chapter FIFTEEN

chapter FIFTEENCharlie congratulated her sister and her team, but she was in no mood for a dinner filled with animals she would never dine on—zebra steaks? Really? But eating horse was bad? What was the difference? Why couldn’t anyone tell her that? Because other than the stripes, Charlie didn’t see that big a difference between horses and zebras!—and watching her honey badger sister and her honey badger friends drink more and more deadly snake poisons to “celebrate” their win. So she went home after getting everyone settled for their night of “fun.”After parking her car, she debated whether to go to her rental house first or the Dunn house across the street to see the love of her life. The only reason she didn’t go to see Berg first was because she really should check on her baby sister. Although life with her panda had made Stevie a lot more tolerant of having “man-eating bears” around the house, it still freaked her out when they began to “surround us like they’re going to eat us all!” Something the bears on this street would never do because they were smart enough to know that if they ate Stevie or Max, they would never get any more baked goods from Charlie.As it was, she wasn’t sure how she was going to tell them that she would be playing football from time to time. If they thought it would cut into her baking time, they might get a little hysterical.Charlie heard a whistle and stepped away from her car door. She smiled. Berg was sitting on the open back gate of his triplet sister’s pickup truck. It was specially reinforced, so it could handle weight up to thirty-five-hundred pounds. Which was good because that’s nearly what the triplets weighed together. Not quite, but close . . .As always, Charlie loved seeing Berg’s handsome face. True, it matched the faces of two other people in nearly every way, but it was weird how she could immediately tell the difference between him and his “identical” brother, Dag. Even early in the morning, when she barely had both eyes open, and they were dressed exactly alike for that day’s security job, she never kissed the wrong one goodbye.“Our own mother gets us confused,” Dag would complain.Which would force Charlie to point out that in the brief time she’d met their hippy mother, who loved to smoke the honey-infused cannabis she sold to bears for a hefty sum, “She gets me confused with Max.Max. So I wouldn’t take it too personally.”“How did your tryouts go?” Berg asked as soon as Charlie put her arms around his waist and buried her head in his massive chest.“Pretty good, I guess.”“Just pretty good? I heard you put John Hartman through a wall.”“Who’s John Hartman?”“Offensive lineman. Used to date my sister. So she adores you like the sun now.”“I didn’t know. They just said—”“Get the guy with the ball. Yeah. Apparently stories of your tryout are all over the Sports Center. Her hockey team is pissed, though.”“Why?”“They should have gotten you first.”“I. Can’t. Skate.”“They figure, how hard can it be to learn?”“Very!”There was the slightest change in Berg’s body. The slightest shift in the tension of his muscles. But, for once, Charlie had remembered to take her allergy meds, so she could actually smell what was now standing behind her.* * *Berg knew he could have grabbed her. Could have held her tight. Could have yanked her onto the back of his sister’s truck to keep her away from the two females who’d silently sidled up to them in the dark. He could have done all that.But where would the fun be? And that was the upside of loving a MacKilligan sister. The fun! The downside, of course, was the worry when they went out at night and you weren’t sure they’d come back in one piece or come back at all. Because they faced such daunting nightmares out there in the world. But the upside was the entertaining crazy they brought to a shifter world in which everything had run a certain way for the last ten thousand years or so. It didn’t matter if it was Zé dealing with a smiling Max or Shen watching out for an easily startled Stevie or Berg watching a distrustful Charlie. Their lives had not been the same since they’d become involved with the MacKilligans.That’s why when Charlie, with blinding speed, suddenly yanked herself out of his arms, spun, and swung her fist at one of the females standing behind her, he didn’t attempt to stop her. He just sat back and watched what Charlie would do next. Because that would all depend on her mood.Her brutal fist slammed into a nose that had been broken so many times, another hit should not have hurt, but clearly it did. The She-wolf stumbled back, blood splattering the wolf’s face and Cella Malone standing next to her.“You evil little whore!”“Oh, my gosh! It’s you!” Charlie put her hands to her mouth in feigned surprise. “I’m so sorry, but you scared me.”“Liar!”“I didn’t know what was behind me. I just knew I was unsafe.”It seemed her mood tonight was “taunting innocence.” Charlie didn’t get to pull that one out very often. Mostly she had to go with “deadly threat” or “no one leaves here alive.” It was nice to see her able to have some fun for once.“You poor thing. Are you okay?” She reached out to the She-wolf, who stepped back.It was not something Berg ever thought he’d see. Because this wasn’t just any She-wolf. This was a Smith wolf. From a greatly feared pack that had whole Southern towns named after them, towns they ran with an iron claw. But even that wasn’t the most important thing about this particular She-wolf. She wasn’t just a Smith wolf... she was Dee-Ann Smith. A former Marine and the most feared wolf anywhere apart from her daddy, Eggie Smith. The pair of them were only spoken about in hushed whispers. And the last thing you wanted was one of them showing up at your door for any reason. Even worse . . . was if both of them showed up.Shifters of all breeds, all species avoided Dee-Ann Smith. Only those who knew her well ever got close to her. And yet, Charlie MacKilligan had nearly killed her once because Dee-Ann had made her mad. The boundary crossed had to do with Charlie’s baby sister, Stevie, and that was a fool’s move. Max could take care of herself but Stevie . . .Well, Stevie was unique. Sweet, brilliant, a little fragile mentally, and wildly unstable when it came to her shifting abilities. Although Charlie and Max rarely agreed on anything in life, they did agree on three things: their love of horror movies, protecting Stevie from the world, and protecting the world from Stevie.When it looked like Dee-Ann was about to interfere, Charlie did not hold back. The only thing that kept Dee-Ann alive was that she was a powerful She-wolf with centuries of good breeding stock behind her. And decades of Marine and Eggie training to keep her alive.But that shattered nose she was desperately trying to put back in place so it could knit together during the night . . . that was just Charlie toying with her. Because she knew her message had gotten across the first time.“I’m really sorry. I didn’t take my allergy meds—”Lie. He’d been standing right there when she downed her allergy meds with orange juice and a muffin. Then she’d used her nasal spray.“—so I can’t smell a thing! And I heard something behind us—”Another lie. The one thing a Smith could do at birth was move without making a sound. Berg didn’t want to think about all the times he’d found a bunch of Smiths suddenly standing next to him at some event where he’d been hired as security. It drove him nuts! How could he be doing his job when he didn’t notice that Smiths had eased their way in without invites? And then sidled up to him without a sound so he didn’t even notice! And yes, he always tossed them out of those venues with way more . . . well . . . let’s just say “enthusiasm” than was necessary.“—so I just reacted. You understand, right?”“No! You lying little liar!”“It doesn’t matter,” the She-tiger said over Charlie’s dramatic gasp. “We’re here for a reason.”A cat was an odd partner for a wolf to have, but the Marines made for strange bedfellows.And Dee-Ann Smith and Cella Malone were as strange as anyone could get.“It’d better not have to do with my baby sister,” Charlie said through her teeth, but with a giant smile. “I don’t want to get angry.”“This has nothing to do with her,” Malone said. “It’s all about you and Max. And what you were up to last night in Chinatown.”The fake smile on Charlie’s face faded and was quickly replaced by a sly real one.“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”“Yeah. That’s what the Yuns said. But we don’t believe them either.”“Look, I don’t know what you want—”“Cops were all over that part of Chinatown yesterday. There was blood everywhere. We have our people on it, but we can’t have a war between you and the Yuns.”“A war? Are they threatening a war?”“You took out one of the leader’s daughters—did you think that was going to be ignored?”“I don’t know why not. You ignored what happened to your uncle.”Malone’s gold eyes narrowed and Smith abruptly stopped trying to fix her nose.“Excuse me?” the She-tiger snarled.“Oh, you didn’t know? Your family kept that from you? You see, Natalie, the half-sister of the Malone brothers, is also the half-sister of the MacKilligan sisters, which makes the Malone brothers family. And I heard how their father was murdered and his own family—the Malones, namely you—did nothing about it. You know, my mother was murdered in front of me and my own father did nothing because, well, he didn’t care, so you can see why that would bother me. But the MacKilligan sisters do care. We care, so we’re going to help. That’s what family does. But seeing that the Malone tigers didn’t help family, I just assumed the Yuns wouldn’t do anything either. I just thought that was the tiger way or something. I thought the Malone brothers were just different or freaks or something.”Charlie stepped closer to Cella Malone. “But you can tell the Yuns that if they want a war, they can have a war. And I can do to all of them what I did to their precious daughter after she lured my sister into a trap and threw her into an incinerator.”Malone blinked. “Max is dead?”“No.”Malone glanced off, briefly confused. “So the incinerator wasn’t turned on?”“Oh, no. It was on. And if it was anyone other than Max and her friends, they’d all be dead. But it was Max . . . and her friends . . .”“I don’t understand. Max is not dead?”“No.”“But she was in an incinerator.”“Yes.”“That was turned on.”“Oh, yes. Full blast.”“And now she’s horribly deformed?”“No. A few scars, but she already had a few scars so . . .” Charlie shrugged.With seemingly nothing left to say to anyone, Charlie reached over and gently closed Malone’s open mouth, then took Berg’s hand.“You guys have a nice night now,” she said before leading him toward her rental house to check on her baby sister.* * *“Look what that evil bitch did to my nose!”“How does anyone survive an incinerator?” Cella asked. She kept telling herself that the honey badger-wolf hybrid must be lying. Except Charlie didn’t seem to lie about big things. She lied about little things. Like not knowing it was Smith standing behind her and being startled. But when it came to her sisters . . . that woman didn’t lie. Ever. “An incinerator that was turned on full blast?”“I may need actual plastic surgery to fix this! Do you understand that? Smiths don’t get plastic surgery, Malone! What am I supposed to say at our next family reunion? Got my nose decimated by a mean little hybrid with daddy issues?”“It’s not physically possible for them to have survived.”“Are you even listening to me, Malone?”“No!”They were back in Cella’s car. The Trans-Am she’d had in high school and had souped-up all summer so that it was, in a word, awesome! Smith had helped her. The woman knew her way around a car, and they’d had fun working on it. But having to deal with the MacKilligans over the last couple of months had been a nightmare. That family wasn’t . . . normal.Okay. None of them were “normal.” But the MacKilligans and the shifters they chose to associate with were so far removed from normal, it was like they were from another galaxy. Light-years away from normal.“What are we going to do?” Cella asked Smith. “If the Yuns come for them—”“They’ll come! How could they not? It’s about honor now.”“Do you actually know something or are you saying this because you used to watch those Run Run Shaw movies with your dad when you were a kid?”“I said that one time and no! I’m talking about the fact that they are very Americanized gangsters,” Smith said. “We’d be having the same conversation no matter where their relatives came from because gangsters are gangsters.”“We cannot let them have a full-blown battle in the middle of the five boroughs and think that the full-humans won’t notice. Gang wars they notice.”“Look, when it comes to the Group, we’re just guns for hire. This is for upper management to handle.”“In other words, let your husband and his uncle handle it?” Cella asked.“Yeah. That’s what he gets paid for. We ain’t making enough to put up with this level of shit! He didn’t get his nose broken!”“Fine. But you need to stop being a wuss about your fucking nose.”“Really?” Smith pulled off the towel Cella had given her to help stanch the flow of blood and wiped her hand across her nose.“You wouldn’t dare,” Cella growled out, watching as Smith had the nerve to slash her blood-drenched hand across the passenger-side dashboard of Cella’s car.“Now are you worried about my nose?” Smith asked. “Or should I do the same thing to your backseat?”“This . . . this is why cats hate canines!”