Extraits

"We're afraid magic can make nuclear weapons look like firecrackers. And if the graffiti can affect gravity..."

"If a tag on a wall," I said, "can bend space harder than an entire planet..."

"...Then graffiti magic," Doug said,"is powerful enough to crack open the planet."

But mostly my brain was buzzing with the obvious: I was having dinner with a vampire. Oh, man. How did that happen? And why was I so jazzed about it? My palms were almost as damp on the wheel as they had been when Cinnamon had been ready to rip my head off.

"How? she said bitterly, turning. "I'm a total freak. Look at me. Look at me!"

I stared down at her. At her orange hair, her yellow cat eyes, her tattooed stripes, her huge ears, her twitching tail. This time of the month, fine orange fur began encroaching upon her pale olive skin at the edges of her normal hair. You couldn't not know she was a werekin.

"- and I thought this was evidence," he was saying. "Why are you so sure that it isn't?"

"Fair question," I said. "but Home Depot doesn't sell spray cans filled with a thousoud bucks of magical pigment, and even if they did you wouldn't want to spray a magick mark..."

Cinnamon and Frost

“Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I cursed, slamming the school doors open and stomping out into the cold January Atlanta air. Once outside, facing bare trees in a bleak parking lot under a graymetal sky, I regretted my words—because the example I was setting was the problem.

I stopped, swung back, and reached one lanky arm out to stop the door from closing. Moments later, my daughter stepped out of the darkness, eyes blinking, whiskers twitching, holding her tiger’s tail in her hands before her like a portable lifeline.

The two of us looked as different as can be: me, a six-foot two woman in a long leather vestcoat, wearing my hair in a purple-and-black deathhawk that lengthens into feathers of hair curling around my neck, and her, a five-foot-nothing teenager in a pleated school skirt, taming her wild orange hair with a blue granola-girl headscarf that poorly hid her catlike ears.

“It’s OK,” I lied gently, putting my hand on Cinnamon’s shoulder; though we both knew it was very not OK. “We’ll find a school that will take you.”

She hissed. That school had been the top of her list—until Cinnamon cussed the principal out in the middle of the interview. And this was after she’d promised to be on her best behavior. I was starting to worry something was wrong with her, and not just her being a weretiger.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a weretiger; if anything, lycanthropy was the least of my worries taking an abused, illiterate streetcat into my home. This adoption was turning out to be a lot more than I bargained for—and we were little over a month into it.

I had learned, however, to put my foot down. “Cinnamon. What you said—”

“I’m sor—” she began, then snapped her head aside violently in a kind of a sneeze, pulling at the collar around her neck. “Who cares? School stinks. They all stinks.”

I felt my collar in sympathy: I didn’t like mine either. OK, so I lied again: we didn’t look as different as can be. First, we both had silver collars around our necks, a kind of fangs-off sign provided by the Vampire Queen of Little Five Points; and second, we were both tattooed.

Cinnamon’s tiger stripes were beautiful, eye-catching … and forced upon her by her last guardian. She’d hide them if she could, but they come all the way up to her cheeks and down to the backs of her palms, and our attempts at covering them with makeup were a disaster.

My elaborate vines are even more eye-catching, a tribal rainbow beginning at my temples and cascading over my whole body in braids of flowers and jewels and butterflies. Today I was in a turtleneck, but normally I make no effort to hide them. I want people to see them move.