The auntie nodded at the one holding onto Tina, and Rina’s sister was immediately shoved to the ground.
“We’ve done what we can for ya,” the auntie said. “You take care of Mairi and you stay away from ours, and we leave you be. But if you try to come for us again—especially me sons—it’ll be the last time anyone outside the family ever sees you. But I can promise you one thing, niece: it won’t be over quick for you or your sister. Remember that when you think about fucking with the MacKilligans again.”
She raised her hand, made a circular motion with her forefinger. Instantly the other women slipped out into the darkness, disappearing. Not making a sound. Just going. The yacht wasn’t even docked. They were anchored in open waters. And yet . . . Rina never heard them actually leave.
Tina sat down on the bed next to Rina.
“This,” her sister pointed out, again speaking in their language, “has not been working out for us.”
Slowly Rina turned her head toward her sister and told her plainly, “Shut the fuck up.”
* * *
“I am in love with whoever this guy is.”
Irene Conridge looked up from the book she was reading. Her former protégé was grinning at the computer screen, entertained by what she was seeing. Of course, Miki Kendrick was entertained by many things. Unlike Irene, who found most things annoying and a distraction to her work.
“So you have the hacker locked down?” Irene asked.
“Nope.”
“Then why are you boring me with this conversation?”
Miki glared at her from under all that curly hair. Of course Irene also had curly hair but anytime she brought that up to Miki, she would just grumble, “It’s not the same, dude,” and they were meant to leave it at that. Of course, Miki was African American, so that could have something to do with it, but Irene didn’t let things like race or religion or any of the usual reasons human beings disliked each other affect her life. Instead, she saw people in one of two ways: annoying . . . not annoying. It used to be “stupid . . . smart” but she’d found that there were so many stupid people in the world, she began to run out of people she could allow into her life. Even smart people tended to be stupid and the frustration was more than she could handle. So she’d settled on “annoying . . . not annoying.” It worked for her.
“I said one fucking thing,” Miki complained, “and it wasn’t necessarily to you.”
“So you often speak to yourself?”
“Sometimes. I find myself quite interesting.”
“That’s called delusion, dear.”
Irene hid her smile when she saw that middle finger raised in her direction.
“You’ve been working on this for quite a while,” Irene reminded her. “I don’t mind your staying in my New York home, but is there any chance you can find the culprit before my daughter gets her second doctorate?”
Miki turned in her chair, resting her arm on the back. “While your middle son has gotten his . . . what was it again? That ‘degree’ ”—she said with air quotes—“at Jiffy Lube?”
“He’s taking a gap year, thank you very much. This is just a temporary delay before he—”
“Makes it to a BMW dealership as head mechanic?”
“Engines are hard.”
“Are they, though?”
Irene lowered her book, raised an eyebrow. “And how are your two friends doing? The one who dresses like she’s expecting Coco Chanel to come visit? And the tall one who knows all about how a bicycle works!”
“It’s called a hog,” Miki shot back. “And motorcycles like that are part of the American—”
“Criminal underworld?”
“I was going to say landscape.”
“Ah.”
They glared at each other but they weren’t remotely angry. This was just something they liked to do. Ever since Miki had bravely walked into her office at the university and asked if Irene would be her doctoral advisor. Only the bravest students ever did that because most of the students found her “terrifying.” And Irene rarely said yes, but there was something about the tiny young woman in cutoff shorts and steel-toed Doc Martens that she’d found interesting. At the time, neither Irene nor Miki knew that one of her best friends was a wolf. Then again, Miki hadn’t known that Irene’s husband was a wolf as well, although the two wolves were from vastly different Packs.
Now, however, Miki not only had a canine best friend, but a wolf mate of her own, a wolf pup that was turning out to be smarter than Miki and Irene combined—which was a terrifying thought for either of them—and both of them were forced to help shifters survive in an increasingly horrifying world.
These insult-breaks were something they did to keep long periods of work entertaining. No one else understood them, but no one else mattered.
Irene had just returned to her book when her husband, Niles Van Holtz, stormed into the room. He looked around, walked out again, but returned a minute later with a suitcase.
“Get packed up,” he ordered, opening the suitcase. “Both of you. We have to get out of here.”
Irene watched her husband begin shoving random things into the suitcase. There was no rhyme or reason to what he was grabbing, but he was canine. She was surprised he didn’t just grab a bone and make a run for it.
“Is there a reason we’re escaping?” she finally asked when he slammed closed her laptop and shoved it into the suitcase.
“The MacKilligans. The oldest. I’m pretty sure she’s coming to kill us all.”
“Holtz, perhaps you should calm down and tell me—”
“Why aren’t you moving?” he demanded. “Do you want to live without skin?”
At that point, Miki had turned around in her chair again. “Live without skin? What now?”
“Yes! She promised to skin us!”
“You know it’s not really that easy to skin a person, right?”
“What?”
“I’m a hunter,” Miki explained. “Me and my girls—”
“My girls and I,” Irene corrected.
“Stop it. We go hunting all the time. And it’s not easy to skin a deer, and they have that thick hide you can pretty much grab and pull. But humans . . .” She lifted her left hand and with her right began to simulate removing human skin. “Our skin is so thin, you’ve gotta be real careful about removing it. It’s not like skinning an orange.”
Holtz turned to Irene. “Why are all our full-human friends weird?”
“I didn’t major in psychology,” Miki said before Irene could reply, “but I’d say you draw weird to you.”
“No one asked you, tiny female.”
There was a knock at the door and it opened to reveal her cousin-in-law’s giant mate filling the doorway. The woman boasted shoulders Irene imagined Neanderthals once had. They were enormous!
“Hey there, cousin!” Dee-Ann greeted Holtz, her Tennessee Titans baseball cap low on her head. Irene often wondered if the She-wolf could see or if she was so canine, she simply sniffed her way around. “Whatcha doin’?”
“We’re leaving. Ric told me what happened with those idiots and that psychotic badger. We warned them and they didn’t listen. Now I have to evacuate my family from the state.”