In a Badger Way (Honey Badger Chronicles #2) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,140

on that. She’d merely been born into a family of thieves. On both sides! And she had the skills. But she was not a thief herself.

Of course, the last time she’d been in a situation like this, she’d found her father’s still-shifted body. He’d been stuffed and was displayed in a rich woman’s home. That had been traumatic. Not so much because her father was dead—she’d already thought he was dead—but because her mother had buried someone and told everyone it was Livy’s father.

Turned out that had been a lie. Even worse, to this day, Livy had no idea who was buried in that grave, and her mother wasn’t talking.

That was the past, though. Right now she had bigger issues. She’d been shocked when she’d found out that people she knew had been taken, and now time was a factor. They needed information and they needed it quickly.

Ignoring the pain in her face, Livy got to her feet and cracked her neck.

“I’m in,” she told Shen and Vic. Then she got to work.

* * *

With the help of their cousins—more than just a few had agreed to come with them from the bear bar in Jersey, Will shockingly giving his blessing—they had been able to get inside Wells’s lab. There were security guards but the cousins set up a drunken fistfight in the front of the building as a distraction and using the heating vent to get around, they easily bypassed the labs with people working late.

They located Wells’s office and snuck inside. They didn’t bother with the computer on his desk, knowing he’d keep anything really important on his own laptop at home. Instead, Max picked the locks and they searched his physical files. They kept silent and moved fast, taking whatever they thought could help.

When Max found papers that seemed to be a grant proposal for Wells’s brother, she stuffed the file in Charlie’s bag and they scrambled back into the heating vent.

By the time they made it back outside, they could hear the sirens of New York’s finest responding to the destruction of the glass front of the lab building by the cousins. One of them spotted Charlie and Max, and he grinned a mouthful of blood, motioning for them to meet up with the Dunn triplets around the corner seconds before a fist jammed into his face.

Charlie gave her kin a thumb’s up—the first time she’d ever given one of them that—and ran, making sure Max was right behind her.

As they neared the armored van, the side door opened to reveal Britta crouching inside, motioning them forward. Berg outside the van; Dag driving.

Pushing her sister in front of her, Charlie scrambled into the van. She’d just moved to the far side when her cousins came tearing around the corner and dove headfirst into the vehicle. They knocked Max down, forced Charlie into the corner, kicked Dag in the back of the head, and one of them managed to ask Britta out while dripping blood on the van floor and climbing over his brother’s chest.

“All right then,” Berg sighed as he stepped into the van and closed the door, “glad we’re all safe.”

* * *

The ball rammed into Stevie’s head. Again.

Now she was sure those lion bitches were purposely kicking soccer balls at her.

Coop jogged over to her. “Okay. At this point, I think we should just . . . let you take a break.”

“Clearly they have not let the lost karaoke trophy go.” Stevie wiped blood from her nose.

“Yeah. It’s no longer a game. Just assault.” He picked up the ball. “But hey, we have a game next week. The opposition is all pandas. They’re from Chinatown. They mostly grab the ball and run, but . . . they’re extremely nice and lots of fun.”

“I am not backing away from them or anyone.” Stevie yanked the ball away. “I’m so over this shit.”

Stevie went around Coop and dropped the ball. She stopped thinking about all the stuff going on outside the game. All the danger her sisters and friends were in. She temporarily blocked it and let her mind do what it did best. Analyze.

When she was done, she readjusted her body, moved her feet a bit, then kicked the ball. It spun across the field, hitting the farthest column, ricocheting into another column, which sent it slamming into another, slicing past the goal and ramming into the side of Mary Marie Brunetti’s head. The power of the hit knocked Mary Marie into one of her