“It’s Shen,” Max said. “So what?”
“Look into the leaves.”
Max raised her gaze and studied the higher parts of the tree but still didn’t see anything. At first. Then she noticed a slight movement. She tilted her head and leaned forward.
“Oh, my God. That’s the cat.”
Charlie rested her head on her arm and laughed.
“He’s climbing trees now?” Max asked. “Seriously?” Then she laughed so hard she had to lean against her sister so she didn’t fall to the floor.
“How did you even see him?”
Charlie gave a small shrug. “When I’ve got my contacts in, it’s like I have wolf eyes.”
They watched Zé for a few minutes, and Max loved that he was really starting to embrace “the cat within” as Dutch liked to say about cat shifters in general.
But just as Max was about to turn away to pour some orange juice before getting ready to head out, Charlie asked, “So what are you and Stevie hiding from me?”
Max forced herself not to react to her sister’s question. She kept moving, even as she asked, “What makes you think we’re hiding anything?”
“Instinct. Stevie seemed truly angry, but you . . . you were just trying to distract her. And you only distract her when you want her to keep her mouth shut about something. What’s she keeping her mouth shut about, Max?”
Max continued to stare at the tree, where Zé was easily moving around among the leaves. After a moment, she asked her sister, “Do you really want to know the answer to that?”
From the corner of her eye, Max saw her sister open her mouth . . . close it . . . open it again . . .
Finally, Charlie returned her gaze to the tree. “Not really.”
They stood there like that for quite a bit until a male head suddenly appeared between them. “What are we staring at?”
Max had scented the kid coming. Felt his light footsteps coming through the floor. Heard the way he rubbed his nose sometimes instead of twitching it like a normal jackal. So when he put himself between her and Charlie, Max wasn’t bothered or surprised.
Charlie, however . . .
“Jesus Christ, Kyle! ” she practically screamed, her entire body leaping backward so that she slammed into the oven. “What the fuck, man?”
Kyle Jean-Louis Parker blinked a few times as he stared at Charlie.
“Sorry you’re so unobservant . . . ?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass.” Charlie brushed her jeans off for no reason Max could see, then did that thing she did when she was startled. Barking at the person who’d scared her just like a dog startled from its sleep. “And where the fuck have you been? You’ve been gone for days. For all we knew, you could have been dead!”
“Would you have cared?” Kyle wisely asked.
“That’s not the point!”
“I was with my family. Not on purpose, my mother made me.”
Kyle was one of the Jean-Louis Parkers. A family of jackals headed by a former child-genius mother who’d given birth to a whole litter of geniuses. For some it was math, science, and language. For others it was art, music, and dance. Only one was born “normal” like her father, but Toni Jean-Louis Parker was the true matriarch of the whole troop while the actual mother played violin for monarchs and prime ministers all around the world.
Kyle was only seventeen at the moment but he tended to irritate his family as much as his family irritated him. Maybe more. So he’d moved into one of the MacKilligans’ rooms and paid a very nice rent. It helped that he and Stevie were close friends, each of them understanding the other as only a former child prodigy could.
For most kids his age, being in a house with twenty-something women who barely paid him any attention would be a chance to drink, do drugs, and get laid. But this was Kyle. He’d turned their garage into an art studio and spent hours in there . . . working on his art. No drinking, no drugging, no anything. Except, on occasion, being annoying.
Charlie blinked. “Why are you holding a sledgehammer?” she asked.
“I’m going to destroy my shitty art and start over.”
Max gasped. “Awesome! Can I help?”
“Of course!”
“No!” Charlie snapped. “No, no, no, no, no! You’re not doing that.”
“Why not?” Kyle asked, his voice calm. “I am unhappy with my work—why keep it around? So I can have evidence of my failure?”
“He has a point, Charlie.”
Charlie aimed a warning finger at Max. She didn’t even have to say the words Shut the fuck up. She said it with her glare and that finger. That terrifying forefinger.
“Kyle,” Charlie said, keeping her voice calm, “I know what Shen’s sister said about your art the other day really upset you, but that doesn’t mean you should destroy your work. That doesn’t make sense to me. And it definitely won’t make sense to your sister Toni.”
“Toni has no say when it comes to my work.”
“Well, I under—”
“And neither do you. It’s my work; I can do what I want with it. And I’m going to destroy it. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
Max winced. The poor kid. He didn’t know what he was dealing with, did he? He was dealing with the same woman who had successfully managed Max and Stevie.
Yeah. Poor kid.
Kyle started toward the back door but Charlie grabbed the head of the sledgehammer that was resting on his shoulder. When she yanked it, she dragged the kid back with it. He tried to keep his grip on it, but Charlie wasn’t going for that either. With two good pulls, she took it from his hand.
“Give that back to me,” Kyle ordered.
While staring Kyle in the eyes, Charlie held the wooden handle in one hand and the head in the other. Then, with little effort at all, she ripped the head off and dropped it to the floor.
Kyle briefly chewed the inside of his mouth before asking, “Is that supposed to intimidate me?”
Charlie placed the ragged part of the broken wooden handle against Kyle’s throat.
“Now listen up, kid. I’m happy to have you here. You pay your rent, you’re surprisingly quiet, and you have no friends, so I never have to throw any of them out. But if you think you’re going to do something radical to your work, which will force me to deal with that psychotic sister of yours, you’ve lost your mind. You want to destroy your shit, you take it back to your parents’ place first and do it there. While you live here, you pretend everything you have in our garage was made by Michelangelo himself and is priceless. Do you understand?”
Kyle cleared his throat. “I’ve always found Michelangelo overrated.”
Charlie pulled the broken handle away from Kyle’s neck, her hand gripping it in the center. With her gaze still locked on poor Kyle, she used that single hand to break the wood with what seemed to be very little effort. Because, for Charlie, it was little effort. Stevie had always reasoned that all the energy Charlie would have used for shifting instead seemed to go into muscle strength.
“Okay.” Max grabbed Kyle by his shoulders and steered him out of the kitchen. “Don’t forget the honey buns,” she called back to her sister before stopping at the stairs.