And, with that slow spreading smile, she said, “One day . . . your baby sister is going to come to me and ask me a question about men and dating”—she leaned away from her friends and toward the brothers—“and I’m going to tell her every. fucking. thing.”
Keane was nearly across the room, his hands around MacKilligan’s throat when Finn and Shay caught him and tackled him to the ground like they’d just sacked a quarterback.
“You bitch!” Keane roared from the floor.
“You don’t deserve that Danish, you ungrateful prick!” Max screeched back.
“Your Danish looks dry!”
MacKilligan gasped. “You motherfucker!”
The honey badgers dragged their hysterical friend out the side door and Finn and Shay kept Keane pinned to the ground until he finally threw them off in a burst of tiger strength.
“Get off me!”
The three brothers jumped to their feet and now squared off against each other.
“I was handling that!” Finn told Keane.
“Yeah, I saw how you were handling that. In your usual mealy-mouthed way. Letting those rats walk all over you!”
“But you did such a great fucking job dealing with it yourself!”
“They’re out, aren’t they?”
There was no point in talking to Keane when he was like this. So Finn didn’t bother. He just watched his brother storm toward the hallway, turn around, return to the kitchen table, grab a box of Danish, then storm back to the hallway and upstairs to his room. When Finn heard Keane’s bedroom door slam closed, he let out a breath.
“Can you believe—”
Shay held up a hand, another Danish already in his mouth. “I’m not getting in the middle of—”
The rest of Shay’s statement was lost to his chewing.
“How did you even get that Danish?” They weren’t standing close to the table.
He swallowed. “I was holding it the whole time.”
Disgusted, pissed, and a lot of other things, Finn was about to go to his room and try to get some more sleep. But he’d barely taken a few steps when he heard his brother’s low whistle.
He turned around and Shay jabbed his thumb toward one of the overhead cabinets.
Finn walked across the kitchen and opened the cabinet door.
That’s where he found her. Sound asleep on her right side. A pillow from the couch under her head; one hand tucked under her cheek, the other curled into a fist and pressed against her upper chest. Her hair was still in the two braids she’d worn the night before. He didn’t know any honey badgers with blond hair but maybe she dyed hers. The bruises on her face had turned black and blue but the open wounds on her neck that he’d noticed had already healed.
Fascinated, Finn leaned close to see how big this woman was. He remembered this She-badger from the night before and he recalled her being, you know . . . normal sized. Definitely bigger than Max MacKilligan, who could easily fit into this cabinet space. But she didn’t seem uncomfortable. In fact, she was snoring a little.
“Huh,” Finn said softly when he saw that the badger’s legs were tucked up and around all his mother’s seasoning jars.
How could she possibly be comfortable like that? She looked like a pretzel.
Finn began to pull back when he realized that he was being watched. He lifted his gaze to see that the She-badger was no longer asleep but was now wide awake and studying him closely.
“What’cha doing?” she asked.
“I was just curious to see how you got yourself in there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I swear it wasn’t weird.”
“Okay.”
“Your friends already left, by the way.”
“Friends?” she asked with a confused frown, but then just as quickly she said, “Oh! My teammates. They left?” She lifted her wrist and glanced at her fitness watch. “That was fast.”
“You didn’t hear any of what went on out here?”
She snorted. “I grew up in a family of hyenas.” She untangled herself from the cabinet with ease, forcing Finn to move back so she could get out. “There was never a quiet moment in my house at any time. Either I learned to sleep through anything or I would have died of sleep deprivation by the time I was three.”
She jumped from the cabinet and down to the floor.
“So how did it go?” she asked.
“How did what go?”
“Our Danish-covered thank-you? For saving us last night.”
Finn shook his head. “Not too well, I’m afraid. We didn’t really want what MacKilligan was offering.”
“Really? That’s too bad. Having MacKilligans on my team has always worked out for me.”
“You have great need for a stolen Bugatti in your driveway?”
“I can steal my own Bugatti. It was one of the first things my family made sure I knew how to do, whether I wanted to know it or not,” she said. “But when you need to get rid of that Bugatti because you can hear the police sirens thirty seconds away and you’re bleeding from the leg because your cousin just stabbed you to make sure you couldn’t run and your aunts have blocked the door so you can’t get back into the house and your own mother won’t give you bail even though you know you’re not responsible for this particular felony and you’re at that awkward age where you can be tried as an adult but you can’t move out of your home because you can’t legally sign a lease yet . . . Max MacKilligan is the one you want on your side.”
She shrugged, lifting her arms up and letting them drop.
“But, ya know . . . you do you.”
And with that, the She-badger walked out.
Finn faced his still-feeding brother and said the only thing he could think of saying in that particular moment . . .
“Huh.”
chapter THREE
The SUV stopped in front of the Queens, New York, house that the MacKilligan sisters had been living in for quite a while now.
Well, quite a while for them. The sisters really weren’t known for living in any one place for any length of time. The fact that Max had been able to make it through junior high and high school with the rest of them so that she could stay on the basketball team was an absolute triumph and was, Mads finally realized, the work of Charlie. The eldest MacKilligan sister had determined that both her younger sisters would have some kind of normalcy in their childhoods. Impossible at the end of the day, but what she did insist on was that they had a home at least until they finished high school. For Max that was when she was eighteen and graduated with the rest of her team. For Stevie that was the same year because she’d tested out of high school and went to Oxford University for something or other involving science.
Mads truly didn’t think she’d ever see Max MacKilligan again after graduation. Or any of her other high school teammates. She’d assumed Tock would head back to Israel and Mossad, since that organization had been secretly working for years to recruit her. Streep would head for Hollywood or Broadway. And Nelle would move to Europe. As for her own plans . . . it had always been the WNBA, but then her high school coach had called and offered her a chance to be on the shifter-only team for Wisconsin. It was a good offer but . . . but . . . the WNBA had been her lifelong dream. Right? How could she not even try out?
Then, of course, her coach reminded her. In the WNBA, she could never be what she truly was. Sure, Mads could pull her badass moves on a street court in Detroit with no questions asked, but on TV? With full-human women much taller than she would ever be?
Mads was only five-eight!
Okay. Fine. She was five-seven-and-three-quarters. But her crazy-ass shifter legs combined with her natural basketball skills gave her moves that would have any regular ref demanding drug tests for everyone involved. She could never be who she truly was among full-humans. Not only that, but how was the WNBA supposed to recruit her? She was never going to college. Mostly because she really didn’t want to, and her family would make sure that was not a good experience for her.
&n
bsp; So she went in for the Wisconsin Butchers’ training camp, unsure of what to expect. There were a number of shifters in her small town: her coach, Max’s Pack, her hyena Clan, and some other shifter families. But almost always they’d met in unsafe spaces. Spaces filled with full-humans. At training camp she was with nothing but her own kind. Different species of her own kind but still . . .
Cats, dogs, and so many bears. Thankfully no hyenas, though. She’d had more than enough of them over the last eighteen years of her life. She was ready for anything else. But while she was on the floor, stretching out her legs, a basketball hit her in the back of her head. At first, she was afraid she was going to have to deal with goddamn hyenas!
That did not mean, however, that she would put up with any more shit from hyenas that were not blood relations. That would not be happening! So she’d jumped up, ready not to start shit, but definitely to finish it! Even if it got her kicked out of training camp the first day. But then she saw Max MacKilligan grinning at her . . .
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she’d asked, fighting the urge to hug her old teammate.
“Training camp.”
“I thought you were in England with your sisters.”
“Three months and Stevie suddenly attacked me with a test monkey.” She grinned when Mads laughed. “That’s when Charlie suggested she take care of Stevie for a while and I head back to the States for a break. But she was adamant that if I got into any trouble, she would not bail me out, which really limited my options as to what I could do. Thankfully, Coach gave me a call. Suggested training camp.”
“Did Stevie actually chuck the monkey at you?”
“Who? Little Baby Goody Two-shoes who’d never, ever hurt another animal?”
“And to think she threw that monkey at you.”
“She trained that monkey to attack me. Then pretended that she didn’t.”
“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe the monkey just hated you. Remember when all those racoons mounted that coordinated assault?”
“That was not a coordinated assault. They all had rabies and . . . Is that Nelle?”
It was Nelle. Her family had temporarily moved to San Francisco in order to plan a “family holiday,” which they all knew was code for a grand family heist. But as they’d been finalizing their plans, Nelle’s father and his brothers had made the decision that Nelle’s older sister would run point in Europe. At the time, the message was clear. At least to Nelle. They didn’t think she was ready for such a big job, but they did think her slightly older sister was.
Nelle could have stormed out and returned to Wisconsin. Or gone off on her own. She had family still living in Hong Kong, provinces in China, and in Manhattan. She’d be welcome anywhere. She must have spent too much time around the rest of her teammates, though. Because instead of a dramatic storm off, she chose to punch her sister in the face—breaking her nose and jaw—and tossing her off the penthouse balcony of the Shaw Arms Hotel.
As a honey badger, her sister suffered nothing more than a few broken bones and a temporarily crushed skull, but the family had been shocked. And impressed. Her father and uncles had immediately changed their minds and offered her the chance to go to Europe in her recovering sister’s place, but Nelle had surprised them again and turned them down. She didn’t want anyone’s “day-old dumplings.”
So she’d packed up and headed back to Wisconsin and training camp.
“Does this mean you won’t get any of that money?” Max asked, always concerned about the dollars when it came to family-related heists.
“My daddy will never let me be poor,” Nelle told them. “Ever.” She glanced off. “My God, what would that even be like? Mads?”
“What are you asking me for?”
“Well, now you’ve made it awkward.”
“Now I’ve made it awkward?”
“Hey, bitches!” Streep announced in her grand entrance, arms stretched wide. She pushed past several annoyed cats and spun around so they could all see her brand-new fringed leather jacket. A style that had not been in fashion since the Donner party set out. “What do ya think? Fancy, right?”
“Perhaps I should ask you,” Nelle said to Streep.
“Ask me what?”
“Anyway,” Mads cut in, “I thought you’d be headlining on Broadway by now.”
“I tried. But every time I attempted to leave home, my parents would start sobbing and rending their clothes. But they couldn’t even get any real tears going. I don’t even have to try, and look . . .” She pointed at her face. “Just look.”
And sure enough, without even changing her expression, tears began to pour out of both her eyes.
“Even without the tears, though . . .”
The tears immediately stopped and she shrugged. “I just love ’em so much. And we work together so well. Plussss . . .” She leaned in and whispered, “I get to do some other stuff I enjoy on my own. It all works out.” She straightened up, stopped whispering. “And let’s be honest, I am so damn talented, Hollywood will definitely wait for me.”
“And humble,” Mads noted.
“I am. Because that’s important when you accept your many awards.”
“Hey.”
Tock seemed to come from nowhere, appearing right next to them like a ghost. They’d hissed at her in warning but she didn’t budge. None of them startled easily but honey badgers considered other honey badgers dangerous predators, so what exactly did she expect?
“I thought you were in Tel Aviv,” Max said.
“Was.”
“And?” When she didn’t answer right away, Max grinned. “What’cha do?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, come on,” Streep pushed, scrunching her nose in an annoyingly adorable way. “You can tell us.”
“Really. I didn’t do anything.”
“Mossad again?” Mads guessed.
Finally, Tock smirked.
“Your mom found out?”
She shook her head. “No. My father’s mother.”
“Ohhhhh!” all Tock’s former teammates shouted in unison, arms raised in the air; everyone in the arena turned around to watch beings so small being so loud.
“She was not happy when she found out they’d been recruiting me. Dragged me to someone’s office. Still don’t know who. No name on the building or on the office door. There was a lot of yelling. At some point, she mentioned Golda Meir. I still don’t know why.”
“Was Golda a badger?”
“No. A She-lion, but still . . . it was weird. A couple days later . . . I was on a plane back to Wisconsin. Then I got a call from Coach. Figured it had to be better than sitting around my house watching soap operas and arguing with my mother about whether I should go to college.”
Streep looked around at the other She-predators warming up. “Think we have a chance to make the team?”
“It isn’t whether we can make the team,” Max said, catching with one hand a basketball flung at her head.
“Ooops,” a cheetah said, giving them all a fake smile. “My fault.”
“No problem,” Max replied, before whipping the ball back so hard that they all heard the cheetah’s eye socket crack from the contact.
“Owwwwww! You evil bitch!”
“The question,” Max had calmly continued over the cheetah’s screams of pain, “is whether we can stay on the team.”
“I can,” Mads had told them, her teammates all turning to gaze at her. “I’m a nice person. Good teammate. Try not to fling balls into people’s faces.”
“She started it,” Max had insisted. But she’d insisted without anger.
Max was rarely angry. The only time Mads had ever seen Max angry about anything was when it had to do with her sisters or their father.
So now, seeing Max storm past the SUV, through the front yard, up the porch steps, across the porch, and into the house, slamming the front door behind her was, to say the least, unusual.
“We should go home,” Tock immediately sug
gested.
“Back to Wisconsin?” Streep asked.
Tock frowned. “What?”
“I don’t really have a home,” Mads noted.
“You can’t keep living in cabinets.”
“I find cabinets comfortable.”
“All of you can crash at my family’s place in Manhattan,” Nelle offered.
“So we can all listen to you and your sister argue every fucking night?” Tock asked. “Thanks! That sounds like such fun for everyone!”
“The sarcasm wasn’t necessary.”
“Let’s just drive into the city and get hotel rooms with the rest of the team,” Streep suggested.
“It’s Max’s SUV,” Mads reminded Streep.
“So?”
“Wouldn’t it be wrong to steal it?”
Nelle patted her knee. “You’re funny.”
The front door of the MacKilligan house was snatched open and Max screamed from inside, “Would you bitches get in here!”
“You know,” Streep noted, “when she screams like that . . . you can really see the familial resemblance between her and Charlie.”
* * *
“That Danish was good, though.”
Finn closed his eyes so he only heard the cracking noise as his older brother clenched his jaw.
“If one more person,” Keane growled low, “mentions that fucking Danish to me one more time . . .”
“Just commenting,” Shay insisted.
They stood in line, waiting to order fresh bagels. Finn always got the poppyseed. Keane the sesame. And Shay the salted. This place had been run by Orthodox Jewish bears since the thirties and although they weren’t fans of the cats—what bear was?—they knew that even cats loved a good bagel. And the Malone brothers were faithful customers. They came in at least four times a week. Sometimes twice a day since they also sold, ya know . . . Danish. Although today the Malones just wanted bagels.
They reached the counter and, after the polite shifter nod different species usually exchanged, Keane ordered, “Dozen sesame, dozen salted, dozen poppyseed.”
The bear growled in acknowledgment, pulled their order, and slammed the big paper bags on the counter. Keane threw the cash down and walked out, not waiting for change.
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