Badger to the Bone

by Shelly Laurenston

  Stevie looked away, took in a breath, let it out . . . then exploded.

  Pointing her finger and jumping up from her seat, Stevie screamed, “You are a fucking bitch and I wish I’d set you on fire when I had the chance!”

  Max jumped up, too, making sure her chair went flying back and hitting the counter behind her. Big, clanging noises always set Stevie off. “I’m a fucking bitch? You are a worthless, whiny baby!”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” Charlie bellowed, rushing into the kitchen from the front of the house and pushing Max and Stevie apart. “That is enough!”

  “She started it!” They both screamed in unison.

  “I don’t care! Stop it. Right now!”

  They stopped screaming, but they kept glowering at each other. So, to keep the distraction going, Max shoved Stevie and Stevie shoved her back, and then the mutual headlocks began.

  By the time Charlie had yanked them apart, Max had a bloody nose and Stevie a split lip.

  Charlie shoved them in separate directions and raised her hands, pointing a finger at each of her sisters.

  “That’s enough. Stevie, don’t you have somewhere to be?”

  “As a matter of fact . . . I do! Because I have a life!” She made that sound Max always equated with the British ladies who starred in movies made from Jane Austen novels, before she stormed back to her room. All she was missing was a full skirt that she could lift when she made her exit.

  Instead of laying into Max about giving Stevie “a break,” Charlie walked away from her sister and started pulling out what she needed to make her honey buns.

  She was putting the supplies on the small counter under the window that looked out over the backyard when she suddenly leaned down and gave a low chuckle.

  “You have to see this,” she said, motioning to Max.

  Max came over to the counter and leaned down next to her sister so that both of them were resting their arms on the wood top. But when she looked outside, all she saw was Shen hanging from the big tree in the yard, which wasn’t exactly shocking. He did that most mornings and nights. He hung there with his knees over the lowest limb so his arms could easily reach the bag of bamboo that he placed under it.

  “It’s Shen,” Max said. “So what?”

  “Look into the leaves.”

  Max raised her gaze and studied the higher parts of the tree but still didn’t see anything. At first. Then she noticed a slight movement. She tilted her head and leaned forward.

  “Oh, my God. That’s the cat.”

  Charlie rested her head on her arm and laughed.

  “He’s climbing trees now?” Max asked. “Seriously?” Then she laughed so hard she had to lean against her sister so she didn’t fall to the floor.

  “How did you even see him?”

  Charlie gave a small shrug. “When I’ve got my contacts in, it’s like I have wolf eyes.”

  They watched Zé for a few minutes, and Max loved that he was really starting to embrace “the cat within” as Dutch liked to say about cat shifters in general.

  But just as Max was about to turn away to pour some orange juice before getting ready to head out, Charlie asked, “So what are you and Stevie hiding from me?”

  Max forced herself not to react to her sister’s question. She kept moving, even as she asked, “What makes you think we’re hiding anything?”

  “Instinct. Stevie seemed truly angry, but you . . . you were just trying to distract her. And you only distract her when you want her to keep her mouth shut about something. What’s she keeping her mouth shut about, Max?”

  Max continued to stare at the tree, where Zé was easily moving around among the leaves. After a moment, she asked her sister, “Do you really want to know the answer to that?”

  From the corner of her eye, Max saw her sister open her mouth . . . close it . . . open it again . . .

  Finally, Charlie returned her gaze to the tree. “Not really.”

  They stood there like that for quite a bit until a male head suddenly appeared between them. “What are we staring at?”

  Max had scented the kid coming. Felt his light footsteps coming through the floor. Heard the way he rubbed his nose sometimes instead of twitching it like a normal jackal. So when he put himself between her and Charlie, Max wasn’t bothered or surprised.

  Charlie, however . . .

  “Jesus Christ, Kyle! ” she practically screamed, her entire body leaping backward so that she slammed into the oven. “What the fuck, man?”

  Kyle Jean-Louis Parker blinked a few times as he stared at Charlie.

  “Sorry you’re so unobservant . . . ?”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass.” Charlie brushed her jeans off for no reason Max could see, then did that thing she did when she was startled. Barking at the person who’d scared her just like a dog startled from its sleep. “And where the fuck have you been? You’ve been gone for days. For all we knew, you could have been dead!”

  “Would you have cared?” Kyle wisely asked.

  “That’s not the point!”

  “I was with my family. Not on purpose, my mother made me.”

  Kyle was one of the Jean-Louis Parkers. A family of jackals headed by a former child-genius mother who’d given birth to a whole litter of geniuses. For some it was math, science, and language. For others it was art, music, and dance. Only one was born “normal” like her father, but Toni Jean-Louis Parker was the true matriarch of the whole troop while the actual mother played violin for monarchs and prime ministers all around the world.

  Kyle was only seventeen at the moment but he tended to irritate his family as much as his family irritated him. Maybe more. So he’d moved into one of the MacKilligans’ rooms and paid a very nice rent. It helped that he and Stevie were close friends, each of them understanding the other as only a former child prodigy could.

  For most kids his age, being in a house with twenty-something women who barely paid him any attention would be a chance to drink, do drugs, and get laid. But this was Kyle. He’d turned their garage into an art studio and spent hours in there . . . working on his art. No drinking, no drugging, no anything. Except, on occasion, being annoying.

  Charlie blinked. “Why are you holding a sledgehammer?” she asked.

  “I’m going to destroy my shitty art and start over.”

  Max gasped. “Awesome! Can I help?”

  “Of course!”

  “No!” Charlie snapped. “No, no, no, no, no! You’re not doing that.”

  “Why not?” Kyle asked, his voice calm. “I am unhappy with my work—why keep it around? So I can have evidence of my failure?”

  “He has a point, Charlie.”

  Charlie aimed a warning finger at Max. She didn’t even have to say the words Shut the fuck up. She said it with her glare and that finger. That terrifying forefinger.

  “Kyle,” Charlie said, keeping her voice calm, “I know what Shen’s sister said about your art the other day really upset you, but that doesn’t mean you should destroy your work. That doesn’t make sense to me. And it definitely won’t make sense to your sister Toni.”

  “Toni has no say when it comes to my work.”

  “Well, I under—”

  “And neither do you. It’s my work; I can do what I want with it. And I’m going to destroy it. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  Max winced. The poor kid. He didn’t know what he was dealing with, did he? He was dealing with the same woman who had successfully managed Max and Stevie.

  Yeah. Poor kid.

  Kyle started toward the back door but Charlie grabbed the head of the sledgehammer that was resting on his shoulder. When she yanked it, she dragged the kid back with it. He tried to keep his grip on it, but Charlie wasn’t going for that either. With two good pulls, she took it from his hand.

  “Give that back to me,” Kyle ordered.

  While staring Kyle in the eyes, Charlie held the wooden handle in one hand and the head in the other. Then, with little effort at all, she ripped the head of
f and dropped it to the floor.

  Kyle briefly chewed the inside of his mouth before asking, “Is that supposed to intimidate me?”

  Charlie placed the ragged part of the broken wooden handle against Kyle’s throat.

  “Now listen up, kid. I’m happy to have you here. You pay your rent, you’re surprisingly quiet, and you have no friends, so I never have to throw any of them out. But if you think you’re going to do something radical to your work, which will force me to deal with that psychotic sister of yours, you’ve lost your mind. You want to destroy your shit, you take it back to your parents’ place first and do it there. While you live here, you pretend everything you have in our garage was made by Michelangelo himself and is priceless. Do you understand?”

  Kyle cleared his throat. “I’ve always found Michelangelo overrated.”

  Charlie pulled the broken handle away from Kyle’s neck, her hand gripping it in the center. With her gaze still locked on poor Kyle, she used that single hand to break the wood with what seemed to be very little effort. Because, for Charlie, it was little effort. Stevie had always reasoned that all the energy Charlie would have used for shifting instead seemed to go into muscle strength.

  “Okay.” Max grabbed Kyle by his shoulders and steered him out of the kitchen. “Don’t forget the honey buns,” she called back to her sister before stopping at the stairs.

  “Your sister is terrifying,” Kyle admitted in a whisper.

  “She is. But no one wants to go toe-to-toe with your sister either. So don’t do anything that’s going to piss them both off. For all our sakes.”

  “But my work sucks.”

  “Because Shen’s sister says so? Who is she anyway?”

  “She is art.”

  “I don’t know shit about art, Kyle. I don’t care about art. The closest thing I ever had to art was my boy-band poster collection in junior high.”

  “Not sure that’s something I’d brag about.”

  “I thought it was awesome.”

  “You do know there are amazing singers and bands and artists that are”—he waved his hand in her direction—“you know . . . Asian . . . right? Music based on the culture of your people that you can really be proud of as opposed to”—he cleared his throat again—“boy bands.”

  “What’s wrong with boy bands?”

  Kyle gave a quick shake of his head. “Forget it.”

  “Look, I can’t help you with this problem you have. Mostly because I don’t care. But I also can’t afford for my big sister to be annoyed by you right now. And I also don’t want to deal with you. It’s nothing personal.”

  “No. I get it.”

  “So I’m going to pass this shit off.” She turned her head and yelled up the stairs, “Stevie! Kyle wants to destroy all the fancy art he has in the garage!”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Stevie yelled back.

  Max nodded. “There you go,” she said to Kyle, patting his shoulder. “Now you can deal with her. Honestly, you’ll be better off in the long run. Because if you keep talking to me, I’ll just bury you alive. Literally. I will literally bury you alive.”

  “I have to say, Max, I enjoy your directness.”

  Max snorted. “Yeahhhhh . . . I’m pretty sure you’re the only one. See how unique you are, Kyle? Like Mozart or John Carpenter.”

  “John Carpenter? The movie director?”

  “The brilliant horror movie director.”

  “Wow.” His eyes blinked wide. “Mozart and Carpenter in the same sentence . . . okay.”

  * * *

  It was as if they were debating on the works of Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. But they weren’t. They were debating about phones.

  Phones!

  For the last hour Max had discussed every phone in the goddamn store with some teen kid who seemed way too young to be legally able to sell anything. This intense, deep, ridiculous conversation on phones.

  Zé didn’t understand it. He just wanted to get a phone. Any phone that could make calls and receive calls.

  He just wanted a phone!

  “Now tell me about this one,” Max said, pointing at another phone that looked just like all the other phones they’d looked at. Sizes might be different but that was it! That was it!

  Zé grabbed a phone that he thought wasn’t too expensive but also wasn’t ridiculously large. He dropped it on the counter.

  “This one.”

  “Wait. We still haven’t looked at—”

  Zé slammed his hand on the counter, making all the people in the store jump. All except Max, who only smirked at him.

  “This. One.”

  “Yeah, let’s go with that one,” she said to the teen.

  As the kid went through all the steps necessary to get the phone set up for him, Zé glanced down at Max standing next to him. She was just standing there, not speaking. She didn’t seem upset or hurt or annoyed or anything. She was smiling but he’d already learned that smile told him absolutely nothing. So he asked.

  “Have you just been fucking with me for the last hour?”

  When she burst into a round of snorted giggles, bending over at the waist, Zé rolled his eyes and tried to say, “Not cool.” But what came out was . . . a growl. A low, rumbling one that came from deep in his gut and worked its way up and out of his throat.

  It startled him and the poor kid but just made Max laugh harder, which he did not appreciate.

  “Would you like a cover for the back of your phone?” the kid asked.

  Annoyed the kid was still bothering him with bullshit, Zé snapped, “Just pick one.”

  The kid went around the counter, grabbed the first thing he found, and rang up the sale. He took the new phone out of the box and put the case on it. He told Zé what his new number was and gave him the phone while pushing the box with the charger toward Max.

  They went out of the store and onto the street. Zé stopped and stared at his phone.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t remember Kamatsu’s number.” He shrugged. “It was in my phone.”

  Zé rested the top of his phone against his chin, trying to remember which of the phone numbers in his brain belonged to his team leader.

  When Max started laughing again, he glared at her. “What now? ”

  “Unicorn,” she gasped out.

  “What?”

  She took the phone from his hand and turned it around. The color of the case the kid had picked out for him was bright pink glitter, which Zé had noticed but not cared about. But the white unicorn with rainbow-colored wings that decorated the back was too much for him. Just too much.

  “Goddammit,” he snarled, snatching the phone from Max and returning to the store to scare the kid into changing it for a simple black protective case. He didn’t have to try too hard to scare the kid. Apparently just staring at him did the trick. The whole exchange took only about three minutes but when Zé got back outside, Max had been slammed over the hood of a cop car and her wrists zip-tied.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, not really thinking about the fact he was mouthing off to cops.

  A big, blond, uniformed male pulled Max off the car.

  “Out of the way, house cat,” the blond ordered as he pushed past Zé.

  “Whatever you do,” Max told him before she was unceremoniously shoved into the back of a police van, “do not tell Charlie. Understand?”

  Of course he understood . . . but he wasn’t going to listen.

  There was just one problem: he didn’t have anyone’s phone number or any money. He’d been planning to get all that together back at the house when he had access to Max’s computer.

  Zé looked up at the corner street sign, and that’s when he remembered where they’d planned to go after they left the phone store.

  * * *

  Nelle was in the middle of a wonderful massage while her teammates got mani-pedis when the front door was battered open and cops came charging in with weapons out.

  The f
ull-human women giving them the in-home spa day screamed and dropped to the ground, most of them sobbing in fear.

  But Nelle and her girls . . . well, they were honey badgers. They weren’t hard to startle but they were hard to scare.

  Big NYPD lions and bears grabbed each of them and as they zip-tied their wrists in front, one of them warned, “We’re being nice here, badger. Don’t make us regret it.” Female cops got Nelle clothing from her room and let her put it on since she’d been naked under the sheet while getting her massage.

  “What are the charges?” she asked, ignoring the laughter of her bitch sister from the other room.

  The grizzly holding her didn’t answer, just pulled her out of the apartment. But Nelle could still hear her sister from inside, cheering, “This is the best day ever!”

  The bitch.

  * * *

  Mads was glad she’d only agreed to the manicure. Her teammates didn’t have on shoes, and the thought of walking around without shoes in fucking New York City made her skin crawl. Honey badgers might be hard to kill but diseases were different from a knife or a gun. Diseases were worse than any serial murderer when it came to killing shifters.

  As they were removed from the building, none of her teammates seemed to show any concern. But Mads was concerned. Because she was worried this was her fault. She hadn’t gone to her family’s heist despite the multiple calls and texts that had hit her phone the night before. But maybe the cops thought they could get to her family through Mads and her friends.

  The thought made her sick to her stomach.

  Her teammates had always been tolerant of the hyena side of Mads’s family. Tolerating the rudeness, the mocking laughter, and the inappropriate “man moves” of her male cousins. But if they were all being dragged to a police station because of her family, Mads wasn’t going to do what she usually did when her family got out of hand: walk away and ignore it. Nope. Not this time.

  The cops opened up the van doors and began to put each of her teammates inside. But just when it was her turn, she saw Zé run around the corner. He had not yet noticed her. Glancing back and forth between the Siberian tiger male on one side and the black bear on the other, she decided to risk it, and let out one of the whooping calls that came from the hyena side of her family. A communication skill only her teammates knew about because it would weird out other shifters, who already hated hybrids on principle.