Frost Moon Read Online Free PDF

more—pale, gothy boys whose high collars hide the bites on their necks, tough butch chicks trying to disguise that bit of wolf in their eyes, and New-Agey grandmothers pretending not to be as hale and hearty as their potions made them. Plus a whole carnival of firedancers and piercers, taggers and tattooers brimming over with magic and trying to hide nothing at all. In the Southeast, Little Five Points was the center of the Edgeworld, a brand new subculture rejecting the secrecy of magical tradition and defying centuries of religious oppression, dragging magic kicking and screaming into the light.
    Even more glorious.
    The Rogue Unicorn wasn’t the largest tattoo shop in Little Five Points, but it was the best—and one of only two licensed to ink magic. Catty-corner from the giant skull that marked the Vortex Bar and Grill, the Rogue occupied most of the top of a converted Victorian whose sprawling bottom floor housed the quite decent Make a Wish clothing shop.
    The sign for the Rogue was easy to find—a brushed metal unicorn, rampant, that we’d gotten in a deal with the city a few years back when they were trying to push a new artist—but getting into the shop itself was quite the trick: you had to park in the back, climb rickety wooden stairs, and worm round the balcony to the Herbalist’s Attic. But—for the view alone—the trees, Little Five, the skull of the Vortex—it was worth it.
    And I had the best view. My office was small, but streetside, with a broad front window whose dark-slatted blinds were always cracked to give me the aforementioned view of L5P. A glass, L-shaped desk held my computer, scanner and papers. A narrow bookshelf put all my books and tapes within easy reach from the desk… or from the sturdy marble workspace of the butcher’s block, whose locked glass cabinet held my precious magical supplies.
    I started the scan and leaned back in my chair, regarding Spleen, who’d arrived right on time. He bounced back and forth in the little space like an animated garden gnome, rattling the cabinet periodically. “Wulfs one of my best clients,” he said. “I swear it, if you could just do this for me—”
    “Hey. I said I’d do it.” I shagged my hands through my hair, trying to shake my deathhawk back to life after being pinned under my helmet. “So stop trying to persuade me, or I might change my mind.” The scanner whirred to life, and I kicked up my feet, staring out over Little Five. Something was wrong. Spleen was nervous, damp, almost sweaty. Damp and sweaty weren’t new, but—”Should I change my mind?”
    “N-no,” Spleen said. Another lie. Not that he never did it, but— even more charming. At my scowl he turned away, stammering; but it was too late; I had him.
    “What is it, Spleen?” I asked.
    “Crap, Frost,” he said. “What can I say? The design is fucking Nazi.”

6. THE ACCURSED FLASH
    “It’s what ?” I said, falling forward in my chair to look as the scanner finished its pass and the image popped up on the screen. The contrast was all fucked, but a moment’s tweaking in Photoshop brought the contrast back up, along with all the nice German letters and genuine swastika printed on the bottom of the singed photo.
    “It’s Nazi, Frost,” he said. “I don’t mean neo-Nazi or skinhead or anything. It’s a genuine fucking World War Two buzz-bombs-and-lost-arks Nazi tattoo design.”
    “Holy… crap,” I said, staring at the image on the screen. Then, gingerly, I raised the scanner cover, hoping nothing would leap out and bite me. The photograph was very old, yellowing, and quite singed. Half the wording was gone, but a rescan at 600 dpi and a bit of fiddling would recover it. No amount of fiddling would bring back my forgotten high school language classes… but with what was left, I recognized the words as unmistakably German.
    “Look, look, look,” he said, wheedling. “Wulf’s one of my best clients—”
    “For how long?” I asked.
    “The last