Free Honored Vow by Mary Calmes Page A

would not be in danger of being scourged yourself for what you did to Miguel Garza’s maahes! If anyone did what you did to Domin, I would kill them. Do you get it? And Delphine was sobbing on the phone to me. Markel should fight Yuri in the pit to atone for the disgrace, but because we’re family, he’s leaving it to me to punish you. Are you getting it? Is it sinking in?”
    Of course it was.
    “You made Russ’s decision so easy! He already asked for and received the status of duat from Miguel Garza. And do you know why the semel granted the request without question?”
    “I—”
    “Because he felt so sorry for him,” he roared at me. “The semel said that anyone that could do that—hurt not only strangers but his own people—was a fuckin’ monster! He was so excited to have you there on his land, a reah, the only nekhene cat in existence, and now he thinks you’re a horror!”
    And I was, wasn’t I?
    “So to keep Russ away from you, he granted his request. So now my brother, who I wanted to see, wanted to talk to before he made this life-changing decision, made a rash choice because of you! This was all because of you! It’s your fault that Russ left his family, no one else’s.”
    Because my family had been taken from me when I was sixteen, there wasn’t anything worse he could have said to me.
    “Do you realize that I gave my mandate as much for everyone else as for you? You are volatile right now. Your emotions are all over the place, and because you’re a reah, because you have the power of a nekhene in you, you are able to transmit all your pain and anger and rage outward at everyone else.”
    I wanted to scream; it felt like my whole body was being squeezed in a vise.
    “Right now we—and I mean me, your family, and your tribe, all of us—need to be protected from you! I’m afraid for you to see Crane because he’s very delicate right now and if you bring all your heightened emotion and flood him with it—will that kill him?”
    “You won’t let me see Crane?” I asked, my voice not mine, garbled with tears, nasal and low.
    “Not right now.”
    “What did they do to him?”
    Silence.
    “Logan?”
    He took a breath. “They castrated him.”
    I dropped the phone and ran for the bathroom.

Chapter Five

     
    T HERE was nothing left in my stomach, and I was shaking by the time I picked my phone back up long minutes later. I couldn’t actually speak yet, but he heard me breathe.
    “Crane won’t shift back,” Logan told me. “It’s lucky that Martine sent his private jet for me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to bring him home.”
    Martine Soto was one of Logan’s oldest friends and the semel in Miami, in fact, the semel of the state of Florida. It wasn’t usual, and the man had many maahes, princes, who took orders from him, as well as many akers. His sylvan and sheseru also had many men who served under them. I had no idea how he did it, but he was very rich and very powerful. Logan had no desire to take care of that many cats.
    “I don’t know what he looks like in his human form; he won’t show me.”
    My friend was so traumatized that he could not allow himself to be vulnerable even for a moment.
    “When I arrived in Chicago I was met by Derek Jackson and Shahid Alon, who was sent by the phocal on behalf of the priest. Jin, a sepat has been called.”
    I couldn’t breathe.
    “Jin.” He cleared his throat. “The priest of Chae Rophon has called me as one of his six champions. I have been summoned to fight for the seat of semel-aten, master of Sobek.”
    Master of Sobek? The priest had wanted Logan to fight Ammon El Masry before, and now it looked as though he would finally get his wish.
    A sepat was an honor challenge that was called by the priest of Chae Rophon if he, along with his council, the council of Ennead, felt that the actions of the semel-aten were in violation of his mandate as guardian of the law. The semel-aten ruled the city of Sobek and the first