Page 19 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

S tevie woke up in the basement again. This was supposed to be Kyle’s rented room, but he’d moved into the garage with his artwork since Stevie started doing some of her science work from here rather than the lab that had been set up for her about an hour away.

Some days it was just easier to roll out of bed and get to work, eventually forced upstairs to shower and brush her teeth before being yelled at that, “You have to eat something!”

Her sisters should be used to this by now.

How she gets when she becomes obsessed. And finding out what someone was using to poison her kind was paramount to anything else at the moment.

Because honey badgers shouldn’t be poisonable.

Their love of poisonous snakes and arachnids made poisoning them nearly impossible.

Good badger mothers usually started poisoning their offspring when only a few months old with small, non-lethal emperor scorpions so that they built up a tolerance.

Stevie’s mother didn’t know she had to do that for her, but that was because her mother was tiger.

Then again, her mother didn’t know what to do with Stevie in general.

When she’d left her with her half-sisters and Charlie’s mom and she just never came back .

. . it had been painful, but for the best. A prodigy with music and science skills as well as deep clinical depression and anxiety and obsessive tendencies did not a great family tableau make.

And even though she’d only known her a short time before she was killed, Charlie’s mom had been the best. She’d just accepted Stevie as she was and taught Charlie to do the same.

When she showed her that garter snake, just to see how she felt about snakes, and Stevie had ended up hanging from the ceiling, hissing at it like a panicked tabby, Charlie’s mom didn’t get mad or disappointed.

She simply nodded and said to Charlie, “Okay, no snakes for Stevie. She does not like snakes.” Then, before she could toss the snake back outside, Max had bitten the small snake’s head off and, while grinning, blood on her lips, her sister had hissed up at her like some kind of mythical demonic being.

That was one of their first fights. Stevie had just retracted her claws from the ceiling and dropped on Max and began wildly punching.

That had been the general tone of their relationship ever since.

Stevie stood in front of her work desk. She was about to dive in, but she had nothing. Nothing! No new ideas of any kind that would lead her to a possible antidote, because she still didn’t know the kind of poison that had been developed.

She wanted to do that thing where she slapped her head several times, but Charlie got really upset when she did that. It also didn’t help that she bruised so easily, meaning her sister always knew when she’d done it.

No. It was better to see what her sister was baking—smelled like blueberry muffins, at the very least—and get a fresh cup of coffee. The caffeine kick may be just what she needed.

Since Stevie had fallen asleep in her shorts and tank top, she didn’t bother to change into anything else yet. She didn’t even want to shower. She just wanted her coffee.

When she reached the top of the basement stairs that led to either another set of stairs or out the back door to the yard, she glanced through the closed screen to see Shen happily hanging from a tree and munching on his bamboo.

She loved that bear. Not only because he was flipping gorgeous and generally kind, but because he actually got her.

He understood when he needed to be right next to her, protecting her from whatever was making her panic—yes, even when it was squirrels—and when she needed space to think and be.

Even her sisters didn’t often get that right.

Although Charlie always tried, and Max didn’t try at all.

He spotted her and waved, and she waved back, giggling a little when he began to swing a little. How he could eat upside down like that, she had no idea, but he’d mastered the skill.

Turning to the second set of stairs, Stevie headed into the kitchen.

But she froze at the doorway when she saw all those people sitting in her kitchen.

At least they weren’t a bunch of bears this time.

She liked when the bears stayed outside.

Away from her. Especially the grizzlies.

Loving a panda was one thing, but the easily startled, easy-to-rampage grizzlies completely made her panic.

The only ones she could tolerate were the Dunn triplets.

They seemed naturally calm, and that kept her calm.

But most of these were badgers and—shit!—tigers. Man-eating tigers! Yes. She knew she was half-Amur tiger, too. Yes. She knew they were the brothers of her half-sister Nat. And yes, she knew they probably would never hurt her, but still....

Man. Eating. Tigers! In her kitchen! Such a small space with all the new, extremely expensive equipment they kept returning home to find had been put in to replace the old oven and refrigerator, and now a massive new freezer that had been set up behind the house and next to the garage.

It turned out their landlord had been putting all this stuff into the property because he adored Charlie’s upside-down pineapple honey cake, and if he could make it so that Charlie wanted to bake more, apparently he’d do it.

Personally, Stevie found that cake much too sweet, but the bears flipped over it.

One wanted it for her daughter’s wedding.

A five-tier one! Whether Charlie would have the time, though. ...

Stevie looked around the room. All she wanted was her coffee and a muffin. This was too much for her. So she handled it as kindly as she could.

“Get the fuck out of my kitchen!”

Startled at her raised voice, the badgers and tigers all gawked at her while she stood in the doorway, probably not smelling great, because she hadn’t showered. And her hair was probably a gross mess, because she hadn’t been sleeping long or well lately. But she didn’t care.

“Was I not clear?” she asked. “Get the fuck out of my kitchen!”

One of the older badgers attempted to be soothing. “Sweetie, Charlie told us to—”

“Out of my kitchen!” she hysterically screamed, shaking her head and her hands for emphasis. “Now! Now! NOWWWWWW!”

Stevie stepped aside and kept shaking her head and hands until the last of the outsiders had escaped out of the kitchen and into the backyard.

That left only Max, who walked by her slowly, eyeing her closely; sneering at her with a turned-up lip and flash of fang before going down the stairs and outside with everyone else.

A few moments later, Charlie walked into the kitchen with Stevie’s kitten on her shoulder.

“Look who came down from the ceiling as soon as she heard your soft, dulcet tones.”

The pair laughed as Stevie made herself a cup of coffee and Charlie put more blueberry muffins in the oven.

* * *

The front door opened, and he had to look down to see the woman who’d opened it.

Big blue eyes gazed up at him. Stevie MacKilligan.

The brilliant little nightmare he’d had to intervene with to stop the government from trying to use her for what she could create.

He honestly didn’t know who was worse to deal with.

The hysterical genius? The protective big sister who had made many men “go missing” when they attempted to even speak to her younger sisters?

Or the psychotic, Max MacKilligan? Each one was her own, separate challenge.

“Edgar?” Stevie asked. “I thought you—”

“Were dead?”

“Retired. I was definitely going to say retired.”

“I am retired. But sometimes it’s important to handle things yourself when they get out of hand.” He gave a small shrug. “May I come in?”

Stevie’s little face scrunched up, and she glanced behind her. That’s when he noticed the kitten that was glaring out at him from her hair. It even hissed.

“I don’t know if that’s—”

“Stevie. Please. I need to see your sister.”

“Fine. Fine. But let’s try not to make her angry.”

“Of course.”

With a heavy sigh that seemed a lot coming from a—what? Twenty-three or maybe twenty-four-year-old?—Stevie stepped back to allow him in.

“Are those your dogs?” she asked.

He glanced at the five Belgian Malinois patiently sitting inside the white picket fence in front of the house. He knew those fucking dogs, and he was not happy about seeing them here.

“Sadly, those are not my dogs. I don’t have dogs. No wolf should have dogs.”

“Wouldn’t say that to Charlie,” she muttered before closing the door.