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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

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    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