Breaking Badger

by Shelly Laurenston

  “What?” she screamed out.

  “Are you guys coming back or what?” Tock screamed up at her from the street.

  “Yeah! Sorry! My mother’s on the phone!”

  Tock frowned. “Why the fuck is she on the phone?”

  “I have no idea! But she’s pissed! She’s so busy screaming at me I can’t make out a word she’s saying!”

  “Hey!” a She-bear yelled at them from her stoop. “Are you two going to do that all the time now that you’ve moved in? All that screaming? This is a quiet neighborhood, ya know!”

  “We’re almost done!” Tock yelled at the She-bear. She looked up at Mads and yelled, “Find out what your mother’s screaming about and then come over when you’re done! I’ll let Charlie know you’ll be over in a couple of minutes! Okay?”

  “Yeah! Okay!”

  Tock turned back to the angry She-bear. “See?” Tock demanded in a yell. “Now we’re done!”

  Mads turned away from the window to find Finn standing in the doorway, gawking at her while still holding the phone her mother was screaming out of.

  “What?” she asked him, no longer yelling since she knew he could hear her.

  “The bears on this street are going to hate you.”

  * * *

  Mads took the phone back from him and began to yell into it, “I don’t understand a word you’re saying, Mummy. Mummy? I don’t understand you!”

  “Mummy?” Finn asked.

  “She hates when I call her that. Or Mom or Mommy or anything mother related. So I go for the very non-American, full British mother name. Like I’m talking to the Queen of England herself.”

  “You can’t call her mom?” he asked, now ignoring the continued ranting from the phone because he was so annoyed by this horrible female he’d never met. “What does she want you to call her? Bitch?”

  Finn cringed. The word was out of his mouth before he could even think to stop it but that had been shitty, even for a tiger. This evil female was still Mads’s mother.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—” He stopped talking, because she was waving him off and laughing.

  “Mummy, please,” she said, still chuckling.

  “Stop calling me that!” her mother yelped. But the distraction was enough for Mads to get a word in.

  “I don’t know what you think I’ve done but—”

  “You’ve stolen the sword! You didn’t think we’d notice?”

  All humor left Mads’s face and she coldly replied, “I didn’t take the sword. Although it’s mine by right.”

  “It’s mine by blood! And we’ll get it back! Do you understand what I’m telling you, girl?”

  Mads let that statement sit for a moment before she replied with freezing calm, “Come for me, Freja, and I promise you’ll regret it.”

  Her mother exploded into more hysterical screaming that was unintelligible, and Mads closed her eyes, let out a breath. Finn reached over as if he was attempting to grasp the phone from her. Instead, he simply disconnected the call. When Mads opened her eyes in surprise, he threw up his hands and said, “Ooops. These big, clumsy mitts of mine.”

  The phone immediately began to ring again but Mads didn’t answer. She tapped on her screen, then announced, “Blocked. I’ve blocked my own mother. How unfortunate.”

  “And your grandmother?”

  “Oh, I blocked her a long time ago. Each time I have to buy a new phone it’s one of the first things I do.”

  “Good. So this sword . . . ?”

  “The family sword.”

  “From ancient Viking times? Pried from the dead hand of one of your ancestors’ enemies?”

  “No. Purchased from a Renn Faire in Norway back in 1952. But it looks very Viking, and Solveig told them, to their great annoyance, that it was going to me because I—unlike my mother and grandmother—am true Viking rather than just a shifter. They actually stole the damn thing from Solveig and always swore I’d never get it from them and I was always like, ‘Whatever.’ ”

  “So you didn’t steal it?”

  “I would never go back to that hoarder’s nest. The sword is in the main house, on the wall so you can easily see it, but you have to climb so much crap to reach it . . .” She visibly shuddered. “That’s why Solveig never went to get it herself. And I’d rather go to another Renn Faire in Jersey and buy one or travel back in time and fight Erik the Red for his goddamn sword than go back to that goddamn house.”

  “How do they live there?”

  “They don’t. They bought a bunch of trailers and they live on the property. At this point, they just use the house as storage.”

  Finn thought a moment. “If you didn’t steal the sword, though . . . who would go in that house and steal it?”

  “I think I know, and none of my teammates are going to like it.”

  * * *

  “All right, what the hell did you do?”

  Max turned away from the kitchen sink to find most of her teammates as well as Charlie, Stevie, and two of those idiot cats staring at her.

  “What did I do about what?” Max pointed at the Malones. “The cats are still alive so I’ve been good.”

  “Forget the cats, and answer me,” Tock pushed. “What did you do?”

  She knew she had to be careful here. This could be a trick question. Charlie had caught Max doing all sorts of shit with that line of questioning when she was younger.

  “Nothin’,” Max instinctively said.

  “Max MacKilligan, don’t you dare lie to me,” Tock barked. “Mads is on the phone with her mother right now getting yelled at. Why is she yelling at her?”

  “Why is that evil bitch calling her at all?” Streep chimed in.

  Now Max was confused and worried. She knew how cruel that family had been to Mads. Max, for one, had been goddamn gleeful when they’d cut off most contact with Mads. So why were they back now? “I have no idea why Freja’s calling her.” When that response elicited nothing but glares and arm crossing, she didn’t know what to say. “I swear. And let’s face it, I would have admitted it by now if I had done something. Under this brutal onslaught of ”—she looked around—“whatever this is.”

  The backdoor opened and Zé came up the short stairway that led into the kitchen. He had bamboo leaves stuck in his black hair, which meant he’d been under the tree where Stevie’s panda boyfriend ate his morning bamboo and Zé drank his morning coffee.

  He stopped as soon as he saw the inquisition and asked Max, “What did you do now?”

  “Is no one on my side?”

  “Of course I’m on your side. I . . .” Her eyebrows went up as she waited for Zé to tell her that he loved her in front of all these people. Something she knew he was not comfortable with, just as she was not comfortable with it, but that was okay. They said it to each other at night, when they were alone. That’s when it mattered anyway.

  “. . . tolerate you greatly,” he finally finished, which only made her laugh out loud. “But we both know that you love to start shit.”

  “Not with Mads’s family! I don’t start shit with them. We all know what they’ll do to her.”

  “What will they do to Mads?” Shay innocently asked.

  Tock shook her head. “Nothing good.”

  The front door opened and before Mads even entered the kitchen, Max was yelling, “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!”

  Mads stood in the kitchen doorway, gazing at her. That other big idiot tiger stood right behind her.

  “What are you talking about?” Mads asked.

  “Everyone is saying I’m the reason your mother is calling you.”

  “I know none of you guys would ever purposely engage with my mother. Not after the Tova incident.”

  “Ahhh. The Tova incident,” Tock repeated, a faraway look in her eyes.

  “I think that was the last time any of us had any direct contact with the females of your family.”

  “What was the Tova incident?” Zé asked.

>   Max chuckled.

  “Tova is Mads’s grandmother,” Streep replied before Mads could say a word, “and she didn’t want any of us hanging around Mads after basketball practice. So she decided it was a good idea to come to each one of us individually and threaten us that if she saw us around Mads, she’d make us pay. But she was really scary about it. Like mobster kind of scary. Like she’d break our legs or something. And since we were only in seventh grade, we all took it very seriously.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She didn’t want me to have a safety net,” Mads said as she pulled a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. “A place I could go if things got tough at home. And it was always tough at home.”

  “We didn’t know that at the time,” Streep continued. “We’d just started hanging together. But threatening baby honey badgers . . . ? Huge mistake.”

  “Definite mistake,” Nelle said with a little laugh.

  “My parents did not like some hyena talking to their adored baby on school grounds,” Streep explained, “which they told her in no uncertain terms. And then, for some unknown reason, my mother shredded this purse Tova had.”

  “She did do that,” Mads said, dropping into an empty chair next to the kitchen table and opening the orange juice. She took a large swig directly from the carton before adding, “She loved that purse. It was Chanel. Stolen. But Chanel.”

  “Everyone in Denny’s was shocked.”

  “My father was appalled when he heard she’d had the gall to say a word to me while I was waiting for the family car to pick me up,” Nelle said. “So he had a couple of his bodyguards burn down that shed she had with a few of her prized racing cars in it.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Mads grinned. “That really pissed her off.”

  “She tried to bully me,” Tock said. “My parents were going to deal with it, but it got back to my grandparents before they could make a move. They were busy at the time in Belarus, I think. So they asked a few friends of theirs who had some important meeting in DC to take a quick break and handle it for them. You guys met them . . . Moshe, Rachel, Ben.”

  Mads spit out some of her juice.

  As she wiped her chin, she asked, “The lion triplets?”

  “Yeah. And you know how lions love hyenas. From what I understand it was a very nice, polite discussion, though, about how it was in Tova’s own best interest never to speak to me again or she would lose her entire face.”

  Everyone in the room chuckled a bit before turning their attention to Max, but she simply shrugged. “What?”

  “So what happened when she talked to you?” Tock asked.

  “She never talked to me. Not about Mads. She yelled horrible things to me from moving cars a few times, but that was about it. She kept it up, you know . . . until I left the state. Other than that . . .” Max shrugged again.

  “My grandmother didn’t talk to you directly at all?” Mads pushed.

  “No. I never heard from her.” Max thought a moment, then turned and faced her sister. She was busy mixing up batter for a fresh set of muffins for the growing group of work-at-home bears in their yard. Some had even brought their laptops and headphones so they could hold meetings and do work while waiting.

  “What?” her sister asked when she looked away from her stainless-steel bowl.

  “Did Mads’s grandmother say anything to you? Back then?”

  “When?”

  “When I started junior high. Started hanging around Mads. Did she stop you on the street or school or anything?”

  “No, actually, she just showed up at the Pack house. When all the adults were out. In fact, everyone was out . . . but me.”

  Shocked because Charlie had never said a word about it, Max moved closer to her sister. “Oh, my God! What happened?”

  “I . . . uh . . . buried her alive.”

  Max and Mads quickly covered their mouths. Max, to stop the laughter and Mads, probably to stop herself from spitting out more juice. The rest of Max’s teammates stepped as far back from Charlie as they could manage in the small kitchen. The Malones just appeared horrified, which Max really liked. Ungrateful bastards.

  Stevie, however, merely grabbed an apple from a bowl on the counter and took a healthy bite; the sound made everyone glare at her. She paused mid-chew to squeak out a “Sorry.”

  Max refocused on Charlie. “Soooo . . . what happened?”

  “I buried her alive. Well . . . first I punched her. Then I hit her with a shovel. Then I dragged her back to hyena territory. Then I buried her alive.”

  “Then . . . you . . . Why?”

  “I wasn’t going to bury her on Pack territory. Duh, Max.”

  “I don’t mean why did you bury her . . .” Max gritted her teeth. “I mean, why did you do any of that?”

  “Oh! She clearly came there looking for a fight. And I was kind of in the mood to give her one because Dad had already pissed me off that morning. What really set me off, though, was she grabbed my arm when I tried to walk away. I think she planned to drag me through the house looking for you. But you weren’t there. When I tried to explain that, she unleashed her claws in my arm, which I did not like. It hurt and I was already cranky. So I punched her. Now that I think of it”—she glanced off for a moment—“yeah, I punched her a couple of times because she didn’t let me go at the first punch. I was still learning my strength, and she was underestimating my strength. But by the third time . . . she was on the ground with a broken jaw and, I think, a broken eye socket. Of course, by then my hand hurt.”

  “I hate that,” Max said and her sister nodded.

  “The thing was, as I was shaking out my sore hand and she was mumbling what sounded like very racist curses at both me and Max, I came to the realization that we were on our own. You, me, Stevie. My grandfather had so much on his mind, and I didn’t want to get his Pack involved. They barely tolerated us being there as it was. You’d just started junior high. Stevie was doing her SATs and finding errors in the test booklets and training guides, so she was freaking out. And those hyenas lived right next door to us. Now I didn’t know much about hyenas. I knew they had a funny run. I could hear them laughing at night. They either had stripes or spots, and they were matriarchal. And she was an old female. That’s when I figured she was probably in charge to some degree, so if I made my point with her . . . I’d make my point.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That if we didn’t start letting people know they couldn’t fuck with us now, they would be fucking with us forever. So I figured I’d start off with her. And the one thing my mom always told me . . . no one wants to fuck with crazy people. Even shifters. So I grabbed the shovel, because Lucy, one of the elders in our Pack, had been doing a lot of gardening. And I hit the hyena a few times—”

  “A few times?” Tock repeated.

  “Well, she wouldn’t stay down.”

  “Right.”

  “And then I dragged her back to hyena territory, dug a hole, dropped her in it, covered it up, went back to the house, made waffles and bacon because I’d missed breakfast. Never heard from her after that, and Max never said a word about her soooo . . .”

  Charlie gave a nonchalant shrug and, with an extra-large ice cream scoop, carefully ladled batter into the muffin pans.

  “I knew Tova was alive, though,” Charlie suddenly added, startling everyone in the room. “Because I’d see her walking around town.”

  “That must have been comforting for you,” one of the Malones said with great sarcasm, which Charlie completely missed.

  “It was because I was worried I might have miscalculated. I was only fourteen or fifteen when this happened. I’d gone through puberty, but I was still figuring out how much strength I had. I was desperately trying not to crush her skull. Or take her head off completely. That would have defeated my purpose. It’s not like I was positive an old hyena could survive the head wound she already had and dig her way out of her own grave. But I was ever hopeful.”

  She pu
t the bowl aside, opened the oven, and carefully placed the muffin trays inside. When she closed the oven door, she faced the room again.

  “I was also surprised, Mads, when Tova or your mother sent those hyena males here to drag you into that heist you didn’t want to do. You remember when that happened a little while ago?”

  Mads nodded. “I remember.”

  “I figured she just didn’t know I was also here. Because, otherwise, why would she challenge me? As I’ve gotten older, I’ve only gotten meaner, angrier, and more willing to bury her alive where she can’t dig herself out. I assume that shooting her Clan’s males in the legs and knees the way I did clearly got my point across. Don’t you think?” Gripping the orange juice carton, eyes wide, Mads simply nodded her head. “Yeah. I think so too. But, hey, if you need me to deal with her again, just give me a heads-up. I’d be happy to help.”

  Max looked at her teammates, grinned, and said, “Hear that, guys? Just give my sister a heads-up! She’d be happy to bury your enemies alive. Owwww, Charlie! I was just joking!”

  * * *

  It was like a herd of cattle stampeding, the way everyone rushed out of that kitchen. Mads wouldn’t necessarily say they were trying to get away from Charlie. But she wouldn’t say that any of them were trying to hang around her either. Not after the previous night’s fight with the Yuns and now hearing how a fourteen-year-old Charlie had handled Tova Galendotter. The reason Mads’s other teammates had let the adults in their lives handle Tova was because they’d been too young and scared to stand up to the adult hyena. But Charlie didn’t have a choice, so she’d done what none of them would have even thought about at the time. Challenged Tova head-on, but was wise and fast enough not to give Tova time to think. To strategize and plan. By the time the old bitch had dug herself out of that grave, she probably didn’t want to ever see Charlie MacKilligan again, much less face her head-on in public. And risk losing one more time, maybe in front of her entire Clan? In front of sisters and nieces who would happily rip the mantle of leadership from her? Nope. She wasn’t about to do that.

  In the end, Charlie’s plan worked brilliantly. She kept Tova away from Max and her grandfather’s entire Pack while unknowingly ensuring that Mads always had some place to go when she needed to escape. Whether it was Tock’s for the Meyerson-Jackson Seder. Streep’s family summer barbeques. Nelle’s for Lunar New Year. Or Max’s for any American holiday since, according to Max, “Those are the only holidays we know.” Her teammates were also there any time Mads needed a bed or a hot meal. They were her escape. Her safety net. Something that drove her grandmother crazy, and that was why Mads was loyal to them to this day.