Honored Vow Read Online Free PDF Page A

awfully pessimistic of you,” he had teased me, leaning sideways to kiss my temple.
    “Someone else will discover Domin Thorne,” I had told my mate very seriously. “He’s a pain in the ass, but the man is beautiful to look at and very passionate, and now, since he’s been your maahes, loyal and fair. You’ve changed him, your faith in him, your kindness, your acceptance, all of it—he’s different.”
    “He’s always been that way,” Logan had told me. “He just forgot for a while.”
    Domin had been a good guy? “Are we talking about the same man?”
    “Yes.”
    I hadn’t wanted to argue; I knew that Logan had made all the difference to the growth of his maahes, even if he didn’t. “Koren’s a fool.”
    “Why don’t you tell him that?”
    I had sighed deeply before I had turned and looked at my mate. “Because no one listens to me. They’re supposed to, but they don’t. Crane left, too, and Russ…. Everybody’s leaving our home, and I hate it.”
    “I’ll never leave you.”
    Which was more comforting than he could have known.
    “Your teeth are chattering,” Yuri told me, bringing me back to the present.
    The reason being that I was cold inside and out.
    “I know you. I know you’re terrified about Crane and scared that I’ll get hurt exacting the revenge you yourself want, but, Jin”—his voice cracked, lowered—“I am the sheseru of my tribe. It is no one’s place but mine.”
    I leaned forward, 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 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