chapter THIRTY-ONE
Max woke up as her body was dragged down some hallway. She opened her eyes to see pipes over her head. She was in the hotel basement. Or at least that’s what she was assuming. Hotels like this didn’t have unattractive things such as plumbing on floors with guest rooms. That would be tacky.
A full-human male dragged her into a room. “Here,” he said. Max didn’t know, though, to whom he was speaking. She’d closed her eyes to maintain the illusion she was still out cold.
“Where is our little friend?”
“She went to find the notebook.”
Ahhh. That’s what they wanted from Stevie. One of the notebooks she obsessively wrote in.
Max had no idea what her sister put into those books, but she’d always assumed if it wasn’t music, it was probably some amazing Leonardo da Vinci–style prototype that would change the world.
The Guerra twins were the kind who could easily afford to make any of Stevie’s ideas into reality with all the money and connections they had. Of course for Max there was another question: Was Freddy also trying to get Stevie’s notebook for himself? Or was he still working for the twins?
“Hello, niece,” a female voice said above Max. “We know you are awake.”
Max opened her eyes and gazed up at one of the women she’d seen in the Vanity Fair article.
“It is so nice to meet family, is it not?” she asked with an Italian accent. An accent Max normally found sexy . . . from a man trying to pick her up in a Rome bar. Not on some broad holding a .45 aimed at Max’s head.
The mirror image of the woman standing over her stepped to Max’s side. “So nice to meet family. Although we must admit. . . you do not look like a MacKilligan. But your father assured us that you are.”
“Your father,” said the other, “has been so helpful. He just can’t do enough for us.”
“He specifically told us to take you. He said . . . what was it, Rina?”
“He said to take the Chinese one, Tina. That would keep the others from doing something stupid.”
“Wasn’t that helpful?”
Actually, it wasn’t helpful. Not to Max’s enemies. Unlike her sisters, anxiety and reason did not rule Max MacKilligan. Insanity did. And her father knew that. For once . . . he’d done something right.
“My sisters would never put me at risk,” Max admitted. “That’s kind of my job.”
The one crouching over her—the one who was probably Rina—narrowed her eyes on Max.
Max smiled. Grinned, really. A big, wide one.
Then she unleashed her claws, reached up, and slashed Rina across the face from her jaw to her forehead.
Screaming, Rina fell to the floor, and Max rolled backward until she was able to get to her feet. Tina fired her weapon and Max turned. The bullets rammed her in the back, two hitting close to her spine. But because they didn’t actually touch it, she was able to grab the male who rushed into the room, his gun drawn.
Max caught his wrist and twisted until she broke it. She yanked him close, using his body to protect her from more bullets, letting her aunt shoot her gun dry. When she went to reload, Max threw the now-dead male across the room, knocking her aunt to the ground.
The other twin sat on the floor, screaming and crying, blood pouring, flesh hanging off her skull. But Tina struggled up from under the body.
“Kill her!” Rina ordered her sister in Italian—an Italian phrase Max had learned long ago. “Kill the bitch!”
Max raised her blood-drenched claws and unleashed her fangs. She jerked her entire body forward and hissed.
Tina, without thought, hissed back and her claws suddenly burst from her fingers. Fangs dropped from her gums.
Shocked, she and her twin gazed at the abrupt change in . . . well . . . everything.
Max grinned. “Welcome to the family, Auntie,” she told the females before she charged Tina.
She was almost on her when the door was kicked open and more armed men came in.
Max ripped a line down the skirt of her gown and yanked a blade out of one of the holsters tied to her thigh. She threw it and it slammed into the throat of the first man entering the room. He fell back into the men behind him and Max punched Tina in the face before jumping up onto a nearby desk, ripping out the grate over an air duct and crawling inside. Bullets riddled the tiny shaft as Max crawled her way down to the first exit she could find.
* * *
Charlie was standing near the room where the ceremony would take place. The wedding planner was asking everyone to take their seats because the ceremony was about to begin. The guests showing surprise that a wedding ceremony was about to take place on time.
The music started and the full-human groomsmen began to line up, waiting to make their way down the aisle.
“You guys ready?” Charlie asked with a false smile. “Then let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
“Is there a problem?” the groom asked her.
“No. Of course not. The bride is just excited to start her new life with you.”
With an annoyed snarl, the wedding planner pushed Charlie away from the groomsmen.
“All right, gentlemen,” the She-tiger said, a headset firmly in place, an iPad desperately clutched in her hand. “You remember what to do. And smile everyone. Smile!”
As the men started to go, the She-tiger turned on Charlie. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to get this thing moving.”
“It’s a wedding. Not a business meeting.”
“You can’t be in that much denial.” Charlie jerked to the side so she could see over the taller woman’s shoulder. Her father had crept out of a room where the bridesmaids and groomsmen were allowed to store their stuff during the ceremony and he now held Stevie’s backpack. Even worse, when he saw his eldest daughter, he ran.
He ran!
“Get this thing moving!” Charlie ordered the She-tiger before she lifted up the skirt of her gown and took off after her old man.
* * *
Stevie came around the corner in time to hear “Here Comes the Bride” played—rather poorly, in her opinion—by the string quartet.
She waited until her cousin started off down the aisle to let out a relieved sigh.
“Hey!” Dutch said, coming up behind her in a perfectly tailored suit. Thankfully not a tux. “Everything going okay?”
“Doubtful.” Stevie faced him. “But Carrie’s heading off down the aisle, so I think she’s ahead of the . . . oh, shit!”
“What?” Dutch looked over his shoulder and he immediately begged, “Please tell me they’re not our problem.”
“They’re our problem.”
There were ten of them. Ten polar bears. A few seven, others maybe eight, feet tall.
And all Stevie wanted to do was run. She wanted to run and never look back. But she couldn’t. She’d made a commitment and she didn’t have time to dash off a letter of resignation to her sisters.
“Look,” Dutch said, “I’ll distract them. You go and get the grizzlies.”
“They’ll just squeeze you until you pop like a zit.” Stevie motioned to the wedding planner to close the doors leading into the wedding venue.
And once she heard those doors close, Stevie grabbed the gun she knew Dutch had holstered under his jacket. Even better, it already had a silencer on it.
She aimed and shot Damian Miller five times in the chest . . . which did nothing really except redirect his focus from finding the honey badger who’d ripped him off to destroying the honey badger who’d fucked up his nice white English suit.
The bear roared and Stevie tossed the gun back to a stunned Dutch.
“Run!” she told Max’s best friend. “Run away!”
Then that’s exactly what she did.
* * *
Charlie caught up to her father near the lobby and threw herself at him, landing on his back and taking them both down to the ground.
They rolled right into the middle of people trying to walk to the nearby stores or to the elevators, but Charlie didn’t care.
Grabbing her father by the hair, she yanked him onto his back and straddled his chest.
She had just leaned in to start asking him questions when she felt she was being watched. She looked up to see Bo Novikov standing over her with one child on his shoulders, another in his arms. Beside him was a tall black woman holding onto a baby.
“Seriously, though,” Novikov said, “I can teach you and your sister to skate. That’s, like, the easiest part.”
“What?”
“Hockey. I can teach you to play hockey.”
Charlie started to say something, but her father was trying to get out from under her.
She punched the idiot in the face three times before looking back up at Novikov. “Can this wait?”
“Well . . . you’re not getting any younger.”
“Bo,” the woman said. “Later. You can talk to her later.”
“Whatever.” He sighed, walked off.
The woman smiled warmly, pressing her hand to her chest, and said, “I’m Bl—”
“I don’t care—could you go?” Charlie barked.
Looking hurt, the woman walked off but Charlie wasn’t too concerned. She had other issues at the moment.
“Help!” her father suddenly yelled. “She’s trying to kill me!”
They both waited but everyone kept moving except for a couple of teenagers who started filming on their phones.
“Seriously, Dad,” Charlie told him, “if you’re going to try that move, you really need to pick another city.”
* * *
Max was crawling through the air ducts, moving fast, but sadly not really knowing where she was going . . . exactly.
Still, she didn’t expect the bottom to go out from under her. Literally.
The hatch opened and Max fell to the floor. She turned over, swinging her fists, her eyes closed. But when she didn’t actually hit anything she looked up and saw . . . Dutch and Stevie?
“Told you I smelled her,” Dutch told Stevie proudly.
“That’s just weird,” Stevie replied. “I’d appreciate you not saying something like that to me ever again.”
Dutch held his hand out and Max reached to grab it, but then Dutch was gone, picked up and flung across the room by Carrie’s polar bear dupe.
He reached down for Max but she grabbed another knife from her holster and slashed. The bear roared, his severed thumb hitting Stevie in the head before bouncing across the room.
Another polar grabbed Max from behind, but Stevie unleashed her ridiculously sized claws and slashed, tearing a massive amount of flesh and muscle from a shoulder. That bear roared in pain and dropped Max.
Now on her feet, Max used her elbow to push her sister toward another door—since her claws were still out—and together they ran, the bears right behind them.
* * *
Charlie’s father was turning blue by the time Berg was able to pry her hands from around his throat and Dag was able to yank her off.
Freddy rolled to his knees, coughing and taking in big gulps of air. It was quite dramatic until he suddenly grabbed Stevie’s pink and burgundy backpack and tried to make a run for it. But Britta caught him around the neck Charlie had tried to wring and dragged him away from the lobby.
Berg took a cursing and hissing Charlie from a terrified Dag and they followed Britta down the hallway. They moved into a room that wasn’t near the wedding festivities and carried the two MacKilligans inside.
Dag kicked the door closed and Britta pressed her .45 under Freddy’s chin. And before he could speak a word, she said, “Keep in mind, old man, I am not your child, I do not like you, and no one in your family will miss you.”
Charlie fought her way out of Berg’s arms and adjusted her dress.
“You should have let me kill him,” she said to Berg without looking at him.
“You were being filmed. I’m pretty sure that’s one of those situations you can’t MacKilligan your way out of.”
Charlie took in a breath, let it out. “You’re right. Thank you.” She pointed at her father. “Why did you take Stevie’s backpack?”
Her father gave a shrug and false smile. “No reason.”
Charlie’s fingers curled into fists and, after a few seconds, she said, “Dag . . . rip off his arm.”
Dag started across the room like he was going to do it, and Britta even forced Freddy to extend a limb. When his brother grabbed hold of it and looked like he was going to start pulling while his sister held the other half of Freddy, the badger screamed out, “Okay! Okay!”
Charlie cocked her head. “Well?”
“I needed one of the notebooks . . .”
“Tell me you’re not trying to sell secrets to the North Koreans again.”
Britta’s eyes widened. “Again?”
“He never actually did,” Charlie explained. “It’s just that . . . um . . .” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s too stupid a story.”
“It’s nothing like that. I just, uh . . .”
When Freddy hesitated too long, Charlie informed her father, “If you think that I won’t tear strips of your flesh off just to see you cry, let alone get information that will protect my baby sister, you are sadly mistaken. So if I were you, Dad, I’d start talking.”
But, even after that, he still hesitated. Berg pushed Charlie to the side, got at the head of the long, heavy wood conference table, raised his fist in the air, and brought it down. Once.
The entire table caved inward, folding like a thin sheet of cardboard.
Berg lowered his head a little so that he was sure Freddy MacKilligan could see his grizzly hump. Then he said, “Talk.”
“It’s account numbers,” the badger quickly replied.
“Account numbers for . . . ?” Charlie pushed.
“Every member of the MacKilligan family in Scotland and in the States.”
Aghast, Charlie demanded, “How the fuck did you get that?”
“I just . . .” Freddy’s gaze bounced around the room, examining them all before he told his daughter, “You don’t have to worry. I don’t have yours and your sisters since you won’t give me that information. Spoiled brats that you are!”
“Seriously?” Britta snapped, pissed for the MacKilligan sisters.
“They’re my daughters. They wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for me.”
Charlie started to go for her father but Berg caught her arm and pulled her back. “Just finish,” he ordered Freddy.
“Anyway, I sold Will’s info to the Guerras to prove what I had.”
“Uh-huh. And?” Charlie pushed.
“But then Will got so mad about it.”
“Shocking,” Charlie drily replied.
“He owes me!” her father yelled. “Fucking cheap ass.”
“Can we just keep going, please?”
“So, I wasn’t going to sell the book to the Guerras since Will was all bitchy about it. But then they . . .”
“Then they . . . ?”
He cleared his throat. “Then they got me drunk one night and I must have told them where it was. Or how they could get it.”
“How they could get it?”
“Well, I know your sister likes to write in those composition notebooks. So, I just bought one, put the info in there, and then slipped it into the middle of the stack she already had in her backpack. I figured she’d never notice.”
Without moving, without blinking, Charlie asked her father, “And when was this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. A month ago. Maybe.”
“You . . . you let your daughter walk around for a month with a target on her back?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
Her voice tight, Charlie asked, “And how would you put it?”
“Ummm . . . well . . . I guess . . . kind of that way. But,” he quickly added, “I knew my little Stevie wouldn’t mind.”
The problem wasn’t Freddy’s “little Stevie.” It was Freddy’s “extremely upset Charlie.”
Body so tense that every vein bulged, Charlie reached down and grabbed one side of the table that Berg had broken in half.
Britta and Dag, eyes wide, immediately dove out of the way as that table half flew across the room and rammed into Freddy MacKilligan, battering him into the wall. When the table hit the floor, a brutalized and unconscious Freddy fell on top of it.
Calm again, Charlie went over to her father’s side and grabbed her sister’s backpack. She dumped everything on the floor and quickly pulled out the notebooks. She handed a couple to Britta, Berg, and Dag. She took the rest. In silence, they all quickly flipped through the pages until Britta said, “All I see are notes for things that I’m not sure are physically possible to make in today’s world.”
“These are all music and drawings,” Dag said.
When Charlie looked at him, Berg just shook his head.
“Someone else must have taken it.”
“Who?”
Charlie thought a moment, but when she suddenly closed her eyes and whispered, “Fuck,” he knew they were in trouble.
* * *
“Come on then, Aunties,” Mairi said as she pulled the Guerra twins up, tucking the notebook the two women wanted into the pack before strapping it to her shoulders. “Let’s get you out of here.”
“My face,” one of them sobbed. “Look what that bitch did to my face!”
Mairi understood why her cousin had done it, though. She’d wanted to do something similar. Just so she could tell the two bitches apart.
“It’s all right. No need to worry. You’ll be better in no time. Plastic surgeons can do wonders these days,” she lied. Those weren’t just scratches. Her cousin had dug down deep with her claws. To bone. Those were scars that would last, even for shifters.
She led them to the door, stepping over the bodies of the men she’d been forced to kill. Her cousin had only taken out one. Mairi had killed the others because they’d seen too much. She’d walked in when they were talking about claws and fangs. Not a good scenario in her estimation. Best to quiet them all.
So she had. She’d killed every man and hadn’t even worked up a sweat. Full-humans were almost too easy.
“Let’s get you someplace safe, Aunties. And then,” she said as she helped them out, “we’ll have a nice, long talk about family. . . and how we’re different from the other boys and girls.”
* * *
They led the bears as far away from the wedding as they could, but when they turned to make sure they were all back there, Stevie realized that only Miller’s polar friends had been chasing them. Miller was gone.
“Max!”
Max stopped and turned, quickly realizing the issue.
They were at a dead end, with the bears only a few feet away from them.
One of them threw his arms wide and asked, “So what are you gonna do now?”
Max reached under the slit in her dress and pulled out two blades. She started toward the men but Stevie yanked her back.
“No!”
“Why not?” Max snapped.
“It’s wrong.”
“And what? You think they were going to be nice to us?”
“We don’t know if they were going to kill us, though, right?” she asked the men, but they just seemed sadly confused by the situation. “Look at them. You can’t just kill them.”
“And I still say, ‘why not’?”
“What about the bodies?”
Now Max was getting frustrated. “What about them?”
“We can’t just leave them here. The cops will come. It’ll ruin the wedding.”
“The wedding?”
“Look, we want to stay in New York, right? So Charlie can have a chance at what some consider normalcy. Then we can’t leave bodies just lying around everywhere.”
“So what do you suggest?”
Stevie studied the hallway they were in, her mind calculating every bit of space, noting anything within arm’s length, taking into account every defect in the design and architecture before evaluating those things within three dimensions inside her mind.
When she was done, she took one of Max’s blades, walked over to the wall on the right, found the patch she wanted, and stabbed it with the knife.
There was a moment of silence before the wall began to crack. The crack spread fast, crawling up the wall, to the ceiling.
The bears were staring up as the crack moved by, a second before nearly five feet of ceiling gave way and fell on them.
Stevie pulled Max’s knife out of the wall and handed it back to her. Then she smiled.
“Show off,” Max muttered before she ran around the bears, who were groaning and trying to dig their way out of the rubble.
* * *
Barb Malone stood behind the tapestry that separated the prep area from the actual ceremony. Everything was going perfectly. She could see her staff on her tablet as they rushed to get those last-minute details finished in the Grand Ballroom for the reception. She’d been reluctant to move away from her paper and pen days, but high tech was her friend, an extra set of hands that she’d never really had before.
Glorious. Just glorious.
“We are winding down here,” she said very softly into her mic. “You have T minus five minutes before the ceremony is over. Be ready. Be smiling.”
To her delight she heard that the cake had arrived and it was perfect. The cake always worried her. If that thing was damaged during transport, a bride would forever say her wedding was ruined by “the cake disaster.” So Barb only worked with certain bakers and bakeries; she wouldn’t tolerate mistakes. Not now, not ever.
She was about to move back to the front of the room when she saw a polar bear come in through one of the doors and start moving toward the ceremony.
Barb quickly and quietly moved across the floor until she stood in front of the man. Why was blood on him? She shook her head. No time for those kind of questions.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she whispered, “but you can’t be back here.”
He tried to push her out of the way but Barb Malone was a Siberian tiger. You didn’t push her anywhere. She unleashed her fangs and he started to roar. A roar that would travel.
But then two of the bride’s cousins were suddenly there, throwing themselves onto the back of the bear, trying to stop him and, thankfully, distracting the polar from roaring.
Unfortunately for the two cousins . . . they were honey badgers. Honey badgers on a polar bear? Seriously?
“This wouldn’t be so bad if I could use my knife!” one cousin complained. Too loudly.
“I said, no!” the other barked back.
“Keep quiet!” Barb ordered.
A muffled scream startled Barb, but a wolverine landing on the bear’s back startled her more.
What the unholy fuck was happening?
“Dutch! Get him!” one cousin squealed.
“I’m trying!”
* * *
Charlie couldn’t find any sign of the Guerra twins or Mairi, and she really didn’t have time to look. She had to check on the damn wedding.
She eased the door open and slid into the back with the Dunn triplets behind her. She’d just let out a relieved breath—seeing the bride and groom about to take their vows—when she noticed the tapestry in the background was moving.
Then she heard a squeak. She knew only one shifter who ever squeaked like that. Stevie.
She motioned to Berg to keep a lookout for trouble before lifting her skirt and moving around the perimeter of the room until she reached the tapestry and disappeared behind it.
Charlie was trying to be quiet but she gasped when she saw Stevie and Max hanging onto a polar bear wearing a blood-soaked white suit and desperate to shake them off. Coming around to the front was Dutch. He grabbed the bear around the waist and was using all of his brawny weasel strength to try to take the bear down to the ground. But Miller wasn’t having any of it.
Charlie ran toward the bear just as he opened his mouth to roar. She slapped her hand over his face and started pushing him back with Dutch.
“Get him out of here!” the She-tiger wedding planner whispered-yelled at them.
The bear tried to go forward again, ready to ruin everything for a couple Charlie really could not give two shits about, but still . . . She’d been paid to prevent something like this from happening. Sadly, she still felt a sense of commitment.
But just when the bear managed to get within inches of the tapestry, his hand reaching down to pull it off and reveal all of this to the rich full-humans about to marry into this insanity, a big hand caught hold of the polar’s wrist and yanked him back.
Max and Stevie were quickly removed from the polar’s back, and Dag wrapped his arms around the polar, slapping his hand over Miller’s mouth.
Then there was Britta. Standing in front of the polar, smirking, she reached down and grabbed Miller’s balls. Then she twisted.
His high-pitched squeal—despite Dag’s hand over his mouth—still made every shifter in the place wince, but the full-humans probably hadn’t heard a thing.
“Let’s go,” Britta ordered, and as one, the Dunns lifted the polar up and carried him out.
Just as the door closed behind them, Charlie heard applause and cheers and knew that the bride and groom were now wife and husband.
Grinning, she looked at her sisters and, together, they all did their own little awkward celebratory dances.
Charlie knew it wasn’t pretty . . . but she also didn’t care.