In a Badger Way (Honey Badger Chronicles #2) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,93
time to pull the knife out of her chest. It wasn’t that the knife hadn’t hit her heart so much as it hadn’t hit anything major in her heart, like the aorta.
If she were not a shifter, she’d have to go to an emergency room and get emergency surgery. She definitely couldn’t keep running or pull the knife from her chest. But she was blessed. Because she’d been born one of the toughest, hardiest shifters there was. And that crazy girl must have been a leftie.
It was nice how the good Lord looked out for her.
Her twin aunts would be disappointed she hadn’t finished off cousin Max, but the message had been sent. Now she had some other things to do. And it wasn’t like she’d be able to sneak back into this neighborhood again. Those bloody bears would be on the lookout for her from now on.
* * *
“You need to stop crying,” Max growled at Stevie.
Max wasn’t growling simply because she was pissed. She was growling because her throat was still recovering from someone trying to strangle her to death.
Stevie, however, didn’t give a shit about that. “I’ll cry if I want to!”
“Because it’s your party?” Kyle asked and when they all gazed at him, he let out a sigh, and said, “Forget it.”
Shen grabbed a box of tissues from the table beside him and held it out for Stevie to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. They’d been at the emergency vet’s office for a couple of hours, but they still hadn’t heard anything specific yet.
“Want me to get you some water or something?” he asked.
“Come on,” Charlie said, standing up and stretching. “Let’s get everybody some sodas from the machine.”
She walked off and Shen followed her.
The vending machines were down the hall and around a corner near the bathrooms. Charlie began pulling singles out of her bag to purchase a few Cokes and a couple bottles of water.
Shen went to get the junk food.
As they both put in money, Charlie asked, “How did you do that?”
“How did I do what?”
“When Stevie was outside with Mairi. She was about to shift. But you pulled her back. How?”
“She was angry, not scared. And I figured it was worth a shot. I mean, she gets mad at Max all the time and manages to control herself. Her rage at her cousin was worse, of course, but that’s where I was working from. Plus, she’s been trying really hard to control her shifting since the event at the Jean-Louis Parker house, so I—”
Shen stopped talking when he realized that Charlie was standing right in front of him. And very close. Making him nervous.
“What?” he asked. “What did I do? What?”
Suddenly he was being hugged by Charlie MacKilligan. A woman who didn’t really seem like she enjoyed hugging.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”
“No problem,” he said, ignoring the weird feeling in his chest.
Charlie stepped away and Shen went back to pumping dollar bills into the machine and getting more junk food.
“So Stevie’s trying to control her shifting again?” Charlie asked.
“Excuse me?”
She gave a little laugh. “Oh? Are we playing that game?”
“I don’t think I understand—”
“Let me guess what she said to you. She wants to fuck with her DNA so she can never shift again. Never put anyone she loves in danger. And save the world from the horror that is her secret love of cat toys. Right?”
“What . . . no. That’s crazy talk. Why are we even discussing this?”
“I was wondering why she hadn’t said anything to Max about it. Now I see it’s because she went to you first. What did you say to get her to stop? Because usually that sort of thing lasts for days. Lots of obsessing. And research.”
Shen glanced down the hallway before admitting, “I told her I’d tell you.”
“Perfect. Everybody uses me when she starts getting those self-destructive ideas and they want her to stop. It should bother me that I terrify her so much, but not if it helps.”
With junk food and drinks in hand, they returned to the waiting room to find the veterinarian standing there, talking to Berg.
“What’s going on?” Charlie demanded, putting all the sodas and water down on a nearby table.
“I was just telling Mr. Dunn,” the vet said, “that Benny is going to be fine. The bullet hit a rib but didn’t go past it. The rib did break, though. Thankfully nothing major was damaged and the rib didn’t puncture the lung.”