Honored Vow

elbows on my knees, face in my hands.
    “Right?”
    I nodded and stayed like that with him sitting silently beside me.
    It was dark by the time they were ready to leave, and I was still,
    wondering about Crane. Was he scared? Conscious? Had he called for me
    when they brutalized him? Did he, at that very second, want me with him?
    Had he felt powerless or abandoned? Had he been raped? Everything was
    swirling through my head.
    I was going right out of my mind, which was no good for anyone,
    not just me. My power, it seemed, was no longer contained in my skin or
    with the shift. Some of it, as I’d learned in Sobek before I was reunited
    with Logan, was the power of a reah, the ability to broadcast what we

    22

    Mary Calmes

    were feeling. Before I knew why or what, I had been able to suddenly
    flood a room with my pheromones and emotions. The jump in power had
    been a surprise, and the priest of Chae Rophon had provided the answer in
    a name: nekhene.
    I was a nekhene cat, hawk-cat, the only one of my kind, and
    powerful in ways that were unknown because, as far as the priest knew,
    the last one before me had lived and died a thousand years ago. The power
    of the nekhene to transform at will, to shift from man to beast in the blink
    of an eye, was one thing, but the rest of it was a learning process.
    The problem was that because we didn’t know, we didn’t know what
    to expect. So far, the only thing that Logan and I and everyone else knew
    for certain was that the reah in me trumped the nekhene, so my love for
    my mate grounded me, gave him dominion over me. But how long that
    would last—if it would—that, too, was unknown. As it was, unfortunately,
    because I was a reah but also a nekhene, when I was in pain, if you were a
    panther, you knew it because you felt it as sharply as if it were your own.
    The normal control that my family and friends and other panthers had over
    their own emotions and desires was stripped away, and there was only the
    continual assault, the constant barrage and battering, until the only refuge
    for the mind was the shift to animal.
    Once people were panthers, there was only that consciousness. They
    could shift back and forth if commanded or reminded because it was
    simply an innate ability. A semel could order his khatyu to shift, and they
    would change only because they were told to. Only reahs retained the
    knowledge that they were humans even when they were in cat form.
    Semels, the strongest of all, only preserved the knowledge of their mate
    and nothing more once they shifted. It was frightening to think that with
    my pain alone, I could transform an entire room of people into panthers.
    But pain was not the only reason people shifted. There was passion
    as well, lust, and desire. Apparently my scent, when I was throbbing with
    my nekhene power, was intoxicating, and there was no way to tell what
    the trigger would be or to gauge my response. It terrified Logan. The
    priest, who was continuing to dig but finding scarce little in the way of
    information on nekhene cats, said that the most important thing we could
    do now, from what he had read, was to show the nekhene the bond
    between myself and my semel.

    Honored Vow

    23

    The only reason I had been able to contain myself at the morgue and
    not let my power run out of me was Logan. If he was there, right there
    with me, hands on my skin, the nekhene was contained. The reah that I
    was first was Logan’s mate, so the nekhene responded to the familiarity of
    the bond. But if he was not close enough to touch me, kiss me, maul me,
    the wild creature that my body housed got restless when it was hurt or
    frightened or threatened.
    The priest had told me before I left Sobek that some of the ancient
    texts spoke of the nekhene as not a kind of cat at all but instead as an
    inherited power. But I knew the truth; it was simply a mutation of speed
    and size. And yet, in all shifts I had ever seen before mine, basic
    composition did not change, only musculature shifted. But now, for me, I
    morphed into something else altogether. It made sense, then, that the
    nekhene was power and not simply biology. And yet how could that be?
    Shifting wasn’t magic, so nekhene power had to be the same, something
    that could be explained logically.
    I told myself about logic and reason and science every single day,
    and every single day it made less sense. My skin, sometimes, was all that
    kept me from flying into a million