“What’s goin on?” Cinnamon said suddenly, staring at me-never underestimate a werekin’s hearing. “Who died?”

Immediately when she said it, I felt she was right. Something catches in a person’s voice when they report a death. Pay attention, in those few awful times in your life when someone gets the call: you can tell from the grief in their voice, from the crumpling of their faces.

“Andy,” I said. “What’s wrong? Is someone hurt?”

“How quickly can you get over to Oakland Cemetery?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Whatever you do, hurry,” he said. “Just-hurry.”

We hopped into the blue bomb and headed to the Cemetery. Actually, the ‘bomb’ was a very nice new Prius I’d picked up last year after besting the magician Christopher Valentine in a tattooing contest. His Foundation had yet to pay up a dime, so I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep it-but it sure beat riding Cinnamon around on the back seat of my Vespa scooter.

Oakland Cemetery was a time capsule. All around us were gentrified warehouses and decaying apartments, but the Cemetery was protected from downtown’s churn by low brick ramparts lining Memorial and Boulevard. Within those long red lines stood sparse trees, from which the winter chill had long since stripped the leaves, 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 they’d thrown up to block the drive, 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 being six-foot-two with tattoos-and-deathhawk just never mixed well with cops.

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-”