Page 18 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

Every once in a while, she’d just show up at her grandfather’s Pack house with blood on her hands, an angry snarl in the back of her throat, and a vehicle none of them had ever seen before that would need new plates and VIN.

She’d never tell them what had happened, and they’d all known better than to ask, but Nelle always knew it had something to do with the government, because if it was anyone else, Charlie would come home raging about her “bastard father” and how he’d “dragged them all into his bullshit!”

Still, it was fascinating to watch the poor kitty fight his urge to start yelling for attention.

Especially when he realized that some of the bears liked to chat while getting their treats.

They didn’t just take their treats and scurry home so the process could go faster.

Some leaned against the doorjamb and chatted about whatever with Charlie.

And she was smart to let them. Charlie and her sisters were only lasting on this block because of the good graces of the bears that lived here.

Not easy to do when one’s sister insisted on raiding their beehives and the other sister hid in trees because they’d been scared up there by squirrels.

So Charlie kept the locals fed and happy and protective of their food source.

Finally, after nearly an hour, the last of the bears left.

Nelle could see the front door from where she was sitting in the living room and watched Charlie close it.

She went back to the kitchen, and eyes that were now gold with annoyance watched her.

When she returned with a tray of big blueberry muffins, Nelle thought the cat was going to spin himself into a rage.

She even saw fangs peek out from under his lips.

He didn’t realize that the muffins were probably for the rest of them.

Nelle loved Charlie’s blueberry muffins.

They weren’t too sweet, and the blueberries were always bursting with flavor.

Charlie stopped in the middle of the living room, ready to offer them, when the front door slammed open and Mads’s aunt and her lady friends burst into the house.

The explosion of noise alone had Max, Mads, Streep, and Tock suddenly appearing from the kitchen, Malone’s two brothers behind them.

Mads’s aunt pointed at Charlie and ordered, “We gotta go kill some people. Let’s go.”

Not needing to hear anything else, they all moved.

* * *

Keane was close to tearing down the house he was currently sitting in, so that it would force Charlie to move out of this house, and he would no longer have to deal with a line of annoying bears waiting for treats like they were animals in a Russian circus.

How long had he been sitting here? Hours? Days? A lifetime? He didn’t know anymore. One day had faded into another as he’d waited and waited and waited for her to stop handing out food! It was like she was a nun feeding the hungry lurking around her church.

Then, when she’d come back with that big platter of blueberry muffins, he’d realized he’d have to kill all the adult bears so he could get five minutes of Charlie’s precious time.

No wonder the woman was always late for practice.

She was an astounding defensive tackle. The other teams were going to be shaking in fear when she finally took the field during an actual game.

But she needed to be pushy in her daily life, too.

Because this was ridiculous! This was New York!

There were bakeries on every other block! These bears could find food anywhere !

But before Keane could start killing all the neighborhood bears, those four older She-badgers had stormed into the house and announced, “We gotta go kill some people. Let’s go.”

He expected at least one of the younger badgers to question that order.

Max usually questioned everyone just so she could annoy them.

And he tolerated Charlie so well, because she was logical.

She didn’t just do things. She asked questions.

Got more information. Did follow-up. But that’s not what happened.

Nelle moved first, reaching over the back of the love seat she’d been sitting in and pulling out a pump-action shotgun. She tore off the duct tape that had held the weapon to the back of the furniture and, with one hand, pumped it while using her free hand to reach for a blueberry muffin.

He didn’t know what appalled him more. That there was a shotgun within easy access to his precious niece?

That after Nelle tossed the weapon to a waiting Max, she reached behind the love seat again and pulled out another, then pumped a live round into that one, too?

That all the guns in this house were already loaded?

Or that while Nelle did all this, she was also eating a muffin nearly as big as her head?

More weapons were retrieved from under tables and behind bookshelves, and not one badger asked a goddamn question. He looked at his brothers, but they seemed equally stunned. Like they didn’t know what they were supposed to do in this absolutely insane situation.

“Ready?” Tracey Rutowski asked the younger badgers once they were all armed. They nodded, and she said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

That’s when Keane snapped, and he unleashed a roar that was so loud, shifters from different blocks responded in warning and claiming their territory.

* * *

Nelle wasn’t about to throw away the rest of her delicious muffin, so she pushed it into her mouth before aiming the Mossberg shotgun at the other side of the room.

They all aimed. All the badgers. Violence was their reaction to any strange sounds, and a loud, pissed-off tiger roar was definitely something that was strange.

Maybe that was because it just wasn’t as common to hear as lion roars or wolf howls.

But by the gods, when tigers did unleash that thing, a person felt it ripping through their very soul. It was terrifying.

Nelle also wondered if Keane knew that he was so pissed at the moment that he’d shifted to his tiger form.

He was on that big couch, his clothes tossed around the room during the shift, with that insane coloring the Malone brothers had in their fur.

No orange. Just black with white stripes.

It was an extremely rare anomaly among tigers, and she’d never actually seen it before she’d met the Malone brothers.

It made them damn near impossible to see in the darkness.

Then there was their size. From nose to tail, a standard Amur tiger could be about ten feet.

Without his tail, Keane was about ten feet.

With his tail, about . . . thirteen feet?

Maybe fourteen. And he swung that tail around like a weapon.

It was typical for most shifters to be bigger than the full-bloods anyway, which was definitely the way of badgers.

But the Malone brothers were massive. Maybe that came from the Mongolian ancestors that were rumored to be fifteen feet from nose to tail.

Nelle didn’t know, but she was damn curious to find out more.

And what did he weigh in his tiger form?

Eight hundred pounds, at least. Maybe nine. Even over a thousand? Wow.

Fascinating! No wonder he walked around like he ruled the world. Because he probably could if he wanted!

Even better? The big cat hadn’t realized that he was no longer human.

Because he was roaring and snarling and roaring and growling and roaring.

In other words, he thought he was talking, but he wasn’t.

Tock had gone through that, but she’d been in the hospital and recovering from being drugged. What was Malone’s excuse?

The big cat continued on, yelling at them, when there was banging at the front door.

“Charlie? Honey? Are you okay?” a She-bear asked from the front porch. Then there were more bears at the windows.

“Hey! Who’s that cat?” a male bear demanded, banging on the windows. “I think we need to kill it!”

He may have been in his cat form, but Malone could still understand English.

He leaped off the couch and, in one fluid move, was across the living room toward the window and that bear.

But with an ease that had always amazed Nelle, Charlie tossed the tray of muffins to Max—which she caught without dropping a muffin—before grabbing the giant cat by its front legs, spinning him around, and slamming him to the floor with such force, she took out the heavy wood coffee table they all loved.

“No, thanks, Mr. Angelopoulos!” Charlie yelled back, her voice calm. Even relaxed. “We’re fine.”

“Yes, yes,” the bear said with a laugh, pointing at a snarling Keane, whom Charlie was holding down with nothing more than her two arms and a knee. “I see that you truly are. Call us if you need us, though!”

“Will do!” She looked down at Malone. “Stop snarling.”

And to Nelle’s eternal shock . . . he did!

* * *

Keane had no idea when he’d shifted to cat.

He usually had ultimate control of that.

It was one thing if he was feeling physically threatened.

Then a shifter did what it had to do. But shifting because he was majorly pissed off?

You couldn’t do that. No one could do that.

That’s how things turned bad for their kind, when a man couldn’t control his rage.

But he’d snapped, hadn’t he? What else could he do, though?

With all these irrational badgers, doing irrational badger things right in front of him.

Thankfully, Charlie had been here. She’d gotten his attention and calmed him down in one brilliant move. Because a shifter who didn’t know how to control his ability to shift didn’t live long. Their kind made sure of it.

“Everyone in the kitchen,” she said, looking around the room. “I’ll be right in. We’ll all talk.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Now!” she barked when one of the older badgers began to argue the point.

When everyone was gone, Charlie released his fur and sat down so that her back rested against his chest.

“Just so we’re clear,” she explained, “I was not going to let them go off and start killing things because Mads’s aunt told them to. I was letting them get geared up in case they needed to be, but we weren’t walking out that door until I knew what the fuck was going on.”

Keane let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding since he’d sat down in the living room and shifted back to human, Charlie’s back still pressed against his bare chest.

Which was how Charlie’s grizzly, Berg Dunn, found them when he walked into the house.

He stopped short as soon as he spotted them on the floor and immediately wanted to know, “Should I ask?”

“Probably not,” Charlie replied.

“Not even about the coffee table?”

“Nope.”

“Should I order a new one?”

“Yeah. The same one would be nice. We all really like it.”

“Okay. Anyway, I got your text. I assume you didn’t tell me to come over to see . . . this.”

“No, just need you to do me a favor and take Dani and her dogs over to your house so your sister can watch them.”

“We are not keeping those dogs, Charlie.”

“I already told you I wasn’t.”

“Good. Because I think one of them ate one of the street cats last night.”

“Probably,” Keane muttered.

“Is that what I heard last night?” Charlie asked. She scratched her forehead with her thumbnail. “Okay, let’s not mention that around Stevie. She’s under enough stress right now.”

“Why would she care?” Keane had to ask. She was terrified of easily startled squirrels; why would she want anything to do with street cats?

“Because she rescued a kitten, and she’ll worry.”

Keane sat up a bit. “You have a kitten here?”

“I haven’t seen it around,” Dunn noted, his head turning from side to side as he desperately searched the room.

“It’s fine,” Charlie said, finally getting to her feet.

“How do you know?”

She pointed her forefinger at the ceiling, and that’s where that poor kitten was hanging.

“How is it . . .”

“Yeah, I don’t know. She seems kind of young to be able to cling like that.

” Charlie picked up Keane’s clothes and tossed them over so he could put them on under the watchful, accusing eyes of a grizzly.

“But Stevie started hanging from the ceiling when she was, like, three, her mother said . . . when she dropped her daughter off and never came back.” She shrugged.

“Yeah, if Stevie wasn’t hanging from the ceiling, she was hiding under the couch. ”

“So you’re saying your baby sister is basically a feral house cat?”

“On a good day.”