Crucible of Fate

saw him start to run.
    Why doesn’t he shift so he can keep up? I wondered vaguely as my head whipped back when we moved from gentle lift to flight.
    It was probably what it was like to be carried off by a bird of prey. I couldn’t even fathom the speed as we blasted through the dark night toward the rock. At the last second, he dipped, and rock formations, huge stalactites and vugs were a blur as we passed them. A miscalculation, a wrong turn, and at the speed we were going, we’d be dead. It would be an instant death to be shattered on one of the walls of the enormous cave.
    I heard gunfire, but it was ricocheting off rock and not hitting us. They couldn’t see us, it was too dark, and we were moving too fast, only the roar of the nekhene cat giving us away.
    He released me when he dropped to the floor of the cavern, and the wings did what they had not done to my men—when he whirled around, he beheaded two of the men before the others hurled themselves into the dirt.
    “Defend me!” Hanif Tarek screamed, and I saw him then—the new semel.
    I stumbled forward with my ruined left arm and saw one of the men rise, rifle in hand, and aim for Jin.
    Kicking hard, I caught him in the side of the head. He went down fast and I stumbled forward to reach Tarek.
    “No!” he screamed, and I saw that it wasn’t Jin he was terrified of, but me, bleeding and broken, lurching toward him.
    He lifted a pistol.
    “Where is my mate?” I yelled.
    “I’m going to kill him. You’re vile and unclean, and it’s a desecration that you are the semel-aten.”
    I didn’t stop moving forward. “I’ll trade you your father for my mate,” I lied, because he wasn’t going to live to see the dawn. “Tell me where he is!”
    “Stop walking before I shoot you!”
    “Where is my mate?” I thundered as I heard wailing behind us. His men, except for the one I had kicked unconscious, were being eviscerated.
    “I’m going—”
    “Your father for my—”
    “Fool!” he rasped as he fired.
    Same shoulder, which was actually kind of lucky.
    “Blow it up!” he shrieked into a walkie-talkie I hadn’t realized he had.
    We were in further than I thought, so I heard the explosion, but there was no blowback.
    I slammed him up against the huge rock he stood in front of and closed my hand around his throat as I felt his gun press against my cheek.
    “The priest ordered me to kill your mate, semel-aten, and that I will do.”
    “Why?” I trembled with pain.
    “Only the priest had honor; he was all I could believe in. It was all a nightmare, my father, the things he let his sheseru do to me—all of it. But when I told the priest, he said once I killed your sekhem, once Yuri Kosa was dead, that it would all end… everything would end… all the horror… just end.”
    “Oh, it’s going to end,” I promised, and I shifted to my werepanther form, crushing his throat, his windpipe, in my grip.
    Everyone always forgot I was a semel. But no matter what they said, no matter how many times they all said kadish , impure, I wasn’t. My blood was of the line of Menhit, and I was a werepanther.
    Hanif Tarek had been surprised, and his last expression conveyed that. The priest had lied, convinced him I was not a true semel. But I was, and he paid for his mistake with his life. I had a moment of regret that the priest had known about the horrors at Ipis and had done nothing to stop them, but the semel’s son had chosen to put this faith in the wrong man.
    Releasing his body, I stumbled back and fell down, dropping to my knees in the dirt. Unable to hold onto my half-man/half-panther form, I cried out for Yuri before I stared at the nekhene cat.
    “Please,” I begged.
    He shuddered, and I saw that he, too, was losing strength. I had no idea what kind of wounds he’d sustained before Logan’s pheromones forced the change, and I was suddenly panicked even as I shivered.
    I was getting cold.
    “Jin,” I said, my voice cracking. “Yuri.”
    He was gone like he’d never been there. He left no trace of sound, nothing. And it struck me then why Logan hadn’t shifted earlier, because if he needed to bring Jin back, he had to be himself to do it. I envied him his reason in the midst of a nightmare.
    It was all my fault.
    Jin, forced into a new and frightening nekhene form, that was on me. Logan, outside, probably hoarse from yelling, petrified of losing his mate, that too was my fault. No one would be in Ipis if they hadn’t followed me.