Crucible of Fate (2 page)

“I’m the semel-aten.” I shrugged as Yuri finished his shift and stood close to me, a massive golden panther bristling with power and fury. “I can do as I please.”

“This is inhumane!”

Yuri’s roar filled the room before he launched himself at Nelson. Man and panther flipped over the love seat together, hitting the floor hard on the other side. The screams came fast, bloodcurdling and loud.

Mitchell began to shriek as a thick splatter of blood washed the curtains.

“It’s sad,” I said over Yuri’s snarling as Nelson’s screaming subsided to wrenching, sobbing whimpering, and I stretched out my hand, the long razor-sharp claws replacing my fingers as I finished the movement. “That only here, now, at the end, will you understand the error of your ways, father of the only nekhene cat in existence.”

“I will go to my death believing him to be an abomination.”

“That is your right,” I said, advancing on him. “But I will no longer have to hear it and neither will he. Let us start with your tongue.”

“You’re a
monster
!” He screamed his very last word.

But I knew who the real monster was.

Chapter 1

I
T
MADE
no sense, and they were all tired of hearing me ask the same questions. But until I had an answer I understood, how was I supposed to simply accept it?

“What did your father tell you when you became a semel?” I inquired of every single tribe leader who visited Sobek.

They all regarded me oddly, the last one being Maroz Amadu of the tribe of Serabit from Giza. He was confused.

Yuri translated. “Specifically, he wants to know what would happen to you if you failed as a semel. Where would the people in your territory go for help, if, let’s say, you decided that two panthers of different races couldn’t be married in your territory.”

“But that’s absurd,” he said to Yuri. “It doesn’t matter who you—”

“The sekhem of the semel-aten is hypothesizing,” his yareah, Hesi Amadu, remarked.

Apparently we needed our mates to do the talking for us.

“Oh, I see.” He plastered on a smile. “Well, I was told that if I was not a good ruler, that the panthers in my tribe could contact the semel-aten, and he would hear the case against me and pass judgment.”

“Exactly.” I pointed at him, then whirled around to face Yuri. “You see?”

He crossed his thickly muscled arms across his wide, bulky chest and fixed me with a stare that made me question my sanity. “What do I see?”

“I was a bad semel.”

“‘Was’. Past tense. What does—”

“So does that mean no one ever reported me to Ammon El Masry when he was semel-aten? That seems odd, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

“And therein lies my question.”

There was a soft clearing of a throat behind me.

Pivoting, I found Maroz and his mate still there. “May we go to the grand salon now, my lord? We’re both famished.”

“Oh yeah, go ahead,” I said, waving them away. “Sorry.”

Maroz grabbed his mate by the hand and tugged her away from me quickly. They all ended up doing that, concerned about my state of mind, I was certain.

“Okay, so what now?” Yuri asked, stepping in front of me.

“It’s what I was told as a new semel, what Logan was, what we all were.”

“That the semel-aten would come get you if you were bad,” Yuri paraphrased. “Right? Like the bogeyman?”

“Yeah. And if that’s true, if millions of panthers are supposed to be calling me or e-mailing me and complaining—where is it?”

“What? You’re asking if there’s, like, a command center or something for all this correspondence?”

“That’s exactly what I’m asking. I mean, who checks to make sure no panther is ever seen? Who spins an attack? Who basically has kept werepanthers off human radar for centuries?”

His eyes narrowed as he regarded me.

“So maybe whoever it is started small and now covers the entire world.”

“You’re nuts. You know that, right?”

“Yuri, there has to be a bigger body, a level up from semel-aten, like a werepanther CIA or something. There
has
to be. Someone is handling situations, and we know it’s not me. I’m a figurehead with no power except for any other semel over my tribe right here.”

“You make law for everyone.”

I dismissed that with a wave.

“And it just so happens that the tribe of Rahotep is the largest single tribe in the world.”

“Yes, but if you put it into perspective and say every panther in the world….” The number was just staggering. “Who does that? Who is responsible for everyone?”

“I think, in all seriousness, everyone is responsible for their own and maybe the tribe closest to them. I mean, it was on Logan to make you stop when you were out of control; maybe that’s how it is everywhere.”

I shook my head. “That’s too simple. Think about it. What if Logan and Christophe were just as fucked up as me? If that was true, then the entire corner of Nevada would have crazed werepanthers running around.”

“Yes, but Logan ended your tribe,” he reminded me. “He ended your reign as semel. Who’s to say that something similar doesn’t occur every day?”

“But if single semels are just policing themselves, why doesn’t the whole thing just collapse and we’re on the six o’clock news everywhere?”

He shook his head. “You’re overthinking this.”

I wasn’t, though; he was just missing it. There had to be a big brother—there simply had to be—but who or what that was, that was the question. I didn’t want to be a figurehead. I wanted to make a difference, and on a larger stage than my own tribe. But I had no idea how to do it.

I did have the power to change the law, though, and that was where I was planning to focus all my energy, if I could just figure out what to start with and how. Everything had to be revamped, but I was buried under the weight of what I
should
have been doing versus what I
was
doing. I was on my second rant of the night. If the first was the conspiracy of silence, my next familiar tangent was change.

Yuri said the time for me to simply
be
had passed. I had to embody the revolution I wanted to see, not simply hope for it. I alone could become a catalyst for action.

“There’s no way,” I railed, pacing in our room, back and forth at the foot of the bed as he lay stretched out on the mattress watching me. It was how it always went, from firebrand to quitter; I swung back and forth daily. “How do I, the infidel, expect to simply upend thousands of years of
this-is-how-we-do-things
?”

He was waggling his eyebrows.

“What?” I yelled.

“You simply say ‘this is the way we’re going to do it from now on.’ You do what we’ve discussed—proclaim yourself akhen-aten and begin a new reign with
your
players on the board.”

I found myself staring at him. “It’s not that easy.”

“I think it is.”

“That’s because you’re not the semel-aten!”

“And you’re not either.” He tipped his head to one side. “Well, at least you don’t want to be.”

“Yuri—”

“You hate it here,” he said, cutting me off. “Not because you’re here in Egypt, but because you don’t like how the upper class treats the lower, how the priest keeps his temple, or how you are supposed to treat the servants in your own villa. You hate the classes of people instead of one tribe that stands together, and you hate that a hundred semel-atens before you and a hundred priests have kept this city in the Dark Ages instead of letting it join the modern world.”

“Yes!”

“Then fucking fix it, my lord,” he placated me.

“It’s not that easy.”

“Change is never easy.” He shrugged. “Who lied and said it would be?”

I flopped down on the end of the bed.

After a moment, I felt the mattress lift and dip and realized he was moving behind me. When his strong arms wrapped around my neck, I grunted and leaned back against him.

“You’ll do the right thing.” He sounded so sure.

“How do you know?”

“Because you always do.”

“That’s not true.” I closed my eyes, savoring the feel of his skin, the heat of his chest against my back, and the stubble-covered jaw grazing mine.

Did he know what a simple comfort his touch was? How did everyone in the world not want a mate? Having someone to listen when you unburden your soul and to sleep wrapped around in the night? How was that not a prerequisite for life?

“You are inherently good,” he said, his voice a vibrating purr against the side of my throat. “And once you set your sight on a course of action, you will not be able to push it from your mind.”

He was so right.

I was assaulted by everything that needed to be changed on a daily basis and crushed under the weight of the status quo. The landslide of obligations from the vital to the mundane never stopped. There were expectations and demands, and endless responsibilities.

I hated it.

S
IX
months had come and gone, and still I felt like I was drowning. Every morning when I woke up, I wondered if that day would be the day I finally got my bearings. I was still waiting. I wanted to go back to the night Logan Church had twisted in his seat and stared at me with a glint in his gold eyes, and tell him to go to hell.

“You should be a semel again,” he had said with that familiar deep rumble in his voice. He had no idea the effect he had on me, on everyone; it was simply how he was, just Logan. “You’re ready, Domin. You need to step out into the light.”

Two years before, the man had ended my reign. I had been the semel of a tribe of werepanthers, leader of the tribe of Menhit, and he had fought me in the pit and won. He could have cut out my heart with his claws, but instead… instead he offered the path to redemption. He opened his home, welcomed me into his tribe and into his life. I was trusted, my counsel heeded, my strength relied upon. It was a gift, the second coming of the friendship we had when we were young. I had worried that I would be consumed by bitterness and would turn on him, catch him unawares, betray him, and then kill him. But I had forgotten about my own heart.

I loved Logan. Not like a lover, not with carnal intent, but—and it was so cliché—like the brother I never had. I wanted him back in my life more than I wanted to hurt him.

I was a shitty leader: the selfish kind, the vindictive kind, the one everyone wished would just die already so they could get someone better, someone who cared at all. So when he beat me in the pit, absorbed my tribe, and took me in, I simply surrendered. Logan was a force of nature, and I had been so tired of fighting him, fighting his nobility and his ethics and his strength, that I let the bitterness go. No good had come from it. Time, instead, to try something new.

Being his maahes, the prince of his tribe, had worked for me. I was easily the second in power. He made the decisions; I carried them out. He navigated; I drove. I was able to be his emissary because I was talking for him, not me. It was so easy.

What came as a surprise was that I changed. I shed my anger, my vanity, and all the pain, and I became everything he’d always seen in me. The man’s faith had made me better, his day-to-day belief invested me in the future of the tribe, in the people, in growth and security and the welfare of all. I was different now, and I owed it all to my old friend, my new semel, Logan Church.

So when he had gazed at me with his honey-colored eyes and told me he wanted me to reclaim my birthright, I couldn’t argue, because
he
believed. I could be, he said, not just a semel, but
the
semel, the semel-aten, the leader of the entire werepanther world. I would be able to lead those who wanted to follow me because of the changes I had experienced myself. I would be able to get through to those werepanthers who had lost their faith and their way. I would be a catalyst for change and restore prodigals to the fold, Logan was certain of it.

“You’re insane,” I had replied. “It should be you. You’re the strongest.”

He shook his head. “You’re wrong, it’s you.”

But no one was stronger than Logan Church. He was semel-netjer, the only panther in the world whose mate was also a nekhene cat.

Jin Church, his reah, was the most fearsome werepanther I had ever seen, that
anyone
had ever seen, and only Logan had tamed him, could tame him, because only Logan was his true-mate. It was ridiculous for him to even suggest that I could be stronger.

“But you can go anywhere and do anything,” he assured me. “I need to stay in the place I was born, rule my tribe, and never leave. All I want to do is go to bed every night with my mate in my arms and wake up every morning to his beautiful gray eyes. Do you understand? You’re stronger than me because you can be whatever you want. All I can be is me.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re going to be semel-aten.”

I was certain I had not heard him correctly. “You have lost your mind.”

“No.” He lifted one golden eyebrow as he stared into my eyes. “Listen and then tell me what you want to do.”