Honored Vow

with a shrug. “It was an accident.”
    “Come here.”
    Mikhail, who slept like the dead, finally woke up as I was crossing
    to Crane. I asked him to herd Danny up to his room, as Yuri was already
    striding across the room toward the front door.
    “Where are you going?”
    “I’ve got another hunt tonight,” he told me. “Christophe very kindly
    sent up six of his panthers who have never met me to help.”
    “And told them to do what?” I was concerned.
    “Kill me, if they could,” he told me from the door.
    “Yuri—”
    “Jin.” He was exasperated, and some of it was at me, but some was
    because of what he had almost confessed to me, and all of it together was
    making him snarly. “I need to practice, and I can’t do it with any of the
    panthers in our own tribe because Logan makes sure that everyone comes
    to our gatherings so no one hasn’t fuckin’ seen me.”
    And I knew that. The last gathering we had, over the long Memorial
    Day holiday, had seen more than four hundred people coming and going at
    different times. It was like a fair. There were booths for food and drinks—
    all free, of course—and dancing, and, of course, hunting. Yuri had led
    most of the hunts himself, and everyone knew the sheseru and sylvan of
    the tribe of Mafdet as they strolled the grounds. Normally, they traveled
    together, Yuri loud, the extrovert, and Mikhail reserved at his side, the
    introvert. Taj was there, too, always with a woman on each arm. I had

    Honored Vow

    127

    watched it all from my balcony, content to breathe in the smells, see
    everyone enjoying themselves, instead of trying to walk the grounds of my
    own home when it was open to the entire tribe.
    At the gathering before the Memorial Day one, in August, I had tried
    to take part, but I had been stopped every five feet, sometimes ten, by
    people who wanted to talk to me and touch me. And I had enjoyed seeing
    my tribe, wanted to know them all, see them all, but it had gotten to a
    point, after the discovery that I was a nekhene cat, that it was too much.
    Logan didn’t like me being constantly pawed, Mikhail didn’t like the
    grabbing at me, and then, on the final day of the gathering, on that
    Monday night, I got stuck in the middle of people pushing and shoving to
    reach me, and when my hair got yanked and my clothes torn, I lost my
    footing for just a minute and was pulled to the ground. Yuri’s yell had
    been frightening. Everyone froze, and he lifted me free, set me on my feet,
    and took my face in his hands to look at me. Even with me assuring him
    that I was fine, I was thrown over his back in the fireman carry and taken
    to the house. Logan had appeared when I got out of the shower.
    “No more.”
    I was towel-drying my hair, having changed into sweats and a T-
    shirt and warm wool socks that Delphine had made me. They were bright
    fuchsia and neon lime green. “So I don’t get to see my tribe anymore? I
    don’t get to attend gatherings?”
    “People can come to the house, stand in line if they want to see you,
    and offer their regards. We’ll make it so all the gatherings from now on
    are three days long, start them all on a Friday, but, Jin—I won’t have
    people so frantic to put their hands on you, so excited to see you, that they
    end up hurting you. I won’t.”
    I went to my armoire and opened the door, took a brush from the
    shelf, and walked it to Logan. Turning, I presented him with my long,
    thick black hair.
    “Why’re you being nice to me?”
    I turned to look at him over my shoulder. “Because I want you to
    change your mind. One bad encounter does not—”
    “It does,” he said, cutting me off, hand in my hair as he gently
    tugged with the paddle brush. “I won’t have you hurt, Jin, because your
    tribe loves you so much that they can’t stand to not touch you.”

    128

    Mary Calmes

    “A reah needs to be accessible.”
    “A reah stands at the side of their mate and doesn’t question him.”
    I scoffed and heard the answering groan.
    “How did I know that wasn’t gonna fly?”
    Standing there, letting him brush my hair, I closed my eyes, reveling
    in the ministrations of my mate. When he pushed my hair aside and I felt
    his lips press down onto my shoulder, I shivered hard.
    “I can’t have you hurt, Jin, I’ve failed you once already. I—”
    “You’ve never failed me,” I told him, turning in his arms to look up
    into his golden eyes. “I’m a powerful werepanther, Logan. I don’t