In a Badger Way (Honey Badger Chronicles #2) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,25

sighed loudly before straightening and tossing the magazine aside.

“That’s not necessary, Charlie,” Stevie stated quietly.

“Together or we all leave,” Charlie insisted.

“Don’t argue with her,” Max said, heading off down the hall. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Wrong way,” the receptionist called out, smirking when Max spun around and came back, crossing by the desk and heading down the other hallway.

“Get that look off your face,” Max warned, “before I rip it off your head.”

Charlie and Stevie followed Max, and Shen went to a couch and dropped on it.

The receptionist, still smirking, asked, “Would you like some bamboo tea, sir?”

He grinned at the fox. “That would be awesome.”

* * *

Dr. Becca Morgan sat across from the three females who’d come to her office.

Conridge, an old associate she’d never have called a friend, but whom she understood well because prodigies and geniuses were one of her specialties, had warned her that the two women would invite themselves into the appointment.

“They are very protective of their sister.”

She understood. Child prodigies—former and current—often had protective families. Usually the parents but sometimes siblings or a spouse. Even when the prodigy was grown up, almost an elderly adult, they often had some relative fluttering around them, attempting to protect the genius from themselves. Totally understandable.

But as the eldest—who seemed to speak for the group— gave the backstory of her youngest sister while the middle sister sat there, studying Becca’s office with curious, plotting eyes, and the youngest kept her eyes completely shut while she softly chanted something to herself the entire time, Becca realized this was not a simple case of “former prodigy with protective family.”

Not even close.

This was something completely different that needed her immediate attention.

As much as she hated to admit it, Conridge had been right when she’d said, “Trust me on this . . . you’re going to love this one.”

* * *

“And that’s it,” Stevie heard Charlie say to Dr. Rebecca Morgan, a psychiatrist with an impressive reputation and a list of books that she’d written or cowritten that could fill an entire bookstore shelf. She was a much respected practitioner with degrees from Wellesley, Harvard, and Columbia. Plus a Rhodes Scholarship. “And that’s it?” Dr. Morgan repeated back.

“Yes.”

There was a moment of silence, but Stevie barely noticed it because she was busy reciting the chant she’d been using the last few weeks: “Please don’t eat me. Please don’t eat me. Please don’t eat me.”

She was chanting it to herself because she’d found it was the only thing that kept her from screaming and running out of the room anytime she had to be around bears she didn’t know. She didn’t mean to be scared of fellow shifters. She didn’t want to be this scared of them, but she couldn’t help it.

Grizzlies and polar bears were known maneaters. Something Stevie simply couldn’t get past. That at any moment, they could shift to their animal form and pop her in their mouths like a Tootsie Roll! Unless she shifted herself and destroyed the entire building.

A situation that also wouldn’t end well for her.

“What is she doing?” Dr. Morgan asked.

“She’s chanting,” Max replied. “She’s afraid of you.”

“Me?”

“You’re a bear. And bears eat people.”

“So do tigers.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Okay,” Dr. Morgan suddenly announced and Stevie heard something hit the floor. It sounded like Dr. Morgan’s feet.

Had she been sitting at her desk with her feet up while Charlie had been telling their story? Was that normal for a mental health expert?

“First,” Dr. Morgan went on, “open your eyes, Dr. MacKilligan. Now.”

Stevie managed one eye.

“Both eyes, Dr. MacKilligan,” Dr. Morgan insisted.

It took a few seconds, but Stevie did it. Making her kind of proud of herself.

All six feet, three inches of Dr. Morgan still sat behind her desk, her arms on the wood, her fingers interlaced. Brown and gold hair reached below her ears without any real style to it. In fact . . . she might just cut her hair herself. Her glasses didn’t look like the latest style either. They were just big, which probably made it easy for her to read lots of books and paperwork. But they made her already big brown eyes look even bigger. She had to be nearing sixty, but she was a very healthy and strong nearly-sixty-year-old.

“Let me see if I understand this,” the psychiatrist began. “All three of you ladies are half-sisters because your father is, to use your words, Ms. MacKilligan, ‘a whore that can’t stop fucking anything that moves.’ When you were still adolescents, your mother”—she