Honored Vow

I always did.
    “How’s Crane?”
    “No. You don’t get to ask about Crane because now you have—”
    “Logan, tell me about Crane!” I shouted, my voice a rasp as the tears
    blurred my vision.

    56

    Mary Calmes

    “Crane is home! I’m home! You’re the only fucking one who’s not
    home because you’re a petulant child who doesn’t ever listen to anyone
    but himself! I’m the law in this tribe, Jin, not you, for this very reason. A
    reah is emotion, a semel is logic, and we see before us a clear example of
    this. You are not allowed to treat my orders like suggestions! You listen to
    me, and if you can’t, I’ll make you. Do you understand?!”
    I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even speak.
    “If you were here, you could see Crane. If you were where you were
    supposed to be, you would not be in danger of being scourged yourself for
    what you did to Miguel Garza’s maahes! If anyone did what you did to
    Domin, I would kill them. Do you get it? And Delphine was sobbing on
    the phone to me. Markel should fight Yuri in the pit to atone for the
    disgrace, but because we’re family, he’s leaving it to me to punish you.
    Are you getting it? Is it sinking in?”
    Of course it was.
    “You made Russ’s decision so easy! He already asked for and
    received the status of duat from Miguel Garza. And do you know why the
    semel granted the request without question?”
    “I—”
    “Because he felt so sorry for him,” he roared at me. “The semel said
    that anyone that could do that—hurt not only strangers but his own
    people—was a fuckin’ monster! He was so excited to have you there on
    his land, a reah, the only nekhene cat in existence, and now he thinks
    you’re a horror!”
    And I was, wasn’t I?
    “So to keep Russ away from you, he granted his request. So now my
    brother, who I wanted to see, wanted to talk to before he made this life-
    changing decision, made a rash choice because of you! This was all
    because of you! It’s your fault that Russ left his family, no one else’s.”
    Because my family had been taken from me when I was sixteen,
    there wasn’t anything worse he could have said to me.
    “Do you realize that I gave my mandate as much for everyone else
    as for you? You are volatile right now. Your emotions are all over the
    place, and because you’re a reah, because you have the power of a
    nekhene in you, you are able to transmit all your pain and anger and rage
    outward at everyone else.”

    Honored Vow

    57

    I wanted to scream; it felt like my whole body was being squeezed in
    a vise.
    “Right now we—and I mean me, your family, and your tribe, all of
    us—need to be protected from you! I’m afraid for you to see Crane
    because he’s very delicate right now and if you bring all your heightened
    emotion and flood him with it—will that kill him?”
    “You won’t let me see Crane?” I asked, my voice not mine, garbled
    with tears, nasal and low.
    “Not right now.”
    “What did they do to him?”
    Silence.
    “Logan?”
    He took a breath. “They castrated him.”
    I dropped the phone and ran for the bathroom.

    58

    Mary Calmes

    Chapter Five

    THERE was nothing left in my stomach, and I was shaking by the time I
    picked my phone back up long minutes later. I couldn’t actually speak yet,
    but he heard me breathe.
    “Crane won’t shift back,” Logan told me. “It’s lucky that Martine
    sent his private jet for me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to bring
    him home.”
    Martine Soto was one of Logan’s oldest friends and the semel in
    Miami, in fact, the semel of the state of Florida. It wasn’t usual, and the
    man had many maahes, princes, who took orders from him, as well as
    many akers. His sylvan and sheseru also had many men who served under
    them. I had no idea how he did it, but he was very rich and very powerful.
    Logan had no desire to take care of that many cats.
    “I don’t know what he looks like in his human form; he won’t show
    me.”
    My friend was so traumatized that he could not allow himself to be
    vulnerable even for a moment.
    “When I arrived in Chicago I was met by Derek Jackson and Shahid
    Alon, who was sent by the phocal on behalf of the priest. Jin, a sepat has
    been called.”
    I couldn’t breathe.
    “Jin.” He cleared his throat. “The priest of Chae Rophon has called
    me as one of his six champions. I have been summoned to fight for the
    seat of semel-aten, master of Sobek.”
    Master of Sobek? The priest had