Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,113
surface of the desk.
“I’m not sure how long this will take,” the tiger explained. “We may need to look in our written archives since some families don’t want their offspring tracked by anyone, especially a database.”
“Are you talking about doomsday preppers?” Max asked.
“Full-human or not . . . they are everywhere.”
She walked off with Zé’s information and Max turned to Tock. “Did you hear something?”
Tock looked around, leaned in, and whispered, “You mean about that delivery of diamonds coming in from South Asia?”
Max scratched her forehead. “No. I mean about Zé.”
“When you couldn’t get in here before, you said you were waiting to hear back from contacts you had. Did you hear something from them?”
“Um . . .” Her teammates exchanged glances with Tock and she said, “Why don’t we wait until—”
“Got it!” the tiger said, coming back to the counter with a smile and a couple of pages printed out. “Here’s what we have.” She held the pages out but Zé didn’t take them. He just glared at them as if expecting them to strike. Like a coiled copperhead.
After an awkward few seconds while the She-tiger held those pages out and Zé stared, Max took them.
“Thanks.”
Since she wasn’t going to stand there holding the pages out for Zé, she simply looked at them herself, but didn’t see anything shocking . . . until she did.
“Huh.”
“Huh?” Zé repeated, a note of panic in his voice. This from a man who’d been through the weirdest life change ever and had shown few-to-no signs of panic when not in a full-blown fever . . . until now. “Why are you huh-ing? What is there to huh about?”
“Well . . . you are in the Katzenhaus system, which would allow what is called the ‘Cat Nation’ to keep track of you. That way if something happens to your immediate family, they can track any relatives you may have in other states or worldwide who might be willing to take you in. To raise you. If there’s no one, you could be taken in by an adoption agency or foster system that handles fellow cats or shifters as a whole.”
“Yeah . . . and?”
“See, I was under the assumption that only one of your parents was a shifter, and since you never mentioned your dad, I just guessed that he didn’t tell your mother what he was, went out for a pack of cigarettes one day, and simply didn’t come back. Sadly, it’s somewhat common for the bigger cats. Although it usually happens more frequently with the hybrids. And my dad.”
“Waiting for you to get to the point.”
Max cleared her throat. “But according to this, both your parents were cats. Your mother was jaguar on her mother’s side.”
“My grandfather raised me on his own after my mother and grandmother died.”
“Yes,” she said, wishing she could avoid going on.
“How did they die?” Nelle gently asked Zé.
“Car accident.”
Max cringed. “Or a fight with a hyena Clan.”
“Sorry?”
Fuck it, she thought. She might as well tell him everything and handed over the document. “It specifies what happened to your mother and grandmother. In the full-human world, the death certificate probably says car accident. But in ours . . . the truth is that your mother and grandmother were in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time during the wrong Pride-Clan fight. The deaths were accidental—the hyenas just saw cats and overreacted—but it’s very clear that your mother and grandmother were part of the shifter world.”
Zé stared at the papers in his hand but he didn’t say anything. Just stood there . . . staring.
Then, abruptly, he walked out.
“Well,” Mads muttered, “he’s off to kill every hyena he sees.”
But that actually wasn’t Max’s worry. She saw a bigger issue and, raising her gaze to Nelle, she saw that her teammate saw it, too.
“Go, Max,” Nelle urged. “Go.”
Max ran out of the main library, past the snobby male lion, and through the double glass doors. When she hit the street, Zé was already stepping into a cab at the end of the block. She charged toward him, but the door closed, and the cab was already moving when Max reached it. She picked up speed, dashed around a few full-humans walking down the street, and when she passed the cab, she abruptly turned into the street and threw herself in front of it.
The cab wasn’t going terribly fast. But fast enough to ram into Max’s small body and send her