“Stop,” he ordered. “She’s fine. She’ll always be fine. So she probably robbed some mall jewelry store and took all their tacky wedding rings and those low-quality tennis bracelets worthless husbands buy their wives when they clearly have nothing but contempt for them.”
“That seems a little harsh.”
“I would never waste my talents on getting that sort of thing for you. You get only the best of what I can get off the black market or steal from the quality jewelers. Just like my daddy does for my mom.”
She tried to hide her smile but he still saw it. And loved it.
“Our baby,” he went on, “is only testing her skills. She and her little friends plotting a heist from a mall store is just healthy teens scratching an instinctual itch.”
She scrunched up her nose in that way he absolutely adored. “You can’t really believe that.”
“Of course, I do. That’s how I got started. At one of those chain jewelry stores where most people buy their wedding rings for second and third marriages. Besides, how cute were they? All trying to pretend that the bags were filled with nothing more than stuff they bought at the game. Let them have their moment. It will build their confidence.”
After staring at him, her mouth hanging open, Ayda asked, “You really think this is helpful?”
“This is helpful. And I am helping. I’m helping you. Because the one thing you don’t want to do is get on the wrong side of our daughter, which is what you’re about to do. Tock can be mean. My Aunt Lucille won’t even speak to her anymore. Said she is Satan’s minion.”
Ayda pulled her hand from his and began to rub her forehead. “Our daughter is too young to be pulling heists with her friends. She doesn’t know how dangerous they can turn. I could easily still be doing time in South Africa because of that heist that went bad.”
“First off, it wasn’t a heist, sweetie. You took over a diamond mine and started a military rebellion. Didn’t they make you their queen?”
“No!” she lashed back. “They made me the ‘goddess of our enemies’ blood,’ which was an honor, I’ll have you know.”
“And your mother was the one who got you out of the country and the reason we can’t visit some of my cousins.” He shook his head. “South Africa does not want you back, baby.”
“I am aware. And I don’t want any of that for our daughter.”
He frowned. “She wants to go to South Africa?”
Ayda slammed her fists on the table. “Goddamnit, Kerry!”
A loud thud outside the glass doors startled them out of the fight they were about to indulge in, and they looked over to see a man lying facedown on their lawn.
“Who the fuck is that?” Ayda wanted to know.
“I have no—”
Another body hit the ground, followed by two more. A few seconds later, Tock and her four honey badger teammates silently landed beside the men, each dropping from the second-story landing.
“What in the world . . . ?” Ayda softly gasped.
For varying reasons, none of the girls had returned to their homes after the team bus arrived at the school to drop them off. While the full-human teammates had gone off with the team captain for a huge celebration party at her parents’ house, Tock and her friends had come back to the house for steaks and shrimp and fresh, still-scrambling scorpions; locally sourced, of course.
After the dinner and a few hours of TV, all five girls had gone to bed. Kerry had assumed that was it. They wouldn’t hear from the girls until morning. Or, if they were acting like normal teenagers, maybe they’d sneak out to smoke some weed or drink a beer or two. That was truly all he’d expected.
He now realized, though . . . he should have known better. Because, at the end of the day, Tock and all her friends weren’t like him and his siblings. Or Ayda and her family. They weren’t just honey badger shifters. They were honey badgers. In their hearts. In their blood. In their souls. They couldn’t switch off the honey badger inside them to easily assimilate with full-humans. Many other shifters didn’t even know their kind still existed.
Their families could blend into any gathering without trouble or concern. They could live for years . . . decades . . . among full-humans without a hint that, at a Sunday family meal, they all indulged in slabs of grilled cottonmouth snake in barbeque sauce along with poison-laced wines. But there were badgers that didn’t assimilate. They didn’t bother. Because they didn’t care. He now realized that was his daughter and her friends . . . these girls were true honey badgers. Mean, vicious, snarling honey badgers that no one should ever sneak up on. Or try to kill while they were having a sleepover at a friend’s house.
Too stunned to do anything to help his child, Kerry instead studied the men on the ground. He knew Chicago gangsters when he saw them. Gangsters who were in his house because his child had not stolen from some mall store. She’d plotted and planned and executed a heist from someone much more dangerous. Someone who’d send henchmen to get his stuff back from little girls, even if they had to kill everyone in the house to do so.
Kerry was awed. He bet the heist timing had been impeccable.
When it came to time, his daughter was always impeccable.
What foolish, foolish men these were. They thought nothing of sneaking into a suburban house in the middle of Wisconsin to get their boss’s stuff back. How hard could it be, they’d probably reasoned, grabbing jewels back from little girls?
But Tock and her friends . . . he almost laughed.
The girls were still dressed in their bedclothes for the overnight stay at the Lepstein-Jackson house. Tock in Kerry’s old college football jersey, even though she had no interest in the sport. Mads in her Chicago Bulls basketball tank that was so long it reached past her knees and had the name “Jordan” emblazoned on the back. Little Cass Gonzalez—whom the other girls now called “Streep” for her ability to cry on cue whenever she was accused of stealing something from the teachers’ lounge at their high school—wore a Hello Kitty nightshirt, Hello Kitty socks, and a Hello Kitty headband to hold back her long brown hair. Gong Zhao had on what Kerry could only call a silk negligee with matching silk robe cinched at the waist by a matching silk belt. It seemed a little mature for a girl barely seventeen, but Gong—nicknamed Nelle for some reason—never wore typical teen clothing. Everything in her wardrobe was designer, including what she was currently wearing. And why a seventeen-year-old had a Lacroix negligee and robe, Kerry really didn’t know. Max MacKilligan, smiling as always, had on a pair of running shorts and a cut-off T-shirt with the singer Pink on the front.
There were, however, some additions to their sleep outfits that hadn’t been there before they’d headed off to bed.
Like gold and platinum necklaces inlaid with diamonds. Ruby and emerald rings on their fingers. Thick platinum bracelets on their wrists and—for the smaller ones—around their biceps. And at least two wore tiaras that he was almost positive once belonged to a European royal family.
“Is that one of the Dutch royal jewels?” his wife asked, her voice filled with awe as she gestured to Gong’s neck.
“Yeah. I think so.” Whatever place they’d broken into was probably a regular jewelry store for the world to see but, underneath or on another floor, laundered stolen jewelry for high bidders. That’s what his kid had gone after.