Putting the food out and turning on the television, Shen only took one bite of his Quarter Pounder before Stevie suddenly walked into the living room, turned, and proceeded to scream back toward the dining room.
Shen tried to understand her, but then Charlie and Max joined in and the three sisters stood right in the archway, just screeching.
Screeching so intensely, the veins on Stevie’s neck bulged, appearing ready to explode. Her face was beet red and she was talking with her hands. Well . . . screeching with her hands. All three gestured wildly but Shen had no idea what anyone was saying because they were not only screeching but screeching fast. Like speed-screeching.
After about three minutes of this, Stevie suddenly leaned her head back, and the roar that exploded from her throat shook the windows and . . . maybe . . . the entire house? Shen wasn’t positive but the roar was powerful.
Charlie and Max stopped their own screeching. Stevie lowered her head, and, slicing her hands through the air, announced, “That. Is. It!” There was a long silence, and the MacKilligans stared at each other until Stevie added, “You both know what I’ll do. And you both know I’ll do it. We’re not having this discussion again.”
“I need to bake,” Charlie announced, heading to the kitchen.
Max just walked away, the back door slamming shut a minute later.
Stevie, her jaw tight, stood in the archway for another two or three minutes until she finally sighed and swung her giant backpack off her shoulder. Digging around for a bit, she eventually pulled out the paper bag she’d gotten from the pharmacy. She took out the bottle of pills and read the label.
“I need to take this with food.”
Shen picked up one of the Quarter Pounders and held it out to her, but Stevie’s nose crinkled in distaste. “No thanks.”
She turned, started toward the kitchen. Stopped when she heard pots banging. Spun around and headed toward the front door, but the local stray cat came charging in from one of the open windows, followed by a shifted Max, who didn’t seem to care it was the middle of the day.
“Leave that cat alone, Max!”
A few seconds later, they heard Charlie bark, “Max!” and then the back door opened and closed, probably meaning the cat and the badger had been tossed out of the house.
With a long sigh, Stevie faced Shen and he motioned to the pile of burgers he had on the coffee table, again offering what he had.
Stevie came over and picked one up. “Thank you,” she said with a sigh and moved back to the other side of the room, heading toward one of the wing-backed chairs across from Shen. She was turning to sit down when big hands slapped against the window, causing Stevie to scream and drop the burger as one of the MacKilligans’ grizzly neighbors put his face close to the glass and yelled, “Is your sister baking? I thought I heard baking noises!”
Shen shook his head, annoyed with his fellow bear. He would think the locals would have stopped doing that sort of thing by now. The MacKilligan sisters were not the kind of women a bear, cat, wolf, or man would want to startle. They made the horror of grizzly-boar rage seem like a toddler’s temper tantrum. Not only because Stevie shifted into . . . whatever the hell it was she shifted into, but also because her sisters didn’t really bother with shifting when they were startled or confronted. Charlie had a way with firearms that he hadn’t seen even from trained military professionals, while Max did love her edge weapons. She could slice and dice like an old-school butcher, but she moved like a dancer or gymnast. And she really enjoyed it. She enjoyed hurting those who hurt or attempted to hurt those she loved.
That made her more than a predator. It made her a killing machine. A shark in a honey badger body.
Shen picked up the SUV keys, his wallet, and sunglasses, and walked over to a panting Stevie, who was trying desperately not to panic. He slung her backpack over his shoulder and took hold of her arm.
“Come on,” he said, pulling her along behind him.
“Where are we going?”
“To get you some food and a break from . . . everything.” He glanced back at her. “I think after the day you’ve had, we can both agree that you deserve it.”
* * *
Coop placed a plate of cookies in front of his twin sisters, Zia and Zoe. He then sat down across from them while his sister Cherise poured milk into two tall glasses.
“We need to discuss this,” Coop said. Twin sets of brown eyes stared at him. “You do understand that what you did was wrong, don’t you?”
They chewed Oreos, their mouths moving in unison, while they continued to stare and not answer. It was something they did to unnerve people. Even blinking at the same time. And all that did unnerve Coop. But he refused to let nine-year-old brats terrorize him by pretending they were live-action dolls from The Shining.
“Are you listening to me?” he demanded.
The expressions on those cold, blank, adolescent faces suggested that no they weren’t listening to him. But those expressions changed when an arm came around Coop’s shoulder and a hand slammed onto the table, making the twins jump and their eyes go wide.
Toni, Coop’s eldest sister, who’d been called home after what they were now calling “the incident,” leaned down so she could look right into the twins’ faces.
“Do you two know what you did?”
Instead of attempting to intimidate Toni—something that would never work on the She-jackal who ruled this family with an iron paw—they began making excuses . . . and lying. Lots of lying.
“Quiet!” Toni barked after a minute or two of said lying. She threw her messenger bag behind her, uncaring there was a laptop inside. Luckily, her wolf mate, Ricky Lee Reed, was standing behind her and caught the bag before it hit the floor. “I don’t want to hear another lie from either one of you.”
Zia began to lie in . . . Russian? Coop wasn’t positive. And Zoe chose to lie in French. As language prodigies—to the point where they’d created several of their own—that was their go-to move when they knew they were caught. But Toni knew the twins’ moves better than she knew her own.
“That is enough!” Toni bellowed.
The twins immediately stopped speaking, looking down at the kitchen table.
“I can’t believe that you two would do something so stupid and mean as poisoning Lame. And she’s always been so nice to you two!”
Zia frowned. “It’s Blayne.”
“And we gave her soda, not cyanide,” Zoe stated.
“Knowing what that would do to her! Have you seen the living room? The living room we do not own!”
“That wasn’t our fault!” Zoe argued.
“Yeah. That was that giant thing!” Zia pointed in the direction of the damaged living room. “It was trying to kill her!”
“You hopped up Blayne on sugar,” Coop reminded his sisters, “and then she startled poor little Stevie.”
“Not our fault,” Zoe said while Zia shook her head. Neither willing to take blame.
“Bullshit.”
A little shocked, they all looked at the end of the table toward Cherise. When no one said anything, she reiterated, “Bullshit. They know it”—she pointed at the twins, then at herself—“and we know it.”
“And if you think this is the end of your problems—” Toni began but was cut off by a scream coming from the second floor.
Toni looked around the room. “Mom? Aunt Irene?”
“Went over to the wild dog house,” Coop explained. “They haven’t come back.”
“The boys?”
“Went to the library.”
“Alone?”
“Dad took them. They won’t be long.”
Kyle ran into the room and stood behind Cherise’s chair, using her as his human shield.
“Really?” Coop had to ask.
“She has that crazy look in her eyes and I’m willing to sacrifice Cherise to save my beautiful, beautiful hands.”
“What about my hands?” Cherise wanted to know.
“Oh, please,” Kyle huffed. “You play the cello. The cello.”
Their twenty-one-year-old sister stomped into the kitchen holding a pair of jeans in each hand.
“Where is it?” Oriana demanded, glaring at everyone.
“Where’s what?” asked Toni, the only one among them brave enough to talk to Oriana when she was like this.
Oriana had been a little on edge lately. A ballerina prodigy since she was five, Oriana had finally gotten her chance to dance with the Fuller-James Ballet Company of Manhattan and was well on her way to becoming the company’s prima ballerina. However, that position was currently being held by a tough full-human Russian who had been playing this game a lot longer than Oriana had. That was hard for Coop’s younger sister. Oriana had always gotten everything she’d wanted in the dance world, and her battle with the lead dancer was—from what Coop had heard—getting pretty nasty.
He knew his younger sister too. Knew she would never give “some bitch” the pleasure of seeing her sweat, which Coop completely understood. There was a twelve-year-old Italian prodigy pianist that Coop called “The Asshole” every time the kid showed up on TV.
So he knew what his sister was going through. Unfortunately, unlike Coop—who took his rage out on his piano or by playing video games on his computer that required him to kill a lot of zombies or World War II Nazis—Oriana tended to pour her rage and panic into being obsessive. And she could be pretty obsessive. Like now.
Shaking her clothes at her family, Oriana barked, “Where are my jeans?”
“You’re holding them,” Coop kindly pointed out, which nearly got his head bitten off.
“Not these jeans, you idiot! The jeans between these jeans. Those are the jeans I want! I had them organized in a certain way, I go to class and rehearsal, and come back . . . and now things are displaced. Why are they displaced?”
Cherise muttered, “Wow,” and lowered her eyes so as not to challenge her fellow canine.