Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,88
accepting all the blame for what had happened. Because it was her fault. All of it. She’d made them all vulnerable.
After a few moments of utter—and painful—silence, Charlie announced, “I’m going to bake cupcakes.”
She stalked from the room, leaving them standing there . . . stunned.
“Is that . . . code or something?” Mads asked. “For, like, murdering us?”
“No,” Max barked. “It means she’s going to make cupcakes. My sister doesn’t lie or use code when it comes to baking.”
“So what do we do?” Streep asked. “Do we make a run for it?”
“My sister has a high prey drive. Making sudden moves will just catch her attention. I suggest we all get comfortable and—”
“Wait for death?” Tock asked.
“I was going to say watch TV, but whatever works for you, sweetie.”
“Before you do anything,” Stevie said to Max, “you may want to check on the cat.”
“Fuck! Did that thing piss in my bed again?”
Stevie crossed her arms over her chest. “Not the cat. The cat.”
“What weird phonetic shit is that?”
“I’m talking about Zé!”
“Oh! That cat!”
“Yes!”
“Don’t get that tone! I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment.”
“He’s been really worried about you! And he was the only one. The rest of us were just worried about what Charlie was going to do to the cops who arrested you.”
“Which was epicly terrifying!” Nelle admitted.
Stevie’s shoulders sagged. “She promised me she wouldn’t kill anyone.”
“She didn’t kill anyone,” Max reassured her.
“That we know of,” Tock muttered.
“And she didn’t touch one cop.” She motioned to her teammates. “Bring Stevie up to speed. I’ll be back.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find the cat.”
“He’s in the backyard,” Stevie told her.
Max nodded and headed through the living room. But when she reached the dining room, she heard Charlie in the kitchen—slamming bowls.
“Nope,” she said to no one in particular. Then she spun on her heel and went out through the front door.
* * *
Zé sat on the ground, his back against the trunk of the tree he’d climbed earlier that day. He’d completely forgotten about calling Kamatsu because he’d been sitting in a tree worried about Max and her teammates. He’d wanted to meet Charlie at the station but the car that Stevie had sent for him brought him back to Queens. When he complained, Stevie had said, “I do what Charlie tells me, because she’s not going to yell at me.”
He assumed she’d meant Charlie would yell at him. Unfortunately, he had no idea which precinct had a “shifter-only division.” And since he wasn’t about to wander around New York state looking for it—or to ask cops if they had any shifters working in their office—he just stayed at the house and hoped for the best.
“Are you listening to me? Because my next question is very important.”
Zé looked up at the kid he’d met about an hour ago. He apparently lived here with Max and her sisters. His name was Kyle. He was a great artist. Brilliant, in fact. A prodigy, like Stevie. And he enjoyed living with the MacKilligan sisters because they didn’t bother him. Not like his own family did, because his family didn’t understand boundaries.
And Zé knew this because the kid had told him all that and much, much more while he’d been standing there, blathering along as if Zé had done anything to warrant such an attack of annoying-ness.
“So,” the kid continued on, “have you ever done any nude modeling?”
“Okay, that’s it.” Zé got to his feet. “I’m out of here.”
He could track Max down later. Because this whole conversation was just weird.
“Are you ashamed of your body? You shouldn’t be. It’s quite nice.”
“You need to stop talking to me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re freaking me out. And I don’t freak out easy.”
“How am I freaking you out?”
“Because you’re a teenage boy asking a grown man if he wants to pose nude for him. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were just a cop attempting to frame me.” The kid wanted to debate this but Zé held his hand up to silence him and walked away.
As he moved out from under the tree, he saw Max coming toward him from the front of the house.
He couldn’t believe how relieved he was to see her. He wanted to rush up to her but he waited where he was until she reached him.
“You’re back.”
“I am. You told my sister.”
“I did. I called Stevie but she put me on the phone with Charlie and I don’t like lying to her. Of the three of you, she does