by Mary Calmes
“I got my portable DVD player fired up to watch The Hangover, figured we could all use the laugh, ya know?”
So I sat there in a heap with the others, and they were all laughing as I used Crane’s thigh for a pillow and he stroked my hair as I passed out. It was the only good part of the whole shitty day.
CHULUUN had come looking for Yuri, and when Crane told him that he was not there, he smiled knowingly and trudged back the way he had come, toward the rock-carved home of his semel.
“Mikhail talked to me.”
I rolled my head on the pillow to look at Danny.
“You were right.”
“I didn’t need to be.”
“I know.”
“Hero worship is okay, and I get thinking Mikhail is amazing, because he is.”
He nodded. “I’ve just been so scared, Jin, and I’m grasping at everyone, Mikhail, Yuri, even Logan, to try and make me safe.”
“Well, that actually is your semel’s job, you know, to keep you safe.”
“But I’ve been so frantic to find a mate and thinking that if it couldn’t be Mikhail, then it should be Yuri, because he actually is gay—”
“Bi,” I corrected. “But since we both have eyes, you know as well as I do that the only thing Yuri really is, is into Domin.”
He grinned at me. “Yeah.”
“So what’s your plan now?”
“I have a lot of things I wanna do, and I think that I should do them before I think about finding a mate.”
“Like what?”
“Going to school, for one,” he said, smiling at me, “but I’m gonna need to talk to you and Logan about a loan so I can start.”
“College is a good plan,” I assured him. “And we can make that happen.”
“Thank you, Jin.”
“Of course. My father took so much time grooming you to be a sylvan that he forgot to let you live at all.”
He didn’t argue.
THE following morning Mikhail and I were summoned alone to the pit when it was still dark out. Dval Quach came with some of his khatyu to summon us, and they were careful and quiet, which I didn’t like. The fact that it was almost like we were sneaking out made me wary. Why was it a secret that we were leaving?
When we reached the pit, I found that each sylvan was there with only the mate of their semel. I understood when I was stripped, along with Teresa and Yusuke, and secured to a saltire cross, that Mikhail’s answers were more important to me than I had originally thought. The semels were shackled to the wall in front of the cross so that I could see Logan and he could see me, but only he could see Mikhail. My sylvan stood behind me. Apparently the semel was to be able to see the face of their mate when they took a lick of the lash. It would not have been as frightening if not for the stipulation that went along with every test: there was no shifting in the pit. We were not allowed to heal the damage until the trial of law was concluded.
It was more frightening than I thought it would be, being spread-eagled on the cross, wrists and ankles immovable, waiting, anticipating the feel of the whip on my skin.
Once the trial officially began, before the first question was asked, the gallery was allowed in.
There were rules for the spectators. If they made a noise, they were dismissed. If they spoke to one another, they were dismissed. If the name of the mate was yelled out, or the sylvan, or the semel, they were dismissed. There was to be silence so that the questions could be heard, the person who answered quickly identified, and the crack of the whip audible.
What went through my mind was that it was like Jeopardy if it had been played back in Roman times with gladiators. Basically, the priest asked a question, and the mate of the semel of whichever sylvan answered first and correctly avoided the sting of the lash. The other two were flogged for their sylvans not being the one who answered. If the sylvan took a chance and answered wrong, the mate got two strikes instead of just one. I took a deep breath as I realized how long the day was going to be.
The sylvan had to yell out the name of their semel to be called on, and that, too, was designed to drive their leader right out of their mind. The mate took a lash, or didn’t, right after their semel’s name was called. I could only imagine the therapy we were all going to need once the sepat concluded.
The sylvan was allowed to speak to the mate of their leader before the trial began. When Mikhail walked around in front of me, I realized how pained he looked.
“Listen,” I told him. “There’s no way to avoid me getting hit. Even if you know all the answers, someone will get picked before you, and I’m gonna get hit. Remember that I can heal whatever damage I take, I’ve come back from more than this, Mikhail, you know I have. This trial is just like Yuri’s: it’s not about winning, it’s just about enduring. We just have to make it through until it concludes. That’s all.”
He nodded, tight-lipped, his eyes lifting to the people above us sitting around the edge.
“Look at me.”
His eyes returned to my face.
“Please don’t beat yourself up about this.”
He gave me a quick nod before he heeded the priest’s order and slowly moved out of my range of vision. I took a breath and the questions began.
The first lash of the whip took my breath away before it felt as though my back was sliced open with a razor blade and alcohol was poured on it. I absorbed it, breathed through it even as Logan’s wail of pain tore through me. The sound of his anger, frustration and helplessness, was worse than anything else… at least at first. By the tenth lash, Logan’s torture, I was sorry to say, was secondary. Each lick of pain was indescribable; I could feel the blood running down my back, and the sting had blossomed from white-hot to aching to screaming, tensing agony.
I could see Logan through blurry tear-filled eyes, and even though I still hadn’t made a sound, Logan made enough for the both of us. Each snap of the whip that hit me sent a jolt of fear and anger and fury through the man. He looked like he had been electrocuted.
Every part of me screamed to shift, to make the horror stop, free Logan, and annihilate the man beating me. It made no sense to remain still and do nothing.
I didn’t move. I lost track of the strokes.
There was no food or water, and still the day wore on. There was the crack of the whip and more questions, and time slowed, dragged, and finally, simply stopped. And then exploded all at once in red and white, and each time it took a little longer to come back, swim up through an ocean of pressing, smothering oblivion until I was again looking into the raw and ragged eyes of my mate.
The hatred in him was palpable. If he got loose, even for a second, the man flogging me was dead. When my legs finally went out on me, the shackles cut into my wrists as I hung there on the cross. It was undignified and I felt weak and unmanly, like I should have held myself up, but I was drenched in blood, muscle and bone feeling as though they were exposed, and each new fissure that opened in my flesh caused more shivering.
My tongue was swollen in my mouth; my head was pounding with dull, aching, relentless pain, and I could not control the retching caused by the nausea. I was in shock, and my body was shutting down with the need to eat and drink and shift.
“The trial of law is now concluded.”
It took long minutes for the words to register, and I realized I was tensed and waiting for the next stroke of the lash that was not coming. I found that I could not unclench my body.
When I felt hands on me, I looked up at Mikhail. He was flecked with blood, covered in sweat and dirt, and his eyes were dead.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to see the hurt there on him, in his gaze, but I couldn’t fix it right that second. I couldn’t even stand. I would have reached for him, but my arms would do nothing but hang useless at my sides.
“It’s over, Jin,” he told me.
I was a panther a second later, rolling, twisting, clawing free of the restraints. There were gasps as I lifted my head and surveyed the pit.
Teresa Medina was on the ground, panting, her hair soaked with sweat, looking more dead than alive.
Yusuke Narae was shifting, but not so fast that I couldn’t see her ruined flesh. We had all been horribly beaten. I walked stiffly over to Yusuke and stood over her as she finished. I helped her out of her restraints, shredded them with my claws to free her. When I bent my nose to hers, she touched it with hers. It was dry and hot, and that was dangerous. She needed water to cool her feverish temperature. I purred, and it calmed her, allowing her shift to quicken. Once she was lying beneath me, all sleek golden panther, she rose and walked with me to Teresa.
The yareah of the tribe of Nebthet was not moving. She had been released and laid on the ground, but her chest was not rising and falling. When I called to her, it took long minutes for her eyes to flutter open and focus. She looked like she was hovering on the verge of death, her skin ashen, covered in sweat, as she began to shiver.
I called again, a warning, and she tensed before I sent my pheromones hurtling into her.
The spasm made it look like her body had been snapped in half before she convulsed with the shift. Others tried to close in on us, my tribe, Yusuke’s, even Teresa’s, but Yusuke’s warning snarl, her bristling stance, hair raised, made everyone keep their distance.
She was all panther; there was no yareah in there at the moment, just animal if anyone was stupid enough to test her.
“They’re out of their minds with pain,” the priest told the room. “Everyone stand back.”
It took long, exhausting minutes, but when Teresa, too, was beside me, I bolted for the door with the two yareahs close behind me.
I could smell the water and the meat, and so led them to it.
It was toward the entrance of the semel’s home, in the long hall, three enormous platters of raw meat and a trough of fresh mountain-stream water.
I drank first, gulped down liquid until my tongue no longer felt as though it were cracking in my mouth. Yusuke did the same; Teresa ate first. We switched then, us eating, Teresa drinking. And the three of us didn’t move, just tore through the meat, drank and drank and drank, filling ourselves, until each one of us could breathe.
I shifted then, back to man, and then back to panther, and I watched the others look at me, Yusuke shifting twice in the time it took me to do ten, Teresa only once. By the fifteenth time, the skin on my back was tender but new. On her fourth shift, Yusuke no longer had open, seeping welts on her skin, but scabs. Teresa was having more trouble.
Finally, I returned to panther form and lay down. Yusuke came forward, head down, and I gave her the growl of welcome. She was instantly curled into my side, tail wrapped around her as we watched Teresa eat. She had to stop when she started retching, and I lifted my head and called her. She was eating and drinking too much, and because she wasn’t shifting, her body wasn’t metabolizing, and she was going to be sick.
She moved fast, padding over to me, came forward with her head lowered until I began to purr, and then she dropped down on the other side of me, her head sliding over my paws so she could rest her head close to me. My scent, the heat rolling off me, both were needed, wanted, and seconds later, feeling safe, sated, I heard her take a last shuddering breath before she passed out.
Yusuke pushed against me on the other side, rubbing her cheek on my shoulder, wiping her scent all over me, and then ran her nose back through her own smell now on my fur. She trembled in pleasure before she, too, let out a huff of air and surrendered to unconsciousness. Normally I liked only Logan this tight against me, but at that moment, being sandwiched between the two panthers was finally chasing the cold from my limbs.
The final trial seemed far away.
Chapter Fifteen
THE hand stroking my fur, gently scratching my ears and under my chin, felt good, and when I let my eyes drift open, I found Crane.
“Hey, you,” he said, smiling at me. “How ya feelin’?”
I lifted my head to look at him and found that the two yareahs were gone and only I was there, alone in the dirt in the cold, dark, cavernous hall.
“You think you wanna come back to our quarters with me? Can you stand?”
When I rose, I found that my muscles were sore but solid. I noticed, too, that he was there with everyone I had brought with me.
Mikhail was beside Crane, down on one knee, studying me. “You were so brave, Jin, and I’m so sorry that I couldn’t—”
“You did everything you could,” Danny said, cutting him off, moving forward, turning from my sylvan to look at me. “If the others hadn’t chimed in with shit they didn’t know, you would have never taken one lash, Jin.”
I waited.
“Danny helped,” Mikhail said, his hand in the younger man’s hair. “Each time I looked up at him, I remembered something he had said.” He looked into Danny’s face. “You helped me save my reah and my semel. I’ll never forget this.”
Danny nodded, unable to speak, only reaching up to wrap his fingers around Mikhail’s wrist. He never wanted the attention to end, of that I was sure.
“Jin.”
I turned my head, and there was Yuri, smiling softly.
“Can I carry you back to the ger? I would love to if you let me.”
I shook my head, looking for Domin. When I saw him, I shifted fast, startling Andrian and Danny as I walked the few feet to stand before my maahes.
“Is Logan alright?”
He was a study in contrasts: his awe at my shift, his concern for Logan, the furrow of his brows as he delivered bad news. “Jin, Logan needs to shift soon, alright? He was really close to it earlier, and if he had….”
I knew what would have happened if he had: he would have been executed in front of my eyes.
“Watching you take those lashes was more than he could bear.”
I nodded, turned, and shifted. Padding around Domin, I headed toward the entrance of the hall toward the enormous cave opening.
“Wait.”
I turned and looked over my shoulder and saw Taj stripping out of his clothes.
“I’ll go with you, my reah; just don’t outrun me tonight.”
As I waited, I saw how uneasy I was making everyone. They were all worried about me, even scared. I was usually more communicative; that I couldn’t be was frightening.
Once Taj joined me, we ran out into the icy wind and swirling snow together.
I RAN leisurely and enjoyed being free instead of lashed to a post. Once we got back, I slipped into the ger in my panther form, rushing to the area by the stove and lying down. When Danny came close, I got up and moved to the other side, away from him.
“What did I do?” Danny asked Mikhail when he called him over to him.
“Nothing, he’s just in pain, leave him alone,” my sylvan answered from where he was sitting, crossed-legged, off to one side of the sleeping area.
“I thought the shift healed him?”
“Not all of it, and not the inside.”
He rose and walked back over to my sylvan, sitting close, his hand on Mikhail’s thigh as he looked at him.
“You have to understand that it’s different for Jin and Logan to be apart than it would be for you and your mate.”
“I know that the bond between—”
“It’s supposed to be this beautiful thing, right? But what they don’t tell you is that the bond between true-mates is rough if they’re separated, if one of them dies…. Right now Logan is slowly going out of his mind. He can see Jin, smell him, even taste his scent, but he’s not allowed to touch him or talk to him. It’s like sensory deprivation.”
“Oh.” Danny looked over at me sadly.
“You don’t know, but Jin—he needs Logan too. His tension level is just rising every day, it’s continual, and pretty soon the running and all the things he’s doing to externally defuse it aren’t going to work. We need them back together before one of them caves.”
Danny went very still. “Who do you think it will be? Jin or—”<
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“Logan,” Mikhail assured him. “If this sepat goes on even one more day—he’s ready to break, and if he does, the tribe is done, but it won’t matter to him anymore, because for a moment, before he’s destroyed, he’ll have his mate.”
“Shit, it’s cold,” Crane groused as he came in, the others trailing behind him.
I watched them all shed their jackets and boots, watched Yuri feed the stove coal and Domin sit down, rubbing his hands together.
“Come here,” he said, gesturing to me. “I wanna see you.”
I stayed where I was, eyes narrowed.
“Please, Jin.”
But I couldn’t move. Everything hurt, inside and out. I was raw and vulnerable, and the only man in existence that I needed was my mate.
“Jin,” Yuri said, soothing me with his voice, “you want to lie down by me?”
I got to my feet and moved away, toward the door. My panic started to rise, flickering low but constant.
“Shit,” Taj said under his breath, turning to Yuri. “Make him heed you, sheseru.”
“Jin,” he called me. “Come.”
Fuck. Him. I was not a dog.
“Just… everybody,” Crane grumbled, clearly annoyed, flopping down, lying on his side, shivering hard. “Fuck, I’m freezing.”
I was across the room to him so fast it could not be followed by the naked eye, and the catches of breath, gasps, and whispers told me that I was scaring the hell out of everybody. I didn’t belong with them inside. Nekhene cats belonged—
“Oh, that’s better, huh?” Crane yawned, not touching me, just lying close, stretching languidly. “Hey, remember that time in Yuma when you fell out of that tree? Badass stealthy panther, my ass,” he scoffed, chuckling.
What? Why was he—
“Or when we were supposed to be all stalkery when we were working as detectives in Nashville, and you fell through the skylight into that guy’s apartment?” He was laughing now.