Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,2

had gotten so bad that Charles and his Beta had traveled to Milwaukee to meet with the Smith Pack to ask them to help back up the much smaller Pack, something he did not want to do. But Charles had always been willing to make sacrifices to protect his Pack; especially with his two adopted granddaughters still under eighteen.

Betsey happened to be back the weekend he’d headed off for that meeting and, about thirty minutes after Charles left, his eldest and middle granddaughters had walked out the front door without a word to anyone. They returned the next day; bruised, bloody, and carrying an actual dog puppy they’d found on the road. They didn’t say a word to anyone, simply went upstairs, took showers, and spent the rest of the day training their new puppy. They’d weirdly named him Karris, which she didn’t find out until much later was after a character from the movie The Exorcist.

At the ages of sixteen and fifteen, it wasn’t really strange that kids with their only guardian out of the house would disappear overnight. One would assume they’d been off drinking beers with their friends. But Betsey suspected otherwise and was then certain when she’d found out that their ex-Alpha and his small Pack of wolves had suddenly disappeared. No one had any idea where they were or when they’d be back, but Betsey knew they’d never “be back.” Whatever Charlie and Max had done, they’d made sure that their ex-Alpha would never return again to bother their grandfather. The disappearance didn’t disturb Betsey as much as the girls’ lack of concern about it. Shouldn’t they be showing signs of PTSD or remorse for what they’d been forced to do? But nope. They’d instead focused on their adorable, disturbingly named puppy and went on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Thereby proving what Betsey had known since the girls first arrived at the Pack house: they were killers. Not simply predators. All shifters were predators. But at least the first two were hard-core killers. Shifters who could do what needed to be done without losing sleep or needing recovery time.

So hearing Max, of all people, whisper in her ear nearly made Betsey wet herself. She didn’t but almost.

Even worse, Betsey had been caught eavesdropping as she liked to do when she came home. Since no one paid any attention to her, it was easy enough.

Max leaned over a bit, looking into the sunken living room. Betsey was going to slink away, but Max had put her hand on Betsey’s nearby forearm. It seemed innocent. As if she’d just reached out for balance. But Betsey knew better about that, too. Knew that the badger was just keeping her in place so she couldn’t warn anyone.

“If we try to force them out now,” the Beta female explained to the Pack’s new Alpha female in that sunken living room, “you are definitely going to have a problem with the oldest.”

“That’s Charlie, right? Charles’s granddaughter.”

“Charles thinks of all three as his granddaughters.”

“Sure, sure. I understand that.”

The new Alpha female wasn’t Charles’s mate. He’d lost his mate a long time ago and had never replaced her. But the females still needed someone to lead them and this one had come in from Ohio less than three months ago. She was tolerable, Betsey supposed, but she was making the same mistake as all the other Alpha females who’d come to the Pack in the last few years: trying to push out the MacKilligan girls.

Not that Betsey blamed her, but still. These three were not like Betsey and her hybrid friends. Half wolf and half black bear, Betsey entertained herself with soccer balls and tough rubber toys that were used for pit bulls; she made sure that all her meat-and-vegetable meals were smothered in quality honey; and, if she wasn’t paying attention, she tended to howl along with ambulance sirens. Normally not a big problem . . . except she’d just started medical school and would eventually be doing her residency at a hospital. With ambulances. That had sirens.

Awkward.

But the MacKilligan girls? They were different from everything. Even the middle one, whose parents were both honey badgers.

Like now. Instead of glaring into that room the way Charlie would, pissed off and annoyed that these females were having this discussion without them, Max glanced at Betsey with that freakish grin of hers. Betsey never knew how to read that smile. Was it happiness? Delusion? A neurological tic? She didn’t know.