Before Darren knew it, the large men were bleeding out on the floor and the women were unlocking his chains.
“You all right?” one of them asked.
“Yes,” he said, unable to look at her. Her face and neck were completely saturated in blood and bloody drool still poured from her mouth.
But still, she was letting him go. He would always be thankful for that at least.
* * *
Nelle opened the locks and removed the chains.
“Come on!” she ordered the full-humans. She didn’t yell, but she made sure to command them. That always worked better in situations like this. Then she said it again in a few other languages just in case.
Streep and Tock helped move the people out of the house. Just as they got them into the yard, a semitruck came toward them on the driveway. The transportation for the “product” they were selling, which was how the shifters had referred to the full-humans.
“Go!” Nelle yelled at Streep and Tock. “Get them down to the buses!”
While her teammates took off, she charged back into the house. As she went for the stairs that led to the lower floors, Charlie and the others were coming up, with even more freed full-humans. Her friends were covered in a good amount of blood, so Nelle wasn’t too concerned about anyone not friendly coming up from the basement.
“Truck coming,” she warned.
“You and Mads take these people out,” Charlie ordered. “Get them to the buses. Max and I will meet you back at the van.”
* * *
“How do you want to do this?” Max asked her sister. “Straight on or roundabout?”
Charlie motioned to the office window and the lawn outside it. “How about underground?”
* * *
Nelle and Mads handed the full-humans in their care over to Streep and Tock. “Meet us at the van!” she yelled, running back to Max and her sister.
She didn’t feel right about leaving them on their own—
Mads caught her and they stopped, watching as the MacKilligan sisters came up through the ground and jumped onto the truck from opposite sides.
They climbed up the doors and leaned into the open windows.
Max had one of her blades in her mouth. When she reached the window, she grabbed it and began stabbing the driver.
Charlie, a clean killer, just fired her weapon twice into the cab.
Max leaned farther in, her little legs just sort of hanging out the open window, making Nelle and Mads laugh, but she still managed to stop the truck before it ran directly into the mansion.
Done, the sisters jumped down and motioned toward the van.
* * *
Charlie reached the van and got in. The rest of her team followed seconds later.
The buses had already driven off and were going in another direction, into another state. There the full-humans would be cared for until they could figure out what was next for them. These weren’t necessarily undocumented workers or women about to be sold into sex slavery. They could have been picked up for no other reason than some freak shifter was in the mood to hunt and eat a blonde.
Whatever the original plans had been for them, Charlie had made it clear to Imani: no matter what these full-humans might have seen . . . no one was allowed to kill them to keep them quiet. They could threaten. They could blackmail. They could give them money to shut them up. But Charlie wouldn’t be part of any operation that involved killing people who had just been unlucky enough to be kidnapped by shifters.
Tock headed the van back to the city. They weren’t returning to the office they’d started at. They didn’t have time.
“To the Kingston Arms,” she told Tock.
“Don’t we have to get this back to the office where Imani met us?” Max asked.
“Tock!” Charlie barked.
“We’ve got two hours to get back to the city, get showered, and meet the pregame bus!”
Max rubbed her nose to hide her smile.
“Are you coming to the game, Charlie?” Nelle asked.
“Yes. I want to see my sister play.” Charlie paused for a few seconds, then added, “So you bitches better win—or I’m going to be upset.”
Slowly, Charlie turned her chair around to focus on the computer screen while Max’s teammates shrank down in terror.
Charlie glanced at Max over her shoulder, but the sisters had to look away from each other before they started to laugh hysterically.
Because that would be wrong. Wouldn’t it?
chapter TWENTY-NINE
At the arena, they had floor seats. Zé might not have been impressed by that if the entire arena had not been filled to capacity. The crowd was already cheering and antsy, desperate for the game to begin. It was like watching an NBA game with half the audience sporting green and white and the other half yellow and blue.
An entire world underneath the full-human one and Zé had never felt more at home.
Zé sat with Charlie and the triplets on his left and Stevie, Shen, and Dutch on his right. Dutch had originally sat down next to him, grinning like an idiot. But when Zé slapped the man’s popcorn, soda, and giant pretzel with cheese onto the floor, Stevie insisted he move.
“Not long now,” Stevie said, clapping her hands together.
“You are so excited.”
“I love watching Max play. She’s not just a good athlete. She also has winning showmanship.”
“I hear you did, too. When you were six.”
“I still do. Someday you’ll have to hear me play with my band. They’re all former child prodigies, too. And I do a mean Jimi Hendrix.”
“On guitar?”
“That, too.”
Zé was going to ask what she meant but she said to him first, “Hear you are my babysitter tonight.”
“I doubt you’ll need it. You have a giant panda.”
Shen held out a bamboo stalk. “Want a bite?”
“No.”
“You guys don’t know what you’re missing,” he said before beginning his nonstop chewing.
“That doesn’t irritate you?” he asked Stevie.
“I fall asleep to it. It’s the most soothing thing to me. And I’m the one who finds Enya’s music a little loud and abrasive.”
* * *
They waited in the hallway, the two teams side by side; Max already bouncing on her toes. Ready to go. Ready to destroy the other team. But in a totally nonlethal way, of course.
Nelle was on her phone, taking selfies. Streep was doing yoga stretches to stay limber. Mads was staring down tigers on the opposite team. Tock was looking at her watch. It was the same thing every time, but Max never got bored by it. Only this time, both her sisters were in the crowd. Charlie hadn’t been to a game since Max was in high school. And once she’d found out Nelle had a limo driver to take the five of them to and from the games, she’d stopped coming altogether. It didn’t bother Max as much as it would have probably bothered others. Actually, it hadn’t bothered Max at all. Not when she knew her sister had a lot more important things to focus on. Like keeping them alive.
It was just nice that finally, after all these years, they could do this and enjoy it.
Mads tapped Max on the shoulder and pointed. Renny stood at the end of the hall, away from the entrance.
“Shit.”
“Tell her you’ll talk to her after the game.”