Badger to the Bone

by Shelly Laurenston

And the guy said that as if he knew Zé couldn’t afford it, which did nothing but piss Zé off. This motherfucker didn’t know what he could or could not afford.

  “I’m more than willing to pay for an entry card.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” the guard asked. “Because if you don’t have an entry card, you need to have an appointment to come in. But I’m guessing you people don’t have that either.”

  Zé’s neck got tight. “You people?”

  “He’s talking about badgers,” Max said from behind him. “It’s not a race thing.”

  “Are you sure?” Because the man was a big, blond, Aryan-looking motherfucker. And it definitely sounded like a race thing.

  Max came to stand beside Zé. Pointed through the glass at the guard. “See that hair? That’s a mane. A lion mane. He’s a cat.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She now pointed at Zé for the “lion’s” benefit. “He’s a cat, too.”

  The guard looked Zé over. Then looked over Max and her teammates. “You need to choose a better class of friends, house cat.”

  Zé grabbed the big metal handles on the glass doors and told Max, “I’m going to tear these fucking doors off.”

  “Calm down,” the guard said. “Calm down.” He unlocked the doors and pushed them open. “No need to get bitchy.”

  Zé stepped back so that Max and the others could walk through first and not be locked out again. Especially since he wasn’t exactly sure what they were looking for. He needed their help in this foreign world.

  Once the ladies were inside, he followed, matching the guard glare for glare until he turned the corner to enter the main room.

  “You’re responsible for your friends!” the guard yelled after them. “They steal anything, bucko, it’s on.”

  “Bucko?” Zé snarled, turning around, but Max grabbed his arm and pulled him away. “What an asshole.”

  “Lion males vary. Some are great. I know a few I just love to hang with. Others . . . you want to throw them from a very high building, headfirst. “

  “If you really want to get them, though,” Nelle said softly, “go for the hair. They’ve got such a fucking thing about their hair.”

  Walking onto the main floor, Zé felt like he was definitely in a snobby library with a lot of very snobby people working in it. These were not the helpful librarians he remembered from his grade school days, like Mrs. Juanita and Miss Frannie. Those two ladies didn’t have much to work with at his old public school but they did their best and they did it with a smile—when the kids weren’t going out of their way to make their lives hell.

  But the librarians here . . . geez.

  * * *

  They went to the counter, where two males and one female ignored them. And continued to ignore them until Tock banged her fists on the wood and yelled, “Two minutes is too long to be standing here waiting!”

  “Quiet, rodent!” a male cheetah snapped. “The cats here are attempting to expand their knowledge. Something that you should try.”

  Tock was on the counter and almost over it when Mads grabbed her around the waist and yanked her off.

  “We need your assistance,” Nelle said kindly.

  “Do you have an appointment? We only assist those who have an appointment.”

  Zé put his hands on the counter and leaned forward so that he was eye to eye with his fellow male cat. “You people are starting to really piss me off,” he growled. “Now, my friends are saying they need assistance—give it to them.”

  The cheetah hissed. Zé snarled back.

  “Good Lord!” the female said, pushing the cheetah out of the way and taking over. “I swear. You house cats and your drama.”

  “Bengal tiger,” Max said to him so he understood the insult.

  “I can’t express to you how much I do not care what she is.”

  “Knowing what they are makes it easier to know whether to run or not.”

  “How can I help you?” the tiger asked, wide gold eyes blinking at them.

  Tock, calm once more—she never let her rage linger the way most honey badgers did—said with a hand wave toward Zé, “We’d like familial information on this jaguar.”

  The tiger nodded. “Of course. How far back would you like to go?”

  “The beginning of time?” Mads asked flatly and Max had to ball her fingers into a fist and dig her nails into her palm so as not to laugh in the tiger’s face. She was the only one being helpful, after all. It would be silly to piss her off.

  “How about a shorter time span?” the tiger sweetly suggested. Maybe it was easier to be pleasant when you knew you were an apex predator. “For instance, three or four generations?”

  “Actually,” Nelle said, “just one.”

  “Just one? Ohhhh.” She leaned in and whispered to Zé, “Were you adopted?”

  Zé leaned in and whispered back, “No.”

  The tiger pushed a pad and pencil in front of him. “First name. Last name. Current address. Address where you grew up, if that’s different.”

  Zé quickly printed out the information in architectural-type block letters and pushed the pad back across the smooth surface of the desk.

  “I’m not sure how long this will take,” the tiger explained. “We may need to look in our written archives since some families don’t want their offspring tracked by anyone, especially a database.”

  “Are you talking about doomsday preppers?” Max asked.

  “Full-human or not . . . they are everywhere.”

  She walked off with Zé’s information and Max turned to Tock. “Did you hear something?”

  Tock looked around, leaned in, and whispered, “You mean about that delivery of diamonds coming in from South Asia?”

  Max scratched her forehead. “No. I mean about Zé.”

  “Oh. Oh!” Tock stood up straight. “Wait . . . what?”

  “When you couldn’t get in here before, you said you were waiting to hear back from contacts you had. Did you hear something from them?”

  “Um . . .” Her teammates exchanged glances with Tock and she said, “Why don’t we wait until—”

  “Got it!” the tiger said, coming back to the counter with a smile and a couple of pages printed out. “Here’s what we have.” She held the pages out but Zé didn’t take them. He just glared at them as if expecting them to strike. Like a coiled copperhead.

  After an awkward few seconds while the She-tiger held those pages out and Zé stared, Max took them.

  “Thanks.”

  Since she wasn’t going to stand there holding the pages out for Zé, she simply looked at them herself, but didn’t see anything shocking . . . until she did.

  “Huh.”

  “Huh?” Zé repeated, a note of panic in his voice. This from a man who’d been through the weirdest life change ever and had shown few-to-no signs of panic when not in a full-blown fever . . . until now. “Why are you huh-ing? What is there to huh about?”

  “Well . . . you are in the Katzenhaus system, which would allow what is called the ‘Cat Nation’ to keep track of you. That way if something happens to your immediate family, they can track any relatives you may have in other states or worldwide who might be willing to take you in. To raise you. If there’s no one, you could be taken in by an adoption agency or foster system that handles fellow cats or shifters as a whole.”

  “Yeah . . . and?”

  “See, I was under the assumption that only one of your parents was a shifter, and since you never mentioned your dad, I just guessed that he didn’t tell your mother what he was, went out for a pack of cigarettes one day, and simply didn’t come back. Sadly, it’s somewhat common for the bigger cats. Although it usually happens more frequently with the hybrids. And my dad.”

  “Waiting for you to get to the point.”

  Max cleared her throat. “But according to this, both your parents were cats. Your mother was jaguar on her mother’s side.”

  “My grandfather raised me on his own after
my mother and grandmother died.”

  “Yes,” she said, wishing she could avoid going on.

  “How did they die?” Nelle gently asked Zé.

  “Car accident.”

  Max cringed. “Or a fight with a hyena Clan.”

  “Sorry?”

  Fuck it, she thought. She might as well tell him everything and handed over the document. “It specifies what happened to your mother and grandmother. In the full-human world, the death certificate probably says car accident. But in ours . . . the truth is that your mother and grandmother were in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time during the wrong Pride-Clan fight. The deaths were accidental—the hyenas just saw cats and overreacted—but it’s very clear that your mother and grandmother were part of the shifter world.”

  Zé stared at the papers in his hand but he didn’t say anything. Just stood there . . . staring.

  Then, abruptly, he walked out.

  “Well,” Mads muttered, “he’s off to kill every hyena he sees.”

  But that actually wasn’t Max’s worry. She saw a bigger issue and, raising her gaze to Nelle, she saw that her teammate saw it, too.

  “Go, Max,” Nelle urged. “Go.”

  Max ran out of the main library, past the snobby male lion, and through the double glass doors. When she hit the street, Zé was already stepping into a cab at the end of the block. She charged toward him, but the door closed, and the cab was already moving when Max reached it. She picked up speed, dashed around a few full-humans walking down the street, and when she passed the cab, she abruptly turned into the street and threw herself in front of it.

  The cab wasn’t going terribly fast. But fast enough to ram into Max’s small body and send her flipping into the back of one of those refrigerated trucks. She bounced off it, hit the ground, rolled toward the cab from the power of that bounce, and went right under the wheels of the vehicle . . .

  * * *

  “Fuck!” the driver screamed when that insane woman rolled under the cab’s wheels. He hadn’t been able to stop in time and the front tires definitely went over her body.

  The poor cabbie hit the brakes and gripped the steering wheel, unable to do anything but pant and pray to St. Francis Cabrini in Spanish.

  After a few seconds, shaking and beginning to sob in despair, the cabbie opened his door to step out. But Zé leaned forward, reached his arm through the opening in the protective glass, and caught the man by his shoulder.

  “Hold on one second,” he suggested.

  “But—”

  “I’m fine!” Max said, appearing by the poor driver’s passenger-side window and waving with that happy smile on her face.

  Not surprisingly, the cabbie screamed in terror at the sight of her. A few days ago, Zé would have done the same.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, moving to the back passenger door and getting into the cab with Zé. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I, uh . . . tripped. But I’m fine.”

  Although she stated this with an actual tire track imprinted across her face like some cosmic joke.

  “Really,” she insisted when both men just stared at her. “I promise. I’m a-okay.” She gave the thumbs-up with both hands as if that gesture alone would fix everything. It didn’t. So Zé told the cabbie, “It’s fine. Just go.”

  The cabbie got back into the vehicle, wiped his eyes and blew his nose with some tissue, then drove on.

  Zé rested back in the seat and gazed out the window, not in the mood to talk to anyone. He had too much on his mind. Thankfully, Max seemed to sense that and she didn’t try to engage him in conversation, nor go on and on about some other weird shifter factoid. She didn’t do any of that. She just sat on her side of the cab and gazed out her own window.

  But halfway through their trip, Zé felt her hand cover his. A simple, quiet gesture he appreciated more than he could say. He turned his hand over and interlaced his fingers with hers.

  And that’s how they stayed for the rest of the journey.

  * * *

  Daley “Dale” Malone closed the video chat, slipped his tablet back into his desk drawer, and pulled out his chemistry books. But as he sat there, trying to focus on his work so that when he started college in a few weeks, he’d be ahead of everyone else . . . he knew he wasn’t alone.

  Even worse, he knew they’d been standing there for a while.

  He turned his office chair around and faced two of his brothers.

  “Do we have to tell Keane?” he asked.

  Because Keane was the one he was worried about. Keane was the eldest. The toughest. The angriest. Not that he didn’t have a reason to be angry. He did. None of that, however, made him pleasant to be around. Especially for Dale, who was the youngest of the Malones.

  Actually, Dale was simply the youngest male. His sister, Natalie, was a year younger than he but, of course, she got treated like a princess by everyone else. Not because she was deaf either. To the immediate family, her being deaf simply meant she couldn’t hear. Like some people were born with blue eyes and others with brown, some people were born deaf and some were born hearing. And if you really wanted to get into a fight with the Black Malones—as the other Malones insisted on calling them—all you had to do was suggest that their baby sister’s deafness was some kind of defect or disability. It wasn’t. Not for her. Or for them.

  Their older brothers, however, continued to protect her like a weak doe in the woods because they insisted on believing that she was as sweet and innocent as the day she’d been born. To quote his brother Shay, “a victim waiting to happen.”

  And in the Malone brothers’ collective mind—and Dale wasn’t considered a “Malone Brother” because he was “too young, too naive, and too fucking stupid,” according to Keane—their sister was currently a victim. A poor, sad, kidnap victim taken by some disgusting older man. Dale knew better, though. He knew because there were no secrets between him and Natalie. They were so close in age, they were like twins. There were, however, secrets between Dale and Natalie and everyone else!

  It was a commitment they’d made to each other when they were toddlers and they kept it to this day. But when it came to their younger siblings, the Malone brothers didn’t care about commitments.

  Dale was yanked out of his chair and dragged through the family home like a feral cat they’d found under the bed.

  They reached the kitchen on the first floor and shoved Dale inside with no mercy. No kindness! Why was he always so mistreated?

  “Tell him,” Finn ordered when Dale came to a stumbling stop in front of a feeding Keane. His eldest brother was hunkered over a big bowl of Irish stew their mother had made them, big arms resting on the wood table, black hair nearly hiding those disturbing gold eyes that never seemed to miss a goddamn thing.

  “Tell him,” Finn said again.

  “I don’t think there’s really anything to—”

  Shay bumped him in the back, shoving him forward. “Tell him.”

  Dale cleared his throat. “The thing is,” he began, “I promised her—”

  Before he could finish, Keane turned his head and locked that cold, merciless gold gaze on Dale, his mouth moving as he very slowly chewed his food. It shouldn’t freak out Dale as much as it did; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been in this situation many times before. But there was just something about the way his brother did that . . . while staring at him . . . that made Dale want to make a run for it.

  And even though he really couldn’t see his brother’s eyes, it didn’t matter. He could feel them.

  Dale swallowed and said, “Okay, before everyone gets hysterical. . . she’s fine. She realizes she made a mistake and she’s going to come home soon. She just . . . wants to fix a few things before she does. I tried to talk her out of it, but you know how she is once she makes up her mind. She’s just like you, Keane. But she is okay. I just talked to her.”

  Keane stopped chewing. He swallowed. He kept staring.

  “What?” Dale finally asked when the staring k
ept going and going.

  “How long have you known where she is?” Finn asked.

  “I actually don’t know where she is. She’s been on the move. Constantly.”

  “But you’ve been in touch with her. All this time. And didn’t say a word to anyone? Even Mom?”

  “She really wanted to do this on her own without you guys.”

  “Your seventeen-year-old baby sister wanted to do this on her own and you think that’s not a problem?”

  “I don’t know why you’re all mad at me. I didn’t do anything! She did it. And you guys were the ones who went after the MacKilligan sisters, which is probably why she thinks she has something to fix. Again, not something I was remotely involved in. So I don’t see why everyone is all—ow. Ow. Ow! Ow!”

  Shay, gripping Dale’s shoulder and squeezing, nearly crushing it with his goddamn tiger-grip, leaned down and reminded him, “Until you have your growth spurt, short stuff, and your fangs fully come in, you may want to just tell Keane what he wants to know.”

  “I’m telling you what I know. I don’t know what she’s up to. I didn’t know she’d be going. And I’m not exactly sure when she’ll be back. She just told me she would be coming home soon and that she was completely fine. That’s all I know.”

  Keane continued to stare at Dale for another full two minutes—really! It was two minutes! He counted!—and Dale forced himself not to look away. Not to avert his eyes. He forced himself not to do anything because he knew his brother would see that as a sign that Dale was lying. And if he thought Dale was lying, this thing could go on for the next twenty-four hours. So Dale kept his gaze steady and waited.

  Finally, after what felt like a lifetime, Keane returned his gaze to what was directly in front of him, spooned more Irish stew into his mouth, and chewed. Slowly. Methodically.

  Finn put his arm over Dale’s shoulder and walked with him back to the stairs. “Next time you hear from her, tell us right away. So that we don’t have to worry about lying to our mother when we tell her that you’re not buried in the backyard. Understand?”

  “That you’re threatening your own brother with death because our sister is always more important than I will ever be? Is that what I’m supposed to understand?”