The men still didn’t give up their weapons . . . until they saw the rest of Mads’s team surrounding them, a weapon locked on each one of them. Without another word, the men gave up.
Getting them on their knees, Tock and Streep zip-tied the men’s wrists and ankles and Max crouched in front of the leader. She held one of her knives in front of his face but he didn’t even see it. None of the men did. They were too busy looking all around them, out into the darkness with wide, panicked eyes.
That was pure terror. Because they still didn’t know what had grabbed and dragged off their teammates. They just knew whatever it had been had not been human.
“Listen,” Max said, and when the man she was talking to ignored her, she snapped her fingers in his face until he turned those panicked eyes directly to her. She raised one of her blades. She was an expert at handling edge weapons. So she wasn’t exaggerating when she told him, “I can cut off pieces of you and be chewing on them like an old cigar before you even know they’re missing. Or you can simply tell me what I want to—”
Blood splashed across Max’s face as white fangs bit down on the head of the man she’d been threatening and tore it off his shoulders.
The remaining men screamed and desperately tried to move away, knocking into each other in their panic.
Max, however, simply wiped the blood and gore from her eyes and sighed deeply as the top of the man’s head was spit out and rolled past her.
“That seems aggressive,” she muttered.
But now the last of the men were ready to talk. In fact, they were ready to reveal anything her team wanted to know.
“The Malones!” one of them yelled. “We’re here for the Malones!”
Max looked off into the darkness and Mads knew she was staring directly into the gold eyes of the Malone brothers. After a brief moment, she nodded and re-focused on the full-humans.
“Why?” Max pushed, grabbing one of the hysterical men and dragging him back by the leg. “Why?” she bellowed when he started to scream.
“We were just told to put them down! I don’t know why!”
“For how much?”
“Three million.”
“For the entire job?” He nodded and Max released his leg so he could continue to drag himself away. It wasn’t like he could get far.
She stood and faced the team.
“So why were the rest of us lured here?” Tock asked.
Max shrugged. “Somebody’s fuckup?”
“Weird fuckup,” Mads remarked. She didn’t like weird fuckups. Then again, she was naturally paranoid. It was in her bones. She wouldn’t say she was born paranoid, but her family situation had made her paranoid. It was the only way she’d managed to survive her early years.
“True, but it’s not like we’ll figure anything out here. Let’s get back and regroup.”
They all nodded in agreement but before they could start moving toward the other side of the island, Mads heard something coming from the nearby beach. She halted her teammates with a raised hand. All of them had enhanced hearing. The benefit of being honey badgers who needed to hear prey underground. But her auditory senses were further enhanced by her hyena hearing and she could hear even the slightest sound if she focused. The turn of a bird’s head. A squirrel asleep in a tree. Or rubber rafts easing up to a coastline and men wordlessly jumping out.
“What?” Max asked.
These men, the ones who’d already been wiped out and the ones still trying to drag themselves away, were nothing more than a distraction. Something to keep the Malones and maybe Mads and her team busy until the real forces showed up.
“We need to go,” Mads said. “Now.”
“What do you want to do about them?” Tock asked, gesturing at the three remaining men with her weapon. They were still trying to crawl away, but they were so busy looking around for whatever had killed their teammates that they weren’t getting very far.
“You guys go,” Max ordered. She still had her blade in her hand. She pulled out another because she worked faster with two. Stretching her shoulders, she faced the three men, but she’d only taken one step toward them when a paw reached out from the darkness and slammed onto the head of one man, crushing it.
Another paw lashed out, ripping the face off the second. And the third was dragged into the darkness screaming. His screams ended within seconds.
Moments later, the cats trotted toward them.
“Those were my toys,” Max complained as the brothers passed her.
“Let’s move out,” Mads pushed, heading toward the location where the copter was waiting to take them back to the city.
They quickly cut through the trees but when they made it to the other side of the small island, they found no copter.
Max walked to where the copter had dropped them off only twenty minutes before. She stood there for long seconds, then faced the rest of her team and the cats, a confused look on her face. “I don’t understand. Did those bitches leave us?”
“Do you see them?” Nelle asked.
“But . . . they’re our transport team. How could they just leave us? No one just leaves.”
“Max—”
“I mean . . . I’ve never been deserted before. Ever.”
“Didn’t your mother desert you?” Tock asked.
“That was different. She was thrown in prison against her will.”
“And your father?”
“He was never there in the first place. I learned never to count on him. But it’s the transport team’s job to be here. To get us out. Who just leaves?”
Mads watched their team leader and finally noted to the others, “I think we may have lost her.”
“She seems so confused by this,” Nelle agreed.
“Look!” Max pointed at the cats now loping by her, heading toward the water. “Now they’re deserting us.”
“They’re tigers. They can swim back to Jersey from here,” Mads pointed out. “Almost five miles with no problem. We do not have that luxury. So we’d better come up with something quick.”
“We can tunnel,” Streep suggested.
“Tunnel where?” Mads asked. “We don’t know what’s between us and the city. Or even Jersey.” She shuddered at the thought of ending up in that hellscape. “Jersey.”
“Fine.” Tock pulled her weapon off her shoulder. “Then we kill everybody.”
“I scented a lot of sweaty men,” Nelle remarked, also readying her weapon. “Enough to accidentally get a good headshot on any one of us.”
“And don’t forget that we do have a game coming up.”
The entire team stopped what they were doing and looked at Mads. Even Max finally returned to the moment at hand to gawk at her.
“What?” Mads demanded. “We’re in the playoffs. We are this close to getting into the championships. But not if we’re dead.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Max shook her head and focused on Tock. “What have you got on you?”
Tock shrugged. “Enough to take out the whole island.”
“And bring down every government organization looking for terrorists,” Nelle noted.
“Especially if you start blowing up islands near New York and Jersey.”