September 2023 Newsletter
BADGER TO THE BONE
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Unedited/Unproofed
Max looked around the conference room of the NYPD shifter division. She was surrounded by crystal-clear reinforced glass, so she could see everything going on. At one point, she looked into the office next door. Inside were a woman and two males she didn’t recognize, and Dee-Ann Smith. Her absolute favorite wolf to torture!
As soon as their eyes locked, Max put on her biggest grin and happily waved at Dee-Ann with her zip-tied hands.
The men and woman laughed as Dee-Ann snarled and looked away from her.
Yup. Her favorite person to torture!
Before she could lower her bound hands, one of the cops grabbed them.
“These were behind your back.”
“Were they?” she asked.
He released her and snarled, “Fucking, badgers.” Then stormed away, leaving her alone.
About thirty minutes later, Max was shocked to see her teammates dragged in. Why were they here? They hadn’t done anything.
Each of them was led to a chair and pushed into it by a much bigger uniformed shifter. Then the cops left and a new team came in. They were all dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts, each with a single holstered firearm, but none of them had badges, so they weren’t detectives Max would expect. She was always interrogated by detectives—at least in major American cities. In other countries, it varied.
After the five of them were seated and the very large, unidentified shifters were comfortably situated around the room . . . nothing. For at least forty-five minutes. Max wasn’t exactly shocked, though. It was an interrogation move. Keep the perp waiting in the hopes that he or she would get worked up and reveal all when the cops entered the room. Although the police outside the room, the ones Max could see through the glass, didn’t seem the least bit interested in them. When a few did notice, they just appeared confused by what was going on. Probably because the NYPD had other rooms that were used specifically for interrogation. So why were she and her team here? In this big glass room? And who were their guards? Max didn’t recognize any of them.
Eventually, while Max was wondering if she could jump out the window and fly—she wasn’t planning on doing that, but she did enjoy wondering what it was like to fly—three males entered the room along with a black woman who looked familiar to her.
“Hello, ladies,” the lion male said. “I’m Benjamin.”
“Benji!”
The lion smirked before correcting Streep. “Benjamin.” He gestured to a grizzly. “This is Oliver.” Then pointed at the shifter beside him, whose animal scent Max didn’t recognize. “And this is Bryan.”
“Benji, Ollie, and Bri!” Streep cheered.
The three men glared at her but the lion quickly continued. “Anyway, I know you’re wondering why you all have been brought here and—”
Tock pointed at the black woman, who was now quietly sitting in a corner, drinking from a large travel cup. “Who’s that?”
“That’s Imani. She’s here to observe.”
“Why didn’t you introduce her? Are you dismissing her very presence because she’s a woman?”
Uh-oh. Tock was putting on what the entire team called her “Feminist Warrior Wear—trademark pending.”
Unfortunately, Tock always seemed to aim her anger-spears at the wrong targets.
“Can I go on?” Benji asked.
Poor kid. He’d only spent three minutes around them and already he was annoyed. Imani, however, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself.
Max remembered her now. She lived a few streets over, in lion territory. She’d been there when Max was trying to protect Zé.
“Please,” Nelle said, flashing her award-winning smile and ingrained old-money politeness. “Go on.”
“As I was saying,” Benji began, “I know you’re all wondering what you’re doing here and—”
“Ohhhh, shit,” Mads breathed out, cutting the cat off, and Max saw the color drain from her teammate’s face.
As one, they all looked at the front of the room through the glass and Max immediately realized that things had just gone to shit.
***
Dez watched Smitty pull back a bit.
“Do y’all see that?” Smitty said in his Tennessean drawl. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen a honey badger show fear.”
“Who is that?” Mace asked, enjoying the bag of popcorn he’d brought with him. Dez had invited him and his best friend, Smitty, because she sensed there would be drama and her hubby, lion male that he was, did love drama that he was not involved in. Smitty had also brought along his cousin Dee-Ann, but unlike the boys, she saw the woman standing outside the conference room and instantly shook her head, pulling out her phone.
“Who are you calling?” Smitty asked.
“Everybody,” she muttered.
An answer that Dez found particularly disturbing.
***
Apparently Zé hadn’t understood her command not to call her sister. Because here Charlie was, gazing at them with a completely blank expression on her face from outside the room.
Benji stupidly motioned her in with a twitch of his hand and Charlie slowly entered. She didn’t speak, just looked at everything. Sizing it up, figuring it out, judging and preparing.
“You must be the big sister, huh?” Benji asked. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Benjamin and—”
“Oh, my God!” Tock suddenly snapped. “Just get on with it! You are taking way too much time with this.”
“Fine.” Benjamin motioned for Charlie to take a seat but she just stood there. Still not speaking; that blank expression on her face.
Honestly, Max found that blank expression much more terrifying than Charlie’s obvious-anger face. But that could be because she really hadn’t seen that expression before. It was new and Max wasn’t crazy about new when it came to her family.
Benji took a moment to let the silence settle before he said, “We want you five to work for us.”
“We’re not rats,” Mads announced. “I won’t tell you anything about my family.”
Nelle cringed and Max informed her teammate, “That’s not what he’s talking about.”
“It’s not?”
“No. So shut the fuck up.”
“Your teammate’s right, of course. You see, we know how talented you all are and we want to put those talents to work for us.”
Nelle smirked. “So you’re starting a basketball team?”
“Of course not.” He stretched his arm out, hand open, and the grizzly turned over a batch of red folders. “We’d like to utilize your other talents.”
“Our other talents?”
“We’re not fucking anyone for some spy job.”
Max turned in her chair so she could look at her teammate. “Again, Mads, I don’t think that’s what he means so maybe shut up.”
“Again, she’s right,” Benji said with a smile. “I’m talking about your other skills.”
He tossed one of the folders across the table so it landed in front of Tock. “Three months ago, uranium stolen from a Russian lab, the entire event somehow managing to take thirty minutes—precisely.”
Another folder landed in front of Nelle. “A year ago, a truckload of gold bars taken from outside the Vatican.”
A folder in front of Streep. “Six months ago, a billionaire—who escaped justice even though he liked his conquests . . . rather young—found with a bullet to the back of his head and his two-hundred-million-dollar impressionist art collection gone.”
He stopped and stared at Mads. “Shockingly, I have nothing on you. Either you’re really good or . . . very boring.”
“That’s just rude,” Tock muttered.
“But your family,” he said. “Now that is some fascinating shit. But we didn’t have space for the number of folders we’d have to use.”
Benji moved around the table until he stood behind Max. Now he slowly leaned around her and placed a thick red folder on the table in front of her.
“Then there’s you, Miss MacKilligan.” He stood straight and patted her shoulder. “And then there’s you.”
He began to pace around the room. “I mean, where do I start? The diamond heist in Uruguay? The missing Gutenberg Bible from Paris? Or the tapestries stolen from the Vatican Gallery of Tapestries? That’s a good one, too. Happened in the middle of the day with a full crowd of tourists mulling around, waiting for the pope to arrive for a visit. Now that, ladies, is skill.”
Max focused her gaze on the unopened folder. She couldn’t look at her sister because she knew Charlie wouldn’t be happy. In fact, she might hate her. Charlie had tried so hard to keep both Max and Stevie out of trouble and away from a “typical MacKilligan career.”
She knew Charlie wouldn’t just be disappointed in her, but ashamed, and that was something Max couldn’t deal with. Because the only other person Charlie was ashamed of was their father and Max never wanted either of her sisters to see her that way.
“What is the point of this?” Mads asked, the only one among them who seemed to have found legal ways to occupy her time between basketball games.
“You work with us, none of this ever gets out.”
Mads sat up a little straighter. “And if we don’t work with you? Then what?”
“Sweetie . . . what do you think? We have enough evidence to put you all away for a very long time. Well”—he glanced at Mads—“maybe not you, but all your family. And not just here in the States, but in places where you don’t want to go to prison.” He leaned down so his head was right by Max’s. “Just ask your mom about that.”
Wow. He’d gone there. Had gone there hard. And her friends were none too happy about it either. The four of them jumped up from the table—despite their bound hands—and started yelling at Benji. The guards he had with him immediately rested their hands on their holstered weapons. And the cops outside the glass had finally found something interesting to watch in this conference room.
Only Max stayed in her seat because . . . because . . . did it matter? Any of it? Now that her sister knew the truth. Now that she knew everything? Would Charlie ever forgive her? Or just push Max out of their lives as she’d done to their father?
Max couldn’t even think about it. It was too horrible for her to even . . .
It was instinctual, the way Max shoved herself and the chair she was sitting in back and out of the way. Because she didn’t hear anything. See anything. She simply sensed a change in the air around them as Charlie launched herself across the table and directly into Benji. She didn’t take him to the ground, though. Instead, she forced him into the wall that was a solid fifty feet behind him.
Benji laughed and grabbed her upper arms, pushing her back. “I heard you’d be the problem here. The Group, Katzenhaus, BPC . . . they may all be scared of you. But I’m not, freak. Now get her out of my sight,” he ordered his team.
A male grizzly grabbed Charlie’s left arm and a She-grizzly grabbed her right; together they led her back toward the door.
“Now,” Benji continued on, “where were we?”
Charlie stopped halfway across the room, pulled her arms free, and spun around to face Benji again.
“What?” Benji asked. “What are you going to say, Miss MacKilligan, that I could possibly give a fuck about?”
It seemed that Charlie was trying to say something. She kept opening her mouth to speak but nothing was coming out. Max had never seen her like this. Charlie almost always had something to say. Usually something precise, brutal, and definitely threatening. Yet this time . . . she kept trying but there was nothing. Not a word.
Fed up, Benji simply flicked his hand toward Charlie, and the bears again grabbed her arms. This time, instead of leading, they began to drag her from the room. They got a few feet but abruptly stopped again. It took a second, but Max realized that the reason the bears had stopped was because Charlie had stopped.
With her head down and her entire body shaking, she refused to move.
Each bear took an even stronger grip on her arms with both hands and again tried to drag her from the room. It should have been easy. They were grizzlies. Max, herself, was once sent flying about a mile through trees when she’d startled a grizzly female camping in the Alps with her family. But no matter how hard those two pulled, Charlie wasn’t moving.
“What the fuck are you two doing?” Benji demanded. “Get her out of here.”
“We’re trying,” one of the grizzlies snarled.
When Charlie finally lifted her head, her eyes hadn’t shifted to wolf gold, the way they sometimes did during a firefight or fistfight. Instead, they were . . . bloodred. Like all the capillaries had broken at the same time.
The muscles in her neck bulged, her shoulders seemed to extend so that they were even bigger, and her combination of badger fangs and wolf fangs extended but the canines also seemed to grow thicker and longer than usual.
Max thought for sure her sister was finally going to shift. Maybe not into a badger or a wolf, but into something else. Something amazing.
But no. She didn’t shift. God knows, she didn’t need to.
Charlie turned her hands so that she could grip the forearms of the bears holding her and then, with a roar that shook all that surrounding glass, Charlie lifted her arms—and the bears. She lifted the motherfucking bears!—and crossed her arms, sending the grizzlies hurtling in opposite directions.
“Down!” Max screamed to her teammates as a grizzly flew over them and crashed into the glass walls, nearly shattering them. The people in the office next door jump to their feet in shock.
Weapons were drawn but Benji quickly threw up his hands. “No! Don’t shoot her!”
Because he knew that if he killed Max’s sister, the only thing he’d be doing was running for the rest of his life. Max wouldn’t stop until she killed him. And if he killed her, her teammates wouldn’t stop until they’d killed him.
Benji and his crew would need to manage Charlie without killing her and, Max had to admit . . . she couldn’t wait for them to try.
