Maybe she was just freaked out. He didn’t blame her.
“What’s different?” he urged. “Tell me. I’ll fix it.”
She didn’t respond, though. She simply dropped to her knees, then forward, crashing into his legs.
“Tock? Tock.” He lowered her to the ground, crouching beside her. “Tock? Talk to me.”
But it seemed she couldn’t. Her eyes were wide open and her body was rigid. He’d found her and her badger friends passed out on his floor before. Filled with poison from some snake or whatever that they’d all willingly eaten. At the time, he’d thought they were all dead. They hadn’t been breathing and their hearts had stopped for a time, but no. They weren’t dead. They were just honey badgers high on snake poison.
But this situation was different. This time her heart was beating. Her breathing was steady. He could hear both. Yet she seemed . . . frozen. Stuck. Her muscles rigid. Her eyes unblinking.
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open, revealing five armed men. Not the ones he’d already dealt with in the parking lot because these guys had recently bathed and used body spray.
The men were about to exit when they saw a naked, bloody Shay crouching beside their prey. They paused, confusion on the parts of their faces he could see—everything around the eyes and bridge of the nose was covered by balaclavas.
Shay roared. The loud sound startled the men. They began firing but he’d already flipped up and by the time he’d punched his way inside the wall, he was tiger again.
He moved easily through the darkness until he reached the elevator. He shifted briefly to open the hatch in the hall ceiling, and shifted back so that he could jump down without making a sound despite his massive cat size.
The men had already moved into the hallway, their heads turning this way and that, searching for him. They didn’t know what they’d seen, but they were smart enough to know they’d seen something.
Shay low-crawled up to the one closest to him before going up on his haunches and slamming his front paws against the man’s back. Not only knocking him into the man ahead of him—putting both on the floor—but snapping the first one’s spine and crushing his ribs.
The rest of the men turned toward him and away from Tock. Shay swatted his paw one way and the arm holding an automatic rifle flew. He bit down on a shoulder and forced another man to his back. He lifted his back legs up at the same moment and unleashed his back claws so that he tore open a chest and, moments later, pulled the balaclava off a face. All in one move.
When his back legs had landed again, he readjusted his maw from the shoulder to the jaw. Then he spun around, using the screaming man he held to knock down the remaining prey. He crushed the jaw between his fangs—mostly to stop the annoying screaming but also . . . why not?—while lifting a front paw and slamming it against the other man’s face. His claws tore off skin, muscle, and bone, leaving nothing but a half-empty skull.
With all the new attackers finished off, he took a step toward Tock. But he heard the ding of the elevator again and spun around to face it, standing over her body. Ready to kill whatever came through that door.
Hackles up. Fangs bared. Bloody drool pouring from his mouth and onto poor Tock, Shay readied himself for whatever might come through that elevator door. He lowered the front of his body so he could easily launch himself into the fray.
The elevator door opened but no one came out. Not immediately.
Then he saw the tip of a silencer move slowly around the edge of the door, and he unleashed a roar in warning. The silencer froze, then lowered and she suddenly appeared in the hallway.
She reminded him of his community college English professor. Older. Straight white hair cut so it dropped across her right eye. Not tall but between the high heels and her erect bearing, she seemed tall. Dark brown eyes simply gawked at him as her perfectly manicured hand gripped her weapon.
“Huh,” she said, still gawking at him. “She did bring a cat with her. Such a strange girl, my granddaughter.”
*
Tock couldn’t move. She felt . . . frozen. She could still see, but couldn’t blink. Could breathe, but couldn’t speak. Could hear, but couldn’t move her head. She was stuck. And it was horrifying.
She didn’t understand. She’d been hit, at some point in her life, with nearly every natural poison and a lot of manufactured ones. More than once, in fact. That included the most lethal snake poisons and even Ricin once. That had been truly unpleasant. Then there’d been the arsenic, cyanide, and that damn ghost pepper Max had slipped into her burrito. Tock had had them all and—if she were affected in any way—it was just to be knocked out for a while. Sometimes her heart stopped, but it always started again. Same thing with her breathing.
Whatever was happening now, however, was so different. For the first time in her life, she felt defeated. Like she’d never move again. She would always feel this way. Trapped in this body. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t.
Through eyes that couldn’t blink, she could see the destruction the tiger brought down on the mercenaries—as long as the action happened over her head. But she couldn’t duck or join in. She couldn’t even cheer him on. She could only watch as bodies and body parts flew by.
But then she heard it. Heard that voice. That goddamn voice!
And sure enough . . . her grandmother—whom they all called Savta—leaned into her eye-view and gazed down at her with obvious disdain.
“I leave you alone,” she admonished Tock in her Israeli accent, “one minute. Two. And next we know, you are on floor like dead body.” She paused, then added, “It is your mother’s fault. She made you weak after I warned her not to.”
Unable to walk away or even roll her eyes, rage built up inside Tock and, before she knew it, she growled. A reaction that made her grandmother look a little surprised. She was never surprised. So why was she surprised now? Something was wrong, very wrong, and Tock wanted to know what the hell was going on. And she wanted to know now.
“You just walk into trouble and think you can always get out,” Savta continued, pretending that Tock’s growl hadn’t taken her by surprise. “But look at you now . . . on the ground. Stuck there like a log.”
Hearing her grandmother chastise her for doing a job she was only on because of her grandmother, had rage building again inside Tock.
“Hey, Emmy!” called her cousin Uri, born and raised in the States like Tock but also with dual citizenship. He annoyingly pushed his face beside their grandmother’s so Tock could see him. “Bad day?”
Rage building.
“Why is she on the floor?” Uri’s sister Shira wanted to know from the other side of Tock. “Why are you on the floor?” she practically yelled in Tock’s face.
And building.
“Is she dead?” Shira asked her brother. Then she yelled at Tock, “Are you dead?”
“She’s not dead,” her grandmother replied. “I think it’s that new poison.”
New poison? There was a new poison that worked on honey badgers and no one had told Tock? No one?
“New poison?” Uri asked.
“Do you not read the encrypted newsletter Savta sends out?”