chapter SIX

chapter SIXFinn ordered a giant soda and ribs.He needed to think and when he was brainstorming, he required two things: caffeine and meat.The bag of food and the big cup of soda appeared on the counter and Finn grabbed them. He looked out over the food court and searched for a table so he could eat and come up with a game plan. He knew that Keane wouldn’t let this go. Neither would Shay.All three of them wanted answers, but to go back to the badgers in the hope they would actually get answers from any of them, especially Max MacKilligan . . . They’d be better off finding a psychic and asking to talk to their dead ancestors.It was early lunchtime so the food court was already packed but Finn kept swinging his head back and forth, his gaze searching for the first open seat he might spot.When his gaze swung back to the left for the fourth time, he spotted her. He should have noticed her before. She was sitting at a table by herself with three open seats. Nearly every other table was full, but people seemed to be actively avoiding her. Maybe it was the way she was eating. Slowly, methodically. One honey-covered fry at a time. It was definitely off-putting; he understood why the others were avoiding her. Shifters, among their own, didn’t eat like that. They devoured food quickly and with an eye out for a hand or claw that might slip in to steal what was theirs.This long-legged honey badger, however, didn’t seem worried at all about the predators surrounding her. She appeared too distracted, her gaze locked across the room, one foot on her seat, the drip of the fresh honey from her fries going unnoticed.With a shrug, Finn made his way to her table. He had to start somewhere, and she seemed the easiest. If nothing else, he could ask her opinion on how to move forward. Maybe she could give him some idea of how to get Max MacKilligan to assist his family.Forcing a warm smile he did not feel, Finn said, “Hey. Mind if I sit?”The badger’s head slowly turned toward him, and furrowed brows over black eyes glared up at him. After a brief moment of silence, she snarled, “Actually, I do mind . . . fuck off.”* * *The big cat blinked in surprise, then turned and walked away.Glad to be alone again, Mads went back to her honey-covered fries and her deep thoughts.The honey was infused with hot Mexican spices and the deep thoughts were infused with misery. She’d been thinking about all the things she hadn’t done with her life since she’d left Wisconsin. Other than a few duffel bags filled with tank tops, shorts, basketball shoes, and underwear, Mads didn’t have a thing to her name.Except, of course, the three storage spaces in Minnesota, Washington state, and upstate New York filled with cash, passports, weapons, and other necessary supplies for quick getaways. The storage spaces were in border towns so she could easily slip into Canada if she had to.Other than that, though . . . she had nothing!Was this to be her life, then? A life with nothing?Most honey badgers had a hard time settling down full time, happily moving from cabinet to cabinet so that homeowners never knew a honey badger had been there until they noticed that their supply of honey had been replaced with corn syrup. Yet even those honey badgers still had a place they called “home.” A place with a TV set and a closet full of clothes . . . and maybe a kid or two who occasionally called them “mom.”Even Max MacKilligan had begun to settle down. She had a boyfriend now! A male who actually wasn’t afraid of her and, Mads was willing to bet, wouldn’t leave her in the middle of the night because he was terrified she’d kill him one day for the insurance money. An insurance plan he’d had no idea she’d taken out on his life and that he had not signed.In fairness, Max only used that move when the guy ignored earlier signals that he should get out. Even her “It’s over. Leave me alone!” She was just so cute and small that full-human males didn’t take her seriously the way shifter males did. Full-human males thought they could ignore her or push her around and, short of killing them and burying them on hyena land so that Max’s adopted grandfather didn’t have to deal with the fallout should the law come looking, Max had found that making them watch a few Dateline episodes before they “accidentally” found the insurance policy was the only way to get them to go for good.Mads never had clingy boyfriends like that. She always found that a good, solid basketball right to the face got a guy to leave. “It was an accident!” she always told the cops, and making the move during a friendly game, with all her teammates as “witnesses,” had kept her out of jail so far. While any pushy dudes got the message . . . and a broken nose.But Mads’s current dilemma wasn’t about past boyfriends. Or past mistakes. Or a combination of both. Her great-grandmother was dead and Mads realized she had nothing to show for her life except a few championship wins and a couple of MVP awards, but would Solveig Galendotter take any of that seriously? No! The first thing she would ask Mads would be, “Do you have a house? A car? A life?”Mads knew what her great-grandmother had always wanted most for her. A life.A life she could be proud of and a life she could live without fear.Not easy when one side of her entire family wanted her—A tray abruptly slammed down on the table and Mads realized the cat had returned.“You have the only table with space,” he complained, sitting his surprisingly narrow ass down. “So you’re just going to have to suck up my presence.”“Then why did you ask me in the first place?”He picked a boar rib off his plate. “I was being polite.”“A polite tiger? Is that like an honest politician or a charming goat? Maybe a selfless actor?”“I tried. I failed. Can we get past it?”“Whatever.”Mads went back to her fries, deciding just to ignore the tiger sitting catty-corner from her.But he was kind of making that impossible.“You’re getting honey on your knee,” he felt he had to point out to her.“I’ll just lick it off later.”“Ewww.”Mads briefly closed her eyes before asking, “What?”“Can’t you just wipe it off?”“Why would I waste good honey?”“Why would you lick it off your knees in public?”“Because tigers are so known for their manners.”“I know not to lick my knees in public!”“Stop talking to me!”“Fine!”“Fine!”They fell into what Mads could only call a moody silence, and she was grateful. She didn’t want to chat with this dude anymore.“You don’t know who I am, do you?”Mads looked back at the cat. “Am I supposed to?”With half a boar rib hanging from his mouth, he barked, “You just talked to me this morning.”“I did?”“Yes! And were in my cabinets!”“I was?”“Yes! How do you not remember?”Mads shrugged. “My great-grandmother just died. I’m a little out of it right now. She was one of the few of my mother’s family that didn’t actively try to kill me at birth. She basically raised me until I was nine. And my family didn’t even tell me she was dead. Some Viking shamaness did. The family didn’t even give her a proper Viking funeral. They just burned her, put her in a box, and stuck her somewhere in their hoarder house. I don’t even know if she’ll get to Valhalla now. So I’m just . . . sad.”The tiger didn’t say anything, but after a minute of silence he got up from the table and walked away. But he left his food, which most cats wouldn’t do. Then again, no one wanted to hear the sad story of Mads Galendotter. So maybe he’d just made a run for it.She didn’t really think about it, just went back to eating her honey-covered fries and staring across the food court.Mads had no idea how much time had passed when she reached out for a fry and hit hot flesh instead. She looked down at the table and saw that her fries had been moved away and replaced with a huge pile of boar ribs.“You need roasted meat to feed your soul. Not fried foods to destroy it,” the tiger said, back in his seat, eating his own ribs. “I got you the lion portion. The tiger and bear portions will make your stomach burst.”As Mads picked up a rib, she also noticed a large bottle of cold water and a carafe of hot tea.“And don’t worry about your great-grandmother’s soul,” he said between tearing off chunks of meat with his fangs. “When her body was burned, her soul was released to her gods. The ashes are for you. You should get them back. But you don’t have to worry about her. The gods always take care of those most loyal to them.”Mads swallowed, although she hadn’t taken a bite of food yet. She swallowed to get that lump of tears back down her throat. As she’d heard Max MacKilligan scream at Stevie MacKilligan more than once over the years, “Honey badgers do not cry!”But she wasn’t about to cry simply because of what the tiger had said. It was because he’d taken her words and worries seriously. When a girl mentioned Valhalla and “the gods,” most people either snickered or headed to the door. But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d given her words to soothe her own troubled soul. As if he understood.His last name might be Malone but she’d heard from Max that his mother was from an ancient and feared Mongolian tribe made up of tiger shifters. They’d existed before even Genghis Khan terrorized Asia. It just hadn’t occurred to her that Mongolian-Americans would hold true to their ancestors’ beliefs just as Solveig had raised Mads to hold true to hers.“We are Viking,” she would say as Mads watched her replenish stock in her tiny Detroit corner store. “Your mother and that idiot daughter of mine will tell you that we are hyena first, but we were Viking long before we could unleash fang and claw. Remember, it is Odin and Freyja that protect us. They gave us the sword and the axe and the—”“Basketball!” three-year-old Mads would add, lifting up her mini-ball for her great-grandmother to see.Solveig would sigh then and complain, “I have got to stop taking you to that basketball park for lunch breaks.”* * *The loss of a parent or parent figure was never easy, no matter the age. But when Finn’s father was murdered, he’d still had his mother. She’d helped her sons get through the worst time of their lives with the kind of strength that could only come from a woman whose ancestors were born of the hard earth of the Mongolian steppes. When she’d gotten pregnant a year later after a one-night stand with that MacKilligan idiot and her sisters had shaken their heads and clucked their tongues, it was her older sons who’d surrounded her and growled in warning, much to the amusement of their aunts. But if there was one woman who’d needed to find her own way to mourn—a way none of them would hold against her—it was Zaya-Sarnai Selenge.Or, as she was known in the States, Lisa Malone.After quite a few generations in the West, Finn’s family had grown tired of explaining Mongolian naming to . . . well . . . everyone. By the time his great-grandmother came along, she was named Mavis. Her daughter, Deloris. And his mother . . . Lisa. Much easier than explaining that Zaya-Sarnai was not his mother’s first name, but her tribal name or surname. Actually, the names of the two sisters who’d discovered the ability to shift into Siberian tigers and taught it to other women in their clan. Eventually, they’d become too strong and hated to stay any longer, so they’d gone off and started their own tribe. Found some men who could hunt and didn’t irritate them too much. The strongest of the females had babies who could shift without spells or sacrifices as soon as they hit puberty. They soon discovered they could live among the tigers with ease, fighting for food or territory, and surviving the winters more successfully than their all-human clan.When the summers came and the clan wars began, the shifters were stronger than the full-humans, combining their ability to shift and their skills with bow and arrow and sword. Eventually they went from defense to offense, able to take what they wanted. But Zaya—her name meant “destiny”—and Sarnai—her name meant “rose”—didn’t believe in taking just to take. If there was a need, if their tribe might starve or suffer, then they took. If not, they let other clans live in peace. If nothing else, their code yielded “a fat pig for us to devour when we’re hungry and desperate, rather than a skinny, weak one we can barely use,” as Zaya used to say.Centuries later, that philosophy had led to a still-strong, family-connected tribe. Most continued to live on the steppes in Mongolia, but some had moved off to cities in France, Thailand, China, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, and the States to bring in new blood to the family.New blood like the Malones.The fact that Finn’s mother had birthed three strong sons had brought her quite a bit of respect among the family. It wasn’t about race with the Zaya-Sarnai tribe. It was about fangs and claws . . .It was about power.The power of the cat within the blood of every Zaya-Sarnai roaming the world.“Do you live with your entire family in that house?”Surprised by that non sequitur, Finn looked at the badger and replied, “Not my entire family. Just my mother, brothers, and sister.”“You don’t feel trapped?”With a boar’s rib in his mouth, Finn asked, “Huh?”“You don’t feel trapped?” she repeated, then continued, “Tigers usually roam hundreds of miles of territory. But you’re locked in this tiny house with all these other giant tigers. On this tiny property. In that tiny town on Long Island. Don’t you feel like a caged tiger in one of those sideshow zoos?” She raised her hands, fingers curled into mock claws, and began to mime tearing at walls. “Desperately trying to get out. Never to be free again!”She abruptly stopped and faced him. “Ever feel like that?” she calmly asked.* * *The boar rib hung from his mouth and his gold eyes were wide, but she still didn’t expect him to explode.“What is wrong with you?” the cat demanded, startling a table of bears sitting next to them.“What?” Mads asked, watching the bears move their table and chairs over so they didn’t have to deal with a testy tiger in close quarters.“Why would you ask me questions like that? And make me think about being trapped? In a zoo? After I just gave you freshly killed and roasted boar!”“I was just thinking about buying a house.”He gawked at her a long moment before pulling the rib out of his mouth. “What?”“I don’t have my own place. I always hated the idea of it. But I figured if a tiger could live in a house with other tigers, I could live in a house by myself. Or with my teammates. If they come visit.”“I found you asleep in my cabinets this morning. Shoved in with the condiments.”“I’m not sure what your point is.”“I don’t see why you’re worried about living in a house if you can survive in a cabinet.”“It’s one thing to sleep in a different cabinet of my choosing every night. It’s another thing completely to have only one set of cabinets to live in for the rest of your life. That’s just sad.”“Where do you live now?”Mads shrugged.“What does that shrug mean?”“Well . . . right now I’m crashing at Max’s place until we get through the playoffs and hopefully the championships. I just found out that’ll be in New York this year. And I think we have a great chance of getting in. Our team has been on fire this season—”“You don’t have your own apartment?” he rudely cut in.“I don’t like a lot of paperwork. Or anyone but my teammates to know where I live. So I don’t really live anywhere.”“That’s so weird.”“Why’s that weird?”“How is that not weird? Just the basics . . . like, how do you pay taxes?”Mads couldn’t help but smile a little. “Taxes?”“Oh, gods,” he muttered. “You don’t pay taxes.”“Of course I pay taxes. It’s just funny that your first thought was of accounting.”“If there’s one thing in this world that can fuck up a shifter or a full-human, it’s the goddamn IRS.”“Which is why I pay my taxes. I just have a post office box in Wisconsin. It gets checked regularly and that way I don’t miss anything important from the government or anyone else. I don’t need a house to get mail.”“Don’t you need a base of operation, though?”“A what?”“A starting point. My brothers and I meet in the same place, punch each other a little, decide what we need to do, and go from there. When we’re done, we come back to the same place—”“Punch each other?”“A little. Discuss things. Decompress from the day—”“By punching each other?”“A little. And then start again in the morning. It gives us a nice sense of grounding.”Mads rubbed her left eye. “You don’t find that boring?”“No.”“I’m afraid I’d find that boring.”“So you’d rather wake up in a stranger’s cabinet if they come home earlier than you expected?”“It does add excitement.”“And possibly two to four at Rikers for breaking and entering.”“I don’t steal anything.”“It doesn’t matter!” He let out a breath. “All I’m saying is, it’s a good idea to have a place you call home. Your own home. That you legally own. Legally being the big word. Legally.”“I know what it means.”His head tilted to the side, shifting all that gorgeous black hair with white stripes, almost giving her a clear view of his face, as he asked, “Do you?”* * *She pursed her lips, which Finn realized was a sign of annoyance, and both of them went back to eating their ribs.But as Finn used his fangs to strip the flesh from the bone and drop the bone back on the plate, he heard crunching from the other side of the table. He glanced over and froze as he saw the honey badger feed rib after rib into her mouth the same way she’d fed the fries.He didn’t know how long he’d been staring until she stopped mid-chomp. Their eyes met, and she shrugged.“It’s a hyena thing,” she admitted.“I thought you were all honey badger.”“Mostly . . . yeah. But I do have a few hyena traits. Well, just a couple. I giggle at inappropriate times. Like in high school, during this old teacher’s funeral . . . that was awkward. Got a week’s detention for that. And I can crush pretty much anything between my jaws and digest it. Like bone . . . granite . . . steel . . . But before you ask, I do not eat human flesh.”“Why would I ever ask you that?”“Some people ask. But in general, I’m honey badger. When I shift, I’m honey badger. My fangs are honey badger. Temperament . . . honey badger. I can’t get enough of actual honey. Most poisons are just a seasoning to me, especially when snake is involved. Although man-made poisons do seem to give me sinus headaches. And that . . . whatchamacallit . . . ricin? It gives me migraines.”“Really? It kills most people.”“Yeah? It just gives me migraines. Max called me a wuss, though.”Unable to help himself, Finn had to ask. “Why were you and Max poisoned with ricin?”“It’s a long story and involves Hungarians, but it wasn’t really a big deal. And after a couple of Excedrin and a soda . . . I felt much better.”“Okay.” Finn threw up his hands. He couldn’t do this anymore. He had come with a purpose. “I just have to ask this and then I’m going to go back to practice—”“I already told you I do not eat human flesh.”“I was not going to ask you that. Ever!” He scrubbed his face with both hands. “I’ve been told that when it comes to getting information, honey badgers are the best. I thought maybe you could tell me how I could get Max to help me and my brothers.”She frowned. “Do what?”“Get information that could lead us to the people involved in my father’s murder.”“You want Max to help you guys with that?”“Or you.”“I can’t do it.”“Why not?”“That would be betrayal.”“Betrayal?”“Of Max.”“Right. Of Max. So I have to go to Max?”“Yes.”“Fine. I’ll go to Max. Since you won’t do it.”Her nose briefly crinkled. “Max? Who you just threw out of your house this morning? After your brother yelled at her? And all her teammates? Even though she brought you pastries? That Max?”Finn let out a sigh. If he had to hear about those damn pastries one more time . . .“Yes. That Max.”It took a moment, but once she started laughing, she didn’t seem able to stop.* * *“You can stop laughing now,” he complained.But Mads couldn’t. She really couldn’t. Did he really think, after what had just happened that morning, and the way his older brother had treated Max MacKilligan, that she would ever, ever help them with anything? For any reason? Ever?Max would rather set herself on fire than help these big bastards! Or set the brothers on fire.The only reason Max MacKilligan hadn’t burned the house down with the brothers in it that very morning was because of her half-sister. But the Malone brothers’ father was not the father of their young sister. She might legally carry the Malone name, but as far as Max was concerned, Natalie Malone was and always would be a MacKilligan. That connection had kept the brothers physically safe, but it bought them no favors.They could have called in a huge favor after saving the lives of Max and her teammates just the night before. But they’d been cranky tigers instead and blown that opportunity.Now, here was younger brother Flynn or Gin or Bry-in— whatever the dude’s name was—asking how he could ask a favor from Max.And he didn’t expect Mads to laugh about that? Laugh a lot? It wasn’t even the tiny bit of hyena in her that was laughing. It was all bitter, angry, mean-spirited honey badger that couldn’t stop laughing right now.“Are you going to help me or not? Or are you just going to keep laughing at me?”Knowing of only one way to answer that, Mads stood up, patted the tiger on his massive shoulder, and walked away.Still laughing.It was the clearest way possible to get her point across.* * *“So is that a ‘no’ on the helping?” Finn called after her.When she only laughed harder as she disappeared around a corner toward the elevators, he figured that, yeah, it was a “no.”Noticing that she’d left her food plates behind, Finn cleaned off the table and took his time scraping things off so he could sort stuff in the recycle bins. He stopped by the bathroom to wash his hands and returned to practice.“Where did you go?” Keane asked, the blood of an offensive lineman splashed across his face.“I was hungry. And I needed to think.”“You and the thinking.” His brother sighed before reaching out his arm, snatching a wide receiver trying to charge past and throwing the poor leopard back a hundred feet.“I like thinking.”“Why? It never gets you anywhere.”“And you and your mighty instinct do?”“We’re still alive, aren’t we?” Keane snapped.“Barely. But let’s not get into a fight.”“Because you know you can’t take me?”“Because I know Ma will beat both our asses if we get into any more fights. So, while I was eating, I saw one of the badgers in the food court.”“Which one?”“The real blond one. Looks like she just got off the boat from Viking Land.”“What did she say?”“I’ll put it to you this way . . . we’d have a better chance of our ancestors returning to this plane of existence and telling us who murdered our father than getting any help from Max MacKilligan.”A cheetah going at least fifty miles per hour dashed past Keane, but Finn’s brother—without even looking—simply reached his arm out and yanked the cat back by his neck, then flung him toward the rest of the offensive line.“So,” Keane reasoned, “we need to find another way to ask MacKilligan nicely.”Shoulders dropping, Finn let out a breath and gave up attempting to understand his eldest brother.“I’m going to go hit bears,” Finn said, moving toward the giant linebackers whose entire job was protecting the quarterback and receiver.“You should wait thirty minutes after eating,” his brother chastised.Finn was about to tell his brother that was for swimming . . . and for full-humans. But why? Why tell the idiot anything? He’d created the situation they were in; he was the one who had to fix it.As far as Finn was concerned, he was done dealing with all the MacKilligans. He had a preseason game to think about and murderers to track down.He did, however, stop long enough to pull his phone out from where he’d tucked it between his hip and his padding and ordered some flowers for the badger who’d just lost her great-grandmother. He knew how hard it was to lose someone you not only loved but who loved you back. And it didn’t sound as though she had a lot of family members who loved her back.With the order in, Finn tossed his phone to Shay, then abruptly charged the unsuspecting linebackers just standing around waiting for Big Julie to give them orders. She saw him coming, too, and didn’t say anything until he’d decimated half her line. Then she informed the tryouts, “This isn’t the NFL, ladies and gents. You’re around real-life predators now. You have to pay attention or you’re going to do nothing but get your ass kicked all. Day. Long. By big cats with nothin’ better to do.”