She was checking out a matching leash and harness that Dani could use to walk Princess and the male dogs—Charlie would normally not be okay with a ten-year-old walking a potentially aggressive dog, but she knew the father and uncles wouldn’t allow it unless they were going along to protect the kid—when she got that feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was her personal warning signal. It let her know when something bad was about to happen. It made her hyperaware of everything within a five-mile radius. Sounds. Smells. Everything.
Charlie lowered her phone and turned toward the SUV, her stomach pressing into the hood while her head moved. She could hear arguing a few blocks away. Angry arguing. The scent of pissed-off cats. She heard Keane Malone snarl in the distance, but before she could pin down his location, the air around her changed.
Jerking her shoulders, Charlie moved her head to the side as a blade slashed the air where her head used to be.
Charlie dropped her phone and spun around, slamming the back of her fist into the head of her attacker, sending him face-first into the passenger-side window of the vehicle. But there were more attackers.
And they all came at her at once.
*
Tock only had a moment to exchange a look with Mads before they hit the ground and bullets tore through the side of the storage container.
The weapons being used were definitely semiauto handguns, but the bullets . . . they had to be 50-millimeter, armor-piercing rounds. Tock would guess the Desert Eagle .50 AE. The one weapon that could actually take down a honey badger.
They all shifted to their badger forms, making them a little smaller, a little harder to hit. Zigzagging while sprinting, they headed toward the doors.
The first bullet hit Tock in her left front leg. Then her left side. Max got hit in the ass, her pained yelp almost making Tock laugh. Mads took a hit to the shoulder, causing her to flip head over tail before she got back to her feet and continued running. Somehow the rain of bullets seemed to miss Nelle completely until a shot nailed her through the neck. Nelle kept moving.
They were nearing the door when a bullet ricocheted off the ground and went into Streep’s chest. The tremendous force sent Streep sliding across the floor and into the wall; Nelle was forced to jump over her teammate’s limp, bleeding badger body so she didn’t crash into her.
*
Shay pushed his cousins away from his eldest brother’s back while Finn worked to get Keane’s hands from around their Uncle Seán’s neck.
It wasn’t that Shay didn’t think his brother was being an asshole. He was an asshole most days. But he also wasn’t going to let his cousins beat up his brother.
Sadly, this wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened. Their grandmother’s birthday. Their great uncle’s funeral. The Malone family reunion. That christening at the church. Of course, their priest uncle started that shit, and their cousin who had taken a vow of silence for her order broke Finn’s nose. So this fight was fairly typical.
Annoyingly . . . painfully typical.
“What is wrong with your brother? Why is he acting like this?” Georgie Malone demanded of Shay while reaching for Keane from behind.
“Him?” Shay yelled back. “You guys started this! Texting him about our dad!”
“No, we didn’t!”
“What?”
Georgie started to answer but stopped, staring off into the street, becoming so distracted he stopped trying to tear Keane’s jaw off with his bare hands. Shay turned to see exactly what his cousin was looking at.
It was a white van. And Shay had always believed that if it wasn’t a plumber’s or painter’s van, a white van was never good.
Shay stepped away from the scrum and watched as the van followed the curving path of the street. As it neared their battling group, the van’s side door slid open and the muzzles of automatic rifles slid out.
“Holy—”
“—shit!” Georgie finished before he and Shay tackled the fighting cousins and their uncle as bullets sprayed the area from at least four separate weapons.
*
Hands dug into her hair and threw Charlie through the plate glass window of a recently shutdown deli. Her body slammed against a table, bounced, and hit the floor. By the time she got up, the attackers had stepped through the destroyed window.
They were shifters, but to Charlie’s shock, they raised Desert Eagles. Charlie was shocked because they weren’t badgers. They were lions. Lions, tigers, and bears rarely used guns against other shifters. As apex predators, they felt it was beneath them. Guns were weapons only weak full-humans and tiny shifters needed to survive. That belief apparently hurt foxes’ feelings and they also rarely used weapons against fellow shifters. But badgers didn’t have feelings to hurt. So they did whatever they had to do to stop an enemy. But to see a bunch of lions pointing guns at her . . .
The cats didn’t even wait; they just pulled their triggers. The Desert Eagle was a gun with ammo powerful enough to go through metal or rock or honey badger.
Charlie grabbed the table she’d fallen on, lifted it, and flung it across the room. Then she charged forward, dodging to the right, then left, then straight at the last two lions still standing and shooting because the table had missed them completely.
*
The shooting stopped as the van careened off. The cousins focused on Georgie. He’d been shot through the leg and the lower back. But Shay hadn’t been hurt. Neither had his brothers. But they’d been shot at. And they were not happy.
Keane may have been the one known as the “mean” Malone Brother. But all three of them had an issue with rage. And vengeance.
Snarling, not caring they were shifting in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, the Malone brothers took off after the van, streaking past stunned full-humans who had managed to drop to the ground when the shooting started.
Shay didn’t care who saw him. He didn’t care what was caught on camera. He didn’t care what repercussions there might be from him showing the world what he was. He didn’t care and neither did his brothers. They cut across the street and leaped onto the roof of a small union building. They sped across the rooftop, well aware their speed would only last so long. Tigers were sprinters, not marathoners. That was wolves.
They jumped from the roof. Shay and Finn landed on the back of the speeding van, Finn gripping the back door with his claws, Shay holding onto the roof rack. Keane landed on the hood. Shay made it across the top toward the front just as Keane rammed his paw into the windshield. The force shattered the glass and Keane shoved his body inside. Not even a second later, the van took a hard turn, hit the curb and flipped, sending Shay and Finn spiraling along with it.
*
Charlie held one She-lion around the neck and shot the male through the head with the Desert Eagle she’d taken from one of the other females.
Brain and bone blew back on her before she put the gun to the She-lion’s head.
The She-lion clawed at her arm and yelped, “Aspetta—”
But she wouldn’t wait. Charlie pulled the trigger, blinking as more blood and bone hit her face. She released the body in her arms and was about to walk out of the store when a bullet slammed into her from behind, breaking her collar bone on its way out of her body.