Zé watched in shock as Stevie expertly flicked open what turned out to be a butterfly knife—an edge weapon that was not remotely legal in New York. He jumped up, ready to step in before she did something she would regret the rest of her life—although he understood it; he wanted to stab that pushy uncle himself. Dude was annoying. But before anyone could make a move, Stevie snatched the basketball from her sister mid-bounce and rammed the blade into it.
Then she did it again. And again. Then a whole bunch more times. All while staring her sister right in the eyes.
Finally, when she stopped, she hysterically screamed in Max’s face, “I told you to stop playing with that fucking ball!”
With that, Stevie shoved the deflated ball back into Max’s hands, the knife still sticking out of it, and stormed out of the room.
There was a long moment of silence until the uncle said, “That girl should be locked up.”
Max pulled out the knife, expertly flicked it closed, and handed it back to one of the other men. “Really?”
“I don’t mean in a prison.”
“Oh, I understand what you mean. You’re talking about a mental hospital. A loony bin, where the crazies go. Do you really think this is about her being annoyed by you? No. It’s about Charlie.”
“Charlie told us we could stay.”
“I’m sure she did. Charlie’s a good person. But she has a very low threshold for other people’s bullshit. She puts up with it from me and Stevie but you’re not us. You’re them. And Stevie’s brain is so advanced, she can look minutes, days, weeks, months, years ahead. She can see that, one day, you’re going to do something so stupid and so uncaring that you piss off Charlie. Piss her off so much that she’ll kill all of you. She’ll kill all of you and not care, even though Charlie cares about everything and everyone. But you’ll push her so far that—boom!—over the edge she’ll go and you boys will be dead and it will be civil war among the MacKilligans. So Stevie is trying to prevent an outcome she sees as clearly as she saw the formula for the minor nuclear explosion she caused that time.”
As the men simply stared at her, Max smiled. “Even worse, once the war starts . . . well, that’s when I will have to step in. And I’ll be forced to do what I do so goddamn well. You wouldn’t want that, would you? Me, completely wiping out the entire Scottish MacKilligan bloodline because . . . ya know . . . I can.”
The smile turned to a grin and that grin grew wide. It wasn’t a sadistic smile, though. That’s what was kind of terrifying about it. It was a pure, happy smile. As if she was at a child’s first birthday party.
“So, to prevent what my adorable baby sister clearly sees,” she went on, “I strongly suggest you make a few calls, pack up your shit, and move over to the Kingston Arms. I’m sure they will take you if you give them our name, promise not to steal anything, and pay much more than anyone in the history of the universe. I know you’re cheap,” she quickly added when her uncle began to argue.
“I ain’t!”
“Oh . . . you is. And we all know it. Right, lads?” she asked the men accompanying her uncle. Their reply was to look down at the floor and not say anything. “See? They know. We all know you’re cheap. But that’s okay. You’re just going to suck it up and pay that tab! Willingly . . . and with love.”
“Now listen to me—”
She held up the deflated ball right in front of her uncle’s face. “What I did with this poor basketball is just one of the many ways I know how to irritate her. You should know that over the years, I’ve discovered thousands of ways to irritate Stevie MacKilligan. You could almost say it’s been a lifetime project of mine. Do you want to stick around while I make her even crazier? Or do you just want to get the fuck out?” Still grinning. How could she say all that and still keep smiling? How could she not be angry on some level? But she wasn’t. Zé knew anger, and she wasn’t angry. Not even a little. “Because I can promise you that my sister can go from slightly hysterical to destroyer of entire worlds in a nanosecond. Can’t she, Dougie?” She looked directly at one of the men and, after a brief staring contest, he nodded. “Remember what happened in the Bronx that time, Dougie? Remember what Stevie did there?” She winked at him and crinkled her nose up at the same time. It was adorable and horrifying. “Oh, yeah. You remember.”
“She’s right, Da,” Dougie said with his gaze fixed to the floor. “We should just go.”
“See? Dougie knows. Because I can promise you, I have practically an entire garage filled with basketballs and I can bounce them all day. I love basketball!” she cheered.
With a growl, her uncle pushed past her, and the burly men followed him out of the room.
“I’ll call you guys a car!” She waved at the men’s retreating backs. “It was great having you, though!” Then she added in the same happy tone, “But don’t ever come back!”
* * *
“So what happened in the Bronx?”
He sat on her couch, bare chested and shoeless. His mostly black hair was a mess, falling over his eyes, but the green glared at her from across the room. He was a very handsome man but stubborn. One of those guys who believed the things right in front of him and nothing else.
“Nothing,” she lied. “Why?”
“Because whatever happened scared your uncle and his burly friends.”
“Those burly friends were his sons.”
“All of them?”
“He has more children. The MacKilligans like to breed. They’re like rats that way.”
“But honey badgers.”
“Yes.” She came across the room and plopped down on the couch. She loved this couch. It was huge! Her entire basketball team could sleep on this thing at the same time. Even the subs. “So how are you feeling?” she asked, sitting cross-legged.
“Much better. Whatever you gave me is wearing off.”
Max rolled her eyes. “I didn’t give you anything. I saved your life.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If it was drug related, what you saw in the kitchen would be known only by you . . . but I know you saw a giant panda.”
He blinked and she shrugged.
“Drug-induced delusions are usually particular to the person experiencing them.”
“How do you know that?”
“My sister is a scientist and she talks about that shit all the time. Besides, I did a whole paper in high school on the experiments the government ran on soldiers in the sixties and seventies.”
“Why?”
“I was curious. And my teacher rejected the paper I did on serial killers. I don’t know why. It was very detailed. I clearly did my research. But the next thing I knew, I was talking to the school shrink.”
“That doesn’t exactly shock me.”
“Did you have to talk to the school shrink?”
“No.”
“Lucky you.”
“In my school, they were just glad I wasn’t selling drugs to the freshmen.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Here. South Bronx. With my grandfather. And you?” he asked after a moment, but she got the feeling he was just asking to be polite. He didn’t really want to know. He wasn’t even looking at her when he asked the question. But that didn’t bother Max. She liked his indifference. She’d discovered that men who wanted to find out everything about you in the first five seconds were the same ones you had to eventually get restraining orders against.
“I was born in Detroit. Lived with my mom until she got busted for a jewelry heist in Bulgaria. Charlie’s mom took me in, and I lived in Connecticut with Charlie, her mom, and eventually Stevie until Charlie’s mom was murdered. Then me, Charlie, and Stevie hiked to Wisconsin, where Charlie’s grandfather took us into his Pack. We stayed there until both me and Charlie graduated high school. Stevie went to Oxford at fourteen to work in a lab there, doing something with physics or whatever. I never asked exactly what she was doing because I didn’t care. But we did go with her to England and that was okay. We had a nice
time and Oxford paid for it. But when she turned eighteen, me and Charlie had to make our own way financially. We still kept an eye on her, though, because if we didn’t, Dad tended to sell her to drug dealers so she could make their drugs.”
He was finally looking at her now. Staring at her with wide eyes.
“Oh, and just a side note . . .” She lowered her voice a bit in case Charlie was anywhere within hearing range. She had excellent hearing. “Any time my father is mentioned, Charlie goes off on a whole thing about how much she hates him. Just let her rant. I mean, it’s all true. She hates him. Not that thing in books and movies where she loves-him-but-hates-him either. It’s just pure hate. But it makes sense, when you think about it. Her mother was murdered and my mom is in prison because of our father. Although, I should clarify, he didn’t actually kill her mother and the Bulgarian cops put my mom in prison. But the men who killed her mother were looking for our dad, and he was part of the crew that my mom got busted with and he left her there with the rest of the gang to be picked up by the cops. Actually,” she added, realizing, “the reason Devon is trying to kidnap me is because he got out of prison and whatever loot they kept from the heist that the cops didn’t find . . . he wants it back, thinking my mom has it, but she doesn’t. But he thinks he can get my mom to tell him by kidnapping me and maybe sending her a finger or whatever. Honestly . . . I’m thinking if there was any loot left, my dad probably grabbed it, but I’m sure he’s lost it all by now. Probably to women and gambling . . . and liquor. And very bad Ponzi schemes. My dad is the worst criminal,” she admitted.
He was still just staring at her, so she asked, “So what made you join the Marines?”
“No, no,” he quickly cut in. “No. Just no.”
“No what?”
“Whatever crazy story you just told me—”
“All true.”
“Sure it was.”
“Who’d make that shit up? Well,” she reasoned, “maybe Stephen King. But then it would involve murderous clowns or haunted hotels or . . . the end of the world. Have you read The Stand?”
“Is this how Manson worked?”
“Manson who?”
“Charles Manson. Did he just vomit up incredibly weird stories while convincing nubile young girls that they had special powers that allowed them to shift into things?”
“Shifting isn’t a special power.”
“It’s not?”
“No,” Max admitted. “Our kind is no different from full-humans. We’re just better.”
“How is that not different?”
“Look, there are a lot of reasons there are shifters. Most involve ancient magic and ancient people, but whatever happened back then, it eventually led to a genetic—”
“Defect?”
Max had been talking with her hands, as she liked to do. But when he said that, she dropped her hands into her lap.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“What?”
“Being a shifter isn’t a defect or a superpower. It just is. We are just what we are.”
“And no one knows?”
“We know. Those we love, some of whom are full-human, know. But our kind has spent centuries making sure that we are never found out so that full-humans don’t turn us into their personal guard dogs or do Mengele-like tests on us in an attempt to steal our genetic gifts.”
Vargas frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you get it? In order to protect our kind we’ve got people everywhere, we’ve infiltrated everything.”
“So, you’re saying . . . your people are in our government.”
“We’re in all governments. We have to be. How else do you think we protect our kind?”
“How high up . . . ?”
“As high as we can get.” His eyes narrowed and she guessed what he was thinking. “Hello? Teddy Roosevelt?” His eyes narrowed even more. “The Teddy Roosevelt?” His lips pursed in disbelief. “Oh, come on! The Teddy Bear? In fact . . . Eleanor Roosevelt was one of us, too, but not FDR.”
“And how did that happen?”
“Bloodlines. He was a distant cousin of Teddy’s. Like a fifth cousin or something. And it’s MacKilligan lore that our family is very distantly connected to—”
“Braveheart or Robert the Bruce?” he asked, now sounding bored and unimpressed.
“Neither. Those two were full-human. I’m talking about the Black Douglas. Distantly, of course. Because we’re honey badgers and the Black Douglas was a wolf.”
“Okay,” he said, slapping his hands against his thighs. “We’re done. I can’t hear any more of this craziness. I just can’t. I’m not a cat. You’re not a badger—and why anyone would want to be that, I do not know—”
“We’re hard to kill, that’s why.”
He sighed and then went on. “And I just can’t do this anymore. Plus, I can’t stop thinking about who can fit this goddamn sneaker!” he said, reaching down and retrieving one of the triplets’ shoes from next to the couch. The boys tended to leave their shit everywhere, while their sister was much tidier.
“So, what I’m going to do,” he said, standing up, “is get a shirt, borrow your cell phone to call a car, and get back to my non-crazy life.”
She could tell he meant it, too. He was going to push everything he’d experienced in the last twenty-four hours from his mind as only a cat could. Because when cats didn’t like something, they simply pretended it didn’t exist. And that’s what he was going to do. Pretend that she didn’t exist, her sisters didn’t exist, and that none of this had ever happened.
But as always in the world of shifters . . . the bears came in and fucked all that shit up.
It was kind of cute, too. The Dunn triplets did it sometimes, when they thought no one was looking. In their grizzly forms, they marched through the house humming “The Bare Necessities” from that old Disney movie.
The three of them, in a line, lumbered through the living room with their big grizzly heads swinging, all three thousand pounds marching along . . . and humming.
Humming “The Bare Necessities” song.
Vargas watched them go by in silence. When they’d made it out of the room, Max expected him to grab the phone she had in the pocket of her basketball shorts but he just . . . walked out. Not out of the house, but upstairs. She could hear his bare feet slowly slapping against each step.
A few seconds later, a calm but concerned Stevie returned to the living room and pointed in the direction of the stairs. Her furrowed brow silently asked Max what had happened.
And all Max could do was cringe. “I think I broke him.”
chapter FOUR
She noticed the Mercedes idling in the middle of the road outside the church. She didn’t approach the vehicle, simply watched. Hoped that no one inside had spotted her near this tree. She’d been planning to sleep for a few hours but if she were noticed . . .
But no one stepped out of the car. The driver didn’t do anything but sit there. He was waiting for someone; she just didn’t know who. She could only hope that whoever was coming wouldn’t be a problem. That they wouldn’t notice her.
She’d been on her own for a couple of years now, since she’d run away from the orphanage. She did better on her own as long as she stayed away from the city and lived in the woods. She loved the woods. Felt at home. For once. But, like the animals she befriended and that befriended her, she knew to stay away from men. There were men in the woods, sometimes, but she knew how to climb. Knew how to blend into her surroundings. Knew how to disappear if she had to. Just like the foxes and wolves that roamed the forests she lived in.
She didn’t move, not even to pull the hood of her coat over her head. Simply watched and waited.
It was a few feet to her left that she heard it. Something coming up from the ground. Scratching at the earth beneath. It took some time for the thing to dig its way through but it finally broke to the surface.
She almost gasped, but slapped a hand over her mout
h before she released the sound.
A human hand with a claw on each finger punched its way through the last bit of dirt and forest debris. A few seconds later another hand came through. Arms stretched out and the hands landed hard on the earth nearby. With a grunt, a human pulled itself free. And did it with ease. The struggle was minor, the body wiggling free until a woman stood in the forest. She did an all-over shake that got most of the dirt off her and ran her hands through her short hair. She wiped her face with human fingers, the claws gone. She used those same hands to brush off her clothes before heading toward the car.
When she got close to the vehicle, the trunk was remotely opened and another woman came out from the driver’s side. This one was meticulously dressed in a black suit and high-heeled shoes. The women stopped long enough to stare at each other and then the driver pointed at the trunk.
Clothes were quickly changed, the old ones tossed into the forest. Then, in new jeans and a black T-shirt, the digger threw herself into the other’s arms.
“Are you all right?” the driver finally asked in English. Her accent . . . it was American. Easy to identify because she’d watched a lot of TV in the orphanage and had seen many American TV shows.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.” The digger stepped away from the other. The digger also spoke American English. “They kept me separated from the others and mostly shackled. For their own protection, they said.” She shrugged. “The guards kept disappearing. I’m not sure how that happened and neither were they.”
The driver laughed. “I see you haven’t changed.”
“Why would I? Prison is easy once you figure out who the players are . . . and kill them.”
The driver nodded toward the car. “We don’t have much time before they come after you.”
The digger snorted. “I doubt they’ll come after me. As long as I stay out of Bulgaria, I’m sure they’ll be glad to see the back of me. Besides . . . I’ve got something to fix. I can’t let anyone get in the way of that.”
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