In a Badger Way (Honey Badger Chronicles #2) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,4
lot to kill us. But I guess you don’t know much about that, huh?” She sniffed the air. “Yeah, full-human . . . so you don’t know about any of that. But you can count yourself lucky. You’ll get a nice bit of cash from the estate and can go on and live your life as long as the Almighty allows. Won’t that be nice? Rather than waking up again . . . and finding me standing over you?”
Doreen forced herself to nod.
“That’s a good lass.” Again, she patted her knee and Doreen fought the urge to recoil. To run screaming from the room, the building . . . the state.
The woman stood, stretched her back. The sound of bones cracking had Doreen cringing.
She watched the woman walk across the room to the open window she’d probably come through.
“Now don’t forget,” she added before slipping back out as soundlessly as she’d slipped in. “Lots of tears for his sons, and lots of ‘He can’t be dead. He can’t be dead.’ That’ll impress the family. And they deserve that, don’t you think?”
Then with that disturbing grin still on her face, she was out the window and out of Doreen’s life.
Shaking with a fear she’d never known, Doreen slipped deep into the covers next to her dead husband and waited until the alarm clock went off. Then she got up, went to one of her stepson’s rooms, and, while the family gathered, rushing around to call the doctor they had on payroll and the lawyer who kept them all out of prison, she sobbed and sobbed and kept repeating, “He can’t be dead. He can’t be dead.”
* * *
When he went to bed late that night, he thought she’d be there to complain about his long hours working, but then he remembered . . . he didn’t have a wife like everyone else. He had Irene Conridge. The genius.
Niles Van Holtz—“Van” to his friends and Pack but “Holtz” to his mate—found his full-human wife still doing her own work in her very messy office. Her gaze fixed on her computer screen, her fingers flying over the keyboard, desperately trying to keep up with her even faster brain.
He didn’t wait for her to notice him. She never would. Instead, he leaned down and kissed her neck.
“I’ll be right with you,” she said, still working. “Go have lunch and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“It’s three in the morning.”
Her hands froze on the keyboard. “Oh. All right.”
Van sat down on the floor, his back resting against her desk. “Did you eat at all today?”
“I had breakfast.” When he continued to stare at her, she added, “A very large breakfast. Is there a reason you’re here?”
Van rested his arms on his raised knees. “They found three more.”
Irene dropped back into her seat, her lips slightly parted. It took a lot to stun her, but here they were.
“Burned?”
“Yes.”
“The same other issues?”
“Yes. Hybrids in the process of shifting into or out of their human forms when killed, but, for whatever reason, none turned completely back to human, which they should have when they died. We all shift back to human after we die.”
Irene shook her head. “Fascinating. He’s really advanced his work.”
“You know, we don’t know it’s him.”
“It’s him,” she snapped. “Trust me, it’s him.”
“Because you don’t like him?”
“I don’t like most people, but he’s the only one with the science to come up with this.”
“That’s because he’s been working on ways to change DNA to get rid of the most deadly diseases. Like cancer and diabetes.”
“I wish you would just admit that you don’t believe it’s him because he’s one of you. A fellow shifter.”
“You’re right, I have a very hard time believing any shifter would do this to another.”
“Because you refuse to believe some shifters are more human than others. He’s also a scientist and I know my own kind. We can rationalize almost anything as long as it doesn’t touch our work. We can give you very logical reasons why we’re doing it—even when we know it’s wrong. Trust me when I say, he is no different. At the very least,” she added, “we need to investigate him thoroughly.”
“My people have already started but it would be great if we could get someone on the inside.”
“I already told you that I’m out . . . he loathes me.”
“Do you have any idea how many times you’ve made that statement to me about so many people?”
“I could calculate it, but I’m sure the final tally would be