Stevie stepped close to the wolves, and both her sisters looked tense. Ready. Of course, those two were always ready.
Placing her hand on Ric Van Holtz’s forearm, Stevie asked, “What’s happened?”
He swallowed. Glanced at his cousin. “They took my friends,” he said, his voice tight. “They’re both hybrids. Blayne and Gwenie.”
“I just saw Blayne last night,” Shen said. “She was at Wild Dog Night.”
“They both were.”
“So was Matt Wells’s brother.” Stevie looked at her sisters. “He was there last night. It has to be him.”
“You don’t know it’s him,” Max cautioned.
“James is not social. Going to a wild dog karaoke night would be one of the seven hells for him. Trust me on this. I knew when I saw him something was going on. And then he was gone before I could reach him. It was him.”
“They also grabbed her mate, Bo Novikov,” Ric added. “He had a scrimmage game last night and he went missing right after.”
“What about their kids?” Shen asked.
“They’re at my house. Dee-Ann and Cella Malone are watching them. And the Malone family is protecting the building.”
“Well, they’re safe,” Max muttered with no sarcasm. And she was right.
“We need your help,” the elder Van Holtz said. “We can’t wait—”
“Stop talking.” Charlie, her back to all of them, held up her hand to silence everyone, and Stevie’s cringe was so intense, Shen felt her pain. They might have to go it alone on this without Charlie and Max. And he would go, just as he knew Stevie would. No matter what her sisters said. She was ready to move right this moment to help those who needed it.
“Look,” Van Holtz began, “I know we’ve had some issues, but—”
Charlie shook one forefinger. Then she faced them and Shen realized she was already on her phone.
“Livy. It’s Charlie. We need to move. Now. Yeah. Stevie told me. Yeah. Do you know a bear bar in Jersey?” She shook her head. “Not gay bears. Bear-bears. Yes. That one. Meet us there in the hour.”
She disconnected that call and started calling someone else. “Max. Text Berg for me. Tell him we’re moving out in ten minutes. Uncle Will. Hi. It’s Charlie. When are you guys going back home? Good. I need a few of your boys. Tonight. Great. We’re meeting at the bar we went to after the funeral. Go there now. Make sure the snakes are all gone, please. Eat them. I don’t care. I just don’t want any there when we arrive.”
With another call disconnected, she pointed at Stevie. “They’re going to assume it was you when they discover the lab break-in so you need an alibi.”
“I’m not going into hiding and I’m not staying here.”
“No. If you go into hiding, they’ll know we know and they’ll move everything. It’s better you’re out and about. Let everybody see you. Like it’s a regular thing.”
Stevie pulled her phone out. “I got an invitation to something for tonight . . .” She put in what appeared to be a ten-digit code and quickly scanned her email. “Here. I’ve been invited to a soccer game at the Sports Center. I can go to that.”
“They invited you because you’re on the team,” Max reminded Stevie. “Remember?”
“Oh. Yeah. I do now. Okay. I can do that.”
“Perfect. Shen, I need you to work with Livy. She asked for you specifically.”
“We’ve worked together before.”
“I’m going to have her hit Wells Pride’s home. Max and I will take the lab. I’ll have the MacKilligans secure the outside.”
“I can do the lab on my own,” Max protested.
“And not kill everyone?” Charlie asked, not even looking at her sister. When Max did not answer, “Yeah, exactly. I’m going with you.”
“The Wells brothers still live with their mother’s Pride.” Stevie scratched her forehead. “If you send Livy in there—”
“We need to get the family all out.”
“How? ”
“I can do that.”
Shen looked down at Kiki. “You can do what?”
“You’re talking about the Wells Pride, right? Jennifer Wells? And her scientist sons? She’s always hitting me up for financial backing for her sons’ work. If she thinks she can meet some connections . . .” She smiled at Shen. “I can do it. Trust me.”
“Are you sure you want to get involved in this?” Stevie asked.
“Are innocent people being hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m in.”
“Great.” Charlie focused on her phone while walking toward the living room. “I have to get changed.” She stopped by Ric, looked up at him. “We’ll do our best to get your friends back.”
“Thank you.”
A brisk nod and Charlie was walking again, barking over her shoulder, “Max! Stevie! Let’s move out!”
Max immediately followed, motioning to the Van Holtz males to follow her back to the front door, but Stevie stopped right outside the kitchen, looked over her shoulder at Shen.
“I love you, too,” she said sweetly, giving him a warm smile. Then she was gone.
Stunned, Shen simply stood there. Staring at where she’d just been.
“That sounded like she was responding to something,” Kiki noted.
“Yeah. It did, didn’t it?”
Zhen, rubbing her nose, asked, “Do you not remember saying anything to her?”
“I . . . don’t.” Shen pressed his palms to his eyes. “She is driving me crazy!”
“Good crazy? Or bad crazy?”
Shen shrugged. “A little of both . . . ?”
chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
Stevie, sitting on the bench, glanced at her watch again. She kept trying not to. She kept trying to focus on the game. But how could she? With everything that was going on at the moment?
Kiki had turned out to be as good as her word. She’d invited the Wells Pride to some art thing in the Village and they had cleared out of their Park Avenue apartment, even leaving their youngest offspring with an adolescent She-lion. Thankfully, she’d taken the kids out for dinner, giving Livy at least an hour to get information from the computers.
Stevie checked her cell phone again, but still no word from her sisters. A few of her cousins and Uncle Will were at the bar when they’d arrived, but she didn’t trust them. Not fully. Especially because none of this had anything to do with the MacKilligans, which meant they would be helping others out of the kindness of their hearts. That was not Uncle Will’s thing.
She heard a roar and realized it was the crowd. It was a surprisingly large one for a friendly amateur game. They didn’t really sell tickets so much as ask for donations. But if you just wanted to wander in for free, you could do that too.
“Stevie?”
Coop was standing in front of her. “Hi, Coop. What’s up?”
“You ready to go in?”
“Um . . . okay.” She put her phone down on the bench, automatically turning off the screen. “Where do you want me?” she asked, standing.
“You wanna play forward?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“There is just one thing, though. On the other team . . .”
“Yeah?”
He pointed and Stevie studied the players on the field.
“What about them?”
“You don’t recognize them?”
“Should I?”
“You just stole the wild dog karaoke trophy from them.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes,” Coop laughed.
“I just can’t get away from the lions today.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You don’t have to play if you don’t want.”
She waved him off. “It’s all right.”
Maybe playing would distract her from all her worries.
* * *
Livy fell out of the overhead vent and landed face-first on the floor.
“Ow,” she moaned
.
“You all right?” she heard Shen ask in her ear.
“I’m fine.”
Shen and Livy’s mate Vic were in the communications truck. Sadly, this was not the first time they’d done something like this. Where she’d broken in someplace and Shen and Vic helped from outside. She wasn’t a thief, though. She prided herself on that. She’d merely been born into a family of thieves. On both sides! And she had the skills. But she was not a thief herself.
Of course, the last time she’d been in a situation like this, she’d found her father’s still-shifted body. He’d been stuffed and was displayed in a rich woman’s home. That had been traumatic. Not so much because her father was dead—she’d already thought he was dead—but because her mother had buried someone and told everyone it was Livy’s father.
Turned out that had been a lie. Even worse, to this day, Livy had no idea who was buried in that grave, and her mother wasn’t talking.
That was the past, though. Right now she had bigger issues. She’d been shocked when she’d found out that people she knew had been taken, and now time was a factor. They needed information and they needed it quickly.
Ignoring the pain in her face, Livy got to her feet and cracked her neck.
“I’m in,” she told Shen and Vic. Then she got to work.
* * *
With the help of their cousins—more than just a few had agreed to come with them from the bear bar in Jersey, Will shockingly giving his blessing—they had been able to get inside Wells’s lab. There were security guards but the cousins set up a drunken fistfight in the front of the building as a distraction and using the heating vent to get around, they easily bypassed the labs with people working late.
They located Wells’s office and snuck inside. They didn’t bother with the computer on his desk, knowing he’d keep anything really important on his own laptop at home. Instead, Max picked the locks and they searched his physical files. They kept silent and moved fast, taking whatever they thought could help.
When Max found papers that seemed to be a grant proposal for Wells’s brother, she stuffed the file in Charlie’s bag and they scrambled back into the heating vent.
By the time they made it back outside, they could hear the sirens of New York’s finest responding to the destruction of the glass front of the lab building by the cousins. One of them spotted Charlie and Max, and he grinned a mouthful of blood, motioning for them to meet up with the Dunn triplets around the corner seconds before a fist jammed into his face.
Charlie gave her kin a thumb’s up—the first time she’d ever given one of them that—and ran, making sure Max was right behind her.
As they neared the armored van, the side door opened to reveal Britta crouching inside, motioning them forward. Berg outside the van; Dag driving.
Pushing her sister in front of her, Charlie scrambled into the van. She’d just moved to the far side when her cousins came tearing around the corner and dove headfirst into the vehicle. They knocked Max down, forced Charlie into the corner, kicked Dag in the back of the head, and one of them managed to ask Britta out while dripping blood on the van floor and climbing over his brother’s chest.
“All right then,” Berg sighed as he stepped into the van and closed the door, “glad we’re all safe.”
* * *
The ball rammed into Stevie’s head. Again.
Now she was sure those lion bitches were purposely kicking soccer balls at her.
Coop jogged over to her. “Okay. At this point, I think we should just . . . let you take a break.”
“Clearly they have not let the lost karaoke trophy go.” Stevie wiped blood from her nose.
“Yeah. It’s no longer a game. Just assault.” He picked up the ball. “But hey, we have a game next week. The opposition is all pandas. They’re from Chinatown. They mostly grab the ball and run, but . . . they’re extremely nice and lots of fun.”
“I am not backing away from them or anyone.” Stevie yanked the ball away. “I’m so over this shit.”
Stevie went around Coop and dropped the ball. She stopped thinking about all the stuff going on outside the game. All the danger her sisters and friends were in. She temporarily blocked it and let her mind do what it did best. Analyze.
When she was done, she readjusted her body, moved her feet a bit, then kicked the ball. It spun across the field, hitting the farthest column, ricocheting into another column, which sent it slamming into another, slicing past the goal and ramming into the side of Mary Marie Brunetti’s head. The power of the hit knocked Mary Marie into one of her sisters, sending both women to the ground.
“Wow,” Coop sighed out in awe. “It picked up speed.”
Stevie began to explain how she’d calculated the potential velocity, but she saw the blank expression on Coop’s face and just ended with, “Physics. It’s the best.”
* * *
Shen dropped Livy and Vic off at their vehicle and headed to the Sports Center. They’d already given the copied drives to Irene Conridge, who had been waiting for them. She had someone at the ready to hack into those things and he hadn’t wanted to lose a minute getting the information into Conridge’s hands. Now he just wanted to get back to Stevie. He knew she was safe, but he still didn’t feel right without her in his sight, which was ridiculous. He was just being pathetic and needy at this point.
Even though there were no big games going on, he still had a hell of a time finding a parking space. When he finally did, he was parked on the roof, which meant it would take him ages to get down to the lower levels where all the shifter activities took place.
He got on the elevator with a full-human family, watching as the numbers moved slowly from one to the other in reverse order.
Shen blew out a breath, tapped his foot, and continued to watch the numbers. At least he did until he felt a small hand grab his T-shirt.
He slowly looked down at the toddler. His father had just realized he was touching a stranger.
“Oh. Sorry.”
The child held out his stuffed giant panda toy at Shen and said, “Pan-daaa.”
“Yes. Panda,” the mother replied, which had Shen confused for a second until she grabbed the stuffed panda from her son and wiggled it in front of him. “Pan-da.”
“No!” the child snapped, angry, pointing at Shen. “Pan-daaaaaa!” He reached for Shen, trying to wiggle out of his father’s arms.
“What is with you?” his father asked, becoming as frustrated as his son.
“No, sweetie,” his mother corrected, pointing at Shen. “Man.” She held up the stuffed toy again. “Pan-da. Panda.”
The elevator doors finally opened and, with a nod and a smile at the family, Shen stepped out. That’s when the kid started screaming, because his real-life panda was walking away.
Shen never knew what it was, but kids under the age of four seemed to know a panda shifter as soon as they saw one. When it came to the other predators, kids that age usually just started crying or trying to move away from them to the safety of their parents. But they always knew the pandas and they always wanted to cuddle them.
Shen reached the private entrance to the floors that were for shifters only, passing the fox and jaguar security guards who kept the full-humans out. One sniff and they pulled the door open for Shen so he could go inside.
He saw Dag standing in line at Starbucks. He hurried over, tapped his shoulder. “All cool?”
“Yeah. Charlie and Max are in room twenty-B. It’s one of the offices. They’re going through the paperwork they grabbed. Hoping to find a property address.”
“Okay. I’ll go get Stevie.”
Dag nodded. “Want a coffee?”
“I’ll get one later.”
Shen left Starbucks and went over to the elevator, which he took down to the floor where the soccer field was located. As he stepped out, he could see crowds coming through the main doors. It looked like the game was over. He went on his toes to look over the big cats and bears. He spotted Stevie ar
guing with a couple of the Brunettis.
“Don’t tell me they play soccer,” he muttered to himself.
Shen, trying to push his way past unhelpful bears and bitchy cats, raised his arm. “Stevie!”
She looked up, went on her toes. Their eyes caught and she smiled. Waved. She walked away from the Brunettis and a fast-talking Coop, who thankfully blocked the She-lions from following her with his long jackal body.
Shen headed toward her, trying to keep eye contact, but it seemed a lot of people had come to the game tonight and Stevie kept dipping in and out of his . . .
He stopped. Looked over his shoulder, then back to where he’d last seen Stevie.
Moving forward, now pushing past the bigger breeds, he ran to the last spot he’d seen her, but there was no sign.
“Coop!” he called out. “Where’s Stevie?”
The jackal turned away from the Brunettis and took a quick look around. “She was just here. I saw her.”
“Stairs! Where are the stairs?”
Coop pointed. “Emergency exit that way.”
Shen ran, slamming into the doors and taking the steps two at a time, heading up.
He reached the first floor. The two guards who protected these doors from unknowing full-humans and made sure all the shifters got out safely if there was an emergency were out cold, blood seeping from wounds on their heads.
Shen jumped over them and raced out the door and onto the city street.
“Stevie!” he called out. “Stevie!”
But she was already gone.
* * *
Irene continued to pace around the room. The one person she knew who could do this level of illegal hacking—at least the one person she knew who’d nearly served hard federal time for this level of illegal hacking—continued to work.
“How are we doing?” she finally asked.
“I just started. Back off.”
She glared at her one-time PhD student, Miki Kendrick. Although Miki now did a lot of work for the government to stop the sort of hacking she was currently performing, she was willing to return to her old ways. Not for money, but for friends. Thankfully—and surprisingly to many—Irene was one of those friends. Of course, they were two full-human geniuses married to wolves. It was logical that they’d end up friends.
In a Badger Way Page 37