Crucible of Fate

deathly dark and cold as he began stripping.
    Both men rose and stumbled away, Crane’s father jostling the table and knocking it over, Jin’s father walking backward until he hit the far wall.
    “You mean to kill us,” Mitchell choked out.
    “I mean to tear you to pieces and then have you burned with the nightly trash,” I stated gamely, smirking at the end.
    “You cannot! We need burial rites and to be—”
    “I’m the semel-aten.” I shrugged as Yuri finished his shift and stood close to me, a massive golden panther bristling with power and fury. “I can do as I please.”
    “This is inhumane!”
    Yuri’s roar filled the room before he launched himself at Nelson. Man and panther flipped over the love seat together, hitting the floor hard on the other side. The screams came fast, bloodcurdling and loud.
    Mitchell began to shriek as a thick splatter of blood washed the curtains.
    “It’s sad,” I said over Yuri’s snarling as Nelson’s screaming subsided to wrenching, sobbing whimpering, and I stretched out my hand, the long razor-sharp claws replacing my fingers as I finished the movement. “That only here, now, at the end, will you understand the error of your ways, father of the only nekhene cat in existence.”
    “I will go to my death believing him to be an abomination.”
    “That is your right,” I said, advancing on him. “But I will no longer have to hear it and neither will he. Let us start with your tongue.”
    “You’re a monster !” He screamed his very last word.
    But I knew who the real monster was.

Chapter 1

     
    I T MADE no sense, and they were all tired of hearing me ask the same questions. But until I had an answer I understood, how was I supposed to simply accept it?
    “What did your father tell you when you became a semel?” I inquired of every single tribe leader who visited Sobek.
    They all regarded me oddly, the last one being Maroz Amadu of the tribe of Serabit from Giza. He was confused.
    Yuri translated. “Specifically, he wants to know what would happen to you if you failed as a semel. Where would the people in your territory go for help, if, let’s say, you decided that two panthers of different races couldn’t be married in your territory.”
    “But that’s absurd,” he said to Yuri. “It doesn’t matter who you—”
    “The sekhem of the semel-aten is hypothesizing,” his yareah, Hesi Amadu, remarked.
    Apparently we needed our mates to do the talking for us.
    “Oh, I see.” He plastered on a smile. “Well, I was told that if I was not a good ruler, that the panthers in my tribe could contact the semel-aten, and he would hear the case against me and pass judgment.”
    “Exactly.” I pointed at him, then whirled around to face Yuri. “You see?”
    He crossed his thickly muscled arms across his wide, bulky chest and fixed me with a stare that made me question my sanity. “What do I see?”
    “I was a bad semel.”
    “‘Was’. Past tense. What does—”
    “So does that mean no one ever reported me to Ammon El Masry when he was semel-aten? That seems odd, doesn’t it?”
    “I don’t know. How would I know?”
    “And therein lies my question.”
    There was a soft clearing of a throat behind me.
    Pivoting, I found Maroz and his mate still there. “May we go to the grand salon now, my lord? We’re both famished.”
    “Oh yeah, go ahead,” I said, waving them away. “Sorry.”
    Maroz grabbed his mate by the hand and tugged her away from me quickly. They all ended up doing that, concerned about my state of mind, I was certain.
    “Okay, so what now?” Yuri asked, stepping in front of me.
    “It’s what I was told as a new semel, what Logan was, what we all were.”
    “That the semel-aten would come get you if you were bad,” Yuri paraphrased. “Right? Like the bogeyman?”
    “Yeah. And if that’s true, if millions of panthers are supposed to be calling me or e-mailing me and complaining—where is it?”
    “What? You’re asking if there’s, like, a command center or something for all this correspondence?”
    “That’s exactly what I’m asking. I mean, who checks to make sure no panther is ever seen? Who spins an attack? Who basically has kept werepanthers off human radar for centuries?”
    His eyes narrowed as he regarded me.
    “So maybe whoever it is started small and now covers the entire world.”
    “You’re nuts. You know that, right?”
    “Yuri, there has to be a bigger body, a level up from semel-aten, like a