October 2023 Newsletter
BREAKING BADGER
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“You found an ice pack?”
“There were a bunch in your freezer. Right next to the frozen food. Lots of frozen meat pies.”
“Oh, come on.”
He straightened up. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Do I need to get you to the hospital?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.” Mads briefly glanced off before admitting, “I love meat pies.”
“Holy shit. Is this still about Nelle getting your house set up for you?”
“It’s weird!”
He started to say something, but shook his head instead and returned to applying the ice pack.
“You don’t think it’s weird?”
“I’m not getting in the middle of this.” He took her hand and held it against the ice pack. “Hold this a second.”
Crouching down, he went into the cabinet under the bathroom sink and immediately came out with a big first-aid kit. He placed it on the countertop and pulled out medical tape. Using two strips from the roll, he secured the ice pack against Mads’s wound.
“Is that too cold for you?”
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Honey badger skin.”
“Don’t know what that means.”
“Can stand up to almost anything. That’s why my teammates survived being tossed in an incinerator.”
“I still think that’s weird.”
“Would you rather they’d burned to death so I could be really sad?”
“That’s not what I—” Finn’s next words were cut off by his own growl of frustration. He carefully grabbed her around the waist and lifted her up on the bathroom countertop.
He used alcohol wipes from the first-aid kit to clean off the wounds on her face.
“Should I worry about you getting the fever?” he asked, discussing the way shifter bodies sometimes healed themselves when gravely wounded.
“I never have,” she replied. “Some hybrids do, some don’t. MacKilligans don’t. But not a lot of honey badgers get the fever anyway.”
“Because you’re all just so badass?”
“No. I think it’s just the way our bodies deal with trauma. Like when we’re poisoned. We just pass out for a while. And either we wake up . . . or we don’t.”
Finn gawked at her for a few moments before throwing the last wipe away and remarking, “Fascinating.”
“You asked.”
“Sorry I did.” He carefully lifted her off the counter and stood her on the tiled floor. “To bed with you.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Then we’ll turn on the TV Nelle wisely put in your bedroom. But you’re getting in bed, so you don’t randomly pass out, fall down the stairs, crack your hard head open, and—I know it’s rare—possibly kill yourself.”
“You’re worried about me falling down a flight of stairs after I fell off a building and nearly destroyed your brother’s car with the impact?”
“And some tough guys get killed by one punch. Strange things happen. Just go to bed. At least until I’m sure your kidney doesn’t explode and you start bleeding out.”
“Fine. I’ve gotta pee first.”
“Okay. I’ll go wait for you out—are you peeing in front of me?”
Mads looked up at him from the toilet she was now sitting on. And, yes, peeing into.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You couldn’t wait until I got out of here and closed the door?”
“You saw me beaten up by my own family. We are beyond the bullshit games that people play with each other, like pretending we have no bodily functions. Besides . . . it’s just pee.”
Again, he started to say something but instead simply threw his hands up and stormed out of the room, making sure to slam the bathroom door behind him.
Kind of enjoying his dramatic reaction to her casual Viking ways, Mads finished using the toilet, washed her hands, and walked out into the bedroom. That’s where she found him trying to get the coyote off the bed. Much to Mads’s growing delight, the coyote seemed determined to stay right where he was.
“It’s not moving!” he complained.
“Maybe because you call him ‘it.’”
“I’m not giving this animal more respect than I give my own baby brother.”
Deciding not to argue that disturbing point, Mads knew she didn’t want to go to bed in tight black jeans and shirt. Even a sleeveless one. So she sat on a cushioned bench by the window and began to tug off her boots, gritting her teeth when she had to bend over a bit and her kidney screamed at her to stop. Once she had her boots and socks off, she took a moment to get her breath back and for the pain to stop shooting through her system. She noticed that Finn was now in a tug-of-war with the coyote over the comforter.
Shaking her head, Mads got up and went to the dresser. She opened one of the drawers and, sure enough, she found several pairs of the loose shorts and cotton camisoles she loved to wear to bed.
Damn, Nelle! Why did she constantly have to prove how well she knew them all? That was something Mads would have to figure out later, after she got some sleep.
She pulled out dark blue shorts and a cami and plopped them on the dresser. She was in the middle of changing clothes when she heard Finn yell, “Why are you naked?”
“I’m changing for bed.”
“Why didn’t you ask me to leave the room?”
“Well, I’ve already seen you naked.”
“When I shifted from animal to human. That’s different!”
“Is it?”
Finn snarled, turned away from her, dragged the comforter forward and the coyote along with it until he could wrap the material around the coyote and remove all three of them from the room entirely.
“That seemed overly dramatic!” she called after him.
“Shut up!”
***
Finn dropped the coyote in the backyard, and when it tried to shoot past him back into the house, Finn’s roar seemed to scare it off. At least for the moment.
“Shut up the damn cat noise!” one of Mads’s new neighbors complained.
“I will burn your hives to the ground!” Finn bellowed in warning before going into the house and slamming the door.
He knew he shouldn’t take it out on the bears—the coyote was getting exactly what he deserved! Just as seeing a bruised and damaged Mads should have made him feel simple pity for her. But instead, finding her standing there, completely naked, made him horny and hard despite all those bruises. What kind of human being was he?
Maybe his mother’s family was right. Their side of the family was more tiger than human. They didn’t let things like bruises and kidney damage get in the way of what their heart and loins wanted. The females of their kin were as demanding as the males.
He should leave. Right now. He shouldn’t even go back upstairs. He should call Charlie, give her a heads-up about what had happened, and speed away in shame. That’s what he should do. He knew it. The coyote knew it. The bear that he could hear next door desperately checking his hives knew it.
He had his keys in his pocket. He had absolutely no logical reason to stay!
“Hey, Finn!” Mads called from her bedroom. “Could you grab a bottled water for me? And a jar of honey-covered nuts, too? Please?”
It was the “please” that did him in. Why did she have to say “please”? And so nicely. Not mocking nice, or manipulative nice, but just . . . nice.
“Fuck!” he growled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
He stomped to the kitchen. Got her a big bottled water from the refrigerator. Dug around in the cabinets until he found a whole cupboard filled with cans and jars of honey-covered peanuts and almonds and cashews. He grabbed the peanuts. Then he took all of it upstairs for her.
Finn found her tucked into the middle of the bed with the TV on. A Taiwanese action movie was playing. He’d thought she would be watching ESPN, but was glad she wasn’t. He didn’t need any more sports tonight. Especially full-human sports.
She was stretched out on top of the sheets, several pillows behind her back. She took the water and peanuts from him and dropped them next to her on the bed. Then she turned those big blue eyes on him.
“Get comfortable,” she said, and tapped the bed with her hand. “Sit. You ever see this movie? The fight scenes are awesome.”
“Uh . . . I was thinking . . . ”
Again, she looked at him with those blue eyes.
“You were thinking what?” she pushed when he didn’t finish his thought.
“I should take my shoes off.”
“Okay.”
He kicked his shoes off and got on the bed, stretching his long legs out.
They watched the movie in silence for a while until she asked, “Water?”
She held the big water bottle in front of his face. “Oh. Thanks.” He took it from her and gulped some water down, handed it back. She re-capped it and put it aside.
“What did you do to the coyote?”
“Just put it outside. It’s fine. Probably under the house again.”
“Poor thing.”
“You and my brother.”
“Keane?”
“Shay. He’s a dog lover, too.”
“I could not care less about dogs. But I do appreciate a wild animal that is smart enough to get in and out of a home without messing it up. When you have a racoon in your home . . . you know you have a racoon in your home.”
Finn put an arm behind his head. “So I guess you’re going to tell your teammates about your cousins being in town.”
“No, I am not.”
Confused, he studied Mads, noticed how serious she suddenly looked.
“Why not?”
“Are you kidding? That’s a nightmare I can’t wake up from. I’m not saying a word and neither are you. Not a word.”
“Wait a minute—”
“No. I’m serious.”
Finn let his elbows prop him up. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to understand.”
“Explain it to me or I start dialing. Because I think your friends would want to know. At least Tock would.”
“I’m trying to protect them.”
“Are you kidding?” he asked with a harsh laugh. “You’re trying to protect those broads? Seriously? There’s not one of them that I worry about. Not one!”
“But they have families. I can’t put their families at risk.”
“Isn’t most of Tock’s family in Mossad? And Nelle’s father has bodyguards and I think close to a billion dollars. And Max, oh . . . Max.”
“What about her grandfather?”
“He’s in a wolf pack, right?”
“Living right next to my much bigger hyena family! They will destroy him! And Streep’s family has no protection at all.” Mads shook her head and swiped her hands across each other. “No. We’re not telling them anything. We’re not getting them involved.”
“So what are going to do with that idiotic sword?”
“We’ll just send it back through the mail or something.”
“After what they did to you, you’re really going to give it back to them?”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I don’t know. Throw it out. Or hide it under the house with the coyote.”
“So we can put the coyote in danger when they come here looking for that stupid sword? Because they’ll eventually find out where I live.”
Finn sat up straight and rested his arms on his knees, focusing his full attention directly on Mads.
“Are you telling me that not only are you worrying about your friends, and the families of your friends, but you’re also worried about the safety of a random coyote that just happens to be living under the house you just bought a day ago? Is that what you’re telling me?”
Mads shrugged. “Yes.”
“Wow.” Finn pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes and lay back on the bed. “Wow.”
“It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Just . . . no.”
“But—”
“No.”
“If you’d only—”
“No.”
“Well . . . do you want a honey-covered nut?”
“I’m already sitting next to a honey-covered nut.”
