Anthony Francis - Frost Moon

"Shoot," Philip said.

"That damn box," I said. "Mirabilus didn't use it to take down Buck, and it didn't look like he was going to use it in the ceremony on me. He went on and on about the Children of this and the Inheritance of that, but never mentioned the box. But it was far too sophisticated a magic to imagine it was just a trophy. So… what the fuck was it for?"

"I have a better question," he replied. "Mirabilus was killing people and taking their tattoos to put on that damn box," Philip said. "But it wasn't his damn box."

I just stared at him.

"When we got the lid, we also got some of his notes," Philip said. "I've read them. From what I can tell… up until recently

Mirabilus was just eliminating the competition. The tattoo harvesting is something new, just a silver lining, so to speak, that turned his hobby into profitable work he could do for someone else. The box was a commission."

"So, if it wasn't his…" I said, horrified.

"Then who was it made for?" Philip said, touching his hand to his ear, "Yes, this is Special Agent Davidson. Yes, I'm with Frost. No, she-there's a problem with her what?"

"What is it?" I asked. Philip's eyes had bugged and he was looking at me strangely.

"No, I don't think she has a-yes, that was the-" His eyes narrowed and his face grew hard, stony. "We'll be there right away." He took his hand out of his ear and stood, motioning to me. "We gotta go. We'll take a Shadowhawk-it's faster."

"What's wrong?" I asked, standing as well. "Where are we going?"

"Emory," Philip said. "Cinnamon is dying."

Cinnamon lay in the hospital bed, bedraggled and alone.

The rest of us recovered quickly. Buckhead healed on his own. Alex needed only minor patching. I ended up back in the hospital for one more day-mostly scrapes and bruises, but the real problem was my hands-the doctors said that if Transomnia had heated the pitch to boiling, my hands would have been scalded instantly, and the complications could have killed me. As it was, I escaped with minor burns, where goop had collected at the forks of my fingers.

Jinx was recovering as well. When Valentine opened her eyes, he dispersed the fungal opacity and let in far more light than her shrouded retinas were ready to handle-but not enough to cause damage. Her spooky geode eyes now have black snowflakes, letting her see a little. For now, she was stuck wearing darkened shades, but the doctors said that eventually, when her retinas finally adjusted, she might regain as much as ten percent of her vision. Who knew what that would do to her magic?

As for Cinnamon…

At first the doctors called it 'hyperargyria'-silver shock-a kind of blood poisoning peculiar to shapechangers that can be caused by just trace amounts of silver in the blood. With her massive dose, she slipped into a coma, face ashen gray and gums blue, heart palpitating every time they laid her on her back. When we got to the hospital she was in the middle of a seizure, and they came damn near close to losing her.

But they didn't. She survived the night, barely, and they called in specialists who knew how to handle silver shock-rolling her on her side to stop the shaking, clearing her blood of trace silver with something like dialysis, and feeding her intravenously to build up her strength.

But apparently silver poisoning also wreaks havoc on shapechangers' immune systems. Not a week into her treatment, just one day after she came out of her coma, her fever shot back up and she started hallucinating. An opportunistic pneumonia had settled in her lungs, sending her back into the ICU; and when the doctors fought that off with one cocktail of drugs, she picked up another kind of blood poisoning, a flesh eating bacteria called MRSA-same brand that had attacked Valentine's projectia-that they think she picked up from a bad IV administration. They moved her to a special ward of the hospital, and we all had to wipe our hands with sanitizer every time we left her room.

It took until damn near Thanksgiving for her to fight it off, but at long last, her fever broke and she finally started improving. I was there, every day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes on my break, sometimes in the evening-often, all three-talking with her, cheering her up, slipping her coffee or eclairs, bringing her teen magazines and audiobooks of Laurell Hamilton and gossip about the boys back at the werehouse.

So now it was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and everyone was out of town or off at parties-Philip back in Virginia, Savannah with her vampire clan, the werekin with their mundane families, the collegiates back in their hometowns, even the hospital priest was gone, helping out with a benefit for the homeless.

And so it was just up to me to show up at the hospital, seeing Cinnamon, lying there like a bedraggled cat, suddenly brought back to life when I walked in the door; and then suddenly we began talking and joking and laughing at all the were-mistakes in Underworld: Evolution as it played on the hospital TV.

And it was only then that I noticed she was wearing on her wrist one of those snap-on hospital nametags, just like I wore when I was a patient, not a month ago. And for some reason, I noticed, really noticed the name on it: Cinnamon Frost. Dimly I remembered the doctors telling me the DEI officers had to guess at her name, and had just assumed that Cinnamon was my daughter. I had laughed, saying that no mother would just have left her daughter alone with the medics, but I didn't really object. And then, as I looked at the bracelet, I realized in the whole month that I'd been there I had never objected or corrected them-nor had she.

And around this point I realized: I'd decided to adopt Cinnamon.

"So, Cinnamon," I said, reaching out to pat her tufted little hand. "I was thinking, you know, about you not having a mom."

"What of it?" she said, suddenly sullen.

"Well, I don't have a daughter."

Cinnamon looked up at me in shock. Her eyes grew all shiny and large, though it was difficult for me to see it with all the water building in mine. Then she reached over and grabbed me and pulled me too her and held on tight, claws pricking me gently through my shirt.

"Mom?" She said the word so gently, it was like magic. And then she bawled. "Oh, Mom. Oh, my Mooooom."

"It's okay, Cinnamon," I said, patting her head. "I'm so glad I found you."

Yeah, yeah, I know: sappy as hell. Wake the fuck up. When people talk in real life, they don't make up all sorts of flowery phrases to say what they feel; they say the first thing that comes to mind and then sit there holding each other, glad to be alive.

And we did just sit there, for a long long time, her hugging me hard enough to squeeze the air from my lungs, me cradling her and stroking her soft, feline ears and cooing softly. Finally she said, "How is this going to work?"

"I don't know, Cinnamon," I said. "You're a bit big for me to tell you to clean your room."

"Oh, Mom," she sobbed. "Give me a room, and you can tell me to clean it anytime."

The Valentine Foundation is going to pay out. I'm not joking. It's a big scandal. There are half a dozen investigations ongoing, but apparently Mirabilus was playing his cards very close to his chest, because the Foundation appears completely legit. In fact their board was mortified to find out that Valentine had been killing potential prizewinners. The money may be tied up for years in court until the investigations around Mirabilus are settled, but the hands of Alex's wristwatch tattoo are still turning, counting out one day for each turn of the Earth beneath the stars-and so they're going to pay out.

Even better, I didn't win just by default-there's a clause in the contract which stipulates that if one party in the challenge fails to even attempt the feat, the result is decided not by default, but by a panel of experts. They lined up a half dozen of them, but not one of them could explain through trickery or science how it I made a tattoo watch actually rotate. That only left magic as an explanation.