“Better. No headache this time. I’m really sorry about your china cabinet, though.”
“It’s fine. When I mentioned it to our landlord, Tiny, he didn’t even remember he had one.”
Stevie sat at the table with several of her notebooks, leaned in, and whispered to Vargas, “Tiny’s a hoarder. It’s a behavioral disorder and I’ve come to the realization that he owns lots of real estate, so he has plenty of places to put his shit.”
Vargas leaned toward Stevie and whispered, “I don’t care.”
Stevie laughed in response, which pissed off Max because when she told her sister she didn’t care about some armchair diagnosis she’d just made about someone, all she got in return was foaming anger.
Despite her annoyance, however, Max was not going to point out to her sister what a hypocritical douche bag she was, but instead take the opportunity to show both her sisters what a caring human being Max could be. And not the “sociopath with malignant narcissism” that Stevie had once diagnosed during a heated argument.
Max placed her hand on Vargas’s forearm, and the cat’s green gaze locked on where they touched as she said, “I’m so glad you’re feeling better.”
The cat’s eyes narrowed. “Thank you?”
“And now you understand what you are, yes?”
“Yes. I understand.”
“And don’t you feel better about that?”
He shrugged. “I guess. I mean, it does explain a few things. Maybe.”
“Exactly! You feel better because you now know what you are. A whole new world is ahead of you. Prepare to enjoy the rest of your life.”
“I liked my old life.”
“Well, you’re getting a new one. Be happy!”
“Sure,” he said with a low chuckle. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Great.” Max stood. “I’ve gotta go.” She patted Vargas’s forearm, smiled, and said with as much empathy as she could muster, “Well . . . good luck to you. I’m sure you’ll do great.”
* * *
Zé wasn’t even listening when Max patted his arm. He couldn’t understand why she kept touching him. Or why she kept touching him like that. It reminded him of old Mrs. Ma-ducci down the block from his grandfather, who used to pat Zé’s head every time she saw him. He’d hated the head pat or anything that felt emotionally like a head pat. And that’s how Max was treating him. Like a cute little boy she’d allowed into her yard to get his baseball.
Innocuous. She was treating him as if he was innocuous and Zé didn’t like it.
But he had no idea why her sisters reacted as if she’d spit at him.
Charlie spun away from the oven, eyes wide. And Stevie slammed her hands against the table and stood.
“Max!” they both screeched at the same time, causing their sister to spin around and take a fighting stance.
“What? What’s wrong?” Max demanded, ready to start doing what she’d done to those men who’d kidnapped her.
“You can’t just leave him,” Stevie told her, hands now resting on hips.
Realizing there was no danger, she relaxed, but her eyes also rolled to the back of her head.
“I can’t? Do you want me to get him a limo to take him home?”
“You could call me a cab,” he suggested, enjoying her annoyance.
“Shut up.”
“Max!” Stevie barked again.
“Can we talk to you outside?” Charlie politely asked.
“No.”
Charlie pointed at the back door. “Get your ass outside!” she snarled from between clenched teeth.
With another eye roll, Max walked out of the kitchen, her sisters following.
A minute or two later, Stevie’s boyfriend came in, took a large stash of bamboo from one of the cabinets, and sat down at the table.
“Hey,” he greeted, biting into the bamboo at the same time.
“Hey.”
“Where are the girls?”
“Outside. Yelling at Max.”
“So a typical morning, then?”
“Based on what I know so far. . . probably.”
* * *
“You can’t just inform him that he’s a shifter and then send him off into the world alone.”
Max looked back and forth between her sisters before asking, “Why not?”
Charlie threw up her hands but Stevie answered this time. “You’ve upended the man’s world. He doesn’t know anything about anything. You have to help him.”
“Why?”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“I have a lot going on right now. We’re in the playoffs.”
“He’s still your responsibility!” Stevie argued.
“What playoffs?” Charlie asked.
“With my team.”
“What team?”
Max and Stevie stared at their sister.
“The pro basketball team I’m on?”
“You’re in the WNBA?”
“Do I look like I’d be in the WNBA?”
Charlie’s eyebrow rose. “Because you’re not black?”
“Because I’m not ten feet tall. Nor am I fully human sooooo . . . yeah. I’m on a shifter pro team, not the WNBA.”
“They were interested in you, though,” Stevie reminded her.
“Well . . . after they saw my game footage, yeah. But it wouldn’t be long before someone started asking questions and I’d end up having to hold back on the court, and you know I can’t do that. Besides, the shifter teams offered me more money. Full-human pro teams don’t pay women shit.”
“Because full-humans don’t have to worry about getting trapped in a room with a bunch of grizzly sows angrily demanding fair pay.”
Both sisters laughed at that visual until Charlie asked, “When did you join a pro anything, Max?”
“I don’t know . . . a decade ago?”
Charlie snorted. “Oh, come on.” She looked at Stevie but when her sister just gazed back . . . “Wait . . . really?”
Stevie winced a bit before she admitted, “She was voted MVP two years in a row.”
“Oh. Okay . . . uh.”
“It’s all right.” Max put her hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “You always have so much on your mind. I don’t take it personally. . . when you forget I ever existed because all you care about is Stevie.”
“Oh, puhleeze!” Stevie crowed. “Don’t even attempt to use me as your excuse for being a shitty person!”
Max turned on her baby sister. “Why can’t you ever let me do what I do?”
“Manipulating Charlie does not change the fact that Zé Vargas is your responsibility!”
“But I don’t wanna be helpful.” And Max knew she was whining. She couldn’t help it. She had more important things to do than help some sad sack who’d just found out what he really was.
Right?
“Didn’t he save your life?” Charlie asked. But she revised that when Max did nothing more than gaze at her silently. “Okay. Didn’t he attempt to save your life? And doesn’t it seem that he would have put his life at risk for you whether you were Max ‘Kill It Again’ MacKilligan or not?”
“Dammit, Charlie,” Max continued to whine. “I fucking hate you.”
“I’d hate me, too . . . because I’m always right. I understand how painful that must be for others who aren’t always right.”
* * *
Zé pulled the baking trays out of the oven and stared down at what Charlie had made.
“Croissants,” he sighed. “I love croissants.”
“I’m not usually a big fan but hers are great.” Shen pointed at several on the second tray. “She made those for me. They have bamboo in them.”
“You eat a lot of that, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “I’m a panda.”
“It’s a little on the nose, though, isn’t it?” Zé asked. “A Chinese guy who’s a panda?”
“Says the South American jaguar.”
“Touché.”
Shen track
ed down an obscenely large plate of bacon that had been sitting in the warmer. Zé pulled out the orange juice and milk and plates and glassware.
As they sat down to eat, the back door opened and the three sisters returned.
Charlie pulled Max close as they stood in front of Zé.
“Max is going to assist you,” she announced.
“Assist me?”
With one arm over her sister’s shoulders, she swept the other in a wide arc. “Teach you the ways of our kind.”
“That sounds weirdly sexual. Is this a cult?”
Max rolled her eyes and started to walk off, but her sister yanked her back. When Max tried again, Charlie caught her around the neck and held her.
“This is a whole new world for you, Zé. You need someone to guide you.”
“And,” Zé said on a startled laugh, “you want it to be her?”
Charlie covered her mouth with her free hand to hide her own laugh and Max yanked the other forearm off her throat. “What does that mean?”
“I know,” Stevie cut in, adorably sitting on Shen’s lap, “that my sister may seem like a waste of space—”
“Hey!”
“—but she actually did help me when I started shifting.”
“And she knows more than I do,” Charlie admitted, grabbing one of the croissants off the plate. “I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I didn’t really have time to figure out the different scents of bears and cats and . . . whatever. And that sort of thing actually can help. Especially during a firefight.”
Zé glanced at Shen. “Lot of firefights among your kind?”
He was only being sarcastic but the “yes” he got from all three sisters was off-putting.
“Okay,” Zé agreed, not knowing what else to do. “Where do we start?”
“Our ancient blood rituals!” Max announced.
“No,” Charlie said immediately.
“Then let’s learn all the different poop smells!”
“No,” Stevie said, her lip curled in disgust.
“Answering the ancient question, does rat really taste like chicken?”
“Max!” both sisters barked.
The evil woman laughed. “I’m kidding! Everyone knows that the first lesson for any new shifter is how to lick their own ass.”
Zé thought for sure one of Max’s sisters was about to hit her, and he was going to let it happen. But out of the corner of his eye he saw the largest of the sisters’ dogs ease up to the table and take all the bacon in his giant maw.
“Put that bacon back, mister,” he softly ordered, without facing the animal.
The dog growled at him, but Zé was really hungry. He wasn’t giving up bacon without a fight.
“Put. It. Back.”
Another growl. So Zé snarled back.
The dog finally leaned forward and dropped the bacon back onto the plate before stepping away from the table and leaving the kitchen.
Now Zé glared down at the bacon, annoyed. “Ech. It has dog drool on it.” He looked at the three sisters. “Can one of you make me more? This time without the dog drool?”
Max slammed her hands on the table and brought her face close to Zé’s. “How, in all this time, did you not know you were a cat? How?”
chapter SEVEN
Imani found a comfortable seat against the wall, near the window. That’s where she sat and watched. It was her nature. Lions didn’t run around, chasing everything that moved. They simply waited and watched until something tasty and weak came along. It was what had made her very good at her job back in the day.
A job she had thought she’d left behind long ago. But she’d realized that she had to get involved this time. The de Medicis were ridiculously dangerous and would blow up the world before they’d let any of their direct bloodline be taken down. Even worse, they were naturally paranoid and inherently mean. The de Medici Pride was ruled by three brothers who seemed to love money more than they loved anything else, but even their love of money didn’t explain why they would involve themselves in human trafficking.
No, their motivation was a simple one: They had no respect for full-humans. True, all shifters tended to look down on full-humans, but they also understood that they were all intertwined. That down deep, they were all human beings. Shifters were just better.
But the de Medicis saw full-humans as nothing more than prey. No different from gazelles or wild boars.
Still . . . human trafficking seemed beneath even them.
But when the Alpha male of the Van Holtz Pack and head of the protective organization The Group laid out the evidence that proved the de Medici involvement, that was enough for Imani. The de Medicis were out of control.
Still, the idea of involving herself with the Group—a protection organization that was run by wolves—and the Bear Preservation Council made her almost sick to her stomach. She’d been raised since birth to worry only about other cats, and even among them there was a hierarchy. But here she sat . . . surrounded by wolves and bears and a few cats. Walking into the room, she’d been ready for a fight. Ready to put the drooling dogs and idiot bears in their place so she could take over this situation and manage it.
But it wasn’t the rich Niles Van Holtz and his cousin Ulrich who were the problem. Nor was it the perversely sized Bayla Ben-Zeev from the BPC that was making Imani’s hairline itch.
It was him. Well . . . him and his two friends.
A lion. His grizzly friend. And the weirdly long-legged, maned wolf that turned out not to be a wolf at all.
“This is what comes with intermingling,” she’d jokingly whispered to the current New York head of Katzenhaus, Mary-Ellen Kozłowski.
It turned out the three males had been in the military together. In the aptly named Unit—a shifter-only division of the Marines.
The lion male, Benjamin, took the lead and had been talking for at least thirty minutes since Niles Van Holtz had finished. The bear, Oliver, did nothing but pick things up from Van Holtz’s desk, investigate each one thoroughly, and then set it back down. Where he set them, though, must have been the wrong place, because Van Holtz moved each thing to another spot seconds later.
And the maned wolf, Bryan, just ate apples that he had in a bag beside his chair.
Benjamin was making the case that he and his two friends should take the lead on this assignment against the de Medicis. He strongly felt that he would be best able to deal with the young de Medici males who protected the older lions that ruled the Pride. “Get rid of them, we can get to the others,” he opined.
Imani could tell from the expression on the faces of the Van Holtzes and Ben-Zeev that they were not comfortable with that notion. Not simply because of Benjamin’s youth. They’d all been young when they’d started as operatives. The problem was the arrogance. It was, honestly, all too human. Only humans had the kind of arrogance that could get others killed. Most predators had instincts and a need to survive. These boys didn’t want to survive; they just assumed they would.
But as a She-lion, Imani believed there was only one way to teach young predators that their arrogance was a dangerous thing. That’s what a Pride or Pack was for. Not only protection but to teach those coming up. Either Benjamin hadn’t been raised by a Pride or his Pride hadn’t done a very good job. An error, but one that could be fixed.
Something Imani was very good at, and the reason these three groups had wanted her involved in the first place: she was a very good fixer.
“I assume,” Van Holtz said when Benjamin finished his pitch, “that you’ll want Dee-Ann and Cella on this with you.”
The kid made that face men make when they want to tell someone nicely “fuck, no.”
“The problem with that,” Benjamin reasoned, “is the de Medicis know all about Smith and Malone. They’re recognizable.”
“Yeahhhhh,” the cat and dog in question said at the same time.
“But I think we have a great option after what we saw in the Netherlands,” the kid went
on.
“No, no, no,” the Van Holtzes said together, both wolves shaking their very handsome heads. Imani had never seen the two dogs so animated—and adamant—about anything. They’d always been the “reasonable” dogs. Always wanting to give several options and take everyone’s concerns and opinions seriously. Blah!
“We are not doing that,” Ulrich Van Holtz insisted.
“Look, I get it. The oldest sister seems—”
“Psychotic,” both dogs said together again.
“That’s because of the baby sister,” the maned wolf interjected as he tossed a half-eaten apple core toward the trash can but missed it. Much to the annoyance of the elder Van Holtz. “She’s really protective of her.”
“But we’re not interested in her. It’s the middle sister . . . and her friends. Those are the ones we want.”
“Her friends?” Ulrich Van Holtz asked. “Max MacKilligan has friends? Real ones? Or imaginary?”
“Real ones. They’re part of her basketball team. They all play pro now.”
“You want this situation to be handled by basketball players?”
“We’ve done our research. They’ve got the skills.”
“To play basketball?”
“To kill quickly. Cleanly.”
“Cleanly? Like that mess in the Netherlands?”
“That wasn’t completely their fault.”
“The older sister still won’t like it,” Ben-Zeev said, her gaze on Van Holtz. “She’s made that very clear to all of us.”
“Our plan,” the lion said with great confidence, “is not to go at them head-on. That’s the mistake you guys have been making. We’re going to take things a different route, in a safe space, where they know that their options are very limited.”
The leaders of the three organizations traded glances.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Benjamin continued. “We don’t, for a second, underestimate these females. That’s why we want them for this enterprise. And all of you need to understand that this is an enterprise. The de Medicis won’t go down without a . . . well, I was going to say fight. But really I mean they won’t go down without an apocalypse.”
Imani still hadn’t said anything but she didn’t have to, finding Van Holtz’s doggie gaze locked on her. She gave the smallest nod and he said to Benjamin, “All right. But we want Imani as part of your team.”
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