Honored Vow

who was sick. People fled at
    different intervals, and some didn’t make it out in time.
    The spectacle was ghastly, and no one was unaffected. When I was
    finally able to return to my quarters, dragging in after dark, numb and
    exhausted, still shaking, I found everyone there but Yuri and Domin.
    “Where are they?” I asked Mikhail.
    “Yuri had to shift and eat and drink, so Domin went with him once
    he had gorged on meat and drank more water than I even thought was
    possible.”

    206

    Mary Calmes

    “You saw him, though? You sat with him?”
    “I fed him,” he said, smiling at me. “And he’s sore and he needs to
    sleep and—”
    “He’ll probably have nightmares for weeks,” I said, flopping down
    beside the stove. I was tired of being cold too. I just wanted to go home.
    “Why would he have nightmares?” Mikhail seemed surprised.
    “Because he was attacked by panthers,” I said like it was obvious.
    “It was a trial, Jin, and Yuri can separate that in his head. He did
    what he did for Logan, for our tribe… for you. It’s over, and if he dreams
    about it at all, it won’t be the horror part, only the victory part.”
    “You’re so sure.”
    “Very. I’m very sure.”
    I was silent for a few minutes. “So he went to shift?”
    He looked at me. “That’s what he told everyone.”
    “But they needed to be alone.”
    “They took bedrolls, so the chances of you seeing your sheseru and
    your maahes before the morning are very slight,” Mikhail said with a
    chuckle. “Yuri is gonna do his damndest to make the man his before we
    go home. I’m sure he wishes this trip would never end.”
    “And all I want it to be is over.”
    “Agreed.” Mikhail sniffled, glancing around the room. “We’re all
    wrung out and ready to turn on each other.”
    “Who wants hot chocolate?” Crane asked as he walked over to us,
    beaming, eyes glinting china blue in the low light.
    “Most of us,” I said to Mikhail even as I smiled up at my best friend,
    accepting the steaming mug as my sylvan got dibs on the next one.
    Andrian and Taj and Danny could not have been more appreciative
    of Crane Adams making it feel a little less like a nightmare we were living
    through and a lot more like home.
    “I got my portable DVD player fired up to watch The Hangover ,
    figured we could all use the laugh, ya know?”
    So I sat there in a heap with the others, and they were all laughing as
    I used Crane’s thigh for a pillow and he stroked my hair as I passed out. It
    was the only good part of the whole shitty day.

    Honored Vow

    207

    CHULUUN had come looking for Yuri, and when Crane told him that he
    was not there, he smiled knowingly and trudged back the way he had
    come, toward the rock-carved home of his semel.
    “Mikhail talked to me.”
    I rolled my head on the pillow to look at Danny.
    “You were right.”
    “I didn’t need to be.”
    “I know.”
    “Hero worship is okay, and I get thinking Mikhail is amazing,
    because he is.”
    He nodded. “I’ve just been so scared, Jin, and I’m grasping at
    everyone, Mikhail, Yuri, even Logan, to try and make me safe.”
    “Well, that actually is your semel’s job, you know, to keep you
    safe.”
    “But I’ve been so frantic to find a mate and thinking that if it
    couldn’t be Mikhail, then it should be Yuri, because he actually is gay—”
    “Bi,” I corrected. “But since we both have eyes, you know as well as
    I do that the only thing Yuri really is, is into Domin.”
    He grinned at me. “Yeah.”
    “So what’s your plan now?”
    “I have a lot of things I wanna do, and I think that I should do them
    before I think about finding a mate.”
    “Like what?”
    “Going to school, for one,” he said, smiling at me, “but I’m gonna
    need to talk to you and Logan about a loan so I can start.”
    “College is a good plan,” I assured him. “And we can make that
    happen.”
    “Thank you, Jin.”
    “Of course. My father took so much time grooming you to be a
    sylvan that he forgot to let you live at all.”
    He didn’t argue.

    208

    Mary Calmes

    THE following morning Mikhail and I were summoned alone to the pit
    when it was still dark out. Dval Quach came with some of his khatyu to
    summon us, and they were careful and quiet, which I didn’t like. The fact
    that it was almost like we were sneaking out made me wary. Why was it a
    secret that we were leaving?
    When we reached the pit, I found that each sylvan was there with

only the mate