Honored Vow
said,
putting the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Hi, uhm, is this Jin?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“Really?”
“Yes,” I said irritably.
“Sorry,” the woman said quickly. “I just, I think I thought with a
name like Jin that it was short for Ginger or something.”
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
“No, I’m sorry, I’m Samantha Ritter, uhm, you know, Russ’s
Samantha.”
Russ’s Samantha… Russ’s Samantha….
“He said he told you about me?”
He had told me… crap! “Oh.” I sat up in bed. For the first time in
days, some part of the world did not center around Crane Adams. “Yeah,
he told me. How are you, Samantha?”
Honored Vow
27
“I’m not that good, actually. A couple nights ago Russ didn’t come
home, and the police found his car this morning, and from the looks of
things, he was attacked by an animal.”
Fuck.
“I’ve been really trying not to freak out, and people have been
saying that he probably just went out with the guys and lost track of time,
but I checked with everyone, and nobody’s seen him, and, God, I just
don’t know.”
She was rambling because she was terrified, and I understood that.
“And I called the police, and now they’re not sure, because I think
they thought he was just out doing whatever, too, but that’s not like Russ,
he’s such a grown-up, you know, but now, with his car and everything, I
just…. And he said that if anything strange ever happened to him, which
makes no sense but it’s what he said—he told me to call you.”
“Okay. Uhm, Samantha did Russ happen to tell you where he was
going the night he didn’t come home?”
“Yeah, he was supposed to go see a man named Blake… Blake
Dempsey.”
I moved the phone away from my mouth and covered the receiver
with my hand. “Delph!”
She didn’t turn around.
“Delph!”
Nothing.
I pulled my sock off, balled it up, and beaned her in the back of the
head with it.
She turned from where she was looking outside and faced me. “What
the hell are you—”
“I need you,” I whispered, hissing at the end, pointing at my laptop
on my desk.
“What?” She was chuckling now because I was probably the least
scary thing she’d ever seen in her life. In bed, disheveled, barely awake—
baby bunnies were more frightening.
“Check the list on my desktop; see who the semel in LA is?”
“Semel in LA?” she asked, moving to the chair, pulling it out and
sitting down. “Why?”
“Just do it,” I whispered.
28
Mary Calmes
“Jin?”
“No, no, I’m here,” I said softly. “So, Samantha, do you have any
idea what Russ was supposed to be meeting Mr. Dempsey about?”
“No, he said he wouldn’t be long, had to clear up some
misunderstanding with a friend of ours, Jimmy Tamaki.”
I cleared my throat. “What did Jimmy do?”
“I don’t even know, it’s all sort of fuzzy, but as far as I can tell,
Jimmy and Russ went running together, and something changed, and they
wound up in some weird part of town and got into a fight. Which is so
weird because neither of them are, like, big he-man types, you know? I
mean Russ and Jimmy work at the same animation studio, for goodness’
sake!”
I understood exactly what had happened. Russ, who had never
wanted anything to do with the werepanther world, had, without meaning
to, found another werepanther, and the two of them had shifted and gone
for a run. Unfortunately, they had run in someone’s territory without
permission and were probably in very deep trouble as we spoke.
Before the feast of the valley in the summer, Russ had gone to Los
Angeles for a recruiting convention and finally landed a job at Ironwood
Studios, which was supposed to be the next Pixar. He was scared and
excited and most of all happy to be far away from his family. The thing
about Ruslan Church, the youngest of Logan’s brothers, was that he
absolutely hated being a werepanther. He felt the culture was barbaric and
that everyone should just do their very best never to shift and live their
lives as humans and nothing more.
And so he had moved to LA, against Logan’s express orders, and
had told him that he did not want Logan to speak to or in any way alert the
semel of Los Angeles to his presence there. He was not a semel, he was a
normal cat; no one would know unless he shifted, and he never, ever
would. When he had left, he had a shouting match with his father, and
Peter struck him
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