“And that T-shirt. Is it signed by all the original Black Sabbath members?”
“Cella,” the polar snarled.
“Shay, I’m here for a reason.”
“I’m Finn.”
She paused for a moment before faking a laugh. “I knew that. I was just joking.” When Finn only stared at her, she went on. “Anyway, there was an incident last night on Denley Island and what seems to be a little tiger-related dust-up at a full-human bar downtown. There’s some concern it might have involved you and your brothers.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“What? You’re a cop now, too?”
“No. But I do have some involvement with Katzenhaus.”
“Katzenhaus. They didn’t help us with our father either.”
“At some point, cousin, you need to let that go.”
“At some point you need to blow me.”
“I’m still not hearing nice,” the polar complained.
* * *
Mads made it to the sidewalk and looked around. She could call a car to take her to a hotel. Just for the night, but that seemed rude. She knew that honey badgers were known for being rude but she wasn’t in the mood to be that rude. Not after Charlie had been kind enough to open her home to her.
She began pacing but abruptly stopped when she saw the bear couple she’d noticed earlier talking outside the house they were packing up.
Without looking, Mads ran into the street and immediately got slammed into by a taxi. She jumped up just as the full-human driver came around the front to check on her.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“But—”
“Really.” She pushed him back into the taxi and closed the door for him. “Sorry about that. Totally my fault.”
“But—”
“Have a great night!”
She was hoping he wouldn’t see the dent she’d left in his front grille until he got back to the garage since it suggested she should be a broken husk under his vehicle but wasn’t. And a full-human would find that really strange.
Once the taxi had slowly driven off, the driver looking back at her in his rearview mirror, she rushed across the street to the old She-bear’s house.
“Are you okay?” the sow asked. She was a black bear, so she was much nicer than any grizzly would be.
“Oh, I’m fine.” Mads shrugged. “Honey badgers are really hard to kill. Sooo”—she pointed—“have you sold this house yet?”
“No. We wanted to get Mom’s stuff out before we put it on the market.”
“So, your mom . . . ?”
The sow nodded slowly. “It was her time,” she said softly. Almost a whisper.
“I understand. And I’m so sorry.”
“It had to happen. At some point”—she shrugged—“your mother just wants to move to fucking Florida.”
Mads blinked. “Oh.”
“But I can’t blame her,” the sow went on. “She’s got everything she wants down there. Her friends are all nearby. An unbelievable number of trees with a whole bee hive colony. Fresh lakes filled with fish. And, of course, bear shuffleboard.”
“Bear shuffleboard?”
“Yeah. They just sit around as bears in the Florida heat, sliding that little disc back and forth with their paws. You know, when bears get a certain age, sometimes we just don’t feel like shifting back to human that often. So this place is perfect for her.”
“Oh. Well . . . that’s great!”
“So, are you interested in the house?” the boar asked.
“I am. I can get you cash . . . and a Wassily Kandinsky.”
The pair frowned and the sow asked, “Who?”
“An artist. His paintings are worth a good amount. I think. I’ve had that thing a few years.”
The bear couple glanced at each other and the sow finally said, “Not to be rude or anything but . . . you are a honey badger and—”
“We don’t want to go to prison,” the boar finished.
“The cash is clean,” Charlie said, walking up behind the three of them with a covered dessert in her hand. “And the Kandinsky has its papers.”
“It does,” Mads immediately agreed. “My aunt gave it to me in case I needed to make a quick exit. Can’t make a quick exit if the painting’s authenticity can’t be proved.”
“You have my word,” Charlie said, handing the dessert over to the boar. “We’ll get the cash for you in the next . . . ?” She glanced at Mads.
“Ten to twelve hours. And the painting with papers, too.”
“You sign the house over to her now with the stipulation that she pays you in the next ten days. The timeline is just a cushion. But she’ll get you the cash no later than tomorrow. And you guys will be done moving out of here by . . . ?”
“Tomorrow, actually,” the boar replied.
“Perfect. We agreed?”
The sow and Charlie locked gazes, neither breaking the staredown until the boar, who was busy sniffing whatever was under that foil, finally sighed out, “Agreed.”
The sow closed her eyes and growled, “What are you doing?”
“Smell this,” he ordered, putting the cake under her nose.
“I’m not going to—” She leaned in closer and took several sniffs. “Agreed,” she sighed.
The boar gestured to the house. “Would you like to see inside?”
“Nah,” Mads replied, turning to walk back to Charlie’s house.
“Love to,” Charlie said, grabbing Mads’s shoulder and steering her toward the front porch. “You should look inside the house,” she whispered. “What if they have no cabinets?”
Mads froze mid-step. “By Odin’s beard!” she cried, startling the bears. “Who would have no cabinets?”
* * *
“Whatever happened on that island is bad enough, but if you and your brothers are attacking full-humans as tigers in the middle of the day in bars . . . that’s going to be a problem.”
“But we’re not,” Finn lied.
Before his father’s murder, Finn had heard a lot about the importance of two things: the Malone family and Katzenhaus. Both would protect their family from the full-human world so they could live their lives as they wanted.
Finn had noticed, though, that his mother hadn’t really said anything when his father made those statements. She didn’t agree or disagree. She would just keep doing whatever she was doing. Whether she was cooking or reading or breaking up another fight between Keane and Shay.
Then their father had been killed and no one had helped. Not the Malones and not Katzenhaus. Their mother had not seemed surprised. Hurt, but not surprised. But her three sons had been devastated. Everything they’d been taught about their father’s side of the family and about Katzenhaus had turned out to be a lie. It was, one of their mother’s sisters had noted when she didn’t think any of them were around, “the day your sons’ hearts turned to stone and their resolve turned to steel.”
And she’d been right. Full-blood tigers in the wild were known for their unforgiving nature, and the Black Malones were no different. “To cross a Black Malone is to cross the devil himself,” an Irish priest had once said about their great-great-great-grandfather. The first Black Malone.
All the other Malones, when shifted, looked like every other Siberian tiger. With white, orange, and black stripes and big fangs. But not the Black Malones. They had black fur with white stripes. Maybe a little orange or red tossed in for a dash of color, but not much. Usually, the Malones produced only one or two per generation. And they were never brothers. So when one Black Malone had an entire family of Black Malones . . . it was seen as a bad sign among the religious of the family. The nuns turned their eyes away and the priests crossed themselves when the family passed.
A few attempted to blame the Mongolian side of the family and the fact that their father had only picked one mate to breed with, but the Zaya-Sarnai tribe had no black tigers in their long history. Only the occasi
onal white ones with blue eyes, which were usually treated as shamans. And the Malones weren’t about to challenge the Zaya-Sarnais since no one had any idea how many of them there were in the world. They kept their overall numbers secret.
The only shifters that Finn and his brothers had any faith in were his mother’s side of the family. A large number had come from around the world to attend the funeral. What information they could find about the murder, they’d immediately passed on to Finn’s mother. And it became the goal of the tribal elders to teach the three oldest how to protect their immediate family now that their father was gone. They were taught to fight as human and cat, so they would always be ready to stand at their mother’s side.
But even with the help of their mother’s family, they still had no clue about their father’s murderer. Whoever had killed him had a lot of power to keep it quiet for so long. But the Black Malones would not stop. They would never stop.
Something that Cella Malone, of all people, should understand.
“It was you, cousin,” Cella pushed. “You and your brothers.”
“Prove it.”
“You left your piss all over the crime scene.”
“Let’s test it and find out. Oh, that’s right! Do that and the world will wonder why humans are leaving tiger piss everywhere. Can’t have that, now can we?”
Cella stepped closer and lowered her voice. “If you’re not careful, cousin, there are other ways this could be handled.”
“You mean like a shot from a tall building a thousand yards away? Isn’t that more your thing . . . cousin?”
A tall, lanky woman in loose jeans, worn work boots, and a baseball cap with the Tennessee Titans logo on the front sauntered to a stop in front of them. She was in the middle of eating an ice cream cone. Strawberry, by the looks of it.
“We done?” she asked with a low, gravelly voice.
Finn smirked. “Hanging around dogs now, are we, cousin?”
“We work together.”
“That?” Finn asked, incredulous. “I know that’s not working with Katzenhaus.”
“Better watch your mouth, son,” the canine said around licks of her ice cream. “I ain’t afraid to take on no cat.”
“And a hillbilly dog, too!” Finn laughed, gazing at his snarling cousin. “This just gets better!”
* * *
“Thanks for helping me out with that.”
They walked down the street toward Charlie’s rental house. It wasn’t very often that Mads was alone with Charlie. Mostly because the team found her terrifying. Not Max, of course, but the rest of them . . . they found her terrifying.
“No problem. Amazing what a honey cinnamon coffee cake can get you, though. When you’re dealing with bears anyway. Not polar bears, though. I always have to provide them with something seal or fish based.” Charlie wiped her hands on her jeans before adding, “Sorry about your great-grandmother.”
“Thanks.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. A little sad. I always thought she’d outlive most of us. She seemed too mean to die.”
“Need me to look into anything for you? Or . . . handle anything?”
Mads stopped walking and shook her head. “No. I’m sure she just died. Or it was a robbery or something. If my mother or grandmother had anything to do with it, they would have let me know by taunting me. Because they’re hyena and they can’t help themselves.”
“Lovely. Well, I’d be happy to go to the funeral with you. I know how that kind of gathering can get with a shitty family and—”
“There won’t be a funeral,” Mads cut in before this could go any further. “But thanks for the offer.”
“No funeral, or you just don’t want to go because your family will be a bunch of assholes? I remember them, Mads. I was there.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a warm, friendly smile. It was the brittle one that Charlie only used with people she hated or when talking about people she hated. “I remember your mother and grandmother extremely well.”
“You should. You punched my mother.”
“She deserved it.”
“Oh, I know,” Mads agreed, unable to stop herself from smiling at the memory of what happened after their first junior high team basketball game. “I know. And there won’t be a funeral because there isn’t a body.”
“What do you mean there’s no body? Why is there no body? Oh, my God.” Charlie grabbed her arm. “Did they eat your great-grandmother?”
“No! My family is fucked up, but we’re not that fucked up. They do not eat family. They cremated her, stuck her in a box, and put her somewhere in the house.”
Charlie released her arm. “The hoarder house?” she asked sadly.
“The hoarder house.”
“Why won’t they clean that place up?”
“I have no idea. It’s so nasty. They don’t even live in it anymore. They all have trailers now on the property.”
“From what Max has told me about your great-grandmother, that is not how she should go out.”
“I know. But her daughter will have it no other way. And my mother does whatever her mother tells her. I’m not getting in the middle of that, because I don’t want a world war.” She stepped closer to Charlie. “And your sisters can’t know that, because Max will start a world war. You know it, and I know it.”
“So you weren’t going to tell anyone?”
“Maybe Tock. She barely speaks.”
“And she’s your closest friend.”
Surprised at the statement, Mads simply stared at Charlie.
“Right?” Charlie pushed when Mads stayed quiet.
“Well . . . she’s my teammate. They’re all my teammates.”
“And your friends.” Charlie frowned. “Right?”
“I guess I never really thought about it.”
“How could you not think about it? You guys go into firefights together. How do you trust each other if you’re not friends?”
“We’re teammates.”
Charlie walked away from Mads then. She thought the eldest MacKilligan would return to her house, but she stopped in front of Mads’s teammates, who were lingering outside, and asked, “You guys are all friends . . . right?”
Streep immediately replied, “Of course we are! Best friends forever!”
Tock shrugged and said, “I guess.”
Nelle, busy putting on lip gloss in a compact mirror, asked, “Wait . . . what was the question?”
And Max turned to her baby sister and crowed, “Told you I had friends!”
“Wow,” Charlie said before she went inside her rental house.
Max motioned to the house across the street and asked, “What were you doing at that old She-bear’s house?”
“I just bought it.”
“Why?”
“So I can move into it.”
“What’s wrong with our house?”
“Nothing. Just thought I should buy a place.”
“Is this your form of mourning?” Streep asked.
“Okay. We’re done.” Mads pulled out her phone. “Look, I need to head to my storage—”
“In Wisconsin?”
“No. I can get what I need in my New York storage.”
“Oh.” Nelle snapped her compact closed. “I’ll get one of my father’s copters and we’ll all go together.”
“You guys don’t need to do that.”
“Are you bringing cash back for the purchase?”
“Yes.”
“And one of the real art pieces your aunt gave you?”
“Yes.”
Max pulled out one of the knives she kept hidden on her body at all times, but she did it so fast, Mads had no idea which location she took it from. “Then you’re gonna need us.”
“But we’re not friends?” Streep complained.
Mads cleared her throat. “I happen to think teammates are more import—”
“Shut. The fuck. Up.”
With that, Streep stomped into the house. Snickering
, Nelle and Max followed.
“Don’t worry about her,” Tock said, resting her elbow on Mads’s shoulder. “She’ll get over it. And I totally get what you mean about teammates.”
“Thank you. Besides, we’re not six years old.”
“Streep is.”
Tock looked up and down the street. “Sure you want to buy a house here? It’s bear territory. With lots of cranky grizzlies.”
“And even meaner lions a couple of blocks over.”
Tock smiled, quickly guessing Mads’s logic. “So, doubtful any hyenas will be just dropping by.”
“Not any locals anyway. And Charlie shot the out-of-towners. Making me feel relatively safe.”
Moving her arm so that it looped around Mads’s neck, Tock pressed her head against Mads’s.
“Really sorry about Solveig,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“Who sent you the flowers anyway?”
“Oh, shit!” Mads lifted her phone up again and Tock handed over the card that had come with the flowers. “I forgot to send a thank-you to that tiger.”
“What tiger?”
“Finn Malone. He’s the one who sent the flowers.”
“Who sent you flowers?”
“Uh-oh,” Tock muttered before they both lifted their heads to find a now-seething Max standing in front of them in all black, her denim jacket barely hiding all the weapons she now had strapped to her body. Even more than she’d had five minutes ago.
* * *
“This has been fun and all, but I’m leaving.”
“This isn’t over.”
Slowly, Finn stood, towering over his six-foot cousin.
“Is that right?”
“You don’t scare me.”
Finn took a step closer. “I scare ya a little.”
Because he was a Black Malone, and no one ever knew what a Black Malone would do next. When they shifted, their eyes turned blue and they were known for playing with their prey.
“I’m still not hearing nice,” the polar bear complained.
“You want to come for us,” Finn kindly suggested, “just try. I’m sure Keane would love it.”
“You know, I’m trying to help you. You’re still fam—”
“Don’t even.” He started to walk away but the hillbilly canine was standing in front of him, blocking his way. “And keep your pet dog away from me.”
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