rolled up my window just as the road shot through the chain-link fence and ended in the cracked parking lot of the werehouse.
Once it had been an ironworks on the banks of the Chattahoochee, but a fire had taken half the complex, leaving graffiti-covered hulks. I rolled forward, trying to get my bearings; the last time I’d been here had been at night, on foot, approaching from the other end.
I was starting to feel lost when a youngish blond boy, little older than Cinnamon, ran out of one of the least bombed looking buildings. Even from a distance his eyes glittered green. He waved towards a roll-up entrance door, and I whipped the car around and backed it in.
The Prius slid backwards through the door into darkness, and the view through its backup monitor was not enough. Once again I threw my arm over the seat to guide myself. Through the car’s wide windows I saw the huge space swallowing us up, a giant box barely lit by dying light slipping in through stained skylights. Then we were in and stopped, and the boy ran through the door, hit the button and dropped the roll-up, and only then, as the light faded in its groaning descent, did I reach back and begin to pull aside the blanket to check on Cinnamon.
She was in human form again, sleeping in a little curled ball, tail coiled around her so she looked more like a housecat than a tiger, even with her tattooed stripes. For a moment, I marveled at her marks: the Marquis did artistic, masterly work, legal or no. But then I saw her new school clothes: shredded, practically destroyed, just like the upholstery and lining of the Prius’s cargo area. She had not been gentle. She would be crushed.
“Cinnamon,” I whispered. “Wake up. We’re here.”
She just moaned and shifted in her sleep.
I got out of the car and the blond boy stepped up beside me, fidgeting. He looked to be a werewolf, though it was hard to tell: he wasn’t as far gone as Cinnamon.
“Is that Str-is that Cin?” he asked, sniffing, peering into the car. “What gots to her? Is she all right?”
“Yes, it’s Cinnamon, and she changed early. I’m sure she’ll be all right,” I said, patting his shoulder. “Don’t worry-and you get points for not calling her Stray.”
I opened the trunk, thoughtlessly exposing Cinnamon’s curled form, and the boy’s green eyes widened, drinking her naked body in the way only a teenaged boy’s eyes can. “Whoa.”
“You just lost those points,” I snapped, pulling Mom’s death-blanket over her. Really, I was more angry with myself; what kind of mom was I to have exposed Cinnamon like that? Adopting a teen had left me missing a whole lifetime of mom reflexes I was just now learning.
“Tully!” a sharp voice said. “You preps the room. I’ll tend to the stray.”
Tully’s eyes widened again, fearful, and he darted off. I tucked Cinnamon into the blanket, picked her up, and turned to find myself facing a sharp-featured man with severe glasses and even more severely cut red hair. His clothes looked almost normal: a navy turtleneck and brown jacket, almost like a businessman. But his eyes were wrong, the pupils… off. Too wide, almost horizontal slits. He could pass for human. But just barely.
“Here,” the werekin said, reaching as if to take Cinnamon from me and scowling as I made no move. Instead I just straightened, looking down at him, and the werestag reassessed. “Krishna Gettyson, day captain for the werehouse.”
“Dakota Frost, Cinnamon’s mother,” I said, picking a hand out of the blanket and extending it to him awkwardly. “Thanks for taking us in. This was a real emergency.”
“You aren’t the stray’s mother,” Gettyson snapped. His eyes flicked sideways to the car. “And you gots no idea how to take care of a were.”
“Well, I’ll have to learn,” I said, meeting his eerie gaze. “And she goes by Cinnamon.”
He just frowned at me, then cried, “Tully! Where’s the wheelchair?”
“I can carry her,” I said. “She’s light as a feather.”
“You’re an outsider,” Gettyson said flatly. “You shouldn’t even be here, and I sure as hell don’t intends to let you into the dens.”
“I’ll carry her there myself and watch over her, or we’ll go elsewhere,” I said.
“I won’t let you,” Gettyson said.
“You think you can stop me? Mother. Cub. Do the math,” I said, and Gettyson tensed.
“Dakota,” purred a warm, masculine voice, smooth as silk. “How good to see you.”
A stern pale man stepped out of the darkness. A long-tailed coat clung to his trim form, and a glittering chain dangled from the pocket of his vest, but the overall effect was high style, not old fashioned. His once-frosted locks were now wavy and styled, but against his ivory-pale skin, his blond hair looked almost brown, and his blue eyes almost seemed to glow.
Or perhaps they did glow. He was Calaphase the vampire, head of the Oakdale Clan, my second-best ally in the werehouse… and Revenance’s best friend.
“Gettyson,” Calaphase said, smiling icily. Clearly the status of the Oakdale Clan had risen with the werekin. Last time I’d been here, Calaphase had been walking on thin ice, but now there was an edge in his voice as he warned the werestag off. “I’m sure we can bend the rules for Dakota-”
“That’s a bad idea,” Gettyson said. “Every time we brings in an outsider-”
“You said the same about me,” Calaphase said. “But haven’t we proven our worth?”
As he talked, I realized this is how things started first time I met him. Calaphase had shielded me from his fellow vampire Transomnia, ultimately kicking him out of the clan. For his shame, Transomnia had beaten me and nearly murdered Cinnamon. Not again.
“No,” I said. “Wait, Cally. I screwed up. Gettyson, I came here for help and then turned into an ass.” Oddly, Gettyson’s nostrils flared at ‘ass.’ How had that offended him? “I’m sorry. I just get protective about Cinnamon. Not too long ago, someone tried to kill her.”
Gettyson just stood there, jaw clenched, and then I realized what pile I might have just stepped in: perhaps he wasn’t a werestag. So I decided to risk one step further. “And if you’re a were-donkey or something, sorry about the ‘ass’ comment. I didn’t know.”
“Werehorse,” Gettyson said curtly. “There’s no such things as were-donkeys.”
My mouth opened to correct him: from what I’d learned in school, you could make a werekin out of anything with a genome. Then I shut my mouth-there was no point in getting into an argument with him about his beliefs.
“My apologies,” I managed finally. “I’ve never met a… a werehorse.”
Gettyson’s nostrils flared, but he nodded as Tully pushed up a wheelchair, stopping just out of reach of Gettyson’s arm. “Apology accepted,” Gettyson said, in a tone that clearly indicated that it wasn’t accepted. “But no exceptions, and no outsiders in the dens.”
I didn’t even have to think through it: I knew what waking up here alone would do to Cinnamon. “Then we go somewhere else,” I said. “Cinnamon has abandonment issues. I have to be there when she wakes up, or she’ll think I’m trying to get rid of her-”
“Bull,” Gettyson said. “She knows you wants her in your entourage.”
“She is wanted, but she’s not in my ‘entourage’,” I said.
Gettyson reached in and grabbed Cinnamon’s hand, showing me the butterfly that I’d transferred to her skin the very first time I met her. “So why did you mark her?”
“Maybe the Marquis ‘marked’ her when he took her in because all he wanted a canvas,” I said, “but I don’t do things that way. First, it was a free gift, no strings attached, and second, I’d have never transferred it if I’d known she was so young. Tattooing minors is illegal.”
“Illegal?” Gettyson laughed, looking at me incredulously. He turned away, shaking his head. “Illegal. Of all the crazy-all right, all right. Set her down.”
“I can carry her,” I repeated quietly. “She’s light as a feather.”
Calaphase smiled again. “Give it up, Gettyson,” he said gently. “She’s the only person I know more obstinate than you, you old were-mule.”
Gettyson just stared at me with those eerie eyes, as if he expected me to crack. His gaze drifted up and down, at Cinnamon, then my face, then my feet, then my face again.
“She’s not getting any heavier from you looking at her,” I said.
Gettyson snorted. “You can take her in, stay till she wakes. But that’s it,” he said firmly. “The moon will be damn near full before it sets. You gots to be gone before it gets too close.”
I sighed. He wasn’t just determined to be an ass, he had a point. “Fair enough.”
