Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,108
we were going to lie to her. I was repeatedly told by you and everyone else I’ve met in the last few days that the truth could only hurt everyone and I needed to lie and lie and lie again.”
Max nodded. “Yeah. You need to lie.”
“But you didn’t lie. You didn’t lie at all.”
“I know. That was okay, though.”
“How was that okay?”
She looked at her phone and he felt the urge to grab it from her and toss it into the middle of the street. But then she took his hand and began walking in the opposite direction, tucking her phone into the back of her jeans.
“See,” Max explained, “the plan was to lie and that was a very good plan. It was a safe plan. And right now you need safe plans. At least until you get your feet under you and you can figure all this shit out without too much worry.”
“Okay.”
“But I’ve been doing this sort of thing my entire life and sometimes the truth is perfect . . . because no one fucking believes the truth. You saw her face, right? She didn’t believe anything I said. She thinks I’m insane. It’s perfect.”
“But everyone in Starbucks—”
“Is one of us.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know that the Starbucks we were going to is the one that’s so close to the new Sports Center until we got here. Everyone that works there and everyone that happened to be in there at the time . . . one of us. It was perfect.”
She stopped and pointed at the giant building that took up the entire city block.
“This is the Sports Center,” she said before dragging him through the big doors. As they walked through, he saw a lot of people doing a lot of sporty things. There was a massive gym. A sports medicine facility on the upper floors. An entire stadium in the back. A skating rink. And a Starbucks.
He pointed. “There’s a—”
“No. Not that one. It’s filled with full-humans. And they never have enough honey buns.”
Max continued walking, pulling Zé along.
“Now, I had never been to this place when we first got here a few weeks ago. All the other finals and playoffs I was in took place either at the old Staten Island Sports Center or the Sports Centers around the country . . . or world. Depending on who the finals were against. This place was just built in the last few years. Our first playoff game will be here and I’m so excited. I mean, this place is nice, right?”
She took him to a stairwell that was off the main area. Two large security guards stood in front of it and one of them looked at Max and smirked.
“You start a fight . . .” the security guard warned.
“I won’t. Promise.”
Max opened the door and they went down a flight to the next level. She opened another door and walked in. Zé followed and froze in the doorway. It was just like what he’d seen upstairs except that he knew almost all these people were shifters. The insane variation in sizes. The way they looked at each other—either sizing them up or threatening them. Even the way they walked. The bears lumbering. The canines trotting along. The cats appearing and disappearing among the crowd until they vanished completely.
“Stop staring,” Max said, pulling him along. “You look like you want a fight.”
Not only was the place packed with shifters, it was geared specifically toward shifters. The stores had giant mannequins; the restaurants offered “whale blubber steaks” and “foot-long antelope hotdogs,” and the massive gym had treadmills right in the window. On one of those treadmills was a woman running at least fifty miles per hour.
He pointed. “What’s going on—”
“Tiger. Like the cheetah, they can go fast but only in short bursts. But the wolf on the treadmill next to her . . . ? She can trot like that for several hours. Oh! You should see this.” Still holding his hand—which he really didn’t mind at this point—she dragged him into the gym, past behemoths casually lifting weights that only Norwegian guys trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records could lift.
“This,” she said. “You should try this out at some point.”
He didn’t know what she was talking about until he saw a very wide, very tall tree with lots of limbs and branches that leopards and jaguars were climbing while holding something in their mouths.