Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,81

grabbed Charlie’s left arm and a She-grizzly grabbed her right; together they led her back toward the door.

“Now,” Benji continued on, “where were we?”

Charlie stopped halfway across the room, pulled her arms free, and spun around to face Benji again.

“What?” Benji asked. “What are you going to say, Miss MacKilligan, that I could possibly give a fuck about?”

It seemed that Charlie was trying to say something. She kept opening her mouth to speak but nothing was coming out. Max had never seen her like this. Charlie almost always had something to say. Usually something precise, brutal, and definitely threatening. Yet this time . . . she kept trying but there was nothing. Not a word.

Fed up, Benji simply flicked his hand toward Charlie, and the bears again grabbed her arms. This time, instead of leading, they began to drag her from the room. They got a few feet but abruptly stopped again. It took a second, but Max realized that the reason the bears had stopped was because Charlie had stopped.

With her head down and her entire body shaking, she refused to move.

Each bear took an even stronger grip on her arms with both hands and again tried to drag her from the room. It should have been easy. They were grizzlies. Max, herself, was once sent flying about a mile through trees when she’d startled a grizzly female camping in the Alps with her family. But no matter how hard those two pulled, Charlie wasn’t moving.

“What the fuck are you two doing?” Benji demanded. “Get her out of here.”

“We’re trying,” one of the grizzlies snarled.

When Charlie finally lifted her head, her eyes hadn’t shifted to wolf gold, the way they sometimes did during a firefight or fistfight. Instead, they were . . . bloodred. Like all the capillaries had broken at the same time.

The muscles in her neck bulged, her shoulders seemed to extend so that they were even bigger, and her combination of badger fangs and wolf fangs extended but the canines also seemed to grow thicker and longer than usual.

Max thought for sure her sister was finally going to shift. Maybe not into a badger or a wolf, but into something else. Something amazing.

But no. She didn’t shift. God knows, she didn’t need to.

Charlie turned her hands so that she could grip the forearms of the bears holding her and then, with a roar that shook all that surrounding glass, Charlie lifted her arms—and the bears. She lifted the motherfucking bears!—and crossed her arms, sending the grizzlies hurtling in opposite directions.

“Down!” Max screamed to her teammates as a grizzly flew over them and crashed into the glass walls, nearly shattering them. The people in the office next door jumped to their feet in shock.

Weapons were drawn but Benji quickly threw up his hands. “No! Don’t shoot her!”

Because he knew that if he killed Max’s sister, the only thing he’d be doing would be running for the rest of his life. Max wouldn’t stop until she killed him. And if he killed her, her teammates wouldn’t stop until they’d killed him.

Benji and his crew would need to manage Charlie without killing her and, Max had to admit . . . she couldn’t wait for them to try.

* * *

Mace and Smitty both jumped up, ready to move. Both males were former Navy SEALs and were used to taking action as soon as there was trouble. That was just the way they were.

“Stop!” Dez yelled before they could go out the door.

Mace gawked at her. “You’re not going to do anything?”

Dez went to the door herself, opened it, and ordered her people: “Stand down! Now! You do nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Dez!”

She faced her husband. “I was told to observe. Nothing more. The kid said he can handle it.”

“That kid can’t handle shit!”

“Don’t get in the middle,” Dee-Ann told them.

“You, too?” Smitty asked his cousin.

“I’ve been up against that one,” Dee-Ann said, gesturing toward the older badger sister. “And if you like your body parts still attached to your body, don’t get your dumbasses in the middle.”

* * *

Once she’d tossed the bears holding her away, Charlie flexed. And it was terrifying.

Still, Max knew that at least she was safe. She always knew she was safe with her sister, no matter how mad she might be at Max. Unfortunately, her teammates didn’t have that same sense of security; hands grabbed Max and yanked her down. She managed to bang her head on hard wood and was rubbing it when she found