kill me then?”
“Even if he never saw you before in his life, it’s still a decision he makes to attack you or hurt you. No panther is pure animal; we can’t be. Even when the attack is done purposely, panthers still retain their humanity.”
“You lost me.”
“Well, some semels, before a scheduled fight in the pit, they will have their khatyu, their fighters, shift to panther form and stay that way for the week before or for however long it is before the challenge.”
“That makes no sense. You’d think a semel would want their khatyu to fight smart and fast, not long and bloody.”
“You see, you think like a leader and not like a brute.”
“God!”
“What’s wrong?”
“See, I get why Russ hates all this bullshit. It’s crazy. I mean, it’s hard enough to live your life as a human being, but then you have to add the whole panther bullshit on top of it? How do you do it?”
“It’s different for me, like you said. I don’t have the whole animal-versus-human war going on in my head all the time. I’m just me.”
“What is that like? You shift and you’re still you, still Jin, aware of everything, making sense of—”
“Except when I change into my nekhene form,” I told her.
“What?”
I cleared my throat. “In Sobek, I changed into my nekhene form; you saw it.”
“Yes. You saved Logan and Markel from the semel-aten’s men.”
“In that form, I’m not me,” I confessed to her.
“But my God, Jin, you have to either be threatened with Logan’s death or with forced separation from him to bring on that form. That’s not just something you choose or don’t choose to become. Circumstances make you into your nekhene form; it’s a purely visceral reaction.”
And it was, but I didn’t like it.
“What’s interesting to me about that is that the form you take changes. The first time you shifted, Logan said you looked more like an enormous werepanther, that form that only a semel or reah can be, and then another time he said you looked more like a dragon, and then when I saw you, it was like you were a cross between a scorpion and a panther, almost like a giant spider with a cat muzzle.”
“All those forms sound horrible. I just want to be a panther or a man, nothing else.”
“Well, you can have the panther form, I’ll just be me.”
“If you shifted faster and it didn’t hurt, you might enjoy the freedom of being in your panther form.”
She smiled at me. “That’s another part I don’t get, it seriously doesn’t hurt you even a little to shift?”
“Not at all.”
“But I’ve seen you shift, and it’s amazing. It’s like I blink and you’re a cat.”
“We can increase the speed of your shift if you want.”
“We can?”
“It’s a skill just like anything else; if you practice, you’ll get faster.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Okay.”
We were silent for several minutes, just walking together, enjoying being outside in the cool night air.
“Jin.”
I turned to look at her.
“If protecting you is hardwired into Yuri specifically, then why does every sheseru want to protect you, and not just him?”
“It’s hardwired in a sheseru to protect the mate of his semel, his yareah, but a reah, that notches up the feeling and pulls it from every sheseru that’s encountered. And in Yuri, because he is my sheseru—”
“God, poor Yuri, he must want to sleep with you.”
I gave her a look.
“No, I just mean he must want to be with you and protect you all the time.”
“Yuri’s stronger than people think, and I’m not talking about physically. He’s very disciplined mentally.”
“Yuri’s a brute.”
I shook my head. “He’s really not.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” She sighed heavily. “So back to these akers, where are they in hierarchy in relation to a sylvan and a sheseru?”
“Like I said, they report to a maahes, and he, the maahes, is on the same level as a sylvan and a sheseru.”
“So you think what?
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