despite Charlie’s inability to shift and her calm demeanor when it came to outsiders, Streep, Tock, Mads, and Nelle all managed to agree on this one thing:
That Charlie MacKilligan was the most terrifying being on the planet.
Max didn’t see it. She knew her sister was a dangerous woman but so were Max and Stevie, and the four honey badgers weren’t scared of them. As honey badgers, they weren’t scared by anyone . . . except Charlie.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Keeping her four teammates in the background worked out fine. Charlie had enough to worry about without adding Streep, Tock, Mads, and Nelle to the mix. And, thankfully, her teammates picked up shooting and fighting as easily and as well as Max had. So if Charlie couldn’t be her backup, she knew her four friends would. Like now. They’d saved her from her psychotic cousin in the alley, followed her here, and now they were stepping in to help with this mess. What a great team.
“Who is that?” Nelle asked.
“Max’s kidnapper,” Streep replied. “But she plans to make him her boyfriend.”
Max stood and faced her. Streep wasn’t her real name. Her real name was Cass Gonzalez. They called her Streep after the actress, because when Streep was on the court, she was the queen of the dramatic moment. God forbid some player lightly bumped into her when their team desperately needed a foul. Streep would hit the ground with such drama and hysterics that the refs became worried she was having a seizure . . . or a nervous breakdown.
Nelle sniffed the air. “He’s a cat? What’s a cat doing with these full-humans?”
Gong “Nelle” Zhao’s family came from Hong Kong. They’d had to move to the States when the shifter division of the Chinese government cracked down on the criminal activity of honey badgers. Thankfully Nelle’s father had seen the writing on the wall. He got his family out before the Zhaos could end up on the wrong side of criminal charges, and he got out with the family money, making the Zhaos extremely wealthy. Nelle—pronounced “Nell”—picked that nickname for reasons unknown. But she was a style guru in the middle of Wisconsin. Max never did find out how her wealthy family had ended up in their town but she’d always been grateful. Nelle was a hell of a power forward and an even better diamond connoisseur. Skills Max needed to deploy on occasion.
Tock pointed at her watch. “We’ve got exactly three minutes to bury these men and get the fuck out of here.” She tapped the timepiece. “Tick-tock.”
Yeah. Emily “Tock” Lepstein-Jackson got her nickname for obvious reasons.
Mads, having shifted back to human but still naked, didn’t say anything, just kept spitting blood on the floor. And Mads didn’t have a nickname. Mads was her name. Her mother had given it to her at birth. No one knew why and no one asked. Mads didn’t like a lot of questions.
“You want to take him with us?” Nelle asked, tossing her white-blond hair over her shoulder. She’d been bleaching her hair that color since her sister had told her she didn’t look good as a blonde.
“I can’t leave him here. Poor, helpless little kitten that he is.”
Streep frowned. “Why do you keep talking about him like that?”
“Because he doesn’t know that he’s a shifter. He’s clueless.”
“How is that your problem?”
“It became my problem when he shoved me under the table to protect me. So we’re taking him.”
Max reached down and grabbed an arm. Three of her teammates grabbed the other arm and legs and hefted him up. Nelle picked up the tossed-aside clothes of those who had shifted so they could put them back on when they were in the helicopter.
As they headed toward the exit, Mads stopped. “What is that?”
“What’s what?”
Mads’s head tilted to one side, then the other. Although genetically she was all honey badger, her mother was hyena, which seemed to have given her extra-sensitive hearing the rest of them would never possess.
She finally looked down at the cat. “It’s him.” She leaned in, again tilting her head one way, then another. Mads finally reached over to the arm Max held and yanked the cat’s big, heavy watch off his wrist. She tossed what was probably a fifty-grand accessory aside like it was a used tissue and again they began to move, quickly heading out of the hangar to the helicopter waiting to take them to another private airfield where Nelle’s private plane waited for them.
“What was