Free Blood Rock by Anthony Francis

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 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