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“What
    the hell are you—”
    “I need you,” I whispered, hissing at the end, pointing at my laptop
    on my desk.
    “What?” She was chuckling now because I was probably the least
    scary thing she’d ever seen in her life. In bed, disheveled, barely awake—
    baby bunnies were more frightening.
    “Check the list on my desktop; see who the semel in LA is?”
    “Semel in LA?” she asked, moving to the chair, pulling it out and
    sitting down. “Why?”
    “Just do it,” I whispered.

    28

    Mary Calmes

    “Jin?”
    “No, no, I’m here,” I said softly. “So, Samantha, do you have any
    idea what Russ was supposed to be meeting Mr. Dempsey about?”
    “No, he said he wouldn’t be long, had to clear up some
    misunderstanding with a friend of ours, Jimmy Tamaki.”
    I cleared my throat. “What did Jimmy do?”
    “I don’t even know, it’s all sort of fuzzy, but as far as I can tell,
    Jimmy and Russ went running together, and something changed, and they
    wound up in some weird part of town and got into a fight. Which is so
    weird because neither of them are, like, big he-man types, you know? I
    mean Russ and Jimmy work at the same animation studio, for goodness’
    sake!”
    I understood exactly what had happened. Russ, who had never
    wanted anything to do with the werepanther world, had, without meaning
    to, found another werepanther, and the two of them had shifted and gone
    for a run. Unfortunately, they had run in someone’s territory without
    permission and were probably in very deep trouble as we spoke.
    Before the feast of the valley in the summer, Russ had gone to Los
    Angeles for a recruiting convention and finally landed a job at Ironwood
    Studios, which was supposed to be the next Pixar. He was scared and
    excited and most of all happy to be far away from his family. The thing
    about Ruslan Church, the youngest of Logan’s brothers, was that he
    absolutely hated being a werepanther. He felt the culture was barbaric and
    that everyone should just do their very best never to shift and live their
    lives as humans and nothing more.
    And so he had moved to LA, against Logan’s express orders, and
    had told him that he did not want Logan to speak to or in any way alert the
    semel of Los Angeles to his presence there. He was not a semel, he was a
    normal cat; no one would know unless he shifted, and he never, ever
    would. When he had left, he had a shouting match with his father, and
    Peter struck him with the blow that this was the reason he had never even
    thought to ask Russ to carry on the Church line—he was weak because he
    hated his heritage. They had yelled some more, and finally Russ had told
    his father to go to hell, and Peter Church had stormed from the house. It
    had been quite a day.

    Honored Vow

    29

    I had followed Russ out the door, grabbed him, and turned him
    around to face me. After a heartbeat of time, he had dropped his bags and
    lunged at me, hugging me tight.
    “Promise to call me,” I told him. “E-mail me and let me know
    what’s going on.”
    “I will, Jin, but you can’t ever visit. I mean, I’m nothing, but you’re
    a reah, for crissakes, or a nekhene, or whatever the hell you are… but
    other werepanthers will know if you visit. I don’t want anyone to ever find
    out that my brother is semel-netjer. I’ll get sucked into all the bullshit all
    over again. I mean, I don’t think you even get how much I just want to be
    a regular guy, just some guy doing his thing in LA.”
    “No, I know.”
    “I hate the pit, I hate Mikhail. I—”
    “You hate Mikhail?” I teased him.
    “Yes! I hate them all! I hate Yuri! I hate Markel and Ivan, and I hate
    Logan, and I know you love him, but fuck! I hate gatherings, I hate the
    hunts, and I hate my father preaching the fucking law. Most of all, the fact
    that we can never have someone in our lives who is not a werepanther is
    fucked up. I want to meet a nice girl, marry her, and have very normal,
    very boring, very