Honored Vow

did, then all of it, my power, my pheromones,
    the thrumming, searing energy, was suddenly sucked from the room,
    leaving the cold and the damp and the suddenly clear, fresh air.
    There were moans and gasps as a collective sigh of relief was
    released. I shifted and screamed for Yuri, for Domin and Mikhail, as I
    rounded on Logan, on the man I loved.
    I moved fast, standing beside him, hands in his hair, on his face,
    touching, tracing, and mapping territory I knew with my fingers.
    “Jin.” His voice was hoarse from disuse, his eyes ragged with dark
    circles under them; he had grown a golden beard and mustache I had never
    seen before, his hair standing in tufts, gnarled with sweat and dirt.
    He was breathtaking.
    I bent and kissed his forehead, his eyes, his nose, his cheeks,
    ravenously, deliriously, beyond happy to see him, enraptured.
    “Jin,” he whimpered, tears rolling down the sides of his face toward
    his ears. “Me—baby, kiss me.”
    My lips sealed over his, gently, tenderly, because for all the desire,
    we were both frayed and raw and sensitive. He was vulnerable and so was
    I. So even though I was hungry for him, I claimed what was mine without
    the urgency, with only the love.
    “Jin!”
    I turned, and Yuri was there with the down comforter from our bed
    at home, the one thing I had brought that had both our scents on it,
    Logan’s and mine. Yuri wrapped me up in it before he and Domin and
    Andrian and Taj and Crane lifted the cross Logan was lashed to. They

    Honored Vow

    223

    leaned it against the wall before Yuri hefted the ax that he had been given
    before the trial began. Each sheseru had one, no one knowing who would
    be using it, who would be allowed to free their semel.
    Yuri swung it three times, and the pain it caused Logan, the jolting,
    pounding vibration, was acute, but he was silent until he was suddenly on
    the ground under the cross, finally free. Both of his shoulders were
    dislocated, he had broken ribs, and his skin where the ropes had been
    looked like raw meat. But still, he rose up and staggered forward.
    I went to my knees, and he dropped down into my arms, finally,
    utterly, safe.
    He was safe.
    With his head notched under my chin, his arms wrapped around me,
    his skin pressed to mine, I could breathe again.
    It was so good to breathe.
    When I felt a hand on my back, I lifted my eyes to find Crane’s.
    “I felt the pressure of your power, Jin, but none of the heat or the
    anger.”
    “Me neither,” Taj chimed in, and my eyes flicked to him. “I saw the
    others going through their shift, and it was just hard to drag in air, but
    nothing else. I was okay.”
    “Me too,” Yuri agreed. “How did you do that? It never happened
    like that before. Normally you just have to take it.”
    Domin had felt the same, as had Andrian and Mikhail. Danny had
    been changed to a panther, and I was sorry for that and not sure why it had
    happened. Crane thought that because I didn’t think of Danny as
    belonging to me yet, my power didn’t recognize him.
    Besides Logan and me, the only other humans in the room were the
    priest, Crane, Yuri, Domin, Mikhail, Andrian, and Taj. Everyone else,
    phocal, semel, maahes, yareah, sheseru, sylvan—it didn’t matter. They
    had all been turned to panthers.
    “You’re like the goddess Circe,” Crane said, chuckling. “You turn
    men to beasts.”
    But I didn’t want to be compared to a witch. I would have argued
    with him, but the priest was speaking.
    “It is unusual for us to judge a winner when the trial has not
    concluded, but as every panther in the pit was rendered immobile, pinned

    224

    Mary Calmes

    to the floor in pain, it could not go on. As a result, the semel of the tribe of
    Reshep may now challenge Logan Church to one-on-one combat to
    determine who will face the semel-aten.”
    I turned to look for Hiroshi and found him gasping, trying to rise
    from the fetal position he had obviously been locked in for several
    minutes. He was attempting to rise up off the ground. I saw, too, that there
    was only his yareah with him; the three other khatyu of his household
    were dead. On the other side, Gavin Medina, his yareah, and all in his
    household lay mutilated. It was why there were more panthers on us so
    fast; they had not been able to keep the marauders from their semel and
    were simply overrun and killed. I had no idea how quickly they had fallen,
    but it had to have been fast.
    A high-pitched scream turned my attention,