Page 16 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

It also wasn’t her fault everyone thought she was “weird.” An accusation tossed at her since grade school by full-humans.

She wasn’t weird. She just didn’t know how to fit in.

Or want to fit in. Her neu-rodivergence helped her create amazing things that people used every day in this now-digital world.

If that made her weird . . . well . . . whatever. She had bigger things to worry about.

Like the scent of male lions coming up behind her at this very moment.

Huh , Steph thought, as she had another sip of her tea.

* * *

He kicked the back door open and walked into the surprisingly small house owned by a woman with more money in her many bank accounts scattered around the globe than God himself.

His cousins followed him in, and he again wondered why they were bothering with these old hags. Giuseppe agreed, not wanting to waste the manpower on such nonsense, but their uncle—who still ran the coalition, despite what Giuseppe may think—strongly felt they needed to go.

Personally, he thought the younger badgers were more important.

Although it had been the nine of them—the hags and the sluts—who’d released the family’s cargo and taken down their ship the night before.

But it had been the younger five that had killed Giuseppe’s father and dumped the body in the middle of his family home.

So, he couldn’t wait to kill every last one of those disgusting rodents.

Which was why, he felt, the four old hags could wait.

It wasn’t his decision, though. He was head of his own team, but he did not run the family. The coalition. He didn’t make enough money for that. Not yet. So he shut his mouth and did his job.

Walking into the house, he passed a high-end washer and dryer and entered the kitchen.

“Vile,” one of his cousins noted, pointing at a glass case on the kitchen table filled with scrambling scorpions.

“They eat those,” he informed his cousins.

“Filthy rats. All of them.”

Once they entered the living room, two of his cousins took the stairs up to the second floor. Two others went to the basement. He patiently waited until they returned a few minutes later.

“Nothing,” one said when he walked back into the living room.

“Same for basement.”

He looked around the room. “She’s here somewhere. I can smell her.”

Something moved under the floorboards. It was said honey badgers could slip in almost anywhere.

“Get the axe from outside,” he ordered, pulling out his gun. “We’ll tear out these floorboards.”

His eldest cousin moved quickly to get to the axe they’d passed on their way inside the house, returning in two minutes. After they all moved the fifty-thousand-dollar rug, his cousin eagerly chopped at the wood floor.

“I hear something,” a younger cousin said, dropping to his knees and sticking his head inside the hole that had been created.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing yet, but—” His cousin’s sudden screams startled them, and they all jumped back in horror as his cousin jerked away from the hole, revealing several vipers hanging from the cat’s face.

Arms swinging wildly, his younger cousin stumbled back into the elder, dropping them both to the ground. Now that there was a hole in the middle of the floor, vipers quickly slithered out. They poured from that damn hole and immediately went on the attack, spreading out and going after all of them.

He spun around, shifting to his animal form to make his escape, but the snakes were on him in seconds.

Fangs digging into his leg and ass, his underbelly, his neck and paws, and injecting him with their venom.

Over and over. Immediately he felt the effect, splaying out on the floor before he could get a foot off the ground and jump onto the dining room table in the hopes of getting away.

He looked up and saw the old hag walking toward him.

He didn’t know where she’d been that he hadn’t seen her, but she seemed calm and rational as all those nasty snakes slithered around her.

She stopped in front of him, and one of the snakes attacked her ankle.

She bent her knee and lifted her leg up enough so that she could yank the viper off her body.

Then she brought it, still alive and hissing wildly, toward her face.

She opened her mouth, revealing multiple small but bright white badger fangs, before biting down on the viper’s head.

Chewing her treat, she crouched in front of him in seven-thousand-dollar shoes that some of her blood had splattered onto and gazed into his face.

“When you come for badger, little kitten,” she said around a mouthful of snake, “do not miss.”

She stood and began to walk away, his vision and vital signs rapidly fading. But he still heard her when she tossed over shoulder, “Because badgers... ? We never miss.”

* * *

Steph took another sip of her tea and glanced up when the drone flew over her head. She watched it, turning until she faced the five big cats standing behind her.

They all watched the drone get closer until one of the cats swung his arm high and slapped the device out of the air with his hand. It hit the ground hard and broke into several pieces.

“Hey!” she snapped. “That cost more than anything you could possibly own.”

“You think your little drone can stop us ?” one asked in accented English.

“Of course not,” Steph replied. “It just automatically responds to intruders.” She took another sip of her tea before motioning her head to a spot behind her. “This one, though . . . my twins made this one.” She smiled with absolute pride. “And it comes when called.”

She watched the cat’s gazes move up the metal body of the eight-foot drone that had driven to a spot behind her.

Unlike the smaller one that was now destroyed—which she had built—this one couldn’t fly, but she didn’t doubt her twins would fix that defect in due time.

They may grill a steak like their Van Holtz father, but they created robotic devices like their mom.

The twins’ toy raised its two arms, each with Gatling guns mounted on the ends.

The cats didn’t wait. They simply ran.

The twins came around their toy and stood on either side of Steph.

“This thing still doesn’t fire?” she asked.

“We made it for Comic Con, Ma,” Dae replied.

“Not for Auntie Ox to annihilate her enemies with,” Tae finished.

“Then what’s the point?”

* * *

Trace, her arms resting on the kitchen island while facing the sliding glass doors, was rolling her eyes again, while her daughter chastised her like a child about “how much trouble you cause this family!” when she realized she was hungry.

She reached for the loaf of plain, grocery-store-bought white bread her husband absolutely hated and banned from his home when Trace wasn’t “in attendance,” as he liked to say. That’s when her cell phone started ringing and, at the same moment, two of her dogs ran by and out the back doggy door.

The Van Holtz Pack and her husband hated her dogs almost as much as they hated plain, store-bought white bread.

But she’d always had dogs in her life since she was a kid.

She’d taught herself to train them properly and even bred them now.

Not for money, though. Just her own use.

She’d started with German shepherds after dealing with them in East Germany, but over the years, she’d learned to love Belgian Malinois.

She currently had five, but when only two went by—meaning this wasn’t a bathroom break!

—she immediately grabbed her still-rambling eldest and dropped them both to the floor.

The twins followed suit, but her youngest just stood there until Angelika caught the child’s T-shirt and yanked her down.

Less than a second later, those glass doors were blown apart by a shower of gunfire.

But as soon as it started, it stopped; male screams let her know that her dogs had made their move.

Trace immediately stood and saw two full-human men, trying to shake off the five dogs that had come at them from five different directions, grabbing hold of whatever they could. Arms, legs, groin. Just as she’d taught them.

She was going to let her dogs tear the big bastards apart when she saw two more armed men running toward them.

Softly, she ordered, “Angelika. Annika. Go.”

The twins moved, scrambling around the island, and disappearing back into the house.

“Mom?” Nixie asked.

“Stay here.” She pushed her youngest at her eldest. “You two keep down.”

Trace stood and yelled out, “Hier!”

Her dogs instantly released their prey and ran back to the house.

Once her dogs were safe beside her, she called out to the men through what remained of the glass doors, “Looking for me?”

The two full-humans raised their weapons and took aim at her. Meaning they were here to take her out, not capture. Interesting.

“Mom!”

Ignoring her eldest, Trace begged, with no energy whatsoever—she really needed a very large cup of coffee—“No. Don’t. I’m a mother.”

She heard her youngest snort and decided she’d have to deal with that later when, outside, the twins attacked before triggers could be pulled.

Angelika just walked up behind one of the men, put a gun to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger on the .45 Trace had given her for her eighteenth birthday.

Annika, however, liked things a little messy. She jumped onto one of the men’s backs and began stabbing with one of the kitchen knives. Something her father was not going to like at all.

The other two men, the ones her dogs had attacked, had finally picked up their weapons, trying to focus on Trace’s daughters.

“Pass Auf,” she said to her dogs, and they immediately focused on her. Her lip curled a little before she snarled, “Fass.”

The dogs charged outside once more and, again, attacked the men they’d attacked a few seconds before. This time, however, they took the pair down. Trace’s two females gripped the men’s throats and bit, blood spurting on their muzzles from torn arteries.

When the men stopped moving, her dogs let go. But Annika . . .

“He’s dead,” Angelika told her twin. “You can stop stabbing now.”

“Nice,” Nixie sneered, now standing next to Trace. “You’ve ruined Dad’s kitchen.”

“How is that my fault?”

“You’ve started a fight with people willing to slaughter your entire family.”

“I didn’t start anything.”

“And you’ve turned the twins into murderous psychopaths.”

“Oh, my God, Nixie.” Tracey let out a sigh. “Get off the cross, we need the wood.”

Her phone started to ring again, and Trace answered, already knowing it was one of her friends.

“Yeah?”

“You alive?”

Ox. Of course. “Yeah. But they fucked up my kitchen.”

“The wolf will complain.”

“Yep. You hear from Steph and CeCe?”

“Steph, yes. Not CeCe.”

“Shit.”

Trace disconnected the call and started toward the front of the house.

“Is Aunt CeCe okay?” Leni asked.

“I’ll let you know. Nixie, call in a clean-up.”

“A . . . a what? What are you talking about? Wait. Oh, my God . . . are you talking about cleaning up these bodies?”

“Forget it. Leni, you handle it.”

“On it!”

“Wait . . . the fourteen-year-old? Mom!”

* * *

Amelia was into her second serving of waffles and bacon—her brothers were into their third—when her aunts walked into the family kitchen. The four family homes of these honey badgers were all on the same suburban street. So them showing up at any time of the day or night was not exactly shocking.

But when she saw that all three were armed—her Aunt Tracey covered in glass and a little blood from nicks, her Aunt Ox covered in viper bites that hadn’t killed her but had managed to make her a little woozy from all the toxin flooding her system—she knew there was trouble.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“What makes you think we did anything?” her Aunt Tracey wanted to know.

“Nope,” Amelia told her brothers. “There are not enough waffles in the world to deal with their crazy this early in the morning.”

“It’s the afternoon, sunshine, and you don’t have to be rude. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t ,” she insisted when they laughed.

Of course, that’s when the back door opened and Amelia’s mother walked in. She was naked, drenched in blood that was not her own, and carrying a blood-and-gore-covered machete that she kept taped under one of her work tables.

Silently, they all watched her walk past them toward the hallway.

Once she’d exited the room, Amelia and her siblings refocused on her aunts by marriage and friendship.

“It’s not my fault,” Trace insisted. “It’s not!”

Disgusted, Amelia went back to her food. But her youngest brother had one big concern as he reached for more bacon . . .

“Someone needs to check on the cat.”