Mads handed the basketball over to the assistant, horribly embarrassed.
“Don’t worry,” she said on a long sigh. “I know who they are.”
“Should I call a cleanup crew?”
“No, no. They’re fine.” Idiots, but fine.
“They’re wearing wolf and bear fur . . . in the summer . . . that’s just rude on so many levels.”
Mads patted the female’s shoulder. “I’ve got this, Tammy.”
Slowly, Mads walked over to the four silent people waiting for her.
When she was right in front of them, the four bowed their heads but Mads didn’t return the gesture because it was stupid. Maybe if it was the year 910, it would be okay, but it wasn’t.
It wasn’t!
“What is it?” Mads demanded.
It was the shamaness who spoke. It was always the shamaness who spoke. Of course, she was also the one with a dragon tattoo that went from her left eye, down her cheek to her chin, which gave a gal a certain sense of rank among the fruitcakes the shamaness hung around every day.
“Your great-grandmother—” The shamaness began before lowering her eyes, as did the other three acolytes with her.
“If she has a message for me,” Mads said, already running out of patience, “she could have just . . . ya know . . . called me. I sent her that cell phone with the big buttons. Didn’t she get it?”
“Yes. She received it.”
“I made sure it could withstand her throwing it against the wall repeatedly.”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t she just call? Because she’s torturing me?”
Or simply because her great-grandmother always made things hard. And weird. Always so weird.
“That wasn’t possible, I’m afraid,” the shamaness told her. “Your great-grandmother has entered the gates of Valhalla.”
Mads frowned at the statement. “She what?” When the four messengers only gazed at her, Mads blinked and asked, “Wait. Wait. She’s dead? Solveig Galendotter is dead?”
“I’m sorry, but yes.”
“In battle?”
“No.”
“Store robbery?”
“Um—”
“Did the cops shoot her? The Marines? Another blood feud? The old man down the street who said he’d see her dead one day? That militia? They were really gunning for her.”
“Ummm. No. She’d already taken care of the militia. The old man died in his sleep months ago. She’d come to a reasonable agreement with the cops and the Marines. And she was managing the blood feuds.”
“Then what?”
“It seemed she just died. In her store. Heart attack, apparently.”
Mads shook her head. “No way. We’re not talking about some everyday . . . This is Solveig Galendotter. She was never just going to die. Not now, not ever.”
When the shamaness did no more than shrug, Mads blew out a breath, nodded, and worked hard to keep control of her emotions. Her great-grandmother would expect no less from her. Gallendotters didn’t get “weepy.”
“When did this happen? I’ll need to start making calls to—”
“Three weeks ago.”
Mads snarled a little. “She died three weeks ago, and you’re just telling me now?”
“We just found out now.”
A chill went down Mads’s back. “How is that possible? Her store—”
“There was always an excuse for why it was closed. Always a reason. We didn’t realize anything was wrong until they had already cremated her and placed her ashes in an urn.”
“An urn? Solveig is in an urn?”
“And that urn is in Wisconsin.”
Mads gasped and stepped back as if she’d been struck. “Dear gods,” she whispered. “Not Wisconsin.”
* * *
Mick had just gotten this job a few months back. He was fresh out of the military and was ready to get to work in the civilian sector. His older brother had hooked him up, which was surprising. Danny had not been in the military. He’d been the smart one. Had done the college track. Had graduated and everything. No one in the family had really seen him much after that. Their mother got the occasional call or email but that was about it. Mick had found out later that boring, always reading in his room, determined to go to the college farthest away from his family, never had time to hunt down a blue sheep Danny had been recruited by the CIA out of college. The siblings had met face-to-face somewhere in the Middle East during an operation they could never speak of to anyone.
Even stranger, both the CIA team Danny was part of and the Navy SEAL team Mick was leading were all shifters. Every last one of them. That meeting had happened four years ago and Mick hadn’t seen his brother since, not until he’d decided against re-upping in the military, when suddenly his phone rang.
“Need work?” his brother had asked.
Of course he did. He got bonuses from the government but not anything that would have him living in the lap of luxury until his death of old age.
“The Thursday after you get back to Ma’s house, come to this location at two o’clock,” Danny had said, spitting out some address in the city, not waiting for Mick to write it down. Must have assumed he’d remember it. “Dress in black jeans, black shirt, and black jacket. That way Ma won’t ask any questions but it won’t look like you just rolled out of bed either.”
Out of habit more than anything, Mick had followed orders. He’d met his brother outside a nice-looking brownstone, but once inside he’d quickly realized what he was about to become a part of: The Group. Unlike Katzenhaus or the Bear Preservation Council, the associations of the Group didn’t just “protect their own kind.”
Instead, the Group was a nationwide organization that worked with multiple species and breeds of shifters to keep their kind safe. A surprisingly tough job. Like human villages that moved too close to lion territory, the proximity of shifters and full-humans led to all sorts of problems. The Group stepped in before things spun out of control. And if it wasn’t battles between shifters and full-humans, it was battles between shifters and shifters. There were far more “wars” that went on between prides and packs and clans than Mick had realized. His species didn’t usually worry about that sort of thing. They were all about the hunt and relaxing after a long day of mountain climbing. Who had time for all these blood feuds?
“Hey, y’all.”
Mick closed his eyes and fought his urge to leap away from the voice coming from right behind him.
At first, he thought maybe his reaction was PTSD. He’d been through a lot during his time in the military. So being a little jumpy was normal. Some guys got a therapy dog to watch their back for them and help them feel calmer when they were away from home. Then Mick realized that he only got this jumpy when she was around. He’d worked with Dee-Ann Smith just a couple of times so far, but there was something about this She-wolf that put him off. He couldn’t figure out what it was about her, but he was doing his best to give her the benefit of the doubt. She was a former Marine and their military connection should have put him at ease. But something about her just set his teeth on edge.
“Find anything?” she asked around an apple she was biting with her fangs.
“Yeah,” Danny replied, gesturing to the tree line. “There is tiger piss . . . everywhere.”
“And I smell honey badger,” Mick added. “And blood. Full-human blood.”
“Yup. That’s what everyone else has been saying, too.” She pushed back her Tennessee Titans baseball cap and looked around the small island not far from New York. Mick didn’t even know little islands like this existed near his city. Islands with mansions on them. Rich people got everything! He’d grown up on Staten Island in a four-bedroom walk-up with his parents, his brother, and five bitchy sisters. Forget the cousins who moved in and out when they had nowhere else to go. Maybe he wouldn’t have felt the overwhelming desire to make a run for it and join the Marines if he’d grown up in a big mansion like the ones on this island.
<
br /> “Something very bad happened here. Hell if I know what it was, though.” She patted Mick on the shoulder, and it took everything in him not to slap her hand away.
Smith tossed the apple core and sauntered off to talk to some other team members, hiking up her too-loose jeans with apple-juice–covered hands as she moved, and he fought the urge to hiss and attack her from behind, grasping the back of her, dragging her off to a quiet spot, pinning her to the ground, and squeezing her neck until she stopped moving.
He couldn’t help it. He was a snow leopard. It’s what he did when he was hungry or when he just didn’t trust someone.
“You’re glaring,” his brother warned him.
“What is it about her?” Mick asked. “She’s always so nice to me, but . . .”
“Careful, she’s the boss’s wife.”
“What boss?”
“Our boss.”
That’s what he’d thought his brother had meant, but their boss ought to be able to do better than . . . her. Their boss was one of the Van Holtz Pack, a very wealthy, very powerful Pack out of Seattle and Germany. Their bloodline went back centuries, and it was said they’d started the Group with their own money. Not only that, but the man looked like he’d stepped off the pages of GQ magazine. Mick had gone to lunch with him, and women literally swooned around him. Women the man had ignored. Mick had thought maybe his boss simply didn’t swing toward females or had his own supermodel at home, but . . . she was what he had at home? A rangy She-wolf who dressed like she was about to go to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in the seventies on the back of some dude’s motorcycle and said “y’all” a lot?
Mick, for as long as he lived, would never understand the canine mind.
Shaking off what was essentially none of his business, he turned to his brother.
“So what happens now?”
Danny jerked his head to the north and Mick watched a chopper land and a dark-haired woman get off. She kept her body hunched over to avoid the chopper blades, so it wasn’t until she straightened up that Mick recognized her.
“Oh . . . no. What is she doing here?”
“There’s tiger piss all over the place. What do you think she’s doing here?”
“So? There’s tigers all over the five boroughs. Who says it’s one of theirs?”
“Yeah. Sure. There’s tigers everywhere. But when it comes to true shit-startin’ . . .” Danny shrugged. “We both know, little brother . . . it’s always a Malone.”
* * *
“Why didn’t you just eat the pastry?” Stein demanded, and Julie had to agree. Who wouldn’t just say “thank you” and eat the goddamn pastries while gently leading the annoying honey badgers out the door? Oh. That’s right. Tigers! That’s who. The angriest cats in the land! They made paranoid, rabid alley cats seem calm and rational.
By now Shay was off Julie’s floor and he, along with Finn, turned to look at Keane.
The bigger, older—and meaner—brother didn’t even glance at them in return, but a growl came from the back of his throat, vibrating across the room even though he never even opened his mouth.
“This is bad,” Stein said, pacing now. “This is very bad.”
With his big arms crossed over his chest like he ruled the whole world and had complete control of this situation, Keane cleared his throat and asked, “Can’t we just pay them for the information?”
“The same badgers you insulted?” He glanced at Keane from the corner of one eye before rolling both. “You tigers aren’t the only ones that can hold a grudge, ya know.”
“There are other badgers, right?”
Stein faced the three brothers. “And you can’t afford any of them!” He briefly closed his eyes and took a calming breath. “Badgers have an intricate communications system dating back to ancient civilization.”
“Is this where you tell us that Julius Caesar was a honey badger?” Shay asked, already sounding bored.
“Julius Caesar was not a honey badger,” Stein corrected, clearly annoyed. “Locusta was.”
Finn blinked. “Who?”
“Locusta. Poisoner of Ancient Rome. She worked for Nero. Took out Britannicus, heir to the Roman Empire.” Julie, who’d been working on some papers, noticed the quiet and glanced up to see the males gazing at her in surprise. She shrugged. “Not surprisingly, there were a lot of lions in Ancient Rome and, when they weren’t eating Christians, they used a lot of poisoners. It was a thing.”
“Lions,” Keane sniffed. “Bunch of snobs.”
* * *
“Why is my great-grandmother in Wisconsin?” Mads demanded.
“Your mother’s family took over everything before we even had a chance—”
Mads tugged at one of her braids and walked away from the shamaness and her acolytes. Then she immediately walked back.
“You let this happen,” she accused. “You let those idiots take her body and do exactly what she did not want. Now her soul is trapped in a goddamn urn. In Wisconsin.”
“We had no rights to Solveig’s remains once your grandmother and mother stepped in. Perhaps if you had been more involved in her life—”
Mads pointed a finger, not realizing her claws had come out. She was pointing a lethal claw at a powerful shamaness and she didn’t even care, she was so pissed. “Don’t. Even.”
The shamaness lowered her eyes and raised her hands in supplication.
“Forgive me. I am merely here to tell you what has happened as she had requested. Nothing more.”
“Well, you’ve done your job. Now fuck off.”
“Perhaps if we talked to your mother and grand—”
“If you go to Wisconsin, my family will eat you.”
“But—”
“Unlike my great-grandmother, their loyalty is not to our Viking blood, so they will show you no respect. They are hyena through and through, always hungry and able to chew and digest bone.” Mads stared straight into the shamaness’s eyes. “Understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Very clearly.”
“Then go. I’m getting tense.”
With another annoying head-bow, the four full-humans walked out of the practice court.
Mads couldn’t believe her great-grandmother was dead. Solveig Galendotter? Not alive? Sure, she’d been at least one hundred and five years old, but that was nothing. Solveig’s own mother had lived until she was one hundred and twenty, and she’d only died because she’d been killed by a blood enemy in battle.
Gallendotter females were long lived not because they were shifters or even because they were Viking . . . but simply because they were too mean to die.
Living was their revenge on all who hated them. And there were many who hated them.
Mads planned to live as long as possible simply to irritate her mother and grandmother. It wasn’t a lofty goal but it was better than nothing.
Turning away from the double doors, Mads faced the assistant coach she’d been working with. As soon as she saw the sad expression on the cat’s face, she threw up her hands.
“Don’t,” she ordered, returning to grab the basketball from the female’s hands.
“But—”
“No.”
“I just want to—”
“No.”
“Just let me—”
“No, Tammy. We’re not doing this. We’re not having the conversation you want to have. So let it go.”
“Should I call someone for you?”
“To do what? Raise my great-grandmother from the dead?”
“Uhhhh . . . ?”
“Exactly. So just let it go.”
Mads dribbled the ball to the free-throw line and took a couple of shots. When she was about to take a third, she stopped and glanced over her shoulder. Now three of the assistant coaches stood there watching her. They were all cats, so they had the big cat eyes. Not the ones she was used to seeing, narrowed with distrust and plotting, but big and wide and sad.
Eyes filled with pity.
She drop
ped the ball and walked toward the exit, grabbing her wallet from her open backpack as she moved.
“Where are you going?”
“I need a break,” she told the coaches. Not a lie. She really needed a break.
From cats with pity in their eyes.
* * *
“You want me to talk to them?”
“Well, I can’t do it,” Keane said calmly, and probably honestly, Julie was guessing. Since, you know, he’d yelled at the honey badgers just that morning.
“And I don’t wanna do it,” Shay added, also probably honestly.
“I don’t want to do it either,” Finn practically whined. “They hate us. All of us.”
“And with good reason.”
The three brothers glared across the room at the Van Holtz wolf.
“Who rejects pastries?” Van Holtz demanded. “Who? And they brought you an array of pastries.” He pointed an accusing finger. “An array. Before we were Van Holtzes, we were just Holtzes in the wilds of Germany, and anyone who turned down our pastries would have started a blood feud.”
“Can I hurt him now?” Shay asked, his cat gaze locked on the canine. “I really want to hurt him now.”
“No,” Finn replied. “His Pack is huge. And one of his uncles makes this amazing Cape buffalo with onion sauce that is to murder for, and I don’t want to be banned from their restaurant soooo . . .”
“Fine.” Shay walked out of the office without another word, because he had nothing else to say.
Keane stared at his younger brother for a brief moment before following Shay.
“So all this is up to me?” Finn called after Keane.
“Yes!” Keane barked back.
“I hate them,” Finn growled before he walked out after his brothers.
Julie went back to the paperwork on her desk, wanting to finish signing a few purchase orders before returning to practice. But then she noticed that the canine hadn’t left.
Looking up at him, she asked, “What?”
“I’m waiting.”
“For?”
“The box seat tickets you’re going to offer me to the first home game so that I don’t sue your team into oblivion for hitting me in the head with a football.”
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