Honored Vow (5 page)

“Baby, you haven’t slept in days. Let me put you in bed, you need to sleep. You need to close your eyes. I have you, I’ll always have you. You’ll always belong to me.”

“Oh my God, thank you,” Delphine gasped, and I heard her drop to the floor.

“Christ,” Mikhail moaned, and I opened my eyes in time to see him slide down the wall so he was sitting with his knees up, looking completely wrung out.

“Thank you, Logan,” Markel muttered.

Yuri took a deep breath.

“Rest, Jin,” I heard Mikhail murmur, his voice edged with pain. “Please.”

“Yes,” Taj muttered. “Please.”

I inhaled Logan’s scent and concentrated on the sound of his heartbeat. I wished I could lie down with him, curl around him.

“When I get back with your beset, my reah, I’m all yours.”

I had only his promise to comfort me.

Chapter Three

D
ELPHINE
woke me the following morning and brought me the cordless phone.

“Who is it?” I asked her, because Logan and anyone else close to me would have called my cell; it had to be someone else.

“I’m not sure,” she said, squinting at me, her hand on my face. “But I think maybe it’s somebody who knows Russ.”

Someone who knew Logan’s youngest brother? “Russ?” I said, putting the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

“Hi, uhm, is this Jin?”

“Yes, who’s this?”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said irritably.

“Sorry,” the woman said quickly. “I just, I think I thought with a name like Jin that it was short for Ginger or something.”

“I’m sorry, who is this?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m Samantha Ritter, uhm, you know, Russ’s Samantha.”

Russ’s Samantha… Russ’s Samantha….

“He said he told you about me?”

He had told me… crap! “Oh.” I sat up in bed. For the first time in days, some part of the world did not center around Crane Adams. “Yeah, he told me. How are you, Samantha?”

“I’m not that good, actually. A couple nights ago Russ didn’t come home, and the police found his car this morning, and from the looks of things, he was attacked by an animal.”

Fuck.

“I’ve been really trying not to freak out, and people have been saying that he probably just went out with the guys and lost track of time, but I checked with everyone, and nobody’s seen him, and, God, I just don’t know.”

She was rambling because she was terrified, and I understood that.

“And I called the police, and now they’re not sure, because I think they thought he was just out doing whatever, too, but that’s not like Russ, he’s such a grown-up, you know, but now, with his car and everything, I just…. And he said that if anything strange ever happened to him, which makes no sense but it’s what he said—he told me to call you.”

“Okay. Uhm, Samantha did Russ happen to tell you where he was going the night he didn’t come home?”

“Yeah, he was supposed to go see a man named Blake… Blake Dempsey.”

I moved the phone away from my mouth and covered the receiver with my hand. “Delph!”

She didn’t turn around.

“Delph!”

Nothing.

I pulled my sock off, balled it up, and beaned her in the back of the head with it.

She turned from where she was looking outside and faced me. “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.

“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.

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 healthy, and very without-teeth-and-claws babies. I just want to be human.”

“I know.” I smiled at him.

“You get it ’cause you used to want that too.”

“Yes, I did.”

“So I’m gonna find a girl and never see my stupid family until they can accept me for who I am, and that’s it.”

“Are you done?”

He smiled at me. “I’ll really miss you.”

I hugged him again, and he put his head down on my shoulder when he embraced me.

“You always smell so good,” he growled, and I shoved him off me.

“I’m not saying I wanna sleep with you or anything.”

I nodded.

“But see, I could get hurt for wising off to the mate of my brother.”

“No, you couldn’t.”

He grunted, threw the last of his bags in the front of his Audi, and drove away, the U-Haul trailer he was pulling following behind him. I had sent Crane to his new place a month later and got video of a very nice loft that he shared with the lovely Samantha, who was a computer programmer. They kissed for the camera, Crane had given me an eyebrow waggle, and that had been it. When Crane got home from his secret mission, we did not mention it to Logan; he reported that Russ looked happy, was happy, and that everything was going well. Russ didn’t come home for Christmas; they went to see Samantha’s family instead, but Eva and Delphine and Markel went to California for New Year’s and took enough food and goodies to feed an army. Samantha had apparently loved her gifts and loved Russ’s mother, sister, and brother-in-law. They stayed only three days. It was as long as Markel felt was safe. Russ had told them not to mention one word about werepanthers. And now, less than three weeks later, he was missing.

“So, Jin, do you think you could come and help me find Russ? The police have no idea what to even do.”

“Of course I will.”

“Oh God, thank you so much. I mean, you and his mother and his sister, you guys are the only ones he talks about when he talks about home, you know? I would love to visit, but he won’t… and I am in this with him, he’s so beautiful and smart and funny and ohmygod, if I lose him, I—”

“I’ll fix it, don’t worry.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“I’ll call you when I get there.”

“Thank you, Jin,” she said and hung up.

“I’m sorry, where exactly are you going?” Delphine scrutinized me.

“Your brother’s in trouble.”

“Which one?”

“Ruslan.” I smirked at her.

“Oh shit.”

“Oh yes,” I groaned, getting out of bed, striding across the room to stand over her.

She pointed at the screen. “It looks like you’ve got a Miguel Garza there in LA.”

“Garza? Not Dempsey?”

“There’s a number here. I can call his sylvan.”

“Forget it, just pack.”

“Pack? Me?”

“Yeah. You and I are going to LA.”

“How?”

“What do you mean how?”

“I mean how do you plan to get off the grounds?”

“You—”

“Not me,” she said with a grin. “I can leave whenever I want. You’re the one who’s under house arrest, dear.”

“But us getting out of here starts with you,” I assured her.

“How?”

“Just put on your gym clothes and drive out the front gate.”

She stared at me.

“I’ll pack a bag and drop it off the balcony, and then I’ll go down for a run. When everyone’s trying to figure out who’s gonna go with me, you get the bag and throw it in the back of your car. Once we’re off the grounds, we’re out of here.”

“Jin, they’ll never let you off the grounds, honey. They’ll follow you and—”

I arched an eyebrow for her.

“Oh,” she said, nodding, “right. They won’t even be able to keep up.”

“Taj is the only one who can keep pace with me, and he’s gone.”

“Logan can too.”

“For a short time.” I swallowed down my heart.

She nodded. “Okay. How far down do I meet you?”

“A mile.”

“How fast can you do that?”

I waggled my brows for her, and she giggled.

“He’ll skin us both, you know.”

A shudder tore through me, and her eyes filled that fast as I allowed her, for a second, to feel the breadth of my pain.

“Oh, Jin,” she whimpered.

I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart. “He left me here, and all I wanted was to go to Crane. He forbade me from going with him. And I understand why, I do, but staying here… I—I will go right out of my mind. And Russ needs us. If Logan’s gonna save Crane, then you and I, we’re saving Russ.”

She nodded, taking a breath. “Okay.”

“Aren’t you worried about him? Don’t you think we should go?”

“I do.”

“So let’s go.”

She turned for the door.

“Shit.”

“What?” She looked back at me.

“Markel.”

“Oh, no, it’s okay; he’s working on a new piece for his gallery opening next week, so he’s at his studio morning, noon, and night.”

“So he won’t even notice you’re gone.”

“Probably not.”

“Good. We’ll be gone; he’ll have more time without you bugging him to have sex.”

“Exactly.”

We had a pact.

And two hours later, our escape was seamless. I met her, alone, in her Lexus, a mile away from the front gate of our home. She had clothes and shoes for me and a big smile. Ivan, who was at the front gate, had let Delphine leave to go to the gym without question. He didn’t even check to see how many bags there were in the trunk of the car. But why would he have?

I had shifted, ostensibly to exercise, and Artem, Yuri’s second, and three others had started the run with me. I left them after five minutes, and they never caught up.

At the airport, I paid for the one-way tickets to Los Angeles in cash, having taken a wad from the safe in my bedroom and given it to Delphine. Once we were taxiing down the runway, I felt like I could breathe.

T
HE
cold January air smelled good, faintly of the sea, which soothed me, and it was not nearly as freezing in Santa Monica as it was in Nevada. Delphine had used her phone and booked a room at the Surfrider Motel, which was on Ocean Avenue, and I drove us there after we used her card at the rental-car counter. Once we had checked in, each of us claiming one of the twin beds, we left our bags and Delphine navigated to Russ’s loft.