Finn quickly followed Keane, but when Shay tried to do the same, Tock stopped him with one raised finger.
“Drop the head,” she told him.
Shay took a step back; a giant male lion’s head was securely locked between his jaws. You’d think, with all that golden mane getting in his eyes, Shay would be happy to get rid of the thing. But he clearly didn’t want to release his prize. Instead, he growled a little and shook it.
“Shay Malone,” Tock barked, using her mother’s authoritarian tone, “drop that head and get the fuck out here!”
Shay’s prize hit the floor and rolled out of the lopsided van, landing on the ground with a wet thud. A second later, Shay followed, running over to the van and jumping inside.
“Let’s go,” the She-badger ordered, already moving back to the driver’s side.
Tock began to follow but a full-human woman was standing on the sidewalk, gawking at her. She was so stunned, she hadn’t even bothered to use her phone to record what she had witnessed. It simply hung limply from her hand.
With a shrug, Tock told her, “Wild animal trafficking gone horribly, horribly wrong. Never put different apex predators in the same van.”
When the woman only frowned in confusion, Tock walked away. She didn’t have time for further explanation.
Tock forced herself inside between three really big Siberian tigers and her teammates, all of whom were trying to give Streep some space, and leaned back out to grab the doors and slam them closed.
The van began moving again and Tock sat down on the floor, a now-human and naked Shay sitting beside her.
Both covered in a good amount of blood, the pair glanced at each other, then away.
“How was your morning?” Tock asked the cat.
“Pretty bad. And yours?”
“Shitty. Quite shitty.”
“Yeah,” Shay said on a long sigh. “Yeah.”
Chapter 17
Captain Desiree “Dez” MacDermot watched in fascination as nearly the entire Eastern Seaboard was shut down in record time. Not by the United States government. They’d only managed to shut down the Jersey docks.
But the United States shifters? They didn’t play. As soon as they heard about what was going on at the docks, they moved with a speed she’d never actually witnessed before. The area was blocked off in all directions for up to ten miles. Communications were completely shut off. Suddenly, cell phones didn’t work. There was also an immediate media blackout—local and national news were unable to get anywhere near the epicenter of “animal trafficking gone very wrong.”
At least that was the story the media was getting and would continue to get. About how some very bad men had been moving apex predators through the docks to sell to rich billionaires when the animals got loose and went on a rampage.
What about the bullet casings? And reports of drive-by shootings? No, no. That was just the bad guys trying to get their animals back under control. Yes, there were guns, but no one was actually hurt.
If one did not count honey badgers, apparently.
Dez wasn’t surprised to find that honey badgers were somehow a part of the disaster. Of all the problems she had to deal with as head of the NYPD’s Shifter Only Unit, the badgers were always the worst to deal with. A few years ago, she would have said it was grizzly bears hopped up on cocaine-infused honey that were her biggest problem. But she’d quickly learned that particular issue was easily rectified with a tranq gun normally used on elephants and a media report about meth-head body builders.
Honey badgers, though . . . they were a nightmare. Because they didn’t act like other shifters. They were nothing like Mace, Dez’s husband, or their son—both very moody lion males who took lots of naps and ate a lot of food. She loved them both, but she fought hard to manage them. Especially with each other. But she was from the Bronx. Managing two males with machismo issues was something she was used to after years as a cop and former Marine MP.
The badgers, however, didn’t have machismo issues. They didn’t think because they had a lot of hair and a big attitude, the world should automatically back away and let them roam free. Instead, badgers insinuated themselves into the full-human world and then started shit. Whether it was the young badgers who nearly burned down a school so they could get out early and go to a concert at Madison Square Garden, or adult badgers who somehow managed to start a fistfight between diplomats at the UN. Diplomats! Their whole business was not to fight. But, as Dez had been saying since she found out that actual honey badger shifters existed, “Leave it to a badger.”
Leave it to a badger to steal Romanian royal jewels on loan to MOMA.
Leave it to a badger to get moms to literally spit at each other during a parent-teacher conference when all Dez wanted to know was how to help her son pass his English course because he found it “soooo boring!”
And leave it to a badger to shut down the Eastern Seaboard because someone wanted to kill a whole bunch of them.
She examined the shipping container that her former partner told her some of the badgers had been stuffed in. There were bullet holes and blood everywhere. Plus, dead lions on the outside and dead bears on the inside.
That was concerning. Especially the lions. The New York Lion prides could be an issue, sure. But always easily managed. They, like everyone else, just wanted to live their lives. Some were really rich. Some less so. But their goal was always to protect the pride. Nothing else mattered.
But the lions she saw scattered around the shipping container and in the white van that had done the drive-by . . .
First off, they weren’t American. The few IDs that had been found on them said they were from Italy. Again, Dez was always a little surprised when she discovered something new. Like Italian lions. It made sense, of course. But still . . . she was just a full-human cop from the Bronx who happened to fall in love with a lion. Stuff that her husband had grown up knowing, she was still discovering almost each and every day.
It was fun and interesting, but definitely terrifying. How could it not be? A human being able to shift into an apex predator! One just had to hope and pray those unusual beings didn’t get bitchy about how full-humans were fucking up the planet and each other. Dez knew if those shifters ever decided to turn on the rest of them . . . they would all be screwed.