fucking amazing before in his life.
He pulled on jeans, and a now dressed Max came over to clean up his wounds.
“Don’t sweat it,” she said to him. “The bleeding will stop in a few minutes, these will be completely healed in less than twenty-four hours, and you’ll probably only have one or two scars where that tiger went a little too deep.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Max kept her face down, focused on his wounds.
“Keep looking at me like that,” Max warned, “and I’m going to fuck you right here.”
“Promise?”
“Hey!” that growly voice barked at them. “I want my sister! Where the fuck is she?”
Max handed Zé the alcohol wipes and started to walk across the room to the tigers, but Charlie said, “No, Max.”
Max stopped immediately. When they’d started training with their neighbor, Charlie had made Max agree to one thing: “When I tell you to stop, you stop.” Even then, at fourteen, she’d had that calm delivery. Not soft-spoken so much as rational. Very rational.
At the time, Max had easily agreed, not thinking it would be that hard to comply. It turned out that it was surprisingly hard to stop in the middle of a fistfight or firefight. Especially if someone had managed to piss her off. In the end, though, it was the rule she’d been most glad her sister had made her commit to. Charlie had saved her life with that one short sentence—“No, Max”—more than a dozen times.
Charlie still held her weapon but had the barrel pointing at the ground. She motioned Max to step back with a jerk of her head.
“Stevie,” she said when Max had moved back to Zé’s side. “Come down.”
“Nope.”
The only order that Charlie had ever forced Stevie to follow was “run.” So if they asked her to do anything else and she wasn’t in the mood or too freaked out, she just didn’t do it.
The tigers looked up to find Stevie hanging from the ceiling above them.
“Stevie,” Charlie tried again. “Get down here.”
“Forget it. There’s three of them. Three man-eaters! Why not just serve us up with some Tabasco sauce?”
Charlie closed her eyes, took a breath, and ranted, “Stevie MacKilligan, get your ass down here!”
“Okay, okay.” She could have just dropped to the floor but she scuttled across the ceiling and down the wall until she could stand directly behind Charlie.
“Are you hiding behind your sister?” Bernice asked.
“Don’t harass me.”
Charlie ignored the bickering behind her and informed the invaders, “I don’t know who your sister is.”
“You’re lying.”
“Call my sister a liar again,” Max warned.
“Okay.” The one who hadn’t bothered to shift at all quickly stepped into the middle of the room, a forced smile on his face. “How about we take this down a notch and I start off with introductions. We’re the Malone brothers. I’m Shay.” He pointed at the smaller brother—small being relative at six-four. “That’s Finn. And this big lug here”—he dropped his hand on the biggest brother’s massive shoulder and was immediately tossed off—“is our older brother, Keane.”
“And your sister is Cella Malone?” Max asked. But the look she got from all three tigers told her, in no uncertain terms, that they were not the brothers of Cella Malone and how dare she even suggest such a thing!
“Sorry. Just a question.”
“Our sister is Natalie Malone and—”
Keane yanked his brother out of the way and finished his sentence. “—she’s seventeen, deaf, and was last seen in the company of Freddy MacKilligan. That was a week ago.”
Max locked gazes with Stevie. A lifetime of conversation passed in those two seconds before Stevie pointed at her unadorned wrist and said, “Look at the time! I, uh, need to go get ready. I’m supposed to be doing something with ballet and my music in the city so . . . yeah . . . I need to go. Away.”
Like Max’s teammates, Stevie disappeared up the stairs and Max whispered to Zé, “If I tell you to run, you run.”
Then she turned and faced her eldest sister. She raised her hands to her chest, palms out, and slowly and carefully moved toward Charlie.
“Now, Charlie, I know that’s not what you wanted to hear. That’s not what anyone wanted to hear. And I’m sure that—” Stevie silently ran back down the stairs with her backpack slung over her shoulder, Max’s teammates following behind. She paused long enough to grab their aunt and, as a group, they all quickly rushed toward the kitchen to escape what was about to happen. “I’m sure that we can all