“Run!” Mads yelled, not sure the tiger understood her team’s vocal codes.
But he was tiger. Short sprints were their way. He was nearly past them when he abruptly shifted to human and his arms reached out to scoop Mads and Tock up by the waist. She didn’t know why. They were two of the fastest girls on their pro basketball team. And even with the extra weight of their equip—
The cat jumped, taking her and Tock straight up. Tock kept counting.
“Three! Two!”
Near them, also making the insane straight-up leap, were two more Siberian tigers. One held a screeching Cass, now nicknamed Streep due to her dramatic antics on and off the courts. And an even larger one gripped both Nelle and Max.
“One! Brace for impact!”
The blast was so bright, it blinded Mads and sent the cat holding her flipping wildly and freely through the air. Something Mads did not like one bit. Even though she should be used to it by now. She’d been battered by enough predatory players over the years to have experienced this sort of thing before but still . . . she was not enjoying it at all.
At some point, the arm around her turned from human to cat as the man shifted, so when they came screaming back to the ground several million miles away—okay, it wasn’t that far—he landed like a cat. That allowed him to flip head over tail over ass so that he landed safely on all four paws. Alive and pissed. Roaring and spitting.
Mads, however, stayed human because it wouldn’t matter either way. So when she hit the ground, she hit it hard. On her back. Staring up at the stars.
In all honesty, she should be crushed by the impact. All broken bones and destroyed insides. Brains nothing but pudding. The back of her head something not even a puzzle master could put back together.
But, again, she was honey badger. So her ass was a little singed from the explosion and a couple of her fingers were broken, but they’d been broken before by rough basketball games on street courts. One eye did pop out, but Streep, of all people, crawled over to her, let out a loud, disgusted, “Ewwwww! Madsssss! That is sooooooo grossssssss!” and popped the eye back in, then used a bandana from her pocket to wrap her head.
Max stumbled over to them. Her right arm hung at a weird angle, as did her jaw, but she was alive, too.
She gave them orders but they couldn’t understand a word because, again, her jaw . . . weird angle.
“What?” Tock asked.
Max repeated her orders.
Nelle approached but seemed unable to figure out where or how to put Max’s jaw back into place.
Mads had just decided to take a shot at fixing her teammate when she was roughly pushed aside and a giant of a man stormed over. Two other men were with him and she now recognized all of them. The Malone brothers. Or, as they were called on the streets, The Black Malones.
The oldest, Keane, was also the largest. And the most terrifying. She could see him living his life in Siberia among the few remaining cats of the region. Killing any and all human hunters that came into his territory.
So Mads wasn’t exactly shocked when Keane grabbed Max’s head between his big hands and slammed her jaw back into place as if he was working on an old carburetor for free. The sound of bone being forced back into place had all the badgers bark-hissing in surprise and poor Max swinging her fists and ready for a life-or-death fight.
Nelle stepped in to calm everything down, quickly moving a livid Max away from the naked Keane before their team leader could rip his cock off with her claws.
Instead of Keane being grateful for their earlier assistance, he bellowed, “Why are you here?”
“Should we be running away?” Tock asked, but everyone ignored her. “I feel like we should be running away.”
“You—” Max paused, taking a brief second to twist her head one way, then the other with her hands. Finishing the job that Keane had started. “You seem tense,” she finally got out without any further difficulty. “You okay, sweetie?”
Mads cringed. Because she knew that Max’s friendly, solicitous tone was antagonistic at its core. A tone that caused a brave Nelle to quickly step between the tiger and honey badger. Although ecologists would call only one of these two an apex predator, Mads strongly felt the need to correct the entire field of study. Because Max MacKilligan was an apex predator in her own right.
She could change an entire ecosystem in a night if she set her mind to it. And she would do it all with a smile.
The same smile she was wearing now as she gazed up, wide-eyed, at the Siberian tiger glaring down at her.
“I’m going to go find out if we should be running,” Tock told Mads before heading back where they’d come from, motioning Streep to accompany her. The pair skirted the giant crater the explosives had opened up and disappeared into what remained of the surrounding tree line.
“You need to tell me why you’re here,” the eldest Malone brother ordered, folding his massive arms over his massive chest and then having the nerve to wait for Max to actually answer him.
Mads watched as Max’s smile grew wider. She knew a smile like that, coming from Max, would not end well and felt the need to intervene—she had no idea why. As Tock had said, they probably should all be running. She looked at the brother on her left. But he had his mouth open wide, his eyes tightly closed, and his tongue hanging out, as if he was tasting the air. It was weird to look at, so Mads turned to the tiger on her right.
“Your brother is being rude,” she said. “And if he expects to get anywhere with Max MacKilligan, he’d better back the fuck up.”
Slowly, the cat’s head turned her way and bright gold eyes gazed at her, blinking slowly before he replied, “My brother’s rude? She had her fangs dug into his balls not too long ago.”
It took a moment for Mads to remember that particular fight. There had been so many over the years with so many shifters and humans, it was honestly hard to keep them all straight. But once the memory returned in all its vicious, honey badger glory, she fought the urge to grimace and instead shrugged and warned, “Then he may want to take a few steps back. You know, so we don’t have a repeat incident.”
* * *
Finn smirked a little. Almost chuckled. A surprising response when just a few seconds ago, he was ready to wipe this entire island from the map.
And he was considered the “calm one” of his three brothers. The “rational brother” when others needed to bring something up with the family.
In all honestly, though, they weren’t doing too badly.
So far his eldest brother hadn’t bitten off Max MacKilligan’s head. Something he could easily do in his tiger form. Her head was really tiny, too, and would take just one bite. But Keane had been working hard over the last few years not to be as angry-tiger as he could be. A request from their mother.
“You keep it up,” she’d warned a few years back, “and we’ll end up having to send you to my cousins. And there are very few MacDonalds on the steppes, my son.”
While their father was “Irish down to his toes,” as he’d always liked to say, their mother’s people were from the Mongolian tribes of the steppes. Tiger shifters whose ancestors had been there long before Genghis Khan had even been born, much less a terror to all the tribes. And although both their parents were several generations American, they’d never lost their connection to the place they’d come from or who they were. And who they were was big cats.