Page 20 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

The word genius didn’t do enough to describe the power of Stevie MacKilligan’s brain.

Countries had been trying to snatch her since she’d solved her first physics problem at the age of six.

When interest in the child’s music career was still going strong, Stevie was getting overwhelmed with performing piano sonatas in front of world royalty.

So, she did what any logical seven-year-old would do .

. . she switched her interest to math and science and went on to create a theorem that could possibly cause a massive ripple effect that would destroy all land masses around the world.

Scientists whom Edgar knew and trusted had been completely freaked out by Stevie MacKilligan’s work and had begged him to step in and “stop her. Stop her before she kills us all!” That seemed a little melodramatic until he met the child that first time.

She’d been living with her sisters by then, her birth mother having abandoned her a few years before.

At the time, he’d thought that a strange reaction coming from a cat.

Big cats loved the glamour that a music prodigy child could get them.

All that paid-for-by-others world travel and expensive lodgings that allowed her to meet actual royalty and heads of state.

What parent wouldn’t enjoy that on some level?

But even as a young child, Stevie had been different from even the most unique prodigy.

Her tiger mom had known it. Known she couldn’t handle the child and handed her off to someone who could.

Not great mothering, but probably the best the big cat could do at that time.

Stevie’s sisters thought that Edgar had first met all of them on the same day.

When he’d brought them back from a government facility they’d nearly decimated, and returned them to their grandfather’s pack house.

But he’d actually met Stevie a short time before any of that.

The grandfather had unofficially adopted Stevie and Max, even though only Charlie was his blood.

Admirable, but it didn’t seem that the rest of the pack wanted the three girls there at all.

Because when he’d shown up after the grandfather took the two girls out somewhere, the other packmates had let Edgar in so he could meet Stevie.

Probably hoping he could at least convince her to leave their territory.

He hadn’t found little Stevie experimenting with the kinds of things smart kids her age liked to try out.

Something involving baking soda or the flight pattern of butterflies.

No. He’d walked into the kid’s dark room—a single, weak desk light that barely helped at all because she had the blackout curtains pulled tight—and found her studying up on Chernobyl and Fukushima and the repercussions to Hiroshima.

Apparently, she’d been spending hours studying the pictures from all those events.

Especially the damage done to the humans and animals.

She’d read and reread about the deaths of those who’d been near the Chernobyl reactor and Hiroshima.

Not only the American versions of such things, but documents she’d found that hadn’t been translated into English.

Apparently she could read Japanese. Or, as she eventually told him, she’d taught it to herself in a few days when she’d started looking at those Japanese-language documents.

Horrified at what such a young child was studying, Edgar had crouched beside her, expecting the little blonde girl with the white streak through her hair to start crying and asking why people were so mean.

He had a ready answer, something to soothe her and allow him to remove her from this dark room.

It had only been ten in the morning; she should be outside! Enjoying life!

But she didn’t cry. And when she turned to him, her face was expressionless and her eyes were dead. That’s when she’d intoned with no emotion in her voice, “We, as a society, are doomed, so I should do what I can to end our mutual suffering.”

That was bad enough. But then she added, “Like a rabid dog you shoot in the back of the head.”

She’d reached out for one of the hundreds of lab notebooks she’d had stacked in her room—apparently, all the spiral binders that held her sheet music had been stuffed in her closet, her clear case of depression making her unwilling to “provide the world with music they no longer deserve,” as she later put it—and began writing with a tiny pink pencil that had a little panda topper on the eraser.

Edgar didn’t even want to think about what she may be writing down.

Where her brilliant but clearly broken mind was taking her.

The world couldn’t afford for her to finish writing what she had started, so he’d swooped her up in his arms and had taken her outside.

Into the sunlight. Into life. He knew some guys, in his line of work, who would have just “vanished” the entire family at that point, but he couldn’t do that.

He would never do that. In retrospect, he was glad he hadn’t.

Although she was still what one of his co-workers called “nutso city,” Stevie MacKilligan was turning out to be quite the asset.

Not for his work. She was way too emotional and sensitive to ever do what he did for a living.

But for their kind. The shifters of the world had no idea what a benefit the tiniest MacKilligan had turned out tobe.

Still . . . one had to be careful around her. Her exploding into a rage was like setting off a thermonuclear device in the middle of a shopping mall. A nightmare from which one would never wake.

“She’s in the kitchen,” Stevie said.

“Of course.” Charlie MacKilligan was always in the kitchen.

He’d offered the eldest MacKilligan sister a chance to own her own bakery or even a bakery chain, thinking if he provided her with stability, she might trust him more; but she wanted nothing to do with a long-term business that would take away the pleasure she got from baking with her own hands.

He understood that. He’d gone out of his way to avoid working in his family’s fine-dining empire.

Not because he didn’t love to create a brilliant meal, but because working with a bunch of wolves—many related by blood—in a high-pressure kitchen was a special kind of hell.

He’d rather deal with spies, murderers, and government secrets instead.

“You don’t age normally,” Stevie noted, forcing Edgar to stop and face her.

“Pardon?”

“You still look very good, but I know you’re quite old.”

“Thank you?”

She stared hard at him for several long seconds, both her brows pulled low.

“Did you get work done?” she finally asked.

“No.”

“Then it’s genetic. Can I have some of your blood?”

“No.”

She kept staring at him, saying nothing. It went on for a while until he finally repeated, “ No . We’ve had this discussion before, Stevie. And the answer will always be no.”

Stevie led him toward the kitchen without another word. He could smell the scent of Charlie’s baking as soon as he’d stepped out of his limo. Christ, he could make a fortune off this girl’s baking talent, if only she would let him.

“Charlie,” Stevie said as she stepped into the kitchen, “you have another visitor.”

“Edgar?” Charlie asked when she looked away from the phone she was staring at like his children and grandchildren all did whenever he met them out in the wild. “Hi. I thought—”

“He retired,” Stevie said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “He’s not dead.”

“Oh. Okay.”

The prodigy smiled before going back to her coffee and half-eaten blueberry muffin.

“Can we talk?” he asked Charlie.

“I’m about to get more muffins out of the oven and bring them outside with coffee. Why don’t you go wait out there, and we can all talk together.”

“I was hoping to talk to you alone first. In fact, I’d rather not . . .” He took a breath. “I saw the dogs.”

Charlie frowned. “My dogs are at Berg’s house. You were talking to Berg?”

“No. Not your dogs. The Belgian Malinois outside the house. Those are Tracey Rutowski’s dogs, yes?”

“Oh. Right. I forgot that she’s married to a Van Holtz. So I guess that would make you her—”

“Please don’t say it.”

She didn’t, but then the kitchen window was shoved open from the outside, and a happy “Uncle!” was yelled at him by four She-badgers he absolutely loathed for the simple reason they always made his job so much harder.

“You!” he snarled, unable to help himself from adding nothing but rage and accusation to that one word.

“And it’s so good to see you, too!” Tracey Rutowski cheered back. “Come. Join us!” That’s when she grinned, showing all her badger fangs, and added in a singsong voice, “We’ve missed you!”