Hot and Badgered

  “Why do I always have to—oh, fuck it!”

  Max charged off after their sister and Charlie headed into the house with Berg behind her.

  “Let’s get your dog and . . .” Charlie stopped, her gaze locked on the living room window. “Isn’t that your dog?” she asked, pointing at the enormous animal wiggling on his back in the middle of the grass.

  “It is.”

  But if her sister had seen the dog in the yard, she wouldn’t have run out of the house, leaving the safety of closed doors. So Stevie had reacted to something inside the house.

  Charlie reached under the coffee table and grabbed the .45 Max had holstered under there, putting a round in the chamber. Berg’s “Whoa!” barely registered before she went through the house, her weapon clasped in both hands, her elbows out at her sides. She never held the gun far from her body. That would make it easy for someone to knock it out of her hands when she went around a blind corner.

  She stopped a few feet from the kitchen and glanced back at Berg. “What are those sounds?”

  He paused a moment, then rolled his eyes. He walked over to the swinging door and pushed it open. With the gun still in front of her, Charlie moved closer but immediately lowered the weapon when she saw a group of what she assumed were her neighbors sitting at her kitchen table or leaning against the counter and devouring her food.

  “I see your mistake,” Berg explained, moving into the kitchen. The neighbors barely noticed him. “You left the window open.”

  “We smelled all this a block away,” a sow said between bites of lemon cookies.

  “Did Tiny give you the right garbage cans?” a male bear asked, remnants of raspberry Danish in the corners of his mouth.

  “The right garbage cans?”

  “Yeah,” Berg explained. “Bear proof.”

  Charlie felt her left eye twitch. “I need bear-proof garbage cans?”

  “Some of us get hungry at night when we’re roaming around,” another sow explained. “But we’re usually too lazy to shift back to human to get the garbage cans open.”

  “When we do get the garbage cans open, most of us are quite neat about it,” the first sow explained as she reached for the ginger cookies. “We put back in the cans what we don’t eat. But some people—”

  “Like the Hendersons, three doors down.”

  “—aren’t so polite. But if you bear-proof, you’ll be fine.”

  Charlie nodded a silent thank-you to the intruders before glancing at Berg and growling, “Can I speak to you outside?”

  * * *

  Berg followed Charlie into the backyard, but he was a little surprised when she suddenly spun toward him, an angry finger pointing at his chest.

  “You said we’d be safe here!”

  “You are.”

  “How can you”—she stepped back to allow a hysterically screaming Stevie to run past her; a snarling Max followed close behind with Berg’s ridiculously happy dog after both of them—“say that when there are bears in my kitchen?”

  Berg didn’t answer her right away. He was too busy watching Stevie leap up and over the two-car garage behind the house. Max and the dog, sadly, had to run around the garage to get to her.

  “Wow. She cleared that easy.”

  “Pay attention to me!” she ordered. And when she had his attention, she said again, “There are bears in my kitchen!”

  “Yeah . . . so?”

  She threw up her hands. “In what world is that safe?”

  “Let’s start with . . . how about no yelling? And you couldn’t be safer than with bears in your kitchen.”

  “Explain that to me,” she managed to say without raising her voice.

  “You’re worried about strange guys coming into your house, killing you and Max, and kidnapping Stevie, right?”

  “That would be the most likely scenario.”

  “How are they going to get past a bunch of hungry bears in your kitchen?”

  She opened her mouth to reply, closed it, opened it, then demanded, “What?”

  “We scented that weasel long before he ever hit our street. My sister had binoculars on him as soon as his car rumbled around the corner. We are very protective of our neighborhood. We have to be. We’ve got a huge lion pride that way”—he pointed south, then east—“and three wolf Packs that way.”

  Charlie suddenly glanced off. “I did hear roaring last night. I thought I was just really tired.”

  “That was Craig. Old lion male. Retired Navy man. Super cranky. He roars every night to let us all know where his territory begins and ends. And when the full moon comes, you get the howling. Unless the wolves have had tequila. Tequila nights are noisy nights.”

  Charlie folded her arms across her chest and asked, “You don’t find that . . . weird?”

  “Find what weird?”

  “Being surrounded by lions and wolves and . . . bears in my kitchen. That seems really weird to me.”

  “Not to me, but I grew up in an all-bear neighborhood in Seattle. Lots of hippy bears. Lots of honey and pot.” He motioned to her. “You weren’t raised by badgers at all? Because they usually keep close to their own.”

  She snorted. “We’re not considered ‘their own.’ After my mom died, we lived with my grandfather’s Pack. They protected us, but they didn’t really”—she briefly struggled for the right words—“teach us. That’s not right either. They taught us stuff . . . just not shifter stuff.”

  “What did they teach you?”

  “They taught me and Max how to drive . . . of course, that was so we could chauffer Stevie around to all her college classes and private lessons.”

  “Oh.”

  “The shifter stuff they taught their pups, but they didn’t consider us their pups. They just made sure we were fed and kept alive. And my grandfather was busy running the Pack. I think he thought his Packmates were helping us more . . . but they really weren’t. Still, they didn’t try to kill us either or chase us off before we were eighteen, so I considered that a win.”

  “I guess. So, in other words, you don’t spend a lot of time around other shifters.”

  “I don’t. And Stevie doesn’t. Max has a bunch of friends through—”

  “The weasel?”

  She smirked. “He’s the brawniest member of the badger family. I would suggest you not fuck with him.”

  Berg suddenly heard crunching sounds behind him and turned to see that the weasel was standing behind him, biting off chunks of meat and bone from a frozen-solid leg of lamb.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” he said around his food. “The bears ate almost all the sweet stuff and I was really hungry.”

  He took another bite, his wolverine jaw easily decimating what most humans and several breeds of shifters would have to thaw first.

  Charlie stared at the weasel with a definite look of distaste before ordering, “Go away. Over there.”

  Without question and still eating, he moved away from them.

  Berg was glad to see she didn’t like Max’s friend. Especially when the first thing Britta had said about him behind her binoculars was, “Nice ass on that short guy.”

  “Well, now that you’re here,” Berg suggested, “we can teach you about shifter stuff.”

  “What do I need to know?”

  “Can you scent the difference between a polar bear and a grizzly?”

  “Don’t all bears smell alike?”

  Berg looked off for a moment and took a deep breath. He especially didn’t like the weasel’s knowing laugh.

  “No,” he finally replied. “We do not all smell alike.”

  “Okay. Okay. Don’t get moody.”

  “But see? It’s insults like that I . . . we . . . can help you avoid.”

  “If you think it’s necessary.”

  Before Berg could tell Charlie exactly how necessary it was—especially if she was going to live in this neighborhood without broken bones—Clark McKlintock walked around the garage, through the back gate in the fence, and
over to the pair.

  “Hey, Clark.”

  “Berg.”

  “Charlie, this is Clark McKlintock. He lives on the next block. He’s a polar.”

  She stared at Clark for a few seconds, then asked, “Should I smell him?”

  “I wouldn’t.” Berg shook his head and again focused on Clark. “So what’s up, Clark?”

  “Was wondering if this is yours?”

  “If what’s mine?”

  Clark turned around and showed them his back, where the quivering, sobbing mess that was Charlie’s baby sister had attached herself. She was still human, but claws on both her hands and feet were buried deep into poor Clark’s flesh.

  “Oh, shit!” Charlie immediately grabbed her sister around the waist. “Let him go!”

  “Safe bear,” Stevie said. “Safe bear. It petted dog. So he is safe bear.”

  Well . . . that was logic. Not necessarily good or sound logic though.

  Charlie attempted to drag her sister off Clark’s back but she simply dug her claws in deeper.

  Clark looked over his shoulder at Berg. “Could you get this mutt off me, please?”

  Berg almost thumped the polar in the back of the head. “Mutt” was a rude way to talk about hybrids, but Charlie didn’t seem to notice. Mostly, he was sure, because she was busy trying to deal with her sister. But also because she didn’t know better. She didn’t know she’d just been insulted.

  But he did. And it pissed him off for her.

  Pulling Charlie’s hands away from her sister, Berg said, “You know what? Let’s make this a learning opportunity.”

  Charlie frowned at him but, after a moment, she took a step back.

  “Now,” Berg said, using his best professorial voice, “this may appear bad. And it is. But your sister still managed to choose well in this instance.”

  Now completely confused, Charlie looked over at the weasel. At this point, he only had a hunk of frozen bone left, and he was gnawing on it like a chicken bone.

  He grinned around his meal at Charlie’s questioning look and nodded.

  With a shrug, Charlie said, “Is that a fact? Please explain.”

  “First, polar bear is always a good choice. It never occurs to them to react to anything. They just lope along.”

  “You do know that what she’s doing to me now hurts, right?” Clark asked.

  “Whereas,” Berg continued, “grizzlies are fast to react. Chances are if she had done this to my sister, Britta would have shifted to her grizzly form and dropped back-first onto the ground. But a polar . . . ? I’m surprised he even noticed. They’re so slow . . . and dull-witted.”

  “Hey,” Clark complained. “Wait a minute—”

  “They’re also slow moving physically. Compared to grizzlies, I mean. And almost every other shifter . . . ever. You and your sisters could easily outrun them. And you can easily out-think them. Without much trouble. Because they’re that fucking stupid.”

  Clark jerked around and pushed him, which pissed Berg off, so he shoved the polar back and let the muscle between his shoulder blades grow, making his shoulders larger.

  But before he could go after the big idiot, Charlie stupidly jumped between them, her arms spread wide to keep them apart. Had she lost her mind? She couldn’t be that clueless to the shifter life, could she? Then again, he and Dag had gotten in the middle of a badger fight—so who was he to talk?

  “Hey! Hey! Gentlemen!” She looked at both of them. “Stop it right now!”

  With her arms still outstretched, she pointed one finger at Berg. “And I don’t need you to protect me from big, slow-moving assholes.”

  “I’m not slow,” Clark said. And when they stared at him, he added, “Mind or body . . . owwwww!” Eyes wide, he stared at Charlie. “I think her claws are getting longer.”

  “They’re totally getting longer,” she said with no obvious sense of urgency. “In fact, they can get so long that they can sever your spine in at least ten places.” She stepped in close to Clark, gazing up at him without any fear. “Because me and my sister are mutts and that’s what we do. We are freaks of nature and we can erase you. So be nice to us . . . or I’ll show you exactly what I can do to you.” She stepped around him, stopping by his side, and adding, “And you won’t even have time to scream.”

  Moving away from the stunned polar, she barked, “Let him go, Stevie!”

  Stevie suddenly hit the ground, her ridiculously long claws covered in blood and gore.

  The poor girl was panting and sweating and completely freaked out.

  With her gaze locked on Clark, Charlie ordered the weasel, “Take her inside, Dutch.”

  “With the bears?” he asked.

  Charlie scrunched up her nose, annoyed. “Shit.”

  “No, no,” Stevie ground out. “I’ll be fine.” Pressing her fists against the ground, she forced herself up. “I can be around the bears.”

  Charlie sighed. “Sweetie—”

  “I can be around the bears!”

  That slightly hysterical bellow had both Berg and Clark taking a big step back, away from the thin hybrid. Her sister, though, moved closer. And she laughed a little.

  “Brave woman,” Clark muttered low to Berg.

  “You sure?” Charlie asked her sister. “I’m sure the idiot wouldn’t mind taking you out for ice cream.”

  “The idiot you love,” the weasel corrected. And Berg wanted to slap him. Just once. Back of the head.

  “There’s a great place a few blocks over. Sammy’s Ice Cream Palace. Only a few minutes away,” Berg told her. But when Charlie raised an eyebrow, he quickly added, “A full-human place. Lots of full-humans. You can find the address on your phone. But I’d suggest using any water hose at any house to wash off her hands and feet—since full-humans usually freak out at the sight of young women covered in gore.”

  “Excellent.” The weasel pushed himself away from the house and came toward Stevie.

  From around the corner, Max came running in, panting, with Berg’s dog beside her. He seemed happy and entertained. She, however, did not.

  She started to speak but the panting kept her from anything more than harsh breathing sounds.

  Max rested her hand against her hip and bent over at the waist.

  Laughing, the weasel went to his friend. He turned away from her and, with some sort of unspoken offer and acceptance, Max climbed onto his back. She rested her arms on his shoulders and he held her with his hands under her legs.

  He started off, and Stevie fell in beside them. She seemed much calmer now, but who knew how long that would last.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Berg asked Charlie. “This is New York. There are a lot of bears in New York. And Jersey.”

  “She’ll be fine once she’s back on her meds.”

  “Why would she be off her meds?”

  Charlie didn’t answer him, just walked back into the house.

  “You know you don’t have a chance with her, right?” Clark asked about Charlie.

  Unable to resist any longer, Berg slapped the back of the polar’s head. He probably put more force behind it than was necessary, but Clark was getting a little of the residual anger Berg felt toward the weasel too.

  Clark spun around, fist pulled back, but all Berg had to say was, “Don’t make me get my sister.”

  Lowering his arm and sneering, Clark headed back toward his street.

  “Just keep those honey-stealing badgers off our territory,” he warned before disappearing around the garage.

  Although Berg wasn’t really as worried about the MacKilligans’ honey-stealing ways as he was about what would make a very careful Charlie suddenly allow her panic-riddled sister to go off her much-needed medication.

  chapter NINE

  The waitress placed a giant Viking boat in front of her sister filled with what was called a banana split but, to Max, looked like a wide bowl of useless calories. And Stevie dove into it like she hadn’t eaten in days.

  “Is this
why you’re so thin?” Max asked. “Because you’re eating all this crap instead of real food? You haven’t gone vegan, have you?”

  Mouth full of ice cream, banana, nuts, chocolate, and caramel, Stevie gazed at Max. “Really?” she finally asked, chocolate and caramel already smeared on her chin and upper lip.

  “Let her enjoy her ice cream,” Dutch said between sips of his strawberry shake. “And since ice cream is filled with dairy, doubt she’s become a vegan.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her to become some hippy freak just to get under my skin.”

  Stevie said something but her mouth was full of banana split, so Max leaned forward and asked, “What?”

  She swallowed and said, “Fuck you.”

  Dutch laughed loud, causing the Ice Palace patrons to look over at them.

  “The best part,” Dutch explained while still laughing, “was that you leaned forward to get that.”

  “Shut up,” Max said. Then she laughed too.

  This was why she kept Dutch around. With all the shit that went on in her life, it was nice to have someone who saw the humor is goddamn everything. And she adored his family. They’d let her stay at their house any time she’d wanted. She’d hang with Dutch and his loud, ridiculous sisters, and their parents had been fine with it.

  Even Stevie would sometimes go to Dutch’s house and spend time with the wolverines. She never found them threatening for some reason. She didn’t jump into their hardcore play, but instead would sit somewhere, working in her notebooks and watching the family interactions. They didn’t pressure her to be part of anything, so she felt welcome and comfortable.

  There had been only one problem over the years . . .

  “So Charlie still hates me.”

  “Yes,” both Max and Stevie said together.

  “Why?” Dutch asked. “I’m charming. Adorable. Everybody loves me.”

  Stevie swallowed her ice cream before replying. “She thinks you’re a bad influence on Max.”

  Max and Dutch laughed at that . . . but they stopped when Stevie continued to eat her banana split and stare at them.

  “You’re serious?” Dutch asked.

  “Very. She doesn’t trust you. She thinks you’ll be the one who will put Max in prison.”