Then again . . . her family always sounded annoyed. As if everything they were doing for you was sooo much work and sooo much trouble. They’d do it . . . for you . . . but it was a lot of work so you really should appreciate all of it! They didn’t do that just to family members either. President of a country, prime minister, richest person in the world, ten-year-old whose ball rolled under a car—everyone, to Tock’s family, was an equal opportunity annoyance.
“Aa-sha, how much longer do we have to wait?” she heard a distant cousin complain.
“Listen to you. Our cousin could be dying! And you complain about being forced to wait.”
“You were just complaining five minutes ago!”
“I’m hungry! Do you want me to starve to death?”
Tock tried again to move parts of her body as she’d done with her arm. She figured she must be annoyed enough by now. But no. She couldn’t move anything.
She’d be more freaked out except that she could still feel that big cat hand on her. Sometimes he had his hand on her shoulder, against her forearm, or brushing her hair from her face after someone took out her ponytail to sew up a small cut in her head. Someone had asked him to leave. More than once. But his answer was always the same: “No.” And one really couldn’t move a tiger if they didn’t want to be moved.
So Shay remained even when they reached the shifter medical facility, and Tock’s family came and went. Along with medical staff made up of cats, dogs, and a couple of bears. Yet they didn’t seem to know how to fix her either.
After a while, Tock began to panic. Was she going to be like this forever? Trapped in her own body? Waiting for death?
Before Tock could really spiral into suicidal ideation, someone was prying open her eyelids.
“Hi, Tock. It’s me . . . Stevie.”
Fuck! Why was Stevie MacKilligan here? Who had brought her here? What was Tock’s grandmother thinking?
There were two things she knew never to do when it came to the MacKilligan sisters. One: Never say, “I dare you” to Max MacKilligan. Because not only would she take the dare, but she would make sure to destroy everything in a ten-mile radius while performing the dare. The second thing . . . ? Never. Fuck. With. Stevie!
Not because Stevie was a problem. She wasn’t. No matter what Max said. In fact, Stevie was a very sweet, soft-spoken genius who made Albert Einstein seem kind of slow. But Stevie was protected. She had to be because all sorts of people wanted to use her genius for their own evil goals. If you messed with Stevie, you had to deal with Charlie MacKilligan.
And no one wanted to deal with Charlie MacKilligan.
Half wolf, half honey badger, Charlie was Max’s eldest sister and a very atypical shifter because she couldn’t shift. She could unleash claws and fangs, but that was it. She never shifted fully into wolf or honey badger or something in between. But what she lacked in shifting ability, she more than made up for with massive strength, brutal determination, and an obsessive focus on protecting her siblings.
Tock, Mads, Nelle, and Streep did their best to avoid Charlie. Four females who weren’t scared of much, they’d learned early to be scared of the slightly older hybrid. Not because she’d ever hurt them but because there was just something about her . . . something terrifying. Predators knew predators and did their best to avoid them. At least that’s what the smart predators did. Sure, a Kamchatka brown bear could fight a Siberian tiger in the wild, but why would he? Wasn’t life hard enough without having to pry the massive jaws of a fellow predator from one’s throat? Wild animals knew that and shifters knew that.
And when honey badgers found someone to be scared of . . . they listened to their instincts.
Since the first time they’d seen Charlie MacKilligan interrogate her sister over why she’d been thrown off a school bus on her first day of junior high, they’d all known they were dealing with someone—something—very dangerous.
Although when it came to Max, Charlie’s biggest job was to keep the troublemaker in line; when it came to Stevie, her job was keeping her sister safe. Keeping her from being used. Keeping her from becoming obsessive and possibly mentally snapping from the pressure to perform. Keeping her from accidentally destroying the world with a random physics equation.
Anyone who tried to get around Charlie so they could use Stevie was merely asking for a knife to the chest. It would not be the first time.
Which was why panic really set in when Charlie’s angry face appeared right next to Stevie’s.
She’d never admit it out loud, but Tock would kind of miss her grandmother . . .
*
Shay felt better seeing somewhat familiar faces. Keane had problems dealing with “the sisters” as he called them, but not Shay. Stevie was sweet and friendly, trying her best to make them all get along for his kid sister’s sake.
And Charlie . . . ?
Well, he couldn’t think of better protection for Tock among all these strangers. Family or not.
Of course, Charlie did look particularly pissed. And she only said one thing when she entered the room:
“Where’s Mira Lepstein?”
Shay didn’t know that name but something told him it was the grandmother.
“She wasn’t with us when we got here.” He motioned to the nonmedical personnel in the room. “This is Tock’s family.”
Moving only her eyes, Charlie looked down at Tock. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Someone poisoned her, but I don’t know what they used.”
Stevie shrugged. “Neither do we, but I’ve been trying to find out.” She walked around the bed, studying Tock. “It’s man-made and they’ve been modifying it—making it stronger and more specific.”
“So it’s for shifters,” he stated.
“It’s for honey badger shifters,” she replied. “It’s for our kind.”
“Who’d want to kill honey badgers specifically?”
Lips pursed, Charlie turned her angry graze over to a male lion standing in the corner, writing in a chart.
It took the cat a moment to notice, but when he did, he snorted and said, “Oh, puhleeze. Get over yourselves.”
*
“If we were going to destroy anyone, it would be hyenas,” the lion male went on. He glanced off, eyes narrowing. “We hate them.”
“Full-humans?” one of Tock’s family asked.
“If you mean inside the government, or any government, doubtful.” Stevie shrugged. “Our people are everywhere. They’d let one of our organizations know about anything like that. But outside the government . . . ? Maybe.”
“Maybe one of our kind knows but is like him about hyenas.”
They all looked at the lion male again and he tossed his hands up in exasperation. “Seriously? Look, I may bite the heads off hyenas when they get on my nerves, but I’d never lower myself to poisoning them or you. We are lions. Proud. Beautiful. Amazing hair.” He motioned to Tock’s family. “Besides, the only shifters I know that do hinky shit are the honey badgers.”
“We fight to survive,” Charlie coldly explained. “So if that means putting a bullet in your head . . . we’ll do it. And it’s not our fault if you’re not faster than a bullet. Or a knife. Or a club. Or snake venom powerful enough to take down a herd of rhino. But that being said, we’d never poison each other.”