Honored Vow

say beside me. “Crane still has some things
    here for when he visits, so I’ll pack that up for him too, alright?”
    Another nod.
    “Okay,” she said softly before she walked away.
    My chest hurt because my heart ached, and holding in the sobs when
    I wanted to break down and bawl was making breathing difficult.
    Yuri was the only one besides Logan brave enough to get close to
    me and stay, and though the man could never be called perceptive,
    because he was a sheseru and I was a reah, our bond, hardwired into both
    of us, sometimes inexplicably verged on psychic.

    18

    Mary Calmes

    “So you don’t have to leave the house, Koren, as Logan’s heir, will
    attend any events in your stead, standing at Domin’s side as he heads the
    tribe in our semel’s absence.”
    I knew who did what; I didn’t have to be told.
    “Although with Domin and Koren not speaking, it will be
    uncomfortable, I’m sure.”
    I was quiet even though I knew, like we all did, where precisely the
    blame fell for the fallout.
    We had all anticipated a mating ceremony. I thought that when we
    returned from the feast of the valley in Sobek in late June that sometime in
    July, August at the latest, Domin and Koren would exchange vows. But
    something had changed when we got back, and Peter, Logan’s father, who
    had arrived a week before us, could shed no light on the mystery. All I
    could see, all that either man would say, was that due to the fact that
    Koren was heir to the tribe of Mafdet, they needed time to reevaluate the
    true nature of their relationship.
    “What?” Delphine, Logan’s sister, had been as confused as I was.
    When Koren brought the first of many women home, bringing them
    for the evening to meet his parents and his brother, the semel-netjer, I
    started to understand.
    In October, right before Halloween, Delphine mated with Markel
    Kovac, who had at one time been the sheseru of the now-defunct tribe of
    Menhit. He had once been to Domin what Yuri was to Logan. The
    ceremony was beautiful, the feast lasted three days, and as a gift, Logan
    knocked out two walls on the second floor toward the back to give the
    newlyweds what amounted to an enormous studio apartment within the
    house. They loved it, the privacy of being alone with the closeness of
    family. Panthers needed the community of others like them. Solitary was
    not the way for us to live.
    When Crane and I had been traveling for years, just the two of us,
    from place to place, the reason had been me. As a reah, I had been much
    sought after, but once I turned a semel down, when they realized they
    were not my mate, things normally turned ugly. They wanted to keep me. I
    wanted to leave. More than once I had been in a fight for my life with
    someone who felt, in the frenzy of the moment, that they loved me. The
    process was too hard to keep repeating, so Crane and I had steered clear of
    all werepanthers, and normally, as soon as we became aware of any, we

    Honored Vow

    19

    were gone. Everything had changed, though, the night I met Logan
    Church. His need had never been his alone. As soon as I saw him, it had
    been mine as well.
    After we rang in the New Year earlier in the month, I had finally
    cornered Koren about what had happened. He didn’t look happy to me,
    and Domin didn’t appear any better. Why the forced separation?
    I was stunned as I stood there and finally heard Koren’s confession.
    He loved Domin; he just wasn’t sure that he was ready to give up the idea
    of a female mate and children born without a surrogate in the mix
    somewhere, and while the idea of having a mate at all was appealing, so
    was not having one and being free, especially as the growth of his real
    estate business took him to different cities and time zones.
    He wasn’t ready to settle down. Or more importantly, he was too
    scared to make a commitment and have it be the wrong one. He was not
    prepared to say, in front of everyone, that this one person was his life and
    that it was forever. Logan had been ready from the moment he laid eyes
    on me; Delphine had decided that Markel was the one; but not Koren.
    There could be someone better out there, and the promise called to him,
    the lure of what could be just around the corner. And, as I suspected, the
    turning point had been when Peter Church returned from Sobek. He had
    come into the house and admitted to Koren that when he found out that his
    second-born son was gay, he had been devastated. It had been hard