“What are the charges?” she asked, ignoring the laughter of her bitch sister from the other room.
The grizzly holding her didn’t answer, just pulled her out of the apartment. But Nelle could still hear her sister from inside, cheering, “This is the best day ever!”
The bitch.
* * *
Mads was glad she’d only agreed to the manicure. Her teammates didn’t have on shoes, and the thought of walking around without shoes in fucking New York City made her skin crawl. Honey badgers might be hard to kill but diseases were different from a knife or a gun. Diseases were worse than any serial murderer when it came to killing shifters.
As they were removed from the building, none of her teammates seemed to show any concern. But Mads was concerned. Because she was worried this was her fault. She hadn’t gone to her family’s heist despite the multiple calls and texts that had hit her phone the night before. But maybe the cops thought they could get to her family through Mads and her friends.
The thought made her sick to her stomach.
Her teammates had always been tolerant of the hyena side of Mads’s family. Tolerating the rudeness, the mocking laughter, and the inappropriate “man moves” of her male cousins. But if they were all being dragged to a police station because of her family, Mads wasn’t going to do what she usually did when her family got out of hand: walk away and ignore it. Nope. Not this time.
The cops opened up the van doors and began to put each of her teammates inside. But just when it was her turn, she saw Zé run around the corner. He had not yet noticed her. Glancing back and forth between the Siberian tiger male on one side and the black bear on the other, she decided to risk it, and let out one of the whooping calls that came from the hyena side of her family. A communication skill only her teammates knew about because it would weird out other shifters, who already hated hybrids on principle.
The full-humans walking down the street looked around—and up . . . which was just weird—in confusion at the sounds they heard, but Vargas immediately stopped running and those bright green eyes locked on her and the NYPD van.
He ran toward them but the tiger lifted her up and threw her into the van. They slammed the doors closed and locked them, but they hadn’t bothered to secure Mads or the others to their seats since there were two grizzlies and three lions in the van with them, confident that so many trained apex predators could eventually dismantle four honey badgers.
But, as a team, Mads and her friends had been playing against bears and cats for years, often communicating with nothing more than a look or a hiss. Using that look, Mads sent her teammates into immediate action.
Streep stood up, her eyes rolling into the back of her head, and dead-dropped right there on the van floor. For added drama, she began convulsing.
Nelle and Tock dropped to the ground beside her.
“Help!” Nelle called out. “Help her! Dear God! Someone please help her!”
One of the grizzles glanced down at Streep. “She’ll live,” he muttered.
Streep immediately sat up. “I’ll live?”
“Look at you. You’re already better.”
Insulted—Streep had really been putting her all into that seizure—she snarled, “Shoes.”
Nelle raised a brow. “Shoes?” They hadn’t used that code word since the last high school party they’d attended with the football team.
“Shoes!”
“Okay, okay. Shoes.”
Streep and Nelle looked at Tock and, after a second, she sighed and agreed, “All right. Shoes.”
Nelle, Tock, and Streep immediately launched themselves on the cops.
They weren’t trying to kill anyone, sticking with general punching and hair pulling. Shifters or no, these were cops after all. Instead, their goal was distraction, allowing Mads to return to the back doors, unleash her claws, and tear a healthy rip into the metal. Using her hands to bend the metal back, she opened up a hole big enough to stick her head through so she could yell at Zé, “Chicken legs!”
“What?” he yelled back, running after the van now that it had pulled out into traffic.
“Chicken legs! One word! Three Zs and three fours. Two exclamation points! And an asterisk!”
Strong hands grabbed Mads by the shoulders and yanked her back into the van.
At that point, they were all secured to the benches and one of their NYPD captors snarled, “I told you not to make us regret being nice.”
Nelle gave her sweetest smile and a shrug. “Oops.”
When the cops stopped glaring at them, Nelle softly asked Mads, “What were you yelling?”
“The password. For my phone.”
“What the fuck for?”
“So he could get into my phone. It’s still in your apartment.”
“Who are you expecting him to call?”
“Max.”
“He was with Max. She texted me and said they’d be coming over after he got his phone so we could all have lunch together. Did you see her with him?”
Mads shook her head. “No. He was alone.” Which meant only one thing: Max had been picked up, too.
“Well, he can still call someone who can help us,” Mads insisted. “At the very least get us some bail money.”
“The only people he knows aside from us are MacKilligans. You know what that means.”
“I only have Stevie’s number in my phone.”
“But Stevie panics, and when she panics . . .”
All four of them blew out breaths while Mads desperately hoped that Zé never found her phone.
* * *
Stevie rushed into the kitchen, where the lingering scent of honey buns still filled the air. She had to get into the city for a meeting with the ballet company and Kyle’s sister, Oriana. A ballerina prodigy, Oriana was about to get her chance at a lead role in a ballet with music written by Stevie. Something that Stevie had offered just to help Oriana out; it had never occurred to her that it was as big a deal as it was turning into. She’d already gotten calls from major media outlets asking about her “return to music.”
They were all acting as if Stevie was giving up her scientific work but she hadn’t. In fact, she was taking over the lab of her ex-boyfriend’s brother, who had kidnapped her and tried to remove her ability to shift. He’d “disapproved” of hybrids and, in his mind, Stevie represented the potential horror of what a hybrid could be. As if it was her fault that when she shifted into her animal form she became a tiger-striped honey badger that weighed more than two tons. “More than two tons” since she’d recently discovered she’d put on weight, which wouldn’t normally bother her except that she’d also noticed her shifted form had gotten bigger, too . . .
That was starting to freak her out. But instead of focusing on something she definitely had no control over, she decided to focus on her new lab and the ballet. Two very positive things! Her life was currently full of positive things! She was in love with the sweetest panda ever—and, oh, my God! He loved her back—her music was flowing out of her the way it used to when she worked on it daily as a kid, and going through the files she’d found in the lab had been fascinating. As well as terrifying. Her predecessor had been brilliant but he’d also been a sick motherfucker. That’s why she didn’t feel guilty for biting him in half.