Honored Vow

was it.
    He was making himself comfortable with being an animal. I knew
    panthers who had done it purposely, shifted and then never returned, for
    whatever reason. I would not let that happen to Crane.
    “I know you,” I told him, walking slowly, carefully, into the room.
    And I was basically talking to myself since he was in his shifted form,
    soothing him with my voice, the words more for my benefit than his
    understanding. “You’ve always been so strong, and if you stay as you are,
    then no one will ever see that your body’s been mutilated.”
    His ears went flat and he hissed at me, mouth open, flashing his
    fangs.
    “But it’s only a mutilation to you,” I said firmly. “Logan told me
    what the doctor said, that for human men, sometimes as a result of what
    you’ve gone through there are side effects, bad ones, and for others they
    don’t affect them at all. Everyone’s different, Crane, everyone has a
    different system. Just because you’ve heard things doesn’t make them so.”
    Panthers other than semels and reahs, when they changed, were
    animals. But that was not to say that they did not know they could change
    back, that they stayed in their bestial form. And even though Crane was
    now, for all intents and purposes, a wild animal, he still had the familiarity
    with me that any creature would with a human who fed it or that they
    continually saw. He knew me but didn’t. It was dangerous to be in the
    room with him, as he was in his panther form and I was human, but the
    risk, for me, was of no consequence. I needed him back.
    “Shift,” I commanded him.

    90

    Mary Calmes

    He charged forward to the edge of the bed, growling, snarling; his
    hair rose, and it looked like he was going to rush across the floor and rip
    me to shreds.
    I went for the heart of his fear. “You’re scared that you won’t be
    able to get it up. You’re terrified that women will laugh when you take
    them to bed, tell you that you’re not a real man anymore, or half a man, or
    no man at all. I know you; I know exactly what you’re thinking.”
    He came at me, stopped a foot in front of me, and roared.
    “Shift!” I ordered.
    He ran back to the bed, halfway up the wall, and then crashed back
    down. The picture rattled and fell. Glass shattered; the lamp on the
    nightstand, bone china, was smashed into a hundred pieces, only the
    fixture intact, the light still on but rolling back and forth on the floor. In a
    frenzy of anger, he destroyed the down comforter and the sheets, left them
    in shreds along with the mattress underneath.
    “Shift!” I screamed at him.
    He ran at me and pounced, slammed me hard to the floor, and stood
    over me, heaving, his muzzle inches from my face, teeth bared, a low
    growl curling up from his throat.
    “They did this to you because of me, to hurt me—Crane!”
    He leaped away and crouched by the window, and slowly, he shifted
    back. When he was sitting there, shivering, I sat up.
    I was not prepared for the way his hair had been shorn off so close to
    his scalp, the skin dug into in places, leaving matted, bloody patches. To
    see the black eye, the torn lip, and the bruises that mottled the left side of
    his face brought hot tears welling up in my eyes. His hands were over his
    genitals, covering them so I couldn’t see.
    “My father did this to me,” he said, and his voice was not his, broken
    and rusty instead. “And I know what you’re thinking, but he didn’t do it
    because of you; he did it because he hates me. He let them hold me down,
    he let them spread my legs, and then he took the knife himself and cut
    me.”
    I felt bile rise in my throat and fought back the urge to vomit with
    everything I had.

    Honored Vow

    91

    “He did it, and when it was done, he rolled me over and told
    everyone that I was no longer a man, no longer a panther, I was nothing at
    all. He left me bleeding to death on the table.”
    Trying to imagine it, I found that my brain could not dredge it up;
    there was just no way, the betrayal far worse than even my father’s of me.
    “All I could think to do was shift. It’s what you always do when
    you’re hurt, it’s what you always told me, and I could hear your voice in
    my head telling me to do it.”
    My voice.
    “And when I did, oh God, Jin, it hurt so bad, but when you shift, you
    know, you can feel your body heal; you can feel it use what it needs to fix
    itself.”
    But I didn’t. I had never known that sensation. Only those