’s lap, head back, eyes closed, and his flaccid cock dripping with come as he lay, spent and boneless, in her arms. She was stripped naked, as Yusuke and I were not, covered in scratches, but smiling down at him as they lay together in the dirt. When she turned her head and shuddered, I looked to see what was wrong.
Amirah had risen from where she had been lying close to the wall. Apparently she had been struck unconscious at some point and was now awake. The three other semels who had killed their mates circled around her but didn’t come any closer; she seemed to be holding them at bay with her power.
“It’s not over,” she yelled before she opened her mouth and breathed out her pheromones. Hiroshi jerked in Yusuke’s arms; Gavin groaned, exhausted, but his primal urges were too strong to deny, and Logan, only Logan, didn’t stir or move to rise, instead just tightened his arms and rubbed his chin over my shoulder, scent-marking me.
Amirah came toward us, intent, it seemed, on Logan, because he was the only who had not immediately responded. She was strutting forward and stripped off her robe as she came, a vision as she closed in.
My first thought was that she had to be freezing. You could hang meat in the pit, and as I shivered, my mate snuggled me tighter, grunting softly, comforting me.
He only wanted me, would, if he were allowed, curl around me and go to sleep. He was exhausted—we all were—and still the horror of a reah came to try and separate us.
I was angrier than I thought I was.
Lifting my head, I released an angry, wild, desperate nekhene power to intercept her.
She screamed and dropped to her knees, fighting, her wail unhinged and terrified. If she shifted in the pit she was dead, and everyone knew it. That was the law.
“No!” Her shrieking got louder, and Hiroshi settled, rolling off his mate but not leaving her side. There was no allure in terror, and so he stayed where he was.
Gavin curled closer to his mate. I spared Teresa a glance as I had Yusuke, and I saw the desperate thankfulness in her gaze.
“No!” Amirah wailed, and I let it recede, inhabiting once again the mantle of reah, of love and shelter and peace.
“Yield.” I found my voice, my eyes flicking to hers even as Logan took a deep breath of me, licking a long line up the side of my throat, the small whimpers making me tighten my arms and legs, the desire to climb inside his skin nearly overwhelming. “You have done your duty: three semels are only panthers, three yareahs lay dead, and three tribes will have new leaders. We’re lucky, as the priest had Khongordzol inform us that he chose no semels with children, that you have left no orphans crying for dead parents.”
“I don’t care!”
“But we care!” I yelled back, indicating Yusuke, Teresa, and myself. “And you can stop; you’ve done what was required and are now free. Is she not free?”
I lifted my head to the priest and saw that
everyone was clustered close around the edge now to see the slaughter and the sex.
“She is free,” the priest said, rendering his verdict, “and no cat may ever touch her again without her leave.”
I returned my eyes to her. “You’re free, Amirah Fehr; you do not even have to make account of your actions to the tribe of Ariat or to the family of your semel, Terrance McCord.”
She rose stiffly and smiled suddenly. “Attack me again, reah, I’ll be ready this time.”
“Where is your beset?” I called to her. “Let her, or him, offer you comfort and counsel now.”
“Never did I need the same crutch that I have heard you have; I’ve never been that weak.”
But needing Crane had never been anything but a blessing, and again, I felt so sorry for her to not even have a companion, not one person to always look for as a grounding force. And not that Crane was mine anymore, Logan having taken over as my touchstone, but she had no mate, no beset and no tribe, she was utterly alone in the world. I ached for her and the pain it all must have caused.
“Attack me!” She yelled.
“Don’t leverage your power against mine,” I warned her. “If I pull you through your shift, you’re dead. You’ll be wounded and left to die outside, at the mercy of the elements and animals. It is not a death I would wish on anyone, even you. A reah is a precious thing, please don’t force my hand.”
“You think you can do it! You think I can’t turn all these semels to slaves that will still turn on their yareahs, and their reah, and carve you into pieces?”
She was so drunk with her own power that she wasn’t even listening to me.
“Please,” I begged her as she advanced.
“You’re trembling, reah,” she said snidely, “frightened of losing the man you hold clutched tight to your chest. Because whatever you think in that deluded brain of yours, he would pick a reah who is a woman that is not his over a true-mate who is a man because, really, all you are is a sick, filthy abomination. Your bond is unnatural and unclean, and you will die now and see the semel of the tribe of Mafdet drink your blood even as he fills me with his hot seed.”
