Page 75 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

Nelle scrambled out and, unleashing her fangs, came at the cat. He tried to pull a gun, but she was on him, grabbing his hands and biting at his face and neck.

He screamed, trying to get her off, but Nelle unleashed her claws and stabbed them into his sides. She was about to start tearing his organs apart when álvarez grabbed her from behind and pulled her away.

“What are you doing?” Nelle demanded.

“Trust me, kid. You don’t want to kill him.”

She didn’t? Because she kind of felt like she did.

álvarez picked up the gun the cheetah had been going for. She aimed it at the cat and pulled the trigger. But a bullet didn’t explode out and tear through the male’s jugular. Instead, a dart did. He gasped, then passed out.

They weren’t trying to kill them, they were trying to sedate them. Like escaped zoo animals. Good to know. But then she remembered Keane.

“Crap!” She ran to the back door.

A brown-haired man with a growing grizzly hump on his back charged toward her, but as she stepped back to move out of his way, black fur with white streaks flashed by, ramming into the bear from the side.

She knew Keane was fast. She’d seen him attack before. And all cats were naturally fast. But still . . . seeing him move like that in the bright morning light. It was wonderfully terrifying.

“You need to stop him,” álvarez told her.

She wanted to, but she wasn’t sure she could. Especially when he wrapped his maw around the fur-covered neck of that grizzly.

Rutowski ran into the room. “We have to get out of here!”

álvarez faced her friend. “What’s wrong?”

“Edgar knows we’re here.”

She shrugged. “Okay. And?”

“He’s sent a Smith to bring us in.”

Frowning, álvarez said, “Edgar doesn’t work with . . .”

The two females stared at each other.

“What?” Nelle asked. “Why do you both look like that?”

“We have to leave,” álvarez said, grabbing a black backpack from under the kitchen table. “Right now.”

The Russian stalked in, ready to go, the straps of a red backpack already on her shoulders. “Why are we still here?” she demanded, getting a few bottles of water. “She will be here soon.”

Nelle had never seen these four She-badgers react to anyone like this. Not Edgar Van Holtz. Not the French government. Not even Charlie! And yet . . .

“Who are you talking about?”

“We just have to go,” Rutowski said, moving behind Nelle and shoving her toward the front of the chateau.

“I’m not leaving Keane!”

“Of course, of course. So in love. It’s adorable.”

Before she could slap the She-badger simply for her condescending tone, Nelle heard the Russian yell, “Cat! Leave bear toy alone! We must go!”

A few seconds later, there was a loud thud, and Keane ran past her. He was covered in blood and waited at the front door for her, panting hard from his fight. Behind her, the Russian complained, “He has fucked up back door! Now we must pay to fix that, too!”

* * *

Keane nearly had the grizzly right where he’d wanted him when he heard the Russian yell.

He didn’t know exactly what she said—he couldn’t hear anything over the grizzly’s roars—but there was a tension in her voice that he had never heard before, and he let the grizzly’s throat go and ran into the house.

He had to jump over several other shifters to get to the front door.

They littered the hallway, but none were dead.

He didn’t understand that. He’d seen these older females work.

They had no qualms about killing anyone.

Yoon tried to order him to get into the SUV—different from the one last night—but he wasn’t leaving until Nelle was with him. He didn’t trust these ladies. Not when it came to Nelle.

“Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” Yoon ordered, while holding the SUV door open so he could get into the back seat.

He ignored her demands until Nelle was by his side. Together, they ran to the SUV and got in. He shifted when one of the women tossed him clothes. Some ill-fitting sweatpants and a too-small black T-shirt that reeked of canine.

“You’re covered in blood,” Nelle told him as the other females got into the vehicle, Rutowski taking the wheel. She grabbed a towel someone had handed her and tried to wipe his face clean, but he sensed that wasn’t effective.

“Anyone have wipes?” she asked, and was immediately forced to rear back when all four She-badgers held out packets of wipes from their bags, álvarez nearly punching her in the face.

“Moms always have wipes on them,” she explained, while gesturing to Rutowski and Yoon.

“And I am often covered in blood,” the Russian added to unnecessarily explain her having wipes, as well.

Grabbing one of the packets, Nelle started wiping Keane’s face clean.

They gazed at each other while doing so.

Not so much out of love and lust—although that was there—as confusion.

What had these women so panicked? He’d never seen them like this.

Not even when the French police were basically on top of them back at Versailles.

“Where are we going?” Nelle asked.

Rutowski shifted the SUV into gear and sped away from the house before suddenly turning into the woods. The vehicle was four-wheel drive, so it maneuvered well enough. Although it was a very bumpy ride—Nelle slamming into Keane, and Keane slamming into the door next to him.

“We are going somewhere safe,” Yoon replied, holding on to the sturdy bar above the passenger window she sat next to.

“Where is that exactly?” Nelle snapped. “Since Van Holtz’s house was supposed to be safe!”

“Someone must have ratted us out,” Rutowski said to her friends, ignoring Nelle’s concerns. “Edgar has never caught us there before.”

“How many times have you used that man’s property?” Keane wanted to know.

“Is that really important?”

“Not getting killed is important,” he told them.

“They didn’t want to kill us,” álvarez said, staring out her window like they were simply sightseeing. “They were just going to dart us so they could transport us to cages and bring us back to the States.”

“That’s humiliating,” Keane admitted, “but at least we’d be going home .”

“We’re not going home like that . Besides, we’re not done here. Right, Zhao? You want to know what’s going on, right?”

“Stop talking to me. I hate you.”

“See?” Rutowski mindlessly said. “She agrees with me.”

“Edgar must have told The Group where we were, and they came to get us,” álvarez surmised. “Those were all Group people. I recognized a few of them.”

“Which means she’s definitely coming,” Rutowski said.

“Who is she ?” Nelle finally yelled, getting fed up. But again, the females managed to ignore her and her very valid questions.

“You know,” Yoon said as she opened her laptop and began typing despite the worsening bumpy ride, “it’s bad enough we have to deal with that female every Thanksgiving. But to send her to retrieve us is just an act of war.”

“I know! Right?” Rutowski agreed.

“Wait a minute.” Nelle finished wiping his face and neck, sat down beside him, and pushed the black T-shirt at him to put on. “All this drama over a Van Holtz ?”

“Not a Van Holtz. A Smith,” Yoon replied.

“That’s even more pathetic.”

“Look, kid, there are Smiths and there are Smiths, and then there are Smiths. ”

“What does that even mean?”

“I get it,” Keane admitted. “There are Malones. Then there are Malones. And then there are Malones .”

“Is this an exclusively American thing?” Nelle asked.

“Yes,” they all replied, even the Russian.

* * *

Richie was sure he was dying after that fucking badger stuck her claws in his sides like he was a side of beef! So when he woke up to stare into the plain, uncaring face of Dee-Ann Smith, he simply assumed he was in hell.

“How hard is it to round up a bunch of badgers and a cat?” she asked with that annoying Southern accent she still hadn’t lost, despite living in New York for all these years.

“You said it would be an easy pickup,” he reminded her, blood spilling from his mouth and dripping down his chin.

“You said there’d be a cat,” his grizzly partner said, as a tech tried to stanch the flow of blood coming from the bear’s neck. “Not a goddamn Siberian tiger. I think it nicked an artery!”

“Don’t wanna hear your whinin’.” Smith stood, motioned to the medical techs to deal with Richie’s wounds.

They thought they’d be doing nothing more than transporting the badgers and one “cat” to cages and then back to the States, monitoring their vitals as they were kept under control with something that would actually knock them out.

That wasn’t easy. Badgers could tolerate extremely high doses of all sorts of toxins.

So keeping them down for longer than sixty seconds took skill and lots of backup treatments.

Now, however, these techs were forced to treat his entire team for near-fatal wounds.

“Where do you think they’re going?” Cella Malone asked as she entered the kitchen. For years now, Malone and Smith had been partners, and it seemed to work for them, but no one understood why. It’s not like they actually got along.

“Isn’t the tiger that tried to kill me one of your many first cousins?” his grizzly partner asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Couldn’t you have just asked him to come home with us?”

Malone and Smith shared a look before Malone admitted, “You know, we actually hadn’t thought about that as an option.”

* * *

Bria Medici wasn’t really thinking when she opened the front door of her family home.

She was too busy fighting with her boyfriend.

He was full-human, and everyone in her family hated him, but she didn’t care about any of that.

She just wanted to know what he thought he was doing with that whore Franny Rossi!

“Hold on,” she said to her yelling boyfriend—which he ignored and kept yelling at her—and looked at the woman standing in her doorway. “What?”