The room was silent a few seconds more after Charlie left, until one of Tock’s cousins turned to Stevie and asked, “What made you think all that poison was going to help Emmy?”
“Who?”
“She means Tock,” Max said.
“Oh! Right. Uh . . . that theory was based on my research on how this substance interacts with our bodies. Honey badgers are very aggressive. Instinctually. And, it turns out, so are our cells. When we are hit with most any toxin, our bodies see it as a threat and react accordingly, immediately getting into a fight with anything not supposed to be there. But with this new toxin, that instinctual reaction does not occur. Our cells don’t see the toxin as a threat so they don’t fight, even while this thing is tearing us apart from the inside out. So I thought maybe if we used something our bodies automatically react to, it would prompt the cells to push anything out that didn’t belong there, whether perceived as a threat or not.”
She let out a breath. “But what worries me is that every time they change the structure of this thing—and they keep changing it, trying to make the toxin stronger—it gets worse for us. I’m concerned that this product will hit a point where our bodies will no longer be able to fight, no matter what we do. In fact, I think it will actually be able to kill us.”
“In other words,” another cousin said, “we are running out of time to find out where this is coming from and put a stop to it.”
“Exactly. As strong as we are as a species, we’re not immortal, and we’re not indestructible. We’re just . . .”
“Hardheaded?” another cousin questioned.
Stevie nodded. “Well . . . yes.”
“Why are we here?”
The question was offensive in its coldness and every badger eye in the room turned to look at the giant Amur tiger who’d asked it.
Keane Malone. Uncontrollable feline rage stuffed into a half-Mongolian, half–Irish Traveler body with nothing but vengeance and football on his mind. Six foot eight and at least three hundred and fifty pounds, Keane was avoided by nearly everyone. Even Nelle’s fellow teammates avoided him as much as possible. They liked Shay and Finn well enough, but Keane was considered persona non grata ever since he’d lashed out at Max when she’d offered him delicious Danish and he’d practically spit the kind gesture back in her face. Considering Max was not known for bouts of kindness, his rude response was a true affront to all of them.
Nelle understood his rage, though. She couldn’t imagine how angry she’d be if someone had murdered her father. Of course, if someone murdered Mae, her sister, she wouldn’t care. But that was Mae’s fault. She was an asshole.
“You’re here because your brother is stalking our cousin?” suggested another of Tock’s cousins, this one wearing a skullcap.
“My brother was helping your sister—”
“Cousin.”
“—which personally I think was wrong. He should have let her die writhing on the floor.”
Tock’s relatives snarled in response but Nelle quickly rubbed her nose to stop from smiling. Keane was just so . . . cranky! Who had the time to always be so unpleasant? Who wanted to be that unpleasant? She knew honey badgers in their nineties who were less caustic! And that knowledge made her want to laugh. He was a ninety-year-old man in a thirtysomething’s body.
A giant, perfect body that she did love to watch from a distance. Although she couldn’t imagine spending any real time around the cat. Who wanted to spend precious moments of their far-too-short lives with a cranky cat?
Besides Max MacKilligan, that is. Although the captain of their basketball team did seem happy with her new jaguar boyfriend. Then again, knowing Max, that was probably because all she really did was torture the poor guy who’d stumbled into her life not so long ago. Zezé Vargas had no idea what he was getting into when he fell for Max MacKilligan.
“The only reason you’re here, cat,” an older badger explained to Keane, “is because your brother decided to insert himself into the situation. In future, if any of you want to avoid such an experience, mind your own business.”
Not surprisingly, Keane didn’t like that sentiment at all. With fangs exploding from his gums, he took an angry step forward. Finn quickly caught his arm and pulled him toward the door. A very wise cat, that Finn. Because every one of Tock’s cousins and uncles and aunts went for a hidden weapon secreted somewhere on their person. Nelle recognized the move. Unlike the rest of her teammates’ families, Tock’s matriarchal relatives were not thieves. They knew how to steal, of course—they were still badgers. But that wasn’t the family “business.” Their skills weren’t defensive . . . they were predatory.
Because if Tock’s family snuck into a building or into someone’s room, it wasn’t to steal a guy’s Rembrandt. It was because the guy was doing something so morally reprehensible, it had been judged that he could not go on. And Tock’s family were some of the people who dealt with that particular issue, led by their matriarch, Mira Malka-Lepstein. And while Tock and all her cousins called Mira “Savta”—Grandmother in Hebrew—there were entire networks of scumbags in the world who called the She-badger “Grandmother Death.” A very fitting name from what Nelle had heard over the years.
Sadly, Tock’s mother hated that name. Hated the way Mira lived and had trained her children and grandchildren to live. Of course, Tock’s mom, Ayda, was a pacifist, or what Mira had apparently once called a “hippy with no redeeming value, trying to make the woman who gave her life feel bad.”
The biggest problem between them was that Tock was not a pacifist. She was anything but a pacifist. Also allegedly said by her grandmother, Tock was “a vicious little badger that knows how to break a man,” which was supposedly the reason Mira Malka-Lepstein had a special place for Tock in that cold badger heart of hers. Something that did not sit well at all with Tock’s mom, who wanted more for her daughter than a lifetime of checking her home for listening devices and assuming any man coming out of the shadows was trying to assassinate her.
So the two—mother and grandmother—did the sort of passive-aggressive family fighting over Tock that Nelle found fascinating. It was so full-human in its subtlety. Because there was nothing passive aggressive about Nelle’s clan. They were more aggressive-aggressive. Meaning that if Nelle had to toss her sister out the window to get her point across, then that’s what she had to do . . . and had done. More than once. And why her mother would then state in no uncertain terms, “This is why your sister hates you. You understand that, yes?”
Yes. That she understood. Direct, clear, concise. Downright brutal in its clarity.
And brutality was something Nelle could always respect.
*
“You need to calm down.”
“They’re pissing me off.”
“Everyone pisses you off. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t calm the fuck down.”
Keane understood what his brother Finn was saying, but he was just so angry.
He really hadn’t thought much about it when his brother had texted that he was going off with Tock. Thought maybe they were hooking up. He could understand it. Tock was pretty and had the kind of long legs his brother loved on a woman. If Shay wanted to distract himself for a little while with a honey badger, who was Keane to question? But if he’d known that idiot was going off with a honey badger on some kind of crazy “secret agent assignment,” he would have yanked his dumb ass back before he’d made it out of Michigan.