Hot and Badgered. Shelly Laurenston

turned to Dr. Gaertner and calmly explained how she needed to find her sisters before it was too late and that she would, unfortunately, be forced to leave the clinic much sooner than she’d originally planned . . .

      Oh, wait. That’s how Stevie had planned to handle it in her head. With logic and reason and a calm, rational demeanor.

      But when she faced Gaertner, just seeing his face made her angry. Angry that she was now alone and frightened because—without speaking to her—he’d sent her sisters away. He should have spoken to her first. He should have said something!

      And her fear led to panic, which led to her hissing and throwing herself at Gaertner, knocking him to the ground, and wrapping her hands around his throat.

      Sitting on his chest, she hissed again, this time right into his face, and she had a feeling her eyes had shifted color because his own eyes widened and she suddenly smelled urine, meaning the man had pissed on himself.

      Huh. Maybe not just her eyes. Maybe her fangs had made an appearance too. That happened when she lost control. That’s why she went to places like this. To get control of her panic disorder with the help of talk therapy and medications. To learn how to manage it and to fully understand it so that she didn’t have what her coworkers fondly called “a MacKilligan episode.”

      And Gaertner had been right. Stevie had been doing well! She had been feeling better. More in control without any additional meds. But her sisters had come here, and they didn’t bother her lightly. Her sisters never got in the way of her work or her mental health. They worried about her, and they sometimes babied her, but they never would have just “dropped by” for a “how do ya do?” That was not her sisters’ way.

      Stevie knew they kept an eye on her. She knew that one of them was always close by. But, again, that was not because they were obsessive about her. They were obsessive about what their father had, to quote Charlie, “Fucked up now.”

      She would have made that clear to Gaertner if she’d thought about it, but it never occurred to her that he’d stop her sisters from visiting. That he thought they were somehow the reason behind her panic disorder. If anything, her sisters were the reason Stevie hadn’t spent most of her life in a straitjacket at Bellevue. Their pesky ways and less-than-stellar educations allowed Stevie some much-needed distraction from the cacophony of sights, sounds, and information that packed her brain each and every day.

      The truth was, her sisters kept her sane, which was more than this damn doctor was doing!

      Big, strong hands gripped Stevie and yanked her off the doctor, and someone shoved a needle in her arm. A strong drug was injected into her veins and she felt a brief moment of euphoria. A moment that allowed those holding her to think she’d been controlled. But Stevie wasn’t completely human and, even worse for the staff, she was half honey badger. And thanks to her father’s confused genes, her body didn’t process drugs and poison the way an ordinary full-human or shifter did. Even the medications she took to manage her panic disorder had to be tested and retested continuously for years by a shifter-run medical group in Germany to get the dosage exactly right for her biological makeup.

      So if they thought filling her up with whatever calming drug they gave the regulars was going to really do anything . . .

      The euphoria passed as quickly as it came and Stevie yanked her arm out of the grip of one orderly, pushed the other orderly off her, and without much thought to consequences, yanked the needle out of her arm and rammed it into the eye of the third orderly reaching out to grab her.

      He went down screaming and, in full-blown panic now—other people’s screaming always freaked her out—Stevie screamed along with him as she made a mad run for the exit.

      chapter THREE

      They hadn’t left the Swiss center yet, and Charlie knew the longer they stayed, the more concerned those orderlies were going to become. Already there were five of them standing outside the front doors, waiting for the pair to leave.

      Hoping to calm them down, Charlie found a map in the glove compartment and spread it out on the hood of the Mercedes.

      Max watched her and finally asked, “What are you doing?”

      “Trying to calm them down by looking like we’re lost,” she softly replied.

      “Why?”

      “Because we’re making them nervous.”

      “We make everybody nervous. Who gives a fuck?”

      Charlie placed her hands on the hood and asked, “What’s it like to be you, Max? Not to care? Ever?”

      Max shrugged. “It’s awesome.”

      Charlie let out that sigh she was convinced she only used when it came to her middle sibling.

      “I’m not going to argue with you today,” Charlie announced. More for her own benefit than for Max’s because Max didn’t give a shit. “We have too much going on.”

      “So, do you want me to look intensely at the map like it’s still 1982?” Max asked. “You know, rather than just using my fucking phone to take us anywhere we need to go in any part of the world?”

      Charlie briefly wondered if slamming her sister’s head against the SUV’s hood would be considered “arguing” when the front doors of the clinic burst open and her baby sister came rushing through.

      An orderly instinctively reached out and grabbed the hysterical Stevie, but that was not a good move. Not a good move at all.

      Stevie spun and slammed the palm of her hand up, ramming the orderly’s nose and crushing it. He released her and, even though the others hadn’t moved, Stevie kicked one orderly in the groin, another in the leg, breaking the fibula with a cracking sound that echoed around the quiet area. Another got a punch to the face that seemed to break his jaw and cheekbone, and the last was punched in the throat.

      The orderly that had followed her outside had spun back around and returned to the safety of the center in order to get reinforcements.

      That’s when, screaming like she was on fire, Stevie ran for her life, so oblivious to everything around her, she didn’t even see Charlie and Max standing there, watching her. She just took off running. And, with the tiger blood flowing through her veins, she hit forty miles per hour pretty damn quickly.

      Max watched their panic-riddled sister tear off across the front lawn and hit the road that would lead out to the main highway. “Guess the doc told her we’d been here.” Then she laughed because, well . . . it was kind of funny. “Look at her go! I think sparks are coming off her feet.”

      “Come on,” Charlie ordered Max, tossing the map off the SUV hood. “We have to catch her.”

      They scrambled into the SUV and sped after their sister, heading down the long road that led to and from the clinic. On both sides were thick forests.

      “If she goes into the woods—”

      “She’s panicking,” Charlie reminded Max. “She’s just gonna run until she can’t anymore.”

      “She’s so fast.”

      “In short bursts. She has no stamina.” Not an insult, just reality. Again, it was the tiger in her. The wolf and honey badger in Charlie meant she could trot for hours. Not that she ever did. Why bother when she could just as easily rent a car?

      Max suddenly hit the brakes and Charlie let out a relieved breath when she saw her baby sister standing in the middle of the road, taking in deep gulps of air and sobbing.

      “I’ll get her.” Charlie opened her door. “And when I bring her back, you be nice!” she warned.

      “I’m always nice!” Max laughed.

      “Shut up.”

      Charlie walked around the car and over to her baby sister’s side, but she didn’t touch Stevie. She didn’t