“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.”