“I’ve got it,” Max said, but she wasn’t standing where she had been. She’d already disappeared into the trees.
* * *
“Hi, Betsey.”
Betsey froze; that voice whispering in her ear. She hadn’t lived in the Pack house for years. She only came home for major holidays and one week during the summer. Otherwise, she stayed as far away from the Pack as possible. Not because they were cruel to her. They really hadn’t been. But as a hybrid, she hadn’t really been accepted either. Tolerated? Yes. Accepted? No.
So she only came when necessary. Like this weekend. It was her mother’s birthday on Sunday. And Betsey did what she always did when she came here . . . stayed out of everyone’s way; kept to the shadows. It wasn’t hard. No one was ever looking for her except her mother, and no one would care when she left Monday morning.
Yet things had been different since she’d arrived Friday night. She knew why, too. It was them. The MacKilligan sisters. She remembered when they’d first arrived. Alone and dirty, they’d managed to secure a spot at the house despite the strong Alpha who always made it clear that he loathed hybrids of any kind. But they’d gotten him out and Betsey had never seen the man again. She used to think that had been down to their grandfather. He’d been so angry that day . . .
But a few years later, out of nowhere, their ex-Alpha had reappeared, very much alive. According to her mother, he’d immediately started making noises, causing problems, had rounded up some lone wolves to create a makeshift Pack in the hope of reclaiming what he still thought was his. It had gotten so bad that Charles and his Beta had traveled to Milwaukee to meet with the Smith Pack to ask them to help back up the much smaller Pack, something he did not want to do. But Charles had always been willing to make sacrifices to protect his Pack; especially with his two adopted granddaughters still under eighteen.
Betsey happened to be back the weekend he’d headed off for that meeting and, about thirty minutes after Charles left, his eldest and middle granddaughters had walked out the front door without a word to anyone. They returned the next day; bruised, bloody, and carrying an actual dog puppy they’d found on the road. They didn’t say a word to anyone, simply went upstairs, took showers, and spent the rest of the day training their new puppy. They’d weirdly named him Karris, which she didn’t find out until much later was after a character from the movie The Exorcist.
At the ages of sixteen and fifteen, it wasn’t really strange that kids with their only guardian out of the house would disappear overnight. One would assume they’d been off drinking beers with their friends. But Betsey suspected otherwise and was then certain when she’d found out that their ex-Alpha and his small Pack of wolves had suddenly disappeared. No one had any idea where they were or when they’d be back, but Betsey knew they’d never “be back.” Whatever Charlie and Max had done, they’d made sure that their ex-Alpha would never return again to bother their grandfather. The disappearance didn’t disturb Betsey as much as the girls’ lack of concern about it. Shouldn’t they be showing signs of PTSD or remorse for what they’d been forced to do? But nope. They’d instead focused on their adorable, disturbingly named puppy and went on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Thereby proving what Betsey had known since the girls first arrived at the Pack house: they were killers. Not simply predators. All shifters were predators. But at least the first two were hard-core killers. Shifters who could do what needed to be done without losing sleep or needing recovery time.
So hearing Max, of all people, whisper in her ear nearly made Betsey wet herself. She didn’t but almost.
Even worse, Betsey had been caught eavesdropping as she liked to do when she came home. Since no one paid any attention to her, it was easy enough.
Max leaned over a bit, looking into the sunken living room. Betsey was going to slink away, but Max had put her hand on Betsey’s nearby forearm. It seemed innocent. As if she’d just reached out for balance. But Betsey knew better about that, too. Knew that the badger was just keeping her in place so she couldn’t warn anyone.
“If we try to force them out now,” the Beta female explained to the Pack’s new Alpha female in that sunken living room, “you are definitely going to have a problem with the oldest.”
“That’s Charlie, right? Charles’s granddaughter.”
“Charles thinks of all three as his granddaughters.”
“Sure, sure. I understand that.”
The new Alpha female wasn’t Charles’s mate. He’d lost his mate a long time ago and had never replaced her. But the females still needed someone to lead them and this one had come in from Ohio less than three months ago. She was tolerable, Betsey supposed, but she was making the same mistake as all the other Alpha females who’d come to the Pack in the last few years: trying to push out the MacKilligan girls.
Not that Betsey blamed her, but still. These three were not like Betsey and her hybrid friends. Half wolf and half black bear, Betsey entertained herself with soccer balls and tough rubber toys that were used for pit bulls; she made sure that all her meat-and-vegetable meals were smothered in quality honey; and, if she wasn’t paying attention, she tended to howl along with ambulance sirens. Normally not a big problem . . . except she’d just started medical school and would eventually be doing her residency at a hospital. With ambulances. That had sirens.
Awkward.
But the MacKilligan girls? They were different from everything. Even the middle one, whose parents were both honey badgers.
Like now. Instead of glaring into that room the way Charlie would, pissed off and annoyed that these females were having this discussion without them, Max glanced at Betsey with that freakish grin of hers. Betsey never knew how to read that smile. Was it happiness? Delusion? A neurological tic? She didn’t know. She just wanted it far away from her.
The conversation in the living room faded away and Betsey heard the Alpha tell the other females to get something to eat. Charlie was cooking breakfast and everything smelled delicious. But Betsey wasn’t about to make any sudden moves. Not yet.
“Come in, Max,” the Alpha said from the other room.
Still smiling, Max winked at Betsey before she stepped in front of the big opening that led to the living room. With her hands behind her back and one sneakered foot resting on the other, she stood on the top step. She looked adorable. Innocent even. But again . . . Betsey knew better.
“Come, come,” the Alpha said. Her voice sounded friendly. Not the fake friendly either, but truly friendly. That didn’t really mean anything, though. Betsey had been pummeled by a librarian once. A six-four grizzly female that she’d accidentally startled in the stacks. So “friendly” didn’t mean the same to their kind as it did to the full-humans.
“I guess you heard, huh, Max?”
“I heard a little. Yes.”
Unable to help herself—curiosity being her main weakness, damn her bear genes!—Betsey leaned over so she could peek around the corner. Max now stood in front of the imposing Alpha female. Big shouldered and slim-hipped, with gray and brown hair, she towered over the tiny badger.
“You understand, don’t you? Why you can’t stay? It’s nothing personal, I swear. We just have to protect our pups, and your younger sister, with her recent mood swings, puts our pups in danger. You understand that, right?”