to school, but I’d learned her moods and knew that not only did she want to go to school, she’d had her heart set on that school, and was crushed to be rejected out of hand. She propped her head on her knees and stared out into the gentle leafy tunnel that was Ponce de Leon Avenue. “Just don’t you be sorrying me about it.”
“Who, me?” I said, grinning. “Do I say sorry? Oh, I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t you be starting that,” she said, putting her knuckles in her ears. Unlike a normal human, actually putting her long, clawed fingers into her huge cat ears could prove dangerous. Werekin could heal most normal damage pretty quick, unless it was dealt by something silver—but still, she tries to be careful. “Don’t even be funning about it—”
My cell rang and I gave it a squeeze to pick up. I loved my new Bluetooth earpiece, even though our receptionist at the Rogue Unicorn Tattooing Studio told me it made me look like I’d been ‘possessed by the Cybermen,’ whatever that meant. “Dakota Frost,” I said. “Best magical tattooist in the Southeast—”
“Dakota,” Uncle Andy said. “It’s Rand. Where are you?”
“Out school shopping with Cinnamon,” I said. When I was a kid, “Uncle” Andy was my father’s partner; now that I was an adult, Detective Andre Rand was my guardian angel in the Atlanta Police Department. Normally smooth, he sounded very stressed—and that scared the hell out of me. “What’s wrong?”
“Whats happened?” Cinnamon said suddenly, staring at me. “Who died?”
Immediately when she said it, I felt she was right. Something catches in a person’s voice when they report death. Listen for it, in those few horrible times in your life when someone around you gets the call: you can tell it from the grief in their voice, from the crumple in their reaction. Even a news announcer goes sad and sullen if they care one whit about who died.
“Andre,” I said, more urgently this time. “What’s wrong? Is someone hurt?”
“How quickly can you get over to the Oakland Cemetery?” he said.
I scowled; that was downtown, south of the last school. “Ten minutes.”
“Whatever you do, hurry,” he said. “Just—hurry.”
The phone hung up and I cursed, punching the trip computer to find the fastest route.
“Don’t be using that thing,” Cinnamon said, snapping her head aside in a kind of a sneeze. “It will rots your maps right out of your brain—”
“Crap,” I said. “It’s not going to let me do this while we’re moving—”
“Whip us round, takes Moreland to Memorial,” Cinnamon said. She pointed at an upcoming street. “No. Hooks right here, then rights on Fairview, then Moreland.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Not bad for someone new to downtown—”
“Don’t be so shocked,” she said. “I catches on fast.”
We shot down a mile of old warehouses and new apartments on Memorial before reaching the brick ramparts of Oakland Cemetery at the cross street of Boulevard. The winter chill had long since stripped the leaves off the trees, leaving branches stretched to the cloudy sky like the claws of dying things pleading to Heaven.
When we hooked around to the entrance, we found an officer guarding the driveway. As we pulled up to the striped sawhorse, I steeled myself for a runaround. My dad was on the force, Rand was a friend, heck, I was even sort of dating a Fed—but somehow six-foot-two tattoos-and-Mohawk just doesn’t mix well with cop.
But the officer’s eyes lit up when he saw us. He didn’t even check for ID—he just pulled the sawhorse out of the way and waved us forward. This was bad—they’d closed off the whole cemetery, and it was huge. I rolled down my window and asked, “Which way—”
“You Frost? Straight back,” he said, eyes a little wild. “Straight back! And hurry!”
“This is bad,” Cinnamon said, head craning back to look at the officer. “Rand’s sweet on ya but we never gets special treatments from the piggies—”
“Don’t call them ‘piggies’,” I said, swallowing, speeding down the tiny road.
“Why?” she asked, flicking an ear at me. “They can’t hears us.”
“And you knows that none of them are weres?” I asked, miming her broken diction. “You knows for sures?”
Her face fell. “No, I don’t.”
We bumped down a worn asphalt road through a canyon of elaborate Victorian markers and rows of Confederate graves. I grew more and more apprehensive as I saw officers spreading through the homes of the dead, searching. The road sunk down, the graves grew smaller, more sad, and we rolled to a