Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,75
belonged to his team leader.
When Max started laughing again, he glared at her. “What now? ”
“Unicorn,” she gasped out.
“What?”
She took the phone from his hand and turned it around. The color of the case the kid had picked out for him was bright pink glitter, which Zé had noticed but not cared about. But the white unicorn with rainbow-colored wings that decorated the back was too much for him. Just too much.
“Goddammit,” he snarled, snatching the phone from Max and returning to the store to scare the kid into changing it for a simple black protective case. He didn’t have to try too hard to scare the kid. Apparently just staring at him did the trick. The whole exchange took only about three minutes but when Zé got back outside, Max had been slammed over the hood of a cop car and her wrists zip-tied.
“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, not really thinking about the fact he was mouthing off to cops.
A big, blond, uniformed male pulled Max off the car.
“Out of the way, house cat,” the blond ordered as he pushed past Zé.
“Whatever you do,” Max told him before she was unceremoniously shoved into the back of a police van, “do not tell Charlie. Understand?”
Of course he understood . . . but he wasn’t going to listen.
There was just one problem: he didn’t have anyone’s phone number or any money. He’d been planning to get all that together back at the house when he had access to Max’s computer.
Zé looked up at the corner street sign, and that’s when he remembered where they’d planned to go after they left the phone store.
* * *
Nelle was in the middle of a wonderful massage while her teammates got mani-pedis when the front door was battered open and cops came charging in with weapons out.
The full-human women giving them the in-home spa day screamed and dropped to the ground, most of them sobbing in fear.
But Nelle and her girls . . . well, they were honey badgers. They weren’t hard to startle but they were hard to scare.
Big NYPD lions and bears grabbed each of them and as they zip-tied their wrists in front, one of them warned, “We’re being nice here, badger. Don’t make us regret it.” Female cops got Nelle clothing from her room and let her put it on since she’d been naked under the sheet while getting her massage.
“What are the charges?” she asked, ignoring the laughter of her bitch sister from the other room.
The grizzly holding her didn’t answer, just pulled her out of the apartment. But Nelle could still hear her sister from inside, cheering, “This is the best day ever!”
The bitch.
* * *
Mads was glad she’d only agreed to the manicure. Her teammates didn’t have on shoes, and the thought of walking around without shoes in fucking New York City made her skin crawl. Honey badgers might be hard to kill but diseases were different from a knife or a gun. Diseases were worse than any serial murderer when it came to killing shifters.
As they were removed from the building, none of her teammates seemed to show any concern. But Mads was concerned. Because she was worried this was her fault. She hadn’t gone to her family’s heist despite the multiple calls and texts that had hit her phone the night before. But maybe the cops thought they could get to her family through Mads and her friends.
The thought made her sick to her stomach.
Her teammates had always been tolerant of the hyena side of Mads’s family. Tolerating the rudeness, the mocking laughter, and the inappropriate “man moves” of her male cousins. But if they were all being dragged to a police station because of her family, Mads wasn’t going to do what she usually did when her family got out of hand: walk away and ignore it. Nope. Not this time.
The cops opened up the van doors and began to put each of her teammates inside. But just when it was her turn, she saw Zé run around the corner. He had not yet noticed her. Glancing back and forth between the Siberian tiger male on one side and the black bear on the other, she decided to risk it, and let out one of the whooping calls that came from the hyena side of her family. A communication skill only her teammates knew about because it would weird out other shifters, who already hated hybrids on principle.