Trusted Bond, page 3
“Nope,” I said, smiling as I turned down another street. “It was just me and Yuri.”
“But Ivan and Yuri went hunting. Ivan just got back right before Delphine and I did. He said that Yuri’s gonna be back later to… night… to… oh, fuck me.” He exhaled long and hard. “It’s fine.”
“Oh shit.”
I groaned as I parked the car in the lot. “Lemme get this straight.” His voice was rising. “You sent Russ away to God knows where––”
“I didn’t send him anywhere. He had to go to LA for a job interview like I told you, don’t be so dramatic.”
“Jin!”
My grunt was infused with all the exasperation I felt. “You sent him away, you fuck!”
“And if I did?”
“You sent Yuri up the mountain to the hunting grounds with Ivan and some of the others; you sent me to Delphine, sent Markel to talk to Christophe with Peter, Logan’s dad, and Domin was gone, and Logan was gone, and Mikhail and Koren were at Simone’s mating ceremony…. Who exactly took care of you? Eva?”
“No, Logan’s mom is still in Pittsburgh visiting her sister.”
“What the fuck,” he breathed out. “Jin, what’d you…? Have you been going to work?”
“Nope, I just checked in tonight. I called and told Ray I was in a car accident.”
His breath came out in small stutters. “You… Jin––”
“He doesn’t expect me back for a month now, since I already had the time off to go with Logan to the feast and––”
“Jin!”
“They all believed me,” I said with a smile. “Owen said I look like I got hit by a truck.”
“Holy shit,” he said, coughing. “Jin, does Yuri know he left you alone?”
“No,” I said as I got out of the car, locking it before heading toward the stairs across the parking lot. “I told Yuri that you were taking care of me.”
“Yeah, but––”
“I told you that Russ would take care of me, and I told Russ that Markel was, and I told Markel that Delphine was.”
“Oh fuck you, Jin! What kinda martyr bullshit is that?”
“It wasn’t like that. I just needed you all to calm down and not be around each other. It was all I could think of.”
“Why lie to Russ, though?”
“Because Russ was supposed to go to that recruiting conference in Los Angeles, and if he was home babysitting me, then he wouldn’t have gone.”
“Christ.”
“He needed to go; I want him to get the job he really wants.”
“Jin, are you… can you––”
“If Logan sees me like this, he might violate the territorial rules and hunt Abbot down on Christophe’s land. I’m not gonna be the cause of a war between two tribes for no reason.”
“How is that no reason? Christophe is responsible for––”
“Christophe was with Logan in New York at Simone’s mating ceremony. He had no idea what his sheseru did or didn’t do. And all Avery did was grant sanctuary to a pair of panthers; he didn’t know what they had done when he took them in. Now that Christophe’s back, once he talks to Avery, he’ll probably turn both panthers over to Logan, but I want him to have the opportunity to make that decision.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“If Logan trespasses on Christophe’s land––”
“No, I know, then he’s the one at fault even though he did nothing wrong.”
“Exactly.”
“But––”
“Logan and Yuri need to stay off Christophe’s land no matter what Avery did.”
“You are the mate of a semel, and you were attacked. I think you’re missing the––”
“But I’m fine. I’m just a little banged up.”
“Simply because you lived does not lessen the offense!” he finally yelled at me. “All of them––Kellen, Avery, Abbot… they have conveniently forgotten that you are the reah of your tribe! By law, Logan can kill them all!”
“You’re forgetting your law,” I sighed. “Only the semel pays for the crimes of his panthers unless there is an actual killing or rape; then and only then is the individual punished or killed.”
“Jin!”
“Crane,” I soothed him. “Abbot was––”
“Wait.”
But I was smarter than that and hung up before Logan’s voice came over the line and ordered me home. Moving fast, realizing that I had told Crane exactly where I was going and not wanting to talk to him, either, I took the stairs fast to Eddie’s apartment to pack my clothes and the few things I had in the bathroom. Back in my Jeep, I decided to spend the night at a motel I knew in Truckee. I stopped to get some water because my body was still healing and so needed lots of fluids. As I was leaving the store, I was suddenly face-to-face with two of Yuri’s khatyu, his fighters, Isaac and Dmitry. “My reah,” Isaac greeted me haltingly, his eyes huge.
“Reah.” Dmitry smiled sheepishly. “It’s good to see you.”
Shit.
“And you guys,” I said quickly, stepping around them to walk toward my Jeep. “Reah!”
I turned and found another of Yuri’s men, Artem Varda, striding toward me. He was tall and muscular with dark brown hair and even darker eyes. He was Yuri’s second, second to the sheseru, and took his job, his position in the tribe, seriously. As he closed in on me, I noted that the facial hair that I was normally not partial to looked good on him. I liked his goatee and mustache; it went with the wavy brown hair that fell to broad shoulders. I stood my ground as he approached me. There was no one else in the parking lot, or they would have never called me by my title but would have instead used my name. “My reah,” Artem said reverently, stepping in front of me, taking a deep breath as he did it, inhaling my scent. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” I lied, making a move to walk by him. He barred my path. “You don’t seem fine.”
My eyes flicked to his.
“You don’t smell fine.”
I forced a smile. “What are you guys even doing here?”
“We stopped for beer. It’s just chance that we ran into you.” The town was small, I would give him that. “Perhaps we should follow you home to make sure you’re safe.”
“Reah!”
We both turned at the cry, and Nico, yet another of Yuri’s men, was motioning to me at the same time he was leaning over into the car. “He’s not breathing!” I bolted over to him, and there in the backseat was a boy much younger than the rest of Yuri’s khatyu. He was maybe fifteen if he was a day. Bending down close, I inhaled deeply. He was, in fact, breathing, but he was passed out cold. “Reah, should we––” Artem began.
“Where’s your house?” I asked, cutting him off.
“That’s my little brother, Roc––”
“Where’s your house?” I yelled at him. I hadn’t asked who the boy was. “Mine is far, but––my mom’s house is right down the street. He lives with her.”
“Let’s go,” I said, getting in beside the unconscious boy. No one questioned me; all four men just piled into the vehicle. Artem threw the car into reverse the second every door closed, gunned the motor, and peeled out of the parking lot, catapulting us out onto the street.
I didn’t say a word. He was terrified for his brother and didn’t need me yelling at him about how us getting killed was not going to help him. I stayed quiet instead, reassuring him with a squeeze of his shoulder that everything would be all right.
He covered my hand with his and held tight, letting me know that the comfort was both welcome and needed.
Chapter Two
THE VARDA house was at the end of a cul-de-sac halfway up on Mount Rose, and people were out strolling, walking their dogs, and I could even smell barbeque as we all got out of the car and charged across the manicured lawn to the front door. There was a party going on that we basically interrupted as we barged into the house. Artem pushed through the crowd of people, carrying his brother, forging a path for me, and I stayed no more than a step behind him. I took in vaulted ceilings, stairs that led to the second floor, and a sunken living room as we moved through it. When we reached the bathroom, I had Artem sit down on the toilet with his brother in his arms as I turned on the hot water in the tub.
“Put him in,” I directed.
“But he’ll get burned,” he said, hesitating.
I shook my head. “He won’t. He’s a panther, and his body temperature will rise to match the water. Hurry up, ’cause I need you to get me stuff.”
“His name is Rocco,” he told me. “It’s a bad nickname that stuck.”
“Okay,” I soothed him. “Put Rocco in the tub. Trust me.”
He did as I asked and then left me to get the bottled water and bucket I needed. “My reah!”
Turning to the door that had been thrown open, I saw a woman staring in at me. There was only one person she could be: mama. “Close the door, Mrs. Varda,” I directed Artem and Rocco’s mother. “You’re letting the heat out.”
She came in and closed the door behind her, rushing to her son’s side as he slouched in the tub. Her hands were all over him before she looked over her shoulder at me with frightened eyes. “He has alcohol poisoning,” I told her. “For us, as you know, the balance is even more precarious, because we need the water in our bodies to shift. As soon as his system realized that he couldn’t shift if he needed to, it shut down, and he passed out to conserve energy.”
“I had no idea that panthers could get alcohol poisoning, because normally we metabolize it so fast out of our systems.”
“It takes a lot,” I told her. “He must have just been putting it away all night.” Her face was pained. “He’ll recover, my reah?”
“As soon as his blood heats,” I told her, “he’ll start throwing up, and he’s gonna be miserable.”
Her face lit. “He’s going to be sick?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling at her. “Very.” “Oh thank you, my reah,” she breathed out. “Bless you.”
I gave her a reassuring smile as Artem came back into the room. Minutes later, Rocco started first to shake before his eyes sprang open and he leaned sideways and vomited. I had the bucket there ready as he brought up more alcohol than I had seen in quite some time. He was so sick all he wanted to do was curl up into a ball and sleep, but I made him drink a gallon of water just to start. “No,” he moaned, shoving Artem and his mother’s hands away. “No, no, no… just lemme sleep. Please, I just––”
“Rocco,” I snapped at him, hot and sweaty from being in the steam-filled bathroom. “Drink the water now.”
He looked up at me, knowing there was someone else there but not sure of my identity. When he realized who I was, who was there with him, his eyes got big and round.
“My reah,” he breathed out, trying to crawl out of the tub to get to his hands and knees. “I didn’t know it was––”
“Drink the water,” I told him. “Do as I say.”
“Yes, my reah.”
As he guzzled more water, Artem and his mother both crawled over in front of me and bowed low.
“If not for you knowing what to do, my reah,” Artem told me, “I would have––”
“It’s okay,” I told them, taking hold of both their arms, urging them to stand. “We just need to educate poor little Rocco here.”
The retching turned all our attention to the young man.
“I just wanna die,” he croaked out before heaving again.
I tried not to smile, but he reminded me of my best friend. How many times over the years had Crane said the same thing to me as I nursed him through alcohol poisoning? Half an hour later, sitting on a chair beside Rocco’s bed, I passed him another small bottle of water and waited. “I can’t drink any more water, my reah.”
I pulled my hair back from my face and looked at him. “You’re hurt,” he said softly. “What happened?”
“Drink the water or I’ll have your sheseru come here and pour it down your throat.”
The threat of seeing Yuri Kosa worked. Rocco drank down the bottle, chugging it down as I watched.
“Reah?” Looking up, I found Artem’s mother standing in the doorway with a tray of food in her hands. “You look pale, reah,” she said, coming into the room, putting the tray with a hamburger, salad, and large glass of iced tea down beside me on the nightstand. “You should eat.”
“Thank you,” I said, releasing a deep breath. “What’s your name?”
“Alex,” she said, smiling at me. “Well, Alexandra, but Alex is best.”
I smiled at her. “Thank you again, Alex. I’m starved.”
She checked on her son, sat beside him, and stared into his face as she talked to him. It was nice to watch the parent-child interaction, see how worried she had been, and have it transformed right in front of me into overflowing love. The conversation slowly broadened to include me, and I was told what an honor it was to have me in their home. In fact, there was an entire houseful of panthers who wanted to come in and see me, if I would allow it. There was no way to say no.
I left Alexandra in the room with her son, as he had to be watched, had to be reminded to keep drinking water until his body regulated itself and he could shift. Until he could, he had more water to drink.
“It has to be just plain old water?” he whined, looking up at me. “Yep,” I told him, rising up out of my chair, slightly unsteady myself. Rocco reached up and clutched my hand, and Artem was suddenly there to grasp my arm. I had not heard the large man come in.
“Maybe I should take you home, my reah.”
“No, I’m fine,” I assured him, turning to look down at Rocco and squeeze his hand gently. “You can drink whatever you want whenever you want, but you must always make sure that with any alcohol you drink, you drink the same amount of water. If you throw off the balance, you run the risk of a coma. And if your brother or your Mom has to take you to the doctor to put an IV in you… that sucks, believe me. I watched them do it to my best friend a couple of times and you sit for hours with this big-ass needle in you.”
He nodded, his bottom lip trembling. “Thank you, my reah, for being there to help me.”
I bent over and hugged him, and his skinny arms went around my neck, holding tight. He inhaled my scent and shivered hard. “Come, my reah,” Artem said when I straightened up. “Let me walk you to the living room.”
I followed him back down the stairs that I had climbed earlier to Rocco’s room and realized that not only were there only panthers at the party, but they were all members of my tribe. Normally city tribes were much smaller than the more remote locations or country ones. The size of a werepanther tribe was dependant on the semel. If the semel owned a lot of open, undeveloped land that could be hunted on, then the tribe was usually larger, because the land could support it. If there was no land, but the semel was wealthy, like Logan’s friend Justin Cho, then the semel could afford to take the tribe someplace to shift and hunt on a monthly basis. As he was in San Francisco, Justin didn’t have open land at his disposal, but there were a lot of preserves in California and private ranches that he paid handsomely to have for his use. His monthly gatherings were always in different places, and he hired buses for those who couldn’t afford the transportation themselves. The gatherings that Logan had were on his own land, and since his family owned a hundred acres of it above Lake Tahoe, there was more than enough room. The land itself was probably worth millions and had been handed down from generation to generation. It would have cost a fortune to develop, as high up as it was. The lower area, house, and glassworks, were owned solely by Logan himself and me. My name was on everything right next to his. If anything ever happened to him, it was all mine. Not that I cared about wealth. What I cared about was Logan. I needed him; the rest was gravy. Most of the semels of city tribes would not be able to tell the members of their tribe just by looking. Only the semels of tribes that stayed together, in one place, that were more like extended families, only those could say for certain who belonged and who didn’t. It was funny—Logan Church lived in a small place; he had a small, lucrative business that generated a reliable source of income, enough to support himself, his family and his home. He funneled quite a bit of funds right back into his business and so stayed profitable. He was not a rich man, but neither was he a poor one. Since I had become his reah, more and more people had joined his tribe, settling in Incline Village just to be close to him—and close to me.
Logan should have been a small and insignificant semel of a forgettable lake town tribe, but at last count we had a little over two hundred members. The monthly gatherings and hunts were now run more like festivals, and Logan had just mandated that more khatyu, fighters, be trained to police the events. He had put Markel, Domin Thorne’s former sheseru, in charge of the new recruits. I had concerns about the growing numbers of our tribe—I wanted us to stay a large family instead of a group—but as Logan had become semel-re, a semel who had found his reah, his true-mate, and word had spread, there was no way to curb the influx of people. For me, though, as reah of my tribe, it meant that I would need to spend more and more time receiving people and visiting homes if I wanted to remain on a first-name basis with everyone. I had no idea how I was going to do that unless I quit my day job. Logan had suggested it more than once, and while I protested, the reality of my situation was becoming increasingly apparent. Music off, there was only silence as I descended the staircase. A path was made for me, and Artem led me to one of the chairs by the couch. I took a seat and a woman stepped in front of me, kneeling down, offering me her hand. “Good evening, my reah,” she said, beaming at me. “I’m Jennifer Eames. It’s so good to see you.”
I took her hand, covered it with my other, and smiled at her. “And you, Jen. How’s school going?”
Her smile went neon. “Oh, you remember?”
I tried to know everyone in my tribe; it was what you did when you were the mate of the leader. And a reah was made to mother everyone; it didn’t matter that I was a man. I was the same. “Of course,” I told her.
If it was me, I would not have stood in line just to say hello to my reah. I would have taken the opportunity to get something to eat while everyone else was distracted. But I sat and met everyone in the house, one after another, until I heard a gasp, whispers, and looked up to find Mikhail Gorgerin, the sylvan of my tribe, striding across the room from the front door. Everyone moved for him, parting fast, and he stepped in front of me seconds later.
