Honored Vow

by Mary Calmes

  I turned my head to look down at him, and he was smiling so big before he lifted his fingers to scratch under my chin.

  “Remember that time we were waiters in San Antonio and you tripped over the side down by the River Walk?” He was amusing the hell out of himself.

  Why were we taking a trip down memory lane? And the man was forgetting a lot of times when he had been the one… to….

  And then I understood, because I had been reminded, in a very roundabout way, that I was a man, apparently a very klutzy man on occasion, but a man nonetheless. I was not a wild panther. I was the best friend of the annoying ass lying beside me.

  He washed normal all over me. I put my head down on my paws and listened to the husky, deep sound of his voice.

  Yuri crawled across the floor and stretched out close, head propped up on his palm, looking at me. “Tell me the stupidest job you guys ever had,” he prodded Crane.

  “We tried to be ranch hands.”

  Yuri snorted out a laugh. “You and him?” He pointed at me. “The guy who has to ride with Logan because he falls off otherwise?”

  Crane snickered. “Yeah, just try and picture it.”

  I growled, which sent Yuri into a fit of coughing, before I stood up, stepped over Crane, and lay down on the other side of my best friend, nuzzling my nose into the back of his hair.

  I was hiding, and I knew that, but I just needed quiet and alone but warmth too. I needed Logan. I craved the shelter he provided, the strength. I wanted my mate, and even though the following day was the trial of the heart, I couldn’t wait, because at least I would see him. As my eyes closed, I could still hear Yuri and Crane talking, as well as the others. They all wanted to be close to me, and while I appreciated that, I also needed to simply rest. With Crane talking to them and me close to him, I felt included without having to exert any energy at all. I didn’t remember closing my eyes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “THE trial of the heart begins now,” the priest announced loudly and gave the command to begin.

  I felt like I was in a dream.

  Each semel was bound to an actual wooden cross, tied tightly and painfully with rope. It was to be endured. The sooner it was over, the sooner your semel went free. The point was to fight efficiently and release your leader.

  If the house failed to protect the semel or shirked their duty in cowardice, the semel was disemboweled by the “knife-wielder,” who was the sheseru of the semel-aten. The semel was then cut to pieces until there was “a river of blood,” the law said. It was far too horrible to contemplate the death of my mate from having his organs devoured and then being drawn and quartered.

  If the assault was foiled, then the semel was released and he and the three chosen from his household to defend him, as well as his mate, attacked the other semels. It was kill or be killed during the final trial of the heart, and whatever I had shared with the other yareahs the night before was meaningless as the test began.

  We all had to make it out alive.

  Dval Quach, Ammon El Masry’s new sheseru, entered the pit with fifteen men. They could shift, if they wanted, into panthers, just as we could, but I was not allowed to employ my werepanther form. If I shifted into either my werepanther form or any nekhene form, I would be disqualified, and Logan and Crane and Andrian and Taj and I would be executed. Logan, of course, would be killed in the prescribed fashion, the rest of us beheaded.

  The sheseru stood in the center of the pit with the three semels trussed up along opposite edges. Five men each ran to attack the households. The problem was in the numbers. If one semel fell, then all those left who had attacked him would join the others. Whoever fell first would be facing a fair number; the others would not. The trial proceeded until there was only one challenger remaining to stand against the semel-aten, with his maahes, the following day.

  We were in a trial today, but there was also the following day to consider. The priest had cautioned us against simply defending our semel and not thinking to attack others as well. If you killed another semel, yes, that would mean more khatyu to fight, but at least you would be that much closer to becoming semel-aten.

  I had told Andrian, Taj, and Crane that no one was to leave Logan’s side. We would slaughter anyone who came near him. It had been my last order before we all shifted to panther form, having agreed that morning that this was the form we would take.

  As we made the phalanx around the cross, I was unprepared for the bullwhip that wrapped around Andrian’s throat and yanked him off his feet into the dirt a few feet from us. Normally there were no weapons in the pit, and so I was surprised. Taj moved fast, faster than any of the khatyu were prepared for, and with a snarling roar, landed all over Dval Quach. Even if he had been warned by the semel-aten that Taj was a former member of the Shu, he had not been prepared for such a blurring attack.

  As soon as the tension released, even for a second, Crane was there at Andrian’s side, having shifted to his human form, as was legal, getting him out of the whip. Andrian rose, coughing, retching a moment before he and my best friend were swarmed by ten panthers.

  If I shifted into my nekhene form, I could kill them all, but I couldn’t. And I wasn’t big in my black panther form. Watching Crane and Andrian fight for their lives, seeing Taj in a fight to the death, I realized the futility of my situation. There were more cats advancing on us, and even without looking, I knew that one of the other semels, either Gavin or Hiroshi, was dead. What could I….

  “Reah!” Logan screamed at me.

  When I turned to him, I saw his eyes. Even where we were, as close to horror, to the end, to the edge of the precipice, still, there was love there in his eyes, not fear. He was so full of desire and want and need, and… he was my mate.

  He was the mate of the reah of the tribe of Mafdet, but not the mate of the nekhene. The nekhene had no mate.

  I couldn’t outwardly shift to anything but a panther, that was true, but the power that I released could be whatever I wanted it to be. And while my nekhene power was feral and angry, my reah power would not touch my tribe, would not hurt what was mine or what I loved.

  I had felt cursed. I had wanted to be free of the selfish, wild nekhene, wanted the power to submit to the reah that I truly was. But at that moment, I was thankful, so deeply, desperately thankful.

  I let down all my barriers, all the careful checkpoints in my head that Crane had helped me build, and let the nekhene burst forth wild and wanton. This was not the moment to punish, it was the time to lure and then exact the toll. My power, which I had worked to empty of heat and seduction and raging carnal appetite, I allowed to embody all those qualities once more. I called every panther in the home of the semel of Khertet to me.

  Where was the mate of the most powerful cat in the world? He needed to show himself!

  The challenge was there as I felt electricity crackle around me, ripple the air, split it, charge everything, and spark over my skin.

  The instant the panthers wanted me, the second they thought to respond to the call, they were sucked through their shift.

  Screaming roars came fast as the pile that had covered Crane and Andrian sloughed off and revealed the two bloody and beaten panthers.

  The air heated, got heavy, sticky, and oppressive, making it hard to breathe. I watched some of the khatyu run from the pit in panic, not even wanting to taste my power, and saw the cats that had been attacking Taj leap away from him as though burned before they fell to the dirt, their fur looking as though it were bubbling. As Taj lay panting, he could have been attacked anew. But no one got close. No one dared; instead they just stood there in wide-eyed shock and dread.

  The ones who ran were smart.

  A moment later, everyone who remained who did not belong to me was on the ground writhing in pain.

  What had started as a search for a mate—I knew, because it had been my thought when I started—had become punishment.

  Painful, debilitating punishment.

  The
nekhene power became a fist of judgment, and I dragged them all through their shift, turned them inside out in a horrendously painful, wrenching action. It was like having skin flayed off, bones broken, muscles torn, and all of it happened in a scalding, burning, squeezed-in-a-vise second.

  Logan. I had to see him, reach him, and touch him. Turning, I saw him straining against his bonds, desperate to get free, to get to me.

  Taking a breath, shifting back to human, I took two steps to Logan and put my hands on his chest. Looking down into his eyes, I saw how pained they looked, how full of longing.

  “My mate,” I said and realized that my voice was not my own. It was low and full of gravel, broken.

  He whimpered and tried to lift up, and I felt my pulse leap at his struggle. Here was what I needed, and it was being kept from me. The frustration rose in me, and instead of trying to gentle it, as Crane had been coaching me to do, I let it out and drowned the room again in blistering, scorching power. I would annihilate them all if my mate was not released.

  “Jin!”

  How dare they restrain the mate of the nekhene!

  “Jin Rayne!”

  I shifted back to my panther form and faced every panther in the pit.

  “Reah of the tribe of Mafdet!”

  My head lifted, and I saw the priest of Chae Rophon above me. I saw no other man or woman close to him, only panthers. Turning my head, panning right, I took in the gallery. There were so many panthers; the entire tribe of Khertet, it seemed, had succumbed.

  As I followed with my eyes, I saw Domin. He was on his knees, and beside him was Yuri and then Mikhail. No one else was there, only animals.

  “Jin!”

  I looked back to the priest.

  “The trial of the heart is over; your semel is free!”

  My eyes never left him even as he balled up his fists and began to tremble ever so slightly.

  “Your semel returns to you, reah, and to his human form.”

  What? I must have misheard.

  “All semels are relieved of their werepanther form.”

  How? They weren’t supposed to be men until after the final trial, semel-aten against semel to determine the new master of Sobek.

  “The contest is moot if no one can participate.”

  The nekhene had rendered the exercise obsolete.

  It was over.

  I exhaled, and when I did, then all of it, my power, my pheromones, the thrumming, searing energy, was suddenly sucked from the room, leaving the cold and the damp and the suddenly clear, fresh air.

  There were moans and gasps as a collective sigh of relief was released. I shifted and screamed for Yuri, for Domin and Mikhail, as I rounded on Logan, on the man I loved.

  I moved fast, standing beside him, hands in his hair, on his face, touching, tracing, and mapping territory I knew with my fingers.

  “Jin.” His voice was hoarse from disuse, his eyes ragged with dark circles under them; he had grown a golden beard and mustache I had never seen before, his hair standing in tufts, gnarled with sweat and dirt.

  He was breathtaking.

  I bent and kissed his forehead, his eyes, his nose, his cheeks, ravenously, deliriously, beyond happy to see him, enraptured.

  “Jin,” he whimpered, tears rolling down the sides of his face toward his ears. “Me—baby, kiss me.”

  My lips sealed over his, gently, tenderly, because for all the desire, we were both frayed and raw and sensitive. He was vulnerable and so was I. So even though I was hungry for him, I claimed what was mine without the urgency, with only the love.

  “Jin!”

  I turned, and Yuri was there with the down comforter from our bed at home, the one thing I had brought that had both our scents on it, Logan’s and mine. Yuri wrapped me up in it before he and Domin and Andrian and Taj and Crane lifted the cross Logan was lashed to. They leaned it against the wall before Yuri hefted the ax that he had been given before the trial began. Each sheseru had one, no one knowing who would be using it, who would be allowed to free their semel.

  Yuri swung it three times, and the pain it caused Logan, the jolting, pounding vibration, was acute, but he was silent until he was suddenly on the ground under the cross, finally free. Both of his shoulders were dislocated, he had broken ribs, and his skin where the ropes had been looked like raw meat. But still, he rose up and staggered forward.

  I went to my knees, and he dropped down into my arms, finally, utterly, safe.

  He was safe.

  With his head notched under my chin, his arms wrapped around me, his skin pressed to mine, I could breathe again.

  It was so good to breathe.

  When I felt a hand on my back, I lifted my eyes to find Crane’s.

  “I felt the pressure of your power, Jin, but none of the heat or the anger.”

  “Me neither,” Taj chimed in, and my eyes flicked to him. “I saw the others going through their shift, and it was just hard to drag in air, but nothing else. I was okay.”

  “Me too,” Yuri agreed. “How did you do that? It never happened like that before. Normally you just have to take it.”

  Domin had felt the same, as had Andrian and Mikhail. Danny had been changed to a panther, and I was sorry for that and not sure why it had happened. Crane thought that because I didn’t think of Danny as belonging to me yet, my power didn’t recognize him.

  Besides Logan and me, the only other humans in the room were the priest, Crane, Yuri, Domin, Mikhail, Andrian, and Taj. Everyone else, phocal, semel, maahes, yareah, sheseru, sylvan—it didn’t matter. They had all been turned to panthers.

  “You’re like the goddess Circe,” Crane said, chuckling. “You turn men to beasts.”

  But I didn’t want to be compared to a witch. I would have argued with him, but the priest was speaking.

  “It is unusual for us to judge a winner when the trial has not concluded, but as every panther in the pit was rendered immobile, pinned to the floor in pain, it could not go on. As a result, the semel of the tribe of Reshep may now challenge Logan Church to one-on-one combat to determine who will face the semel-aten.”

  I turned to look for Hiroshi and found him gasping, trying to rise from the fetal position he had obviously been locked in for several minutes. He was attempting to rise up off the ground. I saw, too, that there was only his yareah with him; the three other khatyu of his household were dead. On the other side, Gavin Medina, his yareah, and all in his household lay mutilated. It was why there were more panthers on us so fast; they had not been able to keep the marauders from their semel and were simply overrun and killed. I had no idea how quickly they had fallen, but it had to have been fast.

  A high-pitched scream turned my attention, and I saw that Hiroshi Narae had shifted back to his werepanther form, probably to give him strength, and was now attacking his own yareah. Yusuke was being held down by several panthers, other members of her tribe who had rushed to the pit, as her semel mauled her.

  “No!” I screamed, and Logan jolted in my arms, lifting his head.

  The panthers, Hiroshi’s sylvan and sheseru among them, stepped in front of their frenzied semel, shielding his actions from our eyes, even though we knew he was biting and scratching and tearing at his mate.

  “Yuri,” Logan roared, his voice carrying like it always did, the embodiment of power and strength even in his weakened state. “Bring me the yareah!”

  “Stay back!” the priest warned Yuri and Mikhail and Domin as they moved toward the cluster of the tribe of Reshep. “The semel will not kill his yareah, only mark her as apophi. We all saw her hesitate to attack Jin when she had the chance before he let loose with his power.”

  “No,” I rasped, struggling to rise, to go to her.

  “Listen,” my mate coughed out and pulled me back to look at his face. “He’s not killing her, Jin; he’s giving her the mark of apophi.”

  Marking her? “Why? She did not disgrace herself,” I whined, struggling to get free, so tired but needing to get to her, to s
ave her.

  “Stop,” he whispered. “You can’t do anything. This is the law. She had a chance to kill you, I saw it—she was close. I turned my head and saw her maybe twelve feet away, but her mate screamed and she ran back to defend him.”

  He blurred as my eyes filled with tears. “He’s marking her as a disgrace because she chose to protect him instead of kill me.”

  “He might have been able to take care of himself, and so he feels her duty was to attack and kill you before going to his aid.”

  “Domin!” I screamed for my maahes.

  “No!” the priest yelled over me from above. “Call no aid for her, Jin Rayne!”

  “You can’t,” Logan told me, tightening his grip on me. “Baby, you can’t. It’s his right, just as it would be mine to mark you.”

  My eyes locked on the shining amber ones in front of me. “You would never, ever mark me.”

  “Not like that,” he agreed, hands on my face. “But I’m not him.”

  I was exhausted, overwrought, and the soul-rending screams of the terrified and wounded and heartbroken yareah were eating me alive. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I began to shake. Logan was in pain, too, excruciating pain, but he grabbed me anyway, as he had his strength as a semel to tap into, and held me tight.

  The sound went on and on for what felt like hours but could not have been more than minutes. Members of my tribe stood hovering over me and Logan. The tribe of Khertet, having recovered from my turning them all to beasts, had returned, changed, clothed, and brought robes for the members of other tribes who were naked. Thus Danny was wrapped in a fur cloak.

  When I could catch my breath, Logan eased me from his lap, and Yuri put his hands on my shoulders as my semel shifted into panther form, and then man, panther, and finally back to man. Logan looked better after he shifted twice more, and as he flexed his muscles, he put his right hand on his left shoulder and stretched, repeating the action on the opposite side, I understood that everything that had been dislocated was healed and that he was well on his way to recovery. He needed food, though, meat, lots of protein, lots of water, and sleep.