Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,71
“Because they can smell us coming a mile away.”
Max had only been seven when she’d asked that question, so she’d taken her mother literally. Of course other shifters could smell honey badgers coming a mile away! Especially if they unleashed their anal glands! But that wasn’t what her mother had meant.
Unlike full-humans, shifters knew better than to trust honey badgers. One never knew when a badger was going to get “fed up with your bullshit” and suddenly just slap the shit out of you or decide “I didn’t like the look on your face” and rip it off or one day simply steal everything you own because “you didn’t look like you really needed that Ming vase.”
Of course, not all honey badgers were like that, but as Max’s teammates had shown her, it wasn’t always easy to completely remove oneself from a honey badger family.
Even she and her sisters had realized that. No matter how much the MacKilligans on both sides of the Atlantic had made it abundantly clear they wanted nothing to do with Max, Stevie, and Charlie . . . here their relatives still were. Annoying Max and her sisters.
Of course, once Will got his money back from their dad—or he killed their dad—they would no longer have to deal with their cousins and aunts and uncles. That’s what Charlie and Stevie seemed to believe, but Max wasn’t so sure.
Max watched her baby sister’s face and knew that she was torturing herself. She had that look she got when she was worried about all the things that could go wrong. Like when she checked herself into a German hospital because she was giving herself panic attacks over Ebola. She’d made the mistake of reading an article about it. Just a general informational thing, but there’d been enough statistics in it for Stevie to figure out exactly how long it would take for the virus to completely wipe out the entire human population. Most scientists could and probably did figure out the same thing, but those same scientists went on about their day. Maybe made plans for their families if something bad ever happened. But not Stevie. She wanted to save the world and when she realized she couldn’t do that without the help of “worthless and uncaring human beings” she had a complete and utter meltdown.
She was in that therapeutic facility for four months before she was ready to check herself out. The psychiatrists were ready to release her after a month, once they got her on meds that helped control her ongoing panic attack, but Stevie kept telling them and Charlie, “I still need time. I’m not ready.”
It was what-ifs that made Stevie a brilliant scientist. It was also what made her “sick” sometimes. Max had realized that after knowing Stevie for less than six months, when they still expected her She-tiger mom to come back and get her daughter. Over the years, though, Max had found ways to distract her sister from her anxiety. Some worked most of the time, but only one way worked all of the time. Out of necessity, that was the one she used.
Sitting down at the table, leaning back in the chair, Max accused, “You’re going to open your big mouth to Charlie, aren’t you?”
Stevie lifted her gaze from the table. That deep-in-thought, I’m-about-to-flip-out gaze.
“No, I’m not.”
“You are,” Max insisted. “She’s gonna walk through the door, and as soon as you see her, you’re going to start running your fucking mouth.” Max did that thing Stevie really hated. She scrunched up her face and began speaking in a high-pitched voice that she always told Stevie was exactly how she sounded. It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. Not at the moment. “‘Nan-nan-nan-nan-nannnnn. Oh, Charlie, he was here. I don’t know what to do. Wah-wah-wah!’ As soon as she comes in this fucking house!”
Stevie looked away, took in a breath, let it out . . . then exploded.
Pointing her finger and jumping up from her seat, Stevie screamed, “You are a fucking bitch and I wish I’d set you on fire when I had the chance!”
Max jumped up, too, making sure her chair went flying back and hitting the counter behind her. Big, clanging noises always set Stevie off. “I’m a fucking bitch? You are a worthless, whiny baby!”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Charlie bellowed, rushing into the kitchen from the front of the house and pushing Max and Stevie apart. “That is enough!”