When I dropped my hand, the anger in her slowly diminished and she lowered her lids so that her long lashes fanned out against her cheeks. More quietly, she added, “No man does.”
“I…I’m sorry, Goddess.” An emotion radiated from Anamika, one I’d never sensed in her before. Embarrassment…shame…with a twinge of…fear? I drew a step closer and lifted her chin with my finger, gently, so she could move away and break contact at any time. When her green eyes met mine, I said, “You do not need to fear me, Ana.”
“I do not fear you, Kishan.”
“Then what is it that frightens you?” I asked.
Her face softened for a moment and it appeared as if she would confess what was bothering her, but then her back stiffened and she closed the emotional connection between us. “My past is my own, black tiger. It is something I do not choose to share with you.”
I stepped back and, after perusing her for a moment, nodded. There was something vulnerable about her right then, and I felt an overwhelming urge to comfort her, but the goddess Durga did not want comfort. She didn’t like showing vulnerability either. That much I already knew.
Ready to leave, I offered her my hand and she took it after only a second of hesitation. She placed her other hand on my forearm as I instructed the amulet to take us home.
When we returned to our stone palace in the mountain, she asked, “Why did you choose to materialize in the park and go through the trouble of disguising yourself if we could have simply appeared in your room of glass?”
Rubbing my neck, I shrugged. “It was safer to assume they had given my office to someone else, I suppose.”
I could see her mind ticking, trying to understand the full meaning of office and the transitory state of such a thing. “I wish to thank you for taking me there,” she said. “I liked walking through the…”
“Park?” I offered.
“Yes. Park. I enjoyed the flowers and fountains.”
“I’m glad.” Truthfully, a part of me had wanted to walk through the park with the goddess on my arm. I liked the idea of wandering with her through Kelsey’s era, a place where we were unknown. No one there clamored for our attention or lined up with gifts for the goddess. We could just be ourselves. Two people enjoying a leisurely stroll. I’d almost felt content when we were there. Until I learned about Kelsey’s impending wedding, that is.
As I used the scarf to switch from an Asian auditor in a business suit back into my normal black clothes and my own face, Anamika eyed me shrewdly. “I do not understand why you needed the information from the picture box on your table. Could you not discover the news of Kelsey’s marriage simply by asking someone or perhaps by listening in on conversations between Kelsey and Ren themselves?”
“I—” Why didn’t I want to go directly to the source? I suppose a part of me, a piece that I didn’t want to admit existed, was uneasy about the idea of seeing them together. I wasn’t ready to risk the possibility that Ren was who Kelsey had wanted all along, because if that was true, then my whole future, the life I’d begun planning for myself from the moment I learned Kadam was Phet and cradled a young Kelsey in my arms would be destroyed in an instant.
No. It wasn’t enough to see if Kelsey was happy now. I needed to be fully convinced that she was happy from the beginning. If Ren was truly the right man for her all along, then it would be obvious. I needed a new perspective. Rewinding the past and taking a second look couldn’t hurt. Besides, there was a desperate itch in my brain that screamed what if. To silence that voice, I’d have to study it from every angle. Only then, when I knew for certain that Ren was without a doubt the one for her, would I resign myself to my fate.
Anamika still waited for my reply. “I have reasons for my actions, Ana, and my reasons don’t concern you.” It was an evasive, somewhat cold answer, but the goddess understood bluntness.
“I see.” She blinked as if waiting for me to add something more, but then sighed and said, “Will you be giving me the Damon Amulet now?”
Lifting my hand to the object, I wrapped my fingers around it. “Not just yet. There’s something…something I must do first.”
Anamika stared at me for a long minute before inclining her head and leaving. I knew that she was giving me a gift. Even if she didn’t approve of what I wanted to do, she was allowing me the freedom to make my own choices, and I appreciated it. In a way, her gesture surprised me. It was as if she had resigned herself to the life of a goddess but she didn’t wish me to have to suffer the same fate. Perhaps there was a way out for both of us, I rationalized, feeling guilty about leaving her behind.
Before she disappeared around the corner, I called out, “Keep the weapons nearby. The amulet will be too far away for you to draw from its power.”
She didn’t acknowledge my comment but turned the corner and disappeared into the area of the palace leading to her chambers.
I decided to get started immediately.
***
My first stop was the jungle where I met Kelsey for the first time.
Wind whipped around my body as I reappeared in the Indian jungle. The scents of the forest surrounded me as I switched to my tiger form in a dense copse of trees. I knew that Ren and Kelsey would be making an appearance soon, so I watched for them on the trail I knew he would take. Before long I heard the noise of a hiker and moved stealthily through the brush so I could watch. Ren came along first and kept his nose pointed in the wind, but I was careful to remain downwind as much as possible.
He paused occasionally and I wondered if he had caught my scent, but he kept moving forward. If I were in human form, I would have laughed at seeing Kelsey plodding along behind him with obvious frustration on her beautiful face. She was tired and didn’t have the physical stamina to hike in the jungle for hours yet. That didn’t come until later, after we started training together.
When they struck camp, I sat there patiently listening to him wax poetic about butterflies of all things and then heard him explain that his purpose was to find me. It was obvious to me fairly quickly that though he was very interested in beginning a relationship with Kelsey, he was unsure as to how to go about the process. His attempt at courtship seemed to include two things—touching her at every opportunity and trying to make her as comfortable as possible on their quest.
I kept vigil through the night, though I knew there weren’t any predators in the jungle that would have rivaled me. I’d declared this jungle my territory centuries before, and no other creatures had dared cross paths with me for at least fifty years by the time Kelsey made an appearance. The truth was that I wasn’t even sure how many tigers were left in this century. Kadam had mentioned that they’d been hunted almost to extinction.
Rubbing my jaw, I realized that I hadn’t met any dominant males in my jungle since the 1950s, give or take a decade. The idea saddened me. Tigers were noble creatures. Intelligent. Perfect predators. Of all the beasts I had worked with as a prince and all the animals that I’d come across in my jungle wanderings, the tiger was the one I respected the most.
Despite my jealousy over Ren getting to lead a normal mortal life, I had to admit that I embraced the tiger aspect of myself much more readily than he did. Even though I didn’t need to assume the form of the black tiger any longer, I still did. I preferred dozing in the afternoons as a tiger, and hunting with teeth and claw focused me in a way nothing else could, other than Kelsey.