by Mary Calmes
“You can come live with us,” I offered, meaning every word. “You can be a part of our tribe and travel the world but know that you’ll always have a home to return to where you’ll be protected and cared for and loved.”
She put on a show of being shocked, eyes wide. “Live in your tribe? Live in sin with the rest of your disgusting panthers? Are you kidding?” Her voice rose. “You’re a monster, and you’ve polluted and disgraced everything you’ve ever touched. You should have killed yourself the moment you had your first thought to go to bed with a man. It’s vile and so are you, and the bond you share with your mate is a—”
“This is your final word,” I cut her off, shaking not with anger or fear but with the need to break down and sob. She was so angry and broken, and I wished, with every part that was reah, to heal her and protect her and that she would accept my offer of a place in my tribe.
She laughed at me as she exhaled heat and desire in a wave of throbbing, pulsing power.
There were gasps from above us as even the gallery was hit hard with her pheromones. Logan leaned back, looking at me, I knew, because my scent was changing. I pushed out of his grip, and he looked at me before his head swiveled fast to Amirah.
I saw the hair rise on his back, the ridge of fur that ran the length of his spine, as he bristled, became wary, ready to fight. She smelled like danger to him because I was his mate and she was threatening me. But if he killed her, he would be a panther forever just as if he slaughtered me or one of the other yareahs. I could not allow his desire to protect me to endanger him.
“Jin!”
I looked over at Yusuke, saw her dark eyes on me.
“You can’t save everyone. You want to, I know you do, reah, but sometimes,” she said, and her smile was full of aching sorrow as she glanced around the pit, “you can’t.”
“Protect your mate,” Teresa called over to me. “Honor those who love you, and guard your tribe, reah of the semel-netjer.”
My eyes flicked back to Amirah as she let out a call to Logan, to the other two semels, the lure of her scent and flesh drowning and overwhelming.
I exhaled and released the fury of the nekhene. It was a wild, untamed thing, but Logan Church had claimed it, held sway over it, and the energy that lived and breathed inside of me was curious about him, wanted to run with him, see if he was really strong enough to mate with. Amirah wanted to take the semel from the nekhene, and so the power blew out of me in a scalding jealous rage, exploded so that my back bowed and I gasped with the release of the ancient annihilating wrath.
If it had been two months ago, Amirah might have countered, but Crane had stripped the temptation from my power, taken away the lust and the seduction and the glamour and the allure. He could not curb my will—the essence itself was feral—but he had trained me not to call others, to instead keep them away. In the past, the energy shifted those not worthy to mate with me into panthers but still wrung sexual submission and climax from them. Now, it brought them to their knees and attacked. If I was allowed to shift, the power transformed me, worked through me, and assailed only those that I could physically touch. If I couldn’t shift, it blasted through whoever was in my way.
Amirah Fehr was threatening that which the nekhene found tempting, and trying to steal the true-mate of a reah. She screamed when the energy hit her.
She was strong, but my moment of regret, of nurturing reah, had passed, and now I saw her with my nekhene eyes, saw only a rival for the affection of the tantalizing creature beside me.
I stood, and Logan rolled forward to his knees, sitting back on his thighs, his legs folded under him. As I pushed my fingers through his hair, he leaned into my touch.
Amirah screamed, and I heard voices from the gallery yelling, screaming.
“She chose!” I heard the priest’s booming voice drown out all protests. “You heard him, we all heard him—he gave her a choice! Be silent!”
Amirah collapsed in a heap, and I watched as she whimpered and whined, her body moving inexorably through the change from human to cat. Only myself and members of the Shu had the ability to stop the shift once it began. It was a strength that only a handful of panthers in the world possessed. I realized for the millionth time that my blink-of-an-eye shift and the mastery over it had nothing to do with being a reah and everything to do with the gift of being a nekhene cat. I was both humbled and thankful and closed my eyes as the rise in power made me tremble hard as fury slammed through me.
Crane had taught me not to fight. Embrace the ebb and flow, back and forth, the roll of the wave. And even though I was afraid, because it would hurt if he was wrong, I relaxed and let the wall down inside and exhaled my fear.
The reah that I was rose up, and I felt it instantly, the change, and I was me again. The nekhene in me went still and quiet, because the fighting was unneeded, as the mate of the reah remained and all was well.
“This trial is concluded.” The priest’s voice boomed out, and when I slowly opened my eyes, I saw Amirah heaving, yowling, curled into a ball on the floor of the pit, shifted into a golden panther.
“All of you, on the wall!”
The snap of the whip of the sheseru of the tribe of Khertet moved my mate and the other two, and when Logan rose, his hand went tight around my neck, snapping my head back, lifting my eyes to his.
“Reah,” he rasped, the voice rough, hoarse, and more snarl than speech.
“Yes,” I managed to get out. “Yours.”
He growled low and menacing. “Mine.”
I nodded even as he gripped my throat. “Yes, my semel.”
He let go at the same minute he swept me up off my feet and crushed me against his broad, rock-solid chest. I was carried to the side of the pit, and he shoved me back into the wall as he, too, pressed his shoulders there.
The priest was in the pit moments later, twenty khatyu armed with traditional spears having run in before him, forming a phalanx of protection. Not that any of us had the energy to even lever off the wall.
“Remove the panthers; inform the tribe of Ptahket, Taweret, and Girdaht that the heir is now semel. Scourge the reah, and at nightfall stake her outside at the base of the mountain. These are my orders, carry out the law!” the priest shouted.
“Surely—”
“Silence!” he yelled at the semel-aten. “No one may question the law; even you, semel-aten, and Amirah lost all rights for claiming when she chose not to submit to the reah of the tribe of Mafdet but to instead engage him. That is an individual challenge, the rules for which are finite. To change in the pit without permission is scourging, followed by staking and death. This is maat.”
“Your Grace,” I called over to him.
He turned to look at me.
“I beg you to contact the tribe of Ariat, speak to their current semel. Let him decide if he wants Amirah staked or sent to him to answer for the crimes against his house.”
“Jin, the rules are—”
“She would still be staked, perhaps, just not this night. Find out what he wants; the justice is owed to the tribe.”
“Agreed,” he said, turning to Jamal. “See it done and speak to them that only on the word of the reah of the semel-netjer is this choice given to them.”
We were all silent then, waiting.
“The semels will now return to their quarters until they are called for the tomorrow’s trial of their sheserus.”
More khatyu filed in, the priest obviously expecting the semels to resist being put back in their boxes.
They did.
When Dval Quach came for Logan, he placed iron shackles on his wrists and ankles. All his khatyu looked at me warily, feeling the hot, prickly power that swirled around me like stinging desert wind. Logan didn’t want to be restrained, but because I was calm, so was he. When they began leading him toward the grate, only then did he balk, struggling to see me, calling with a stuttering, whining purr. I moved forward and he stopped, and I saw the bullwhip then in the sheseru of Khertet’
s hand.
“No, please,” I begged him, moving between him and Logan.
“He’s resisting, reah, he will be flogged.”
“He just doesn’t understand,” I said, taking hold of the shackles, leading Logan toward the gate.
Yusuke and Teresa both led their mates as well, and when we reached the open door, where I couldn’t go, I reached up and put my hands on Logan’s face.
“I love you and I’ll see you in the morning, alright? You go eat something and sleep and wait to see me, okay?”
He leaned forward and ran his chin over the top of my head, inhaling me deeply before he bent and licked up the side of my neck.
Suddenly it was me who needed calming. I leaped at him, not caring that the robe fell away and I was naked, clutching at him, arms and legs holding tight.
Claws dug into my buttocks; teeth grazed the cord in my throat as he purred loudly. I knew then that with each day, the parting would be worse, would get harder for both of us, and that that, too, was part of the test. It was a horrible thing, parting mates that mentally, physically, chemically, and emotionally were supposed to be together. Nothing intuitive about forced separation. It was obscene, and the nekhene in me didn’t like it.
“Jin,” came Crane’s call.
I lifted my head, and Logan snarled loudly.
“No, no,” Crane soothed him, and I had no idea why he was in the pit. He went down on hands and knees and let his head drop down between his shoulder blades.
Logan walked back over to him, knelt with my weight in his arms, and ran his nose up the back of Crane’s neck. And my best friend smelled like him, and me, and the others, and they were all scents Logan knew. When Crane sat up and then back on his knees, Logan knelt and put me in his arms. He then nuzzled my hair, gave me a low growl, rose quickly, and walked without a backward glance to the grate.
After he was gone from sight, I turned to look at my friend’s face. “How did you know?”
Crane took off his parka and wrapped me in it, since I was naked and starting to shiver. “He’s a semel, Jin, and since he claimed you, he’s not a wild creature anymore, he’s a werepanther. He gets that you’re his, and he wasn’t about to leave you in here unguarded.”
“He could have killed you.”
I got an indulgent smile. “I smell like you, Jin, and since he knows that you belong to him and that I belong to you—he’s okay with leaving you with me to care for.”
“Shit, Crane, when did you start seeing things so different?” I said, slipping out of his arms to stand up.
He rose beside me. “When you took a chance on becoming a reah,” he told me, signaling for the others to come close.
“Did you get permission to be down here?”
“It’s over,” he told me, tipping his head at Yusuke and Teresa, who had both been engulfed by members of their entourage. “Now we gotta get you showered and warm.”
“Yes, please,” I said as my legs went out from under me.
And I didn’t want to lean on Crane, because he was still not 100 percent healed himself.
“Jin.”
I turned to look at him.
“I’m good,” he said, nodding.
And all the emotion came flooding out of me as he shook his head before he grabbed me. As I felt the others around us, crushing us, pressing, holding tight, I gave up and let them care for me. For once.
Chapter Fourteen
IT WAS horrible. The tribe of Ariat, though very appreciative of my offer, wanted Amirah Fehr dead right then. It made sense that Orso Bataar owned an Iridium satellite phone, otherwise he would be truly out of touch with the rest of the werepanther world. His Internet connection was of similar origin but it hardly mattered to me. Only the judgment mattered. The tribe of Ariat didn’t want to see Amirah ever again, at least not alive. The semel, Terrance McCord’s brother, Angel McCord, wanted a picture of what the reah looked like in the morning after all her blood had run from her body and the animals had been at her.
I found the practice of staking utterly vile and cruel and obscene. But I had done all I could, tried to delay and give her that hope. But in the end, Dval Quach ripped a hole in her side, and he and his khatyu took her outside in the sub-zero temperature and left her, screaming her pain into the howling wind. The only comfort was that there were no animals around at all, and we all knew she was going to freeze to death before long.
Inside the ger, I lay between Crane and Yuri, shivering with horror and cold. Staking went against every reah instinct I had.
“Get your ass up and let’s go sit by the stove and talk,” Crane told me after an hour of trying to get me to close my eyes.
Once I was there, all the others joined us.
Mikhail boiled water for tea, and we sat there huddled together, no one saying a word.
“What the hell are you all doing?” Domin asked as he came in from outside, shaking snow from his hair and beard.
I was glad that he had been allowed to join us; every maahes was reunited with his tribe now that the sepat had officially begun.
“Jin’s sad about Amirah,” Crane told him.
Domin crossed the felt-covered floor to me and squatted down. “What were your options, my reah?”
“I know that logically, I—”
“Jin,” he cut me off. “She took away your choices. And yeah, maybe if we’d have gotten hold of her, us, your tribe, maybe we could have healed her, but, Jin… how things stood in that pit—it was her or you, and if Logan had reached her, he would have killed her. There was no lust riding him, only fury, and if he had eviscerated her, then he would have been next, and then you. I know you feel like shit right now, but I want you and Logan alive more than I wanted Amirah Fehr to keep breathing.”
I nodded.
“I promise to try and save everyone else I can from now on, okay?”
“Yes.” I smiled at him.
He rose, and my eyes followed him until my head was tipped back so I could still hold his gaze. “And so you know, she’s dead already. It didn’t take long. The cold is merciful. If this was summer, she would have been mauled and mutilated. Everything happens for a reason, Jin, you gotta believe that.”
I put my head in my hands and cried silently for the only other reah I had ever heard of, and Domin’s fingers in my hair were comforting.
“I have an idea.”
Slowly, I lifted my head to look at my maahes.
“Let’s go for a run. The speed and our fur will protect us. C’mon, see if you and Taj can outrun me.”
Taj scoffed and Domin laughed, and Yuri was already stripping as Mikhail stood up to join him.
“I’ll stay here.” Crane yawned, giving me his lopsided grin. “And feed the stove.”
“Me too,” Danny told us, annoyed with all of us for reasons I didn’t understand.
“Oh fuck no,” Crane groused at him. “You go with them.”
“Agreed,” Andrian told him. “I’ll keep Crane company, the rest of you get the hell out.”
So all of us except Crane and Andrian shot out the door of the ger and flew out into the deep snow. It was like running into a wall of icy wind for a moment, until I let myself stop thinking and just feel. The others were already running, sprinting across the icy terrain, and when I joined them, streaking by, only Taj catching me, I felt the thrill of being in my panther form.
The only thing that compared to running, which as fast as I moved across the ground felt more like flying, was being in bed with Logan Church. I was as addicted to being under the man as I was to the freedom of shifting into the animal that lived curled around my heart.
I ran on and on, and when Taj and I were joined by others, I knew from the scent that I was looking at Jamal Hassan, the phocal of the Shu, the protector of the priest of Chae Rophon. The Shu, the fastest, strongest cats in the world, were the only ones who could match my speed. It was a pleasure to have company to run with, and I felt the singing joy infuse my entire being.
&
nbsp; We climbed so high we could see the whole valley stretched out below us. There was no way to see where earth stopped and heaven began, and the midnight-blue sky, the black clouds, the diamond-cut snow, were breathtaking. I shifted fast, a man again atop the precipice, hair blowing in the wailing wind, head back, eyes closed, arms outstretched; I felt like I could fly. Stretching my arms wide, I jumped.
I soared through the air, and as I neared the ground, I shifted so I could turn the falling dive into a leap and touch the snow. I got my feet under me and bolted forward, and the surge of speed took the velocity and channeled it so I was again streaking across the valley floor. No one had followed, could follow. I was the only nekhene cat in existence, and while that should have been sobering and sad, I belonged to my mate and my tribe, and so I could never be unclaimed and float away.
But I didn’t want to be alone, so I ran sideways and leaped high, landing in the powder, falling into it and going still. There was only the wind and the blue sky and the snowflakes that fell like tiny diamonds, each sparkling in the light. The others appeared beside me after long minutes, and Jamal, because he was the only one who could shift fast enough not to freeze in the snow, even stronger than Taj, stood for a second to say that I was breathtaking.
I shifted, naked as he was, and smiled at him.
“Your speed is phenomenal, Jin,” he yelled at me over the wind. “You might see one day if you could run over water—I bet you could.”
I had been wondering about that myself but would never confess to it.
Jamal shifted and so did I before we both froze, and we took off back toward the ger. As I charged back toward it, I saw Crane open the front door and lean out looking for me.
He smiled when he saw me, and I saw a shadow move at the same time. Something was close to him, and I couldn’t reach him. I was too far away.
I couldn’t save him. I wouldn’t be there.
Again.