Page 7 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

Like any decent cat, though, the half-tiger, half-something else was known to protect his mate, as any shifter would once they had a cub or two.

Which meant that if Blayne somebody pissed off that honey badger, she was going to find herself mauled beyond recognition, and the half-tiger, half-something else would go on a vengeful rampage.

A perfect example of a “violence circle.” The kind of thing that Keane usually sat back and watched with feet up on his ottoman and a big bowl of popcorn in his lap.

But Mads was with Keane’s brother now, and he didn’t want to hear that idiot’s whining because she was unhappy. Meaning Keane knew he had to step in.

Blayne somebody almost had her hand on Nelle’s forearm when he caught hold of it and pushed her away. Not hard, though, since she was wearing skates and simply glided backward.

“Hey!” she exclaimed. “Get off.”

“Leave her alone.”

“I’m just trying to—”

“Help. Right. Nelle,” he asked without looking at the badger, “do you need help?”

“No.”

“Do you want this woman to touch you?”

“No.”

“Do you want her to go away?”

“Yes.”

“See?” he asked Blayne somebody, releasing her arm. “She wants you to go away. So go away.”

“She’s bleeding.”

Keane shrugged. “She’s badger. She’ll be fine.” He motioned to Blayne somebody. “Go find someone else to help.”

“Look at her face. She’s sweaty and pasty. Having trouble breathing.”

“And?”

“Her neck is wounded on the left, and the bleeding hasn’t stopped since I’ve been standing here.”

Keane looked Nelle over, trying not to focus too closely on Nelle’s body in that basketball outfit.

Tank top. Shorts. Her legs crossed at the knee.

Sneakers with heels already built in, which was just weird and ridiculous.

Then he moved up to her neck, leaning a bit so he could get a clearer look. And Blayne somebody was right.

“You are bleeding.”

“I am?” Nelle put her hand to her neck and pulled back bloody fingers. “Huh.”

He pointed at the medical office about fifty feet away. “So when you get a chance, go see one of the docs. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Great.”

Keane turned and started off to get to his last-minute medical appointment.

“Is that it?” Blayne somebody yelled.

“Is what it?”

“You’re just going to leave her?”

“She’s a badger. She’ll be fine.” When the female’s mouth opened, and her eyes went wide, and she shook her head back and forth at him like some kind of confused foxhound, he asked, “Don’t you have some homeless people to help?”

“It’s unhoused , and I do that on Sundays. Help her!”

“I’ve got an appointment right now, and also, I don’t care.” In shock, Keane took a quick step back and asked, “Are . . . are you crying ?”

“I am about to get really mad with you. And sometimes that means tears. And when there are tears, I usually lose my mind !” she hysterically screeched. “Help her!”

Not sure what was happening, Keane went back to the bench and quickly grabbed Nelle’s forearm. With his gaze locked on the insane mixed-breed canine snarling at him, he pulled the badger off the bench and dragged her across the floor toward the medical office.

“You can’t pick her up?” the canine sobbed.

“She’s fine !”

“You are a worthless human being!”

“That’s because I’m a cat!” he yelled back before throwing open the medical office door and dragging the badger inside with him.

He stopped long enough to close the door behind him, and then he turned the lock to keep the crazed canine out.

She stood in front of the door, obviously seething, and he knew he’d done the right thing.

Hopefully there wouldn’t be any real emergencies that needed to get in before he got Nelle Zhao out of his life.

“Blayne giving you shit?” the receptionist asked with a laugh.

“Does she just sit outside forcing people to deal with bleeding badgers?”

“No. She’s waiting for her husband and daughter. The kid is getting her shots for the upcoming kid’s hockey season. You know . . . all the important ones. Measles, mumps, flu . . . canine flu, distemper, feline AIDS, parvo, plus flea and tick prevention.”

“Are you supposed to tell me any of that?”

“Probably not. You know . . . the whole HIPAA thing, but they don’t even know we exist so . . . who cares?”

Not in the mood to argue with a bobcat, Keane simply announced, “My trainer booked me in here to see the orthopedist about my shoulder. And the badger’s bleeding from the neck.”

“You sound like you really care,” the bobcat teased.

“No, I don’t. Because I don’t care. I know it. The badger knows it—”

“I do,” Nelle muttered. “I really do. And I’m okay with it.”

“See? Completely rational.” He pointed at the clear door the heaving mixed-breed canine was standing in front of. “But that female is insane.”

“You afraid to take her on, Malone?” The bobcat laughed.

“No. But I can promise that none of you guys want me and her husband going crazed in your very nice offices here.”

“That’s true. But, uh . . . your little badger friend there—”

“She’s not my badger friend. Simply a badger I know.”

“Yeah, well, whatever she is to you . . . it looks like she’s passed out. Or is dead. You know . . . from the bleeding.”

Startled, Keane looked down at the female, whose arm he still held, and said the only thing he could think of . . .

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

* * *

“Are you stabbing me in the neck?” Nelle asked whomever was poking at her throat.

“I’m trying to repair your carotid artery, but . . .” Dr. Jai Davis, doctor to the sports stars—at least the shifter ones—took a step back from the operating table and, slightly panting, asked, “Is your artery. . . fighting me?”

“Possibly.”

“I . . . I think it keeps attacking my instruments,” she noted, studying the tiny heads of the equipment she was currently using.

“Yes. That can happen.”

“How is that normal?”

“Full-humans don’t know we even exist. How is that normal?”

“Great,” the doctor sighed out. “I get the philosopher.”

“Just close up the wound, so I can go.”

“I’m trying, but your arteries are fighting me, and you are supposed to be out. Why aren’t you out? Or screaming in pain and panic now that you’re awake?”

“Because I don’t need you repairing my artery. It’ll repair itself.”

“You were bleeding out in our waiting room. You were clinically dead for at least three minutes when the tiger brought you in here.”

“I only brought her in because of that crazed canine outside the office harassing me.”

With the operating table tilted at a ninety-degree angle so the doctor didn’t have to bend over to work on her neck, Nelle only had to move her gaze to the other side of the room to see Keane Malone sitting on a separate table, another doctor examining his shoulder.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“My shoulder has been bothering me.”

“I don’t mean why are you seeing a doctor. I mean why are you in the operating room with me? This whole thing feels terribly unhygienic.”

“Stop whining, you’ll be fine,” the doctor snapped, while still fighting whatever was going on inside Nelle’s neck.

“I strongly suggested that she not work on a honey badger alone,” the other doctor told Nelle. “The last time I did that, I nearly got my throat ripped out.”

“You did go for the nurse’s throat when we thought you were dead, Miss Zhao. Didn’t she, Hugo?”

“She did!”

“Is that why I’m strapped to the table?” Nelle asked.

“Yes,” the doctors said in unison.

“Mind if you unstrap me?”

“Are you going to act right?” Davis asked.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Yes, that’s the problem.” But she undid the straps holding Nelle down anyway, before returning to her wounded neck.

The orthopedist working on Keane’s shoulder abruptly walked out of the room, but returned a few minutes later with big goggles resting on his forehead and a giant sledgehammer.

“Well,” he said to Keane, “let’s get this done.”

He lowered the goggles over his eyes and lifted the massive sledgehammer, resting the big head on his shoulder.

Eyes wide, Malone blurted out, “What the fuck are you going to do with that thing?”

“I need to rebreak this shoulder. Sledgehammer is the easiest way.”

“ Are you insane? I’m not letting you do that!”

“Oh, come on! Don’t be such a pussy!” Then the lion male laughed at his own joke. “Get it? Because we’re all pus—”

“Yes. Yes. I get it. But if you try to hit me with a hammer, I’m going to beat what little brains you have right out of your giant lion head.”

“I went to Princeton. Where did you go?”

“Long Island ‘I will beat the shit out of you if you touch me with that hammer’ University.”

As entertained as Nelle was—and she was just so entertained right now!—she raised her hand to stop the escalating argument. You never know what could set two cats off, but she was pretty sure threatening one with a sledgehammer would do it.

“Everyone calm down; I can—” Nelle paused while her doctor struggled to pull something from her neck.

She tugged and tugged, her mountain-lion fangs slipping from her gums, until she finally yanked something free.

Holding up her blood-covered hand, she showed off what she held tightly with a pair of titanium needle-nose tweezers.

“Is this a bear claw?” she asked.

It wasn’t the whole claw, but yes. That was a piece of bear claw she held.

“I had a feeling something was in there,” Nelle explained. “I just didn’t know what.”

Davis leaned in closer. “It looks . . . gnawed upon.”

“Just my blood fighting back.”

“See what I mean? Even for shifters, that’s weird. That is just so weird. ”

Ignoring Davis’s observations over her kind’s blood cells, Nelle calmly told the orthopedist, “Don’t break his shoulder. I’ll take him to my guy. He can fix that shoulder without breaking anything.”

“What?” the lion immediately sneered. “Some Eastern, hippy medicine crap, involving tea and prayers?”

Feeling much better now that the piece of bear claw was out of her neck, Nelle decided to have a little fun.

“Why would you ask that? Because I’m Asian . And because I’m Asian , I must be taking Malone to some old man from Shanghai who has a decrepit office somewhere in Chinatown, where he’s doling out tiger dong tea to heal rashes and cancer?”

The lion blinked at her behind his goggles. “No, no. I didn’t mean—”

“My people are just all the same to you, aren’t we?”

“I just meant—”

“Ach!” she said, with a simple hand toss and shifting her gaze away from his stunned face.

The orthopedist stood in the middle of the room, stammering nonsensically for several seconds, until he finally walked out, taking his sledgehammer with him. A move that seemed to relieve Malone a great deal.

“Nicely handled,” Davis chuckled, before quickly stepping back and announcing, “I’m disturbed by this, but your wound just healed up before I could even get in a stitch, so—”

Nelle slipped off the exam table. “Great. Thanks. I have to go shower off all this blood and get changed.” She pointed at Malone. “I’ll meet you after our practices end, and we can go see my specialist, yes?”

“Well, I wasn’t really planning—”

“Excellent.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Davis said, before Nelle could get out the door. “It’s not normal your wound . . . abruptly healed. And we should ensure that it didn’t just hide an infection or some other issue.”

“It didn’t.”

“But—”

“Doctor, for more than a thousand years, the Zhao honey badger has been evolving into the being you see before you. And it’ll be a cold day in some Christian’s hell before an opened carotid artery takes my kind out.

But thank you for doing an excellent job of digging out that bit of claw from my neck.

This way, I won’t miss practice today, and Iwon’t have to listen to my teammate bitch about it.

Because she will. See you in a few hours, Malone. ”

* * *

The door closed behind the badger, and Keane was left alone with a stunned Jai Davis. She kept staring at the exit Nelle Zhao had gone out of and didn’t move or speak.

So he decided to try distracting her with light conversation.

“So . . . how’s your daughter?”

She blinked and her head snapped around, gold eyes glaring at him. “How do you know my daughter?” There was a ton of accusation in that one question. Accusation he did not like at all, but that wasn’t the real insult.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Remember you? I’ve operated on you before? I mean, I have a lot of clients. Especially football players. You guys are always getting your arteries torn open, but—”

“I’m first cousin to your best friend, Cella Malone? I’ve met your parents? I remember when you were a teen mom?” When she continued just to stare at him, he brutally added, “My father was murdered and his brothers did absolutely nothing about it?”

“Ohhhh! Right. Keane. Keane Malone. Hi, Keane. You’ve . . . grown.”

Disgusted, Keane stood and walked to the exit, not caring he was forced to push past the smaller cat in his way.

The last thing she said as he slammed the door shut behind him: “Glad to see you’re still so very angry!”