“Well . . . you are in the Katzenhaus system, which would allow what is called the ‘Cat Nation’ to keep track of you. That way if something happens to your immediate family, they can track any relatives you may have in other states or worldwide who might be willing to take you in. To raise you. If there’s no one, you could be taken in by an adoption agency or foster system that handles fellow cats or shifters as a whole.”
“Yeah . . . and?”
“See, I was under the assumption that only one of your parents was a shifter, and since you never mentioned your dad, I just guessed that he didn’t tell your mother what he was, went out for a pack of cigarettes one day, and simply didn’t come back. Sadly, it’s somewhat common for the bigger cats. Although it usually happens more frequently with the hybrids. And my dad.”
“Waiting for you to get to the point.”
Max cleared her throat. “But according to this, both your parents were cats. Your mother was jaguar on her mother’s side.”
“My grandfather raised me on his own after my mother and grandmother died.”
“Yes,” she said, wishing she could avoid going on.
“How did they die?” Nelle gently asked Zé.
“Car accident.”
Max cringed. “Or a fight with a hyena Clan.”
“Sorry?”
Fuck it, she thought. She might as well tell him everything and handed over the document. “It specifies what happened to your mother and grandmother. In the full-human world, the death certificate probably says car accident. But in ours . . . the truth is that your mother and grandmother were in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time during the wrong Pride-Clan fight. The deaths were accidental—the hyenas just saw cats and overreacted—but it’s very clear that your mother and grandmother were part of the shifter world.”
Zé stared at the papers in his hand but he didn’t say anything. Just stood there . . . staring.
Then, abruptly, he walked out.
“Well,” Mads muttered, “he’s off to kill every hyena he sees.”
But that actually wasn’t Max’s worry. She saw a bigger issue and, raising her gaze to Nelle, she saw that her teammate saw it, too.
“Go, Max,” Nelle urged. “Go.”
Max ran out of the main library, past the snobby male lion, and through the double glass doors. When she hit the street, Zé was already stepping into a cab at the end of the block. She charged toward him, but the door closed, and the cab was already moving when Max reached it. She picked up speed, dashed around a few full-humans walking down the street, and when she passed the cab, she abruptly turned into the street and threw herself in front of it.
The cab wasn’t going terribly fast. But fast enough to ram into Max’s small body and send her flipping into the back of one of those refrigerated trucks. She bounced off it, hit the ground, rolled toward the cab from the power of that bounce, and went right under the wheels of the vehicle . . .
* * *
“Fuck!” the driver screamed when that insane woman rolled under the cab’s wheels. He hadn’t been able to stop in time and the front tires definitely went over her body.
The poor cabbie hit the brakes and gripped the steering wheel, unable to do anything but pant and pray to St. Francis Cabrini in Spanish.
After a few seconds, shaking and beginning to sob in despair, the cabbie opened his door to step out. But Zé leaned forward, reached his arm through the opening in the protective glass, and caught the man by his shoulder.
“Hold on one second,” he suggested.
“But—”
“I’m fine!” Max said, appearing by the poor driver’s passenger-side window and waving with that happy smile on her face.
Not surprisingly, the cabbie screamed in terror at the sight of her. A few days ago, Zé would have done the same.
“I’m sorry,” she said, moving to the back passenger door and getting into the cab with Zé. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I, uh . . . tripped. But I’m fine.”
Although she stated this with an actual tire track imprinted across her face like some cosmic joke.
“Really,” she insisted when both men just stared at her. “I promise. I’m a-okay.” She gave the thumbs-up with both hands as if that gesture alone would fix everything. It didn’t. So Zé told the cabbie, “It’s fine. Just go.”
The cabbie got back into the vehicle, wiped his eyes and blew his nose with some tissue, then drove on.
Zé rested back in the seat and gazed out the window, not in the mood to talk to anyone. He had too much on his mind. Thankfully, Max seemed to sense that and she didn’t try to engage him in conversation, nor go on and on about some other weird shifter factoid. She didn’t do any of that. She just sat on her side of the cab and gazed out her own window.
But halfway through their trip, Zé felt her hand cover his. A simple, quiet gesture he appreciated more than he could say. He turned his hand over and interlaced his fingers with hers.
And that’s how they stayed for the rest of the journey.
* * *
Daley “Dale” Malone closed the video chat, slipped his tablet back into his desk drawer, and pulled out his chemistry books. But as he sat there, trying to focus on his work so that when he started college in a few weeks, he’d be ahead of everyone else . . . he knew he wasn’t alone.
Even worse, he knew they’d been standing there for a while.
He turned his office chair around and faced two of his brothers.
“Do we have to tell Keane?” he asked.
Because Keane was the one he was worried about. Keane was the eldest. The toughest. The angriest. Not that he didn’t have a reason to be angry. He did. None of that, however, made him pleasant to be around. Especially for Dale, who was the youngest of the Malones.
Actually, Dale was simply the youngest male. His sister, Natalie, was a year younger than he but, of course, she got treated like a princess by everyone else. Not because she was deaf either. To the immediate family, her being deaf simply meant she couldn’t hear. Like some people were born with blue eyes and others with brown, some people were born deaf and some were born hearing. And if you really wanted to get into a fight with the Black Malones—as the other Malones insisted on calling them—all you had to do was suggest that their baby sister’s deafness was some kind of defect or disability. It wasn’t. Not for her. Or for them.
Their older brothers, however, continued to protect her like a weak doe in the woods because they insisted on believing that she was as sweet and innocent as the day she’d been born. To quote his brother Shay, “a victim waiting to happen.”
And in the Malone brothers’ collective mind—and Dale wasn’t considered a “Malone Brother” because he was “too young, too naive, and too fucking stupid,” according to Keane—their sister was currently a victim. A poor, sad, kidnap victim taken by some disgusting older man. Dale knew better, though. He knew because there were no secrets between him and Natalie. They were so close in age, they were like twins. There were, however, secrets between Dale and Natalie and everyone else!
It was a commitment they’d made to each other when they were toddlers and they kept it to this day. But when it came to their younger siblings, the Malone brothers didn’t care about commitments.