In a Badger Way (Honey Badger Chronicles #2) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,7

added, “I can take her.”

“Dude. She’s a cat that brazenly lives in a neighborhood filled with bears. That’s not brave. That’s crazy. She’s a crazy cat and she’ll tear your eyes out. So stop it!”

Max started to reply—because she could just never let things go—but the sound of someone clearing his throat distracted her.

Charlie looked across the giant desk she and her sister were sitting in front of. The wolf male on the other side raised one eyebrow. “Do you mind?” he asked.

“Well—” Max began, but Charlie put her hand on her sister’s forearm to stop her.

“Of course,” Charlie said nicely. “Please. Go on.”

“Thank you.”

This was Niles Van Holtz. Head pooch of the Van Holtz Pack. Or alpha dude or . . . whatever they called themselves.

Charlie had the feeling that Van Holtz thought because she was half wolf, she’d respond to him like the rest of the wolves in the world seemed to. But she didn’t. Because she was also half honey badger and because her wolf grandfather hated the Van Holtz Pack. “Rich pricks,” was how he described them.

And Van Holtz was rich. His family had a chain of very expensive restaurants around the world and he had private offices in almost all the major cities in the States and Europe, complete with a full staff. All those offices weren’t for the restaurant business, though. Van Holtz was also in charge of an organization called The Group. They took care of shifter problems and, to The Group, those shifter problems included hybrids. During the time he’d been in charge, Van Holtz had somehow managed to also team up with Katzenhaus, which protected the cat nation and the Bear Protection Council (BPC). Those two organizations protected their own species worldwide and, until recently, didn’t really bother with hybrids unless they had to.

But, according to a very smug Van Holtz, “That’s all changed. We protect everyone now, don’t we, ladies?”

And, at the time, he’d put those wolf eyes on Mary-Ellen Kozlowski of Katzenhaus and Bayla Ben-Zeev of BPC, and what he got back was a less than enthusiastic, “Yeah. Sure.”

Of course, the protection of the MacKilligan sisters wasn’t what really had Charlie dealing with any of these people from shifter worlds she knew very little about. It was the problem that was surrounding Charlie and her sisters. The same problem that had been making their lives nightmarish ever since they’d been born. Her father. Always her father. But this time he’d brought company with him. The Guerra twins out of Italy. Caterina and Celestina. Two very vindictive, angry wenches who were not only Freddy MacKilligan’s half-sisters—which had been unknown to Freddy and the rest of the family for most of the twins’ lives—but who had also just found out they were honey badger shifters.

Angry, vengeful, spiteful honey badger shifters.

Short of a war involving nuclear powers, there was no other worse combination in the universe.

Add in that they were very wealthy women with no real boundaries, and everyone in this room knew that the Guerra twins had to be dealt with. Quickly.

Since they’d last been seen at the wedding of Charlie’s cousin, however, the twins had gone deep into hiding and had been very quiet, which did not fool Charlie or her sisters at all.

Those bitches weren’t gone; they were plotting.

“There is something else we need to discuss with you,” Van Holtz said, his folded hands resting on his giant desk.

Ahhh, here it comes.

“About your Uncle Pete . . .”

Charlie gazed at Van Holtz; then she looked over at Max.

“Do we have an Uncle Pete?” Charlie asked her sister.

“We have several Petes. A few Peters. Most are out of Glasgow.”

“This is your Uncle Pete in New Jersey.”

Charlie stared at Van Holtz again before asking her sister, “We have an Uncle Pete in New Jersey?”

“Maybe. MacKilligans have a lot of Petes.”

“He is your father’s uncle, actually,” Van Holtz clarified.

“So he’s our Great-Uncle Pete,” Charlie said. “Yeah. We don’t know him.”

“Well, sadly, he has died.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And we believe that he was murdered.”

“Shot in the head somewhere in Brooklyn?” Charlie guessed. “Because we’ve lost a few MacKilligan men that way over the years.”

“No. He died in his bed.”

“A MacKilligan dies in his bed and you think he was murdered? MacKilligan men don’t usually end that way.”

“What makes you think it was murder?” Max asked. “If he’s our great-uncle, isn’t he, like, a thousand years old?”

“Not quite.”

“MacKilligan men, when they’re not shot in the head,” Charlie explained, “they tend to live a very long time. Sadly,”