Kerry didn’t know which confused and concerned him more: how his daughter and her friends had found out about this place in Chicago, or how the people in Chicago had found out about his daughter and her friends so quickly. No one, absolutely no one, would expect a bunch of teen girls to break into a place like that. A smash-and-grab, maybe, but a planned assault in the middle of the night with no alarms going off and no cops arriving until the manager came in the next morning to open up? That was a job for old-timers who had been jewelry thieves for decades. That one last job before retirement. Not a starter job for five girls who were still in high school.
Tock signaled to the girls and they began to move. Kerry was only able to glance quickly at an equally shocked Ayda. The seventeen-year-olds had hand signals to communicate silently, as if they were combat trained. They didn’t do that sort of thing on the court. They yelled at one another when they wanted to make a certain move during a game. But when they had bodies to deal with in the middle of the night . . .
Kerry gave a short shake of his head. He knew his girl was special but damn!
Cass grabbed an arm and was about to start dragging a body away when her gaze locked on Kerry and Ayda. She let out a strange little “eep” that they could easily hear despite the glass doors.
“What?” Mads whispered.
Cass simply motioned to Kerry and Ayda with a jerk of her chin and all the girls faced them. Stared. Their eyes glinting in the darkness like any other night-seeing animal.
For a moment, Kerry thought the girls would just run off, leaving the bodies behind. He wouldn’t blame them. It was a normal adolescent reaction to being caught with dead bodies.
Of course, he reminded himself, these were not “normal” adolescents. Not even normal adolescent honey badgers. That was clear when little Max MacKilligan raised her arm in the air, waved, and yelled while grinning, “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson! Beautiful night, huh?”
Kerry had no reply. He was not sure he was supposed to reply. Because that would be weird.
But he had to let that thought go as he saw his precious daughter begin to slowly walk toward the glass doors; the frown she had on her face grew deeper and darker the closer she got.
“Oh, my God,” he heard his wife whisper, “she’s going to kill us both.”
He thought Ayda might be right when Tock reached the doors and stood there, glaring at them both. In that moment, Kerry truly believed his daughter was actually contemplating killing them. Not because she wanted to or hated them, but because they’d seen too much. A terrifying decision but, if he wanted to be honest, very logical. And his daughter was always logical.
He held his breath as she slowly lifted her hand and abruptly jabbed at the glass.
“Is that my rum raisin?” she demanded loudly.
Kerry and Ayda both looked down at the ice cream they’d been eating and then at each other. They were at a loss, but Tock was waiting for an answer.
After clearing her throat, Ayda softly replied, “It’s rum raisin.”
“So my rum raisin,” his daughter insisted, annoyed. “All the rum raisin in this house is mine. You know that, Ma.”
His wife blinked a few times before replying, “I . . . uh . . . guess that’s true. You do love rum raisin.”
“Are you going to replace it?” his child wanted to know, finally sounding like a true teenager.
“There’s more in the freezer in the garage,” Kerry told her.
“You sure?” Tock demanded.
“I always make sure there’s rum raisin in the house, baby. I know how you are,” he added.
“I’m going to be really mad if there isn’t. I was planning to eat it for breakfast.”
“That’s not breakfast,” he told her.
“It is for me. Don’t try and control me, Dad,” she whined.
Then, with that, she turned away and motioned to the bodies.
Without another word, the girls reached down and grabbed arms or legs. Cass and Gong took one body; Tock and Max took another. Mads hefted a large male onto her shoulder, then grabbed the leg of the last. Tock also reached down and took a leg and, together, the girls walked off with their prey.
When they disappeared into the trees behind the house, Ayda looked at him with an expression that could only be called . . . tense.
“Before you panic,” he began, ignoring her raised eyebrows and wide eyes, “I’m sure they’re just going to bury those bodies on hyena territory. You know . . . because we all bury our bodies on hyena territory.”
The fingers on her left hand began to tap on the wood table. Not a good sign. His wife was much more frightening when she became silent. Chatty, hysterical Ayda could be reasoned with. But silent, finger-tapping, glaring Ayda could not.
“Okay,” he continued. “I’m guessing you’re not worried about where they’re planning to bury the bodies.”
Fingers tapped.
“Or how your daughter and her friends quietly killed four armed gangsters in our house without our even knowing . . .”
Fingers continued to tap.
“Or how those gangsters knew it was Tock and her friends in the first place.”
Still those fingers tapped.
“Instead, I’m guessing that you are trying to figure out how your mother is involved in all this.”
The tapping immediately stopped and her fingers curled into a fist. Kerry leaned back in the chair.
“Yeah,” he said on a long sigh, “that’s what I figured.”
Chapter 1
Eleven years later . . .
First the bump; from behind. Then the mumbled apology. Lastly, a piece of paper shoved into her left hand.
Emily “Tock” Lepstein-Jackson kept walking through the crowd, not looking at the man who’d bumped into her. Instead, she waited until she reached a porta potty. She didn’t go in. She couldn’t do that. She went around it and stopped between the porta potty and the six-foot security fence to look at the piece of paper in her hand.
This sort of thing hadn’t happened in a while, because she wasn’t working for anyone. Well, she wasn’t working for any government. She did work for the shifter nation. That’s where her true loyalty lay. Governments were changeable entities—one day a democratic paradise, the next a totalitarian nightmare. She didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of history, so she gave her loyalty to the one group that hadn’t changed in thousands of years. Shifters. Their only goal was to keep their kind safe and able to thrive. They never wanted to be science experiments. They didn’t want to be hunted for trophies. They didn’t want to be sex toys for those who thought they were “exotic.” And they definitely didn’t want to end up as steaks on some full-human’s dinner plate.
That was a belief system Tock could get behind. And an employer who didn’t sneakily shove pieces of paper into her hand in the middle of a street party thrown in honor of her teammate Mads’s grandmother. She was in Detroit with her four teammates and some big cats to relax. To eat amazing food, to get in a little street ball, maybe to flirt a bit with the local cutie pies. Not to be part of some covert operation that could get her—
“Shit.”
Tock crumpled the paper, pulled out a lighter she only used for this sort of thing because she didn’t smoke, and set the paper on fire. She held it between her thumb and forefinger until it had burned down to the tiniest scrap. Her fingers hurt a little from the flame, but they’d heal soon enough.