“Wait,” Vladimir wheezed, running (well, limping) up behind us. “Whoo. Ah, wait, please wait,” he said, holding up the folder. “I don’t want to hold you up, but, please. We would love to have Cinnamon as a student at the Clairmont Academy.”
“Doctor Vladimir, I’m Cinnamon’s guardian,” I said. Actually, we were still working through the adoption, but as far as the law was concerned I was still legally responsible for a werekin minor. “I don’t want to get sued, or, God forbid, go to jail if something happens-”
“I’m sure we can make adequate arrangements before classes start.”
“Oh, gimme that,” I said, taking the folder and handing it to Cinnamon, who cried with delight. “Cinnamon would love to be a student at the Clairmont Academy.”
“Thank you thank you thank you!” Cinnamon said. “We- ah! ” And then she raised a hand to her cheek, felt her whiskers, and said meekly. “We gots to go.”
We got in the car and drove off.
“Well, that went-are you OK?” I said. “Are you going to make it?”
“Just drive,” she said, leaning back in the seat, eyes closed, holding the folder tightly in her hands. “Just get me home.”
“Damnit, we still need to go by a pet store,” I said. Cinnamon snarled at the word ‘pet’, and I winced, but we still needed to go. I had planned a real safety room in the house we were buying, but the closing was on hold until the Valentine Foundation actually started coughing up the payments they owed me. We still didn’t have a cage at the apartment; we’d been planning to go get one this evening. “We’ve put this off too long-”
“Forget it,” Cinnamon said with a growl, leaping between the seats to land in the back, tail thwacking me in the face as she went. “Take me home. Lock me in the bathroom.”
“That’s too small,” I said.
“You wants me to tear up your bedsheets?” she said, a growl growing in her voice.
I glanced back: she was on all fours, eyes glowing, pupils oval and staring at something ahead of me. I turned-and slammed the brakes before I rammed the car stopped in front of me.
“Jesus!” I said, as the Prius squealed to a stop amidst a chorus of angry horns. Ahead, on Clairmont road, early evening traffic stretched off in an endless line of red taillights. I could see a distant blue flashing light, complete with a knot of rubberneckers. “Fuck! This is not fair-”
And then a low, gut churning growl rumbled through the Prius.
Swallowing, I carefully reached up and adjusted the rear-view mirror, and stared straight into the yellow eyes of a huge tiger. Cinnamon was snarling, nose wrinkled, eyes oval against the sun. The steel collar about her throat had become chokingly tight as her body swelled, and she tugged at it with a paw broad enough to claw my face off.
She seemed to fill the entire back seat with fur and rage. I’d never seen her like this: real tigers had nothing on the werekind. She was absolutely terrifying. But oddly, the threat of messy death was not the first thing on my mind.
That horrible paw raised again to tug at the collar, and I said sharply, “Cinnamon Frost! Stop messing with that, you’ll pull out a claw.”
She snarled, then roared at me, a fearsome sound that stung my ears and reverberated in my gut.
I blinked-I couldn’t not blink at that sound-but did not flinch. She reached to claw at the collar again, and I got worried. “Are you choking?”
The tiger’s eyes tightened, its nose wrinkled up, and I could see huge fangs in the rearview as she flinched back. But among all that, I saw the head twitch… in a clear no.
“Good,” I said. My right ear hurt, and the steering wheel creaked under my grip, but it stopped my hands from shaking. “We’ll get Saffron to fit you with a larger one. I don’t want you choking, but I don’t want some vamp tearing into you because you’re not wearing her collar.”
Cinnamon snarled again, striking the back of the seat with that paw so hard I felt the seat squeak. The car rocked under the blow; I understood her strength, but where was she getting the mass to shake a ton and a half of plastic and metal? The steering wheel grew damp under my death grip, but I didn’t turn, didn’t back down, didn’t give her any reason to strike.
“If I can find a p-” don’t say pet, don’t say pet “-a… store,” I said slowly, swallowing as her crackling snarl rippled through the car, “can you wait in the car until I purchase a cage?”
The tiger lowered her head, shaking it. A definite no.
“Great, wonderful,” I said. But I had an idea, and pulled out of the traffic to the left into a nearby driveway so we could turn around. “Don’t worry, Cinnamon,” I said, reaching up to put the gearshift into reverse; when I did so, my hand was trembling. “I know what to do.”
Only when my hand was calm did I flick the Prius in reverse, put my hand on its seat, and look over my shoulder to back up, coming face to face with Cinnamon’s tiger form. Her head was big enough to bite mine off, her body was twisted in rage, her claws were raking the seat-but her voice was mewling in terror, and the human in her eyes was wide and pleading.
“All right,” I said, backing out. “No choice. We go to the werehouse.”
Jasmine and Steel
The entrance to the Oakdale Werehouse was hidden away on one of South Atlanta Road’s tiny tributaries, a dumpy dirt road hooking off into the forest. Past the bend, almost hidden behind heaped jasmine vines, was a narrow gravel driveway. A NO TRESPASSING sign warned away humans; a triangle of magical runes scared off Edgeworlders.
And to stop the determined driving their Priuses, a simple chain hung over the drive.
I saw it almost too late and slammed on the brakes. The Prius noisily slid forward on the gravel, stopping just shy of dinging her nose on the chain.
Nervously, I glanced back, but Cinnamon did not stir beneath the white hospital blanket I’d thrown over her to hide her from prying eyes. Only the deep sound of her breathing betrayed any clues about exactly what made the lumps beneath its white folds.
I got out. The werewolf defenses were simple: anyone stupid enough to walk the drive would be isolated from their vehicle, easy pickings. But I had no intention of playing their game. I just stepped up to the chain, concentrated, and murmured: “Image of tooth: clear my path.”
The snake tattoo on my left wrist came to life, reared, and struck the chain. It parted with a sudden bang, slipping to the ground with a quiet rattle of its own. “Thanks, my trusty serpent,” I murmured, stroking the glowing phantom with my free hand as it merged back into my flesh.
Then I hopped back in, started her up, and shot us down the drive.
The sun was still up, barely, which meant we wouldn’t be dealing with the werehouse’s nighttime guardians, the vampires of the Oakdale Clan. This was not good news: I was on good terms with Oakdale, mostly through Revenance and his friend and maker, Calaphase.
Then it hit me. I was going to have to break the news to him once dark fell.
I was so distracted by the thought, I almost ran over one of the werehouse’s daytime guardians as he stepped in front of me to bar the road. He was an older man with a wild iron-grey beard. He played a good ol’ boy in a worn woodsman’s jacket, but beneath his black fedora, glinting eyes screamed werekin.
He cried something I couldn’t hear over the rattle of the road, thwacking his walking stick at me as if I was going to stop-then leapt nimbly aside when I didn’t, mouthing a curse as the Prius skidded to a stop beside him. He shoved bushes aside with his staff and squeezed over to my window, but I’d already rolled it down and didn’t give him a chance to tell us to ‘git.’
“I’ve got a werekin turning in the back,” I said, and then, when he opened his mouth to object, I amplified, “It’s Cinnamon-Stray. She needs your safety cage. Where do I take her?”
The man stared briefly, then cursed again, whipping out a cell phone. “Go to the upper loading dock,” he snapped, thumbing a button and jamming the phone into his ear. “Not the lower one. You can back right in. Chris? This is Fischer. We got two comin’ in, one for the safety cage and her handler. Yeah, it’s Stray and her bitch Frost.”
And then he glared down at me. “What are you waiting for? Go!”
I put her in gear and trundled down the rest of what they called a road. The smell was awful; there had to be a sewage treatment plant or something somewhere nearby, and I couldn’t imagine how the werekin stood it. I
