Honored Vow

with the blow that this was the reason he had never even
    thought to ask Russ to carry on the Church line—he was weak because he
    hated his heritage. They had yelled some more, and finally Russ had told
    his father to go to hell, and Peter Church had stormed from the house. It
    had been quite a day.

    Honored Vow

    29

    I had followed Russ out the door, grabbed him, and turned him
    around to face me. After a heartbeat of time, he had dropped his bags and
    lunged at me, hugging me tight.
    “Promise to call me,” I told him. “E-mail me and let me know
    what’s going on.”
    “I will, Jin, but you can’t ever visit. I mean, I’m nothing, but you’re
    a reah, for crissakes, or a nekhene, or whatever the hell you are… but
    other werepanthers will know if you visit. I don’t want anyone to ever find
    out that my brother is semel-netjer. I’ll get sucked into all the bullshit all
    over again. I mean, I don’t think you even get how much I just want to be
    a regular guy, just some guy doing his thing in LA.”
    “No, I know.”
    “I hate the pit, I hate Mikhail. I—”
    “You hate Mikhail?” I teased him.
    “Yes! I hate them all! I hate Yuri! I hate Markel and Ivan, and I hate
    Logan, and I know you love him, but fuck! I hate gatherings, I hate the
    hunts, and I hate my father preaching the fucking law. Most of all, the fact
    that we can never have someone in our lives who is not a werepanther is
    fucked up. I want to meet a nice girl, marry her, and have very normal,
    very boring, very healthy, and very without-teeth-and-claws babies. I just
    want to be human.”
    “I know.” I smiled at him.
    “You get it ’cause you used to want that too.”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “So I’m gonna find a girl and never see my stupid family until they
    can accept me for who I am, and that’s it.”
    “Are you done?”
    He smiled at me. “I’ll really miss you.”
    I hugged him again, and he put his head down on my shoulder when
    he embraced me.
    “You always smell so good,” he growled, and I shoved him off me.
    “I’m not saying I wanna sleep with you or anything.”
    I nodded.
    “But see, I could get hurt for wising off to the mate of my brother.”
    “No, you couldn’t.”

    30

    Mary Calmes

    He grunted, threw the last of his bags in the front of his Audi, and
    drove away, the U-Haul trailer he was pulling following behind him. I had
    sent Crane to his new place a month later and got video of a very nice loft
    that he shared with the lovely Samantha, who was a computer
    programmer. They kissed for the camera, Crane had given me an eyebrow
    waggle, and that had been it. When Crane got home from his secret
    mission, we did not mention it to Logan; he reported that Russ looked
    happy, was happy, and that everything was going well. Russ didn’t come
    home for Christmas; they went to see Samantha’s family instead, but Eva
    and Delphine and Markel went to California for New Year’s and took
    enough food and goodies to feed an army. Samantha had apparently loved
    her gifts and loved Russ’s mother, sister, and brother-in-law. They stayed
    only three days. It was as long as Markel felt was safe. Russ had told them
    not to mention one word about werepanthers. And now, less than three
    weeks later, he was missing.
    “So, Jin, do you think you could come and help me find Russ? The
    police have no idea what to even do.”
    “Of course I will.”
    “Oh God, thank you so much. I mean, you and his mother and his
    sister, you guys are the only ones he talks about when he talks about
    home, you know? I would love to visit, but he won’t… and I am in this
    with him, he’s so beautiful and smart and funny and ohmygod, if I lose
    him, I—”
    “I’ll fix it, don’t worry.”
    “Oh, thank you.”
    “I’ll call you when I get there.”
    “Thank you, Jin,” she said and hung up.
    “I’m sorry, where exactly are you going?” Delphine scrutinized me.
    “Your brother’s in trouble.”
    “Which one?”
    “Ruslan.” I smirked at her.
    “Oh shit.”
    “Oh yes,” I groaned, getting out of bed, striding across the room to
    stand over her.
    She pointed at the screen. “It looks like you’ve got a Miguel Garza
    there in LA.”

    Honored Vow

    31

    “Garza? Not Dempsey?”
    “There’s a number here. I can call his sylvan.”
    “Forget it, just pack.”
    “Pack? Me?”
    “Yeah. You and I are going to LA.”
    “How?”
    “What do you mean how?”
    “I mean how do you plan to get off the