Sure. They were human, too. But in their bones, they felt like tigers first and humans second. An attitude that they’d passed down to their three eldest sons. Which meant that Finn couldn’t help but see everyone around him as some form of prey. Not necessarily to be eaten but definitely in his way. An irritant. An annoyance. A pest.
He studied the honey badger next to him. He normally would think of the badgers the same way, except for two things. The first was his baby sister, the light of his life and the lives of his two brothers. True, she’d been a surprise to their mother. A result of that drunken night she’d spent with a honey badger male while mourning the loss of her husband. Yet none of them could regret that it had given them Natalie. Or The Nat, as her big brothers all called her.
Yeah. She was a pain in the ass. And she always found a way to start shit. And when she wasn’t starting shit, she was getting into shit. But she was amazing. Smart, funny, beautiful, and too good for the world they all lived in. But she was half honey badger and hardly a pest.
The second reason? The way honey badger shifters fought. The rest of the shifter world had its rules. When fighting your own kind, you kept it to fangs and claws. A rule that worked out for everyone in the end. Wolves and dogs might not have the strength of tigers and jaguars, but they usually had a pack of their own kind right at their back. Smaller cats might not want to go up against lions and hyenas but they were faster than the bigger shifters, and with a tree or building nearby, no She-lion could get near them.
Then there were the bears . . .
Honestly, no one really wanted to mess with the bears.
So it all worked out in the end.
Except for the outliers. The ones the rest of them forgot about. The foxes. The wolverines. The honey badgers.
The foxes were smart. They kept their enemies close, using the bears and wolves as their protection. The wolverines could disappear, making many in the shifter world believe they didn’t even exist. But they did. Happily.
The honey badgers, however, they didn’t play games. They didn’t hide. They were in your face, urging you to just try something. Go ahead! Try it! And rules, apparently, were for suckers. If you came at them with bigger claws and fangs, then they had guns and knives and bombs and the willingness to not only use all that, but to wipe out several blocks around their prey, if that’s what it came to.
Nothing stopped a honey badger because they were just so fucking mean.
And despite that smile on Max MacKilligan’s face, this particular badger was starting to get a reputation as one of the meanest of them all.
So, yeah, maybe Keane should back up a few hundred feet. He did hope to have children one day. Couldn’t do that without his balls.
“Why are you here?” Max asked Finn’s brother.
That’s when he heard the badger beside him mutter, “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“She’s answering a question with a question.”
“So?”
“That’s never a good sign.”
“What is at the moment?” Finn glanced at the badger beside him and tried something. “Why are you guys here?”
And, to his eternal surprise, she answered his calmly asked question. “We heard prey was being moved through here. We came to get them out.”
Finn frowned. “That’s a lot of firepower to free some monkeys or rabbits used for lipstick testing.”
She let out a very soft snort. “Human prey. For shifters.”
Finn’s muscles tightened in surprise and his jaw clenched. He admitted he didn’t like a lot of things in this world, but using humans like Cape buffalo irritated him. And he definitely had his problems with full-humans. He found most of them something to be swatted out of his way like fleas. But just as he didn’t want his kind shot down by big-game hunters and left stuffed in their living rooms, he felt the same should not happen to full-humans.
“Keane,” Finn called out.
His brother didn’t turn around or take his eyes off Max MacKilligan—not that he blamed his brother—but his head tilted a bit so he could hear Finn better.
“They’re not here for us. Let’s go.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Let’s—”
Finn stopped talking. He’d heard something come up from behind him and turned to see the two honey badgers who’d walked off earlier now charging back. The one who had counted down to the explosion was chanting something new.
“Run! Run, run, run, run, run!”
Finn shifted back to tiger and ran into the nearby trees. When he stopped and looked back, his brothers had done the same.
The honey badgers, however, didn’t run.
They reloaded their weapons.
* * *
The cats had shifted and disappeared before Mads could even bother to tell them to do so. Good, she wouldn’t have to worry about them.
Streep went underground, literally. The rest of them reloaded and got ready for . . .
A man suddenly appeared from behind a tree. He wore all-black tactical gear, including a helmet and night-vision goggles. All of that for them? Did he know they were honey badgers? No. No way.
Whatever the reason for such heavy gear, he put it to full use, raising his weapon and immediately locking on Max and Mads. He was fast, but Mads’s team was faster.
Streep launched herself from the dirt onto the gunman’s back. With her legs wrapped around his waist, she raised her arms and unleashed her claws. Growling, she rammed them into the top of the man’s shoulders. He let out a muted scream; his knees trembled, but he managed to stay standing. Streep’s attack did lock his arms, but his trigger finger was still free. Nelle caught the weapon by its muzzle and lifted up a half second before it started firing. She jerked her head to the side to avoid getting shot and wrenched the gun away.
As Nelle turned, Tock slashed her claws and blood spurted from the gunman’s torn throat.
Just as he dropped face-first into the dirt, Mads scented more human males. She saw ten of them racing their way, weapons raised. She sucked her tongue against her teeth and dropped to one knee. Her team lined up beside her, about to start firing, but they had to pause for a moment. Their plan had been to spray the ten men running toward them. Until several of them went down and were dragged off screaming into the darkness.
The military-trained attackers immediately faced the other way with their weapons raised. Max motioned her team to move away from the line of fire. Just as they did, they saw the big cats ease out of the trees again. They’d moved around so that they were again behind the attacking males.
Tigers preferred to attack their prey from behind. So all those men facing in the opposite direction were vulnerable. The cats picked their victims and pounced . . . literally. Each brother grabbed a man by the back of the neck and ran off into the trees like a dog running off with his favorite stuffed toy.
The remaining men began shooting wildly and screaming out for their comrades. But it was too late. There were only four of them left, and Max wanted information.
Mads followed Max to the hysterical men, and when she got to the one she figured was the leader of the group, she nodded. Mads slapped his helmet off and pressed a .45 to the back of his head.
The other men spun around, ready to fire, but Max simply wagged her finger. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she said.