Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,86
hog,” Miki shot back. “And motorcycles like that are part of the American—”
“Criminal underworld?”
“I was going to say landscape.”
“Ah.”
They glared at each other but they weren’t remotely angry. This was just something they liked to do. Ever since Miki had bravely walked into her office at the university and asked if Irene would be her doctoral advisor. Only the bravest students ever did that because most of the students found her “terrifying.” And Irene rarely said yes, but there was something about the tiny young woman in cutoff shorts and steel-toed Doc Martens that she’d found interesting. At the time, neither Irene nor Miki knew that one of her best friends was a wolf. Then again, Miki hadn’t known that Irene’s husband was a wolf as well, although the two wolves were from vastly different Packs.
Now, however, Miki not only had a canine best friend, but a wolf mate of her own, a wolf pup that was turning out to be smarter than Miki and Irene combined—which was a terrifying thought for either of them—and both of them were forced to help shifters survive in an increasingly horrifying world.
These insult-breaks were something they did to keep long periods of work entertaining. No one else understood them, but no one else mattered.
Irene had just returned to her book when her husband, Niles Van Holtz, stormed into the room. He looked around, walked out again, but returned a minute later with a suitcase.
“Get packed up,” he ordered, opening the suitcase. “Both of you. We have to get out of here.”
Irene watched her husband begin shoving random things into the suitcase. There was no rhyme or reason to what he was grabbing, but he was canine. She was surprised he didn’t just grab a bone and make a run for it.
“Is there a reason we’re escaping?” she finally asked when he slammed closed her laptop and shoved it into the suitcase.
“The MacKilligans. The oldest. I’m pretty sure she’s coming to kill us all.”
“Holtz, perhaps you should calm down and tell me—”
“Why aren’t you moving?” he demanded. “Do you want to live without skin?”
At that point, Miki had turned around in her chair again. “Live without skin? What now?”
“Yes! She promised to skin us!”
“You know it’s not really that easy to skin a person, right?”
“What?”
“I’m a hunter,” Miki explained. “Me and my girls—”
“My girls and I,” Irene corrected.
“Stop it. We go hunting all the time. And it’s not easy to skin a deer, and they have that thick hide you can pretty much grab and pull. But humans . . .” She lifted her left hand and with her right began to simulate removing human skin. “Our skin is so thin, you’ve gotta be real careful about removing it. It’s not like skinning an orange.”
Holtz turned to Irene. “Why are all our full-human friends weird?”
“I didn’t major in psychology,” Miki said before Irene could reply, “but I’d say you draw weird to you.”
“No one asked you, tiny female.”
There was a knock at the door and it opened to reveal her cousin-in-law’s giant mate filling the doorway. The woman boasted shoulders Irene imagined Neanderthals once had. They were enormous!
“Hey there, cousin!” Dee-Ann greeted Holtz, her Tennessee Titans baseball cap low on her head. Irene often wondered if the She-wolf could see or if she was so canine, she simply sniffed her way around. “Whatcha doin’?”
“We’re leaving. Ric told me what happened with those idiots and that psychotic badger. We warned them and they didn’t listen. Now I have to evacuate my family from the state.”
“Or you can calm down,” Dee-Ann suggested, “and not worry. Charlie MacKilligan knows it wasn’t y’all.”
“You do understand ‘y’all’ is not a word?” Irene once again reminded her.
“I’m supposed to believe,” Holtz said, “that the woman who threatened to skin me and my wife in the dark of night if we went near her sisters is rational enough to know we didn’t have anything to do with this?”
“Yep.”
Holtz looked at Irene and she repeated, “Yep.”
“Besides, she made her point,” Dee-Ann continued. “Beat those boys and their friends within an inch of their lives, sending a very clear message.”
Holtz shook his head. “They’re lucky she didn’t kill any of them.”
“That was not luck, cousin.”
“Stop calling me cousin. I am not your cousin.”
“What she did was very precise. She knew exactly how much strength to use to do the most damage without killing her prey. That’s the mark of a real killer.”