Tock couldn’t help but snort. “We spent several hours today reminding Max that Streep is gay.”
“Reminding her? She forgot? Or never knew?”
“Of course she knew. We all knew. We have always known. Streep’s parents have always known. The cheerleaders in our school always knew, which was why they were mean to her, and why we stuck wolf spiders in their lockers and milk snakes in their beds. Yet still . . . Max remembers none of it. So, I have no worries about your brothers because no one can be as annoying and insane as Max.”
“That is a good point.”
“I know.”
Shay suddenly looked off and, for several seconds, didn’t speak.
“What?” she pushed when his silence went on and on.
“I feel like I should tell you . . . I think I definitely like like you now.”
“Oh, my God! Are we still doing this?”
“I thought I should warn you.”
“Why?”
“I’m a cat. We don’t like anyone. So when we do like someone, it’s not something we just get over.”
“Meaning you’re a level-five clinger?”
“I’m not a clinger,” he quickly replied. “Unless I’m hanging from a tree. Then it’s kind of fun,” he explained, a big grin on his face. “You just dig your front claws into the wood and let your legs dangle. Total blast.”
When she only gazed at him silently, he cleared his throat and continued. “Anyway, I just want to give you a heads-up—”
“For when you start stalking me?”
“I won’t ever stalk you! If you want to break up, just say you want to break up!”
“Break up? When did we start dating?”
“Fine! Fine!” He tossed up his hands. “Just leave me, then.”
“Leave you?”
“Alone. Despondent. Broken.” He looked off, let out a sigh. “A bitter, unhappy cat that will never recover from the hurt.”
“Will your foster family have to lure you out from under a couch before they can put you up for adoption, too?”
“Maybe.”
*
Shay loved to hear Tock laugh. Too bad she didn’t realize he was being kind of serious. Cats didn’t get attached easily. Whether it was the big ones that were nearly extinct because full-human men with small penises couldn’t stop hunting them into oblivion or the small ones that pissed all over someone’s yard to annoy the family dog—cats got attached. That’s why people sometimes woke up in the morning and found a cat they didn’t have the day before living in their house and expecting to be fed. That person had been chosen and the cat wouldn’t change its mind just because the person felt they weren’t “pet people.” The cat didn’t care.
Not that Shay would ever force his attachment on Tock. That’s what full-humans did to each other. A few of them would become obsessed with their partners and take it way too personally when they were dumped. But Shay wanted to make it perfectly clear to the naked woman sitting across from him on the long table in the laundry room that he was here for more than a “we nearly died so let’s fuck” night.
“Let me see your watch again,” Shay asked.
Tock held out her arm, turning it so he could easily view her watch. “I think Dani wants me to get her a watch like yours.”
“This one was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“Excuse me?”
“It was handmade in Switzerland by an award-winning watchmaker. We’ve been working together for years, so I actually got a discount.”
“I am not spending two hundred and fifty grand on a fucking watch!”
“Now you sound like my dad.”
“Okay. I’m just going to get Dani’s clothes out of the dryer. She’s going to be up soon and I completely forgo—”
“Already done.”
“Huh?”
She poured herself another glass of milk. “I put her clothes in the dryer earlier. Then I took them out and folded them, put them back in her duffel bag.”
“When did you do all that?”
Tock gulped down her milk before replying, “While you napped.” She wiped the milk off her lip with the back of her hand.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“She didn’t want her father touching her underwear.”
“I do her laundry all the time! So do her uncles.”
“Stop using your boring male logic with a ten-year-old girl. Besides, I didn’t mind. And I get it.”
“You get it?”
“In our house, my dad did laundry. My mom did the dishes. Nothing is weirder than walking into your bedroom and finding your dad folding your panties before putting them away. By the time I started wearing bras, those horrifying days were over.”
“Well,” he said, leaning in close, “since we have a little time before she’s awake—”
“Tock! Are you down there?”
“Fuck,” she sighed.
“We were about to,” Shay muttered.
“Even worse, that’s not Mads or the others.”
“Who is it—”
“Tock?” The laundry room door opened and a female badger walked in. Shay remembered her. She was one of Tock’s cousins that he’d met that awful night Tock got poisoned. “There you are . . . Oh.” Her nose scrunched up. “Ohhhh . . . ewwwwwww. Really? I mean, really?”
“What do you want, Shira?”
“Savta needs to talk. In the kitchen. Maybe take a few minutes first to wash the cat funk off you, though.”
“Nice to see you, too,” Shay tossed out as the female spun around and walked out, slamming the door behind her. “I love your family,” he told Tock.
“Don’t start lying to me now, Shay.”
“Yeah. Because I really won’t be able to keep that lie going.”
*
Ric Van Holtz was exhausted. He hadn’t been sleeping the last few days. Sometimes because he didn’t get to bed. Other times because he got to bed but didn’t sleep.
It felt like the New York streets were a war zone. Not due to full-humans, whose antics he was used to and mostly ignored. But due to his own kind, who’d been rampaging around as if they were on the Serengeti instead of East 59th Street.
They couldn’t keep doing that. One bad situation every century or so could be explained away. But several in a short time frame would be very bad for them.
Unfortunately, the one witness who could answer a lot of his questions was not answering anything. Polar bears were notoriously tough and taciturn, using general grunts more than words. Sometimes not even using grunts. And the Italian bear locked in one of his interrogation rooms wouldn’t say anything. Which left him with a very unfortunate decision:
Bringing in someone who could get what they needed out of this bear in a way that few of them wanted to even attempt. His cousin was not happy about it. Van grew up during the Cold War and he didn’t like to return to those days, when both sides did really shitty things to get the information they wanted and needed.
But they were running out of time and options.
Cella Malone sipped her coffee and stared at her phone. Mary-Ellen Koz?owski, head of the New York branch of Katzenhaus, restlessly paced the room like the annoying cat she was. And Bayla Ben-Zeev, who ran the Bear Preservation Council, wrote notes out longhand in Hebrew, going right to left across the page. Van, however, appeared rage-filled, standing with his back against the wall, a to-go cup of coffee in his hand.