Page 34 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

The only reason Nix was here at all was because her father had sweetly asked her to “check on your mom.” He and her uncles weren’t in the country and, after making sure his “girls” were okay, he wanted to know about his wife and his brothers’ wives.

As well as Aunt Ox, of course, but no one really worried about her, because it was rarely necessary.

The She-badger was a force of nature, full of rage and unpredictability that ensured that, like the wind, few could catch her unaware.

Knowing the four She-badgers were together during a time of crisis had made Nixie hesitate in searching her mother out, but she’d promised her dad. But still . . . she hadn’t expected this .

“Mom!” she practically screamed. Disgusted! She was so disgusted!

Her mother looked up from the bong she’d had her mouth wrapped around and smiled.

“Baby!”

“What are you doing?” Nixie demanded, stepping deeper into the safe house living room, her gaze moving over the four women she adored but resented in equal measure.

All of them were ridiculously high. Music from the eighties and nineties blasting through the sound system, The Breakfast Club silently playing on the big-screen TV, snack foods of all sorts half-eaten and spread out over the coffee table, and these She-badgers draped over the couch and on the floor like sixteen-year-old idiots that don’t know any better!

“What are we doing?” her mother asked back. “Uh . . . getting high.” She held up the bong that Aunt Steph had made out of one of her Renaissance Faire–purchased dragon statues and asked, “Want a hit?”

Aghast, Nixie had only one response to that . . .

“MOM!”

* * *

“We need to shut this down,” Keane told Nelle, gesturing at the street party with a toss of his hand.

“Because you hate fun?” she asked.

“No. Because it’s very late, and I don’t like that .” He pointed at ten-year-old Dani hanging out with her cousins and an aunt. “Kids shouldn’t be up this late.”

“Her father is right over there. He doesn’t seem bothered she is spending time with her cousins. And I doubt they can give her all the ins and outs of leg-breaking while dancing and eating boar ribs.”

Keane’s eyes narrowed a bit. It amazed him how easily Nelle saw what really bothered him. “I love Shay, but he can be an idiot.”

“Do you even know how to be nice?”

“No.”

“At least you said you loved one of your brothers.”

“If you tell anyone, no one will believe you.”

“Especially Shay.”

“But, I will say,” he added, just to piss her off, “if nothing else, I would definitely go to Shay’s wedding.”

“Oh, my God!” she yelled, throwing up her hands. “Are any of you going to let that go? Speaking of which . . . could you hand me that?”

Keane looked at his hands, which were empty, and then around his body.

“The football?” he asked, when that was the only thing nearest his chair that wasn’t an empty beer can.

“Yes. That.”

Confused but interested, he handed her the ball. She took it and held it between her hands, a little confused because it wasn’t a basketball.

“Here.” He reached over and fitted the fingers of her right hand around it, pulled her arm back a bit to indicate how to throw it. When he was done, she stood, narrowed her eyes on a distant spot, and let the ball go.

It slammed into the back of Max MacKilligan’s head, knocking her forward and down.

Keane exploded into laughter. Shocked and amazed! He hadn’t thrown that well until he was on the junior high team, and this little princess had nailed a hard-headed badger on her first throw. Fucking impressive!

“What was that for?” Max demanded, when she’d been helped to her feet and she’d stopped stumbling around, rubbing the back of her head.

“You know what it’s for!”

At first, Max frowned, confused. But then the frown faded and a huge grin broke across her face.

“You gotta do something for the wedding?” she asked with obvious glee.

“I hate you.”

The badger laughed, and Nelle pulled her fist back, ready to start swinging, but then Zé was there, the jaguar taking Max by the hand and dragging her away.

As a running back, the guy always had amazing timing.

Almost always caught the ball, and he always knew when to get his girlfriend out of the line of fire.

“Feel better?” Keane asked, getting to his feet.

“I don’t feel worse.”

That made Keane laugh more, and that was when he finally noticed that his entire family was gawking at him. He didn’t know why. He’d been known to laugh on occasion. He couldn’t remember a time, but he was positive it had happened before now.

* * *

“Did you really just offer your own daughter drugs?” Nixie demanded.

“You’re an adult now, and I just assumed—”

“That I got high?”

“Well—”

“I don’t.”

“Oh.” Trace shrugged. “Okay. Good. I am proud of you. Being drug-free. All kids should be.”

She watched her daughter come to a realization. Eyes narrowing, then widening, her hands briefly covering her mouth, before she accused, “You’ve gotten high with the twins, haven’t you?”

“Of course . . . that’s . . . I would never . . . they offered! ”

“Mom!”

“Smooooooth,” Steph laughed, while wearing sunglasses and hanging upside down on the couch so that her legs dangled over the back.

Her friends began to laugh, Steph sliding off the couch onto the floor, Ox curling into a ball, and CeCe warning them to “Stop! Stop! I’m gonna piss myself!”

“All of you,” her daughter said in her haughtiest tone, “disgust me! Hell is coming. Hell! And you four are doing nothing but getting high!”

“What do we care?” Trace asked, unable to hide the despair. “What does it have to do with us?”

“What?”

“It doesn’t affect us, my sweet baby, because apparently we’re too old to do anything.”

“Uh-oh,” CeCe muttered, as she reached for another Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from the coffee table. “Here we go.”

“Mom, what are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you hear? The women who took down the Berlin Wall—”

“You didn’t.”

“We helped.”

“Mostly because we degraded the reinforcements holding it up after digging under it a few times to get from one side to the other unseen,” Steph explained.

“Its eventual removal still involved us, no matter what Kissinger kept saying,” Trace insisted. “Well, we ”—she gestured to herself and her friends—“no longer matter. The younger set is going to take over and handle it, because we’re so decrepit . . . apparently.”

Nixie pointed a damning finger. “You . . .”

“Bitches?” Ox helpfully offered her niece-by-friendship.

“Women,” Nixie went with, “better not have involved my sisters and cousins in any of this insanity!”

“Not them,” Trace said. “Your cousin and her friends.”

“I have a lot of cousins, Mom. You’ll have to be way more specific.”

“Sweet Mads. Who I thought liked me, but she and her friends just think I’m old and useless.”

Her daughter watched her for several moments before asking, “What are you doing?”

“Sobbing?”

“No. You’re not. You’re just making noises. And there are no tears.”

CeCe leaned in, studied her face. “She’s right, Tee. Dry as a bone.”

“Well, I feel like I could cry.”

Nixie shrugged. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe you are too old for this sort of thing.”

Now it was Trace’s turn to point a damning finger. “Don’t think for a minute that I can’t shove you back into my womb until you learn to be respectful !”

“Okay, that’s disgusting and all I’m saying is that one day . . . I plan to get married—”

“Married?” Tracey asked, appalled. “Why the fuck would you want to get married?”

“You’re married,” her daughter felt the need to remind her.

Trace dropped her head back and said, “Because your father whined so much about it. ‘No Van Holtz will take you seriously as my mate if we don’t get married,’ ” she said in that high-pitched imitation of his voice he hated.

“And let me tell ya somethin’ . . . that oh-so-important marriage changed nothin’ with those dogs. ”

“I’m half-dog, Mom.”

“Not really. My badger genes wiped those dog genes right out. But you did get your father’s height and his lovely cheekbones.”

“Anyway,” Nixie continued, “one day I will get married and have pups, and don’t you want to be that kind of grandmother they come to for cookies and love and hugs?”

Trace stared at her daughter a moment before telling her, “Grandma Rutowski taught me how to strip a Tokarev PPSh-41 submachine gun by the time I was seven. And put it back together again. By the time I was sixteen, I could use it to mow down as many men as were in my way. That’s the kind of grandmother I plan to be. ” Trace paused.

“Yeah,” she said, feeling a flush of energy shoot through her veins. “Yeah. That’s the kind of grandmother I am going to be, and that’s the kind of mother I am now. Wait! Where are you going?”

Her daughter stopped in the entryway, glaring back at her.

“I am going to tell my father that his wife is alive and well, and that he should divorce her as soon as possible! Then I’m going to make sure that my sisters and cousins are safe and not involving themselves in whatever crazy shit you four are about to do to make things even worse than they already are! That’s what I’m going to do!”

Trace cringed when the front door slammed shut. Her daughter was very angry, and she hated when the kid got that way. But she was just so damn sensitive.

Shaking her head, Trace looked at her friends. She began playing with the strings on her thin-cotton hoodie.

“Uh-oh,” CeCe said. “She’s got that look, ladies.”

“We are in so much trouble,” Steph said, giggling.

“I look forward to our honorable deaths.”

“Shut up, Lenkov.”

Trace began chewing on the hoodie strings she’d tied together before washing so they didn’t come out yet again, but they tasted gross. So, instead, she began tugging them up until they framed her head. It was so ridiculous, and they were all so high, and they began to laugh hysterically.

“What were we talking about?” Trace eventually asked. Because she’d completely forgotten.

“The kids . . . or something,” CeCe suggested.

“No, no. The big cats.”

“What big cats?” Trace asked Ox.

“The lions. The angry lions . . . I think.”

“That’s right!” Trace slapped her hands on the coffee table. “I think I have an idea.”

“An idea that will make things better or worse?” Steph asked.

Trace took a second to think that through before replying, “Both?”