New Amsterdam

The conversation proceeded along absolutely predictable lines. Celeste, a sister in the blood to whom Sebastien had spoken in Köln, had been very forthcoming about Monsieur Renault's predilections. Celeste was young, as such things went, and still maintained a few lingering human friendships; some of them touched on the demimonde of Paris.

She had seemed flattered by the attentions of an elder, and had put herself out to be an entertaining and informative conversationalist while Sebastien had allowed her to think he might be seduced to more. He was no fool; he knew that just the evidence of his regard would lend her cachet in the social games the blood played to alleviate their long boredom.

Celeste had assured him that Monsieur Renault considered himself something of an adventurer and a master of intrigue, and would find it

hard to avoid being beguiled by a suitably glamorous proposal. And thus,

all the nonsense with scaling buildings and hand-delivered letters and misled courtesans.

By the end of the conversation, however, Sebastien was confident that he not only had the prime minister's attention—but also his interest.

He exited the hotel not by the window, but more simply: down the corridor and the stair—he had not yet learned to trust lifts, especially new ones installed in old buildings—with only a pause at the bell desk to alert them to the need for a porter in Mademoiselle Glibert's room.

The street beyond was still well-lit, the electric lights unflickering despite the risen wind and deepening chill, but entirely deserted now. Dry snow scoured the cobbles and drifted into doorways, and flakes blew horizontally, swirling around Sebastien's limbs. He turned his collar up for the sake of appearances and hasted his steps.

There was no repeat illusion of dimming street lamps, but Sebastien again found himself with the creeping sensation of being watched. The

snow and the chill emptied the streets. He walked, now, nearly alone. And so, when he felt the pressure of someone's regard most fiercely on his

spine, he stopped, and turned, and stared directly back along the path he had just walked.

There was no benefit in pretending that one believed one's self unobserved when there were no bystanders to perturb. It only made the stalker bold.

Not that this stalker was in any need of additional boldness, apparently.

Sebastien turned to face yellow eyes through eddying snow, a gray

four-legged shape almost the color of the grey city behind. The wolf stared levelly, and Sebastien stared back. It was of a height such that he could have rested a hand on its shoulder without stooping, an animal the weight of a man. Behind it, dimmer in the shadows and veiled by snow, Sebastien made out two more.

The lead wolf stepped forward, ears up and hackles down, and Sebastien awaited it with hands at his sides and chin up, a silent answer. He had the empty street at his back, and he strained his ears for the answering click of claws, but all he heard were echoes from the wolf's advance, hushed and made furry by the snow.

The lead wolf crouched, and Sebastien saw the cobbles through its outline, the gleam of the lamplight on white bones under its shaggy hide. When it rested its elbows on the stones, the trailing guard hairs of its coat traced no lacework in the powder it lay upon.

"Amédée Gosselin." The voice resonated, a sound like the wind scraping the corners of old buildings and racing down narrow streets.

"I was he." Not, I am he. That could never be the answer: what was dead was dead, and the seventeenth century lay buried deep and cold.

"The wolves of Paris are not your enemy."

The other two had faded from sight while Sebastien spoke to the leader, and he was left with the uneasy conviction that they had indeed faded, rather than withdrawn. "Have I an enemy?"

"Paris has an enemy," the gray wolf said. "The enemy has a dog."

Before Sebastien could answer, it rose up—not a bound to its feet, but simply a bound, like a cat springing from a crouch. It flew at Sebastien, ears down now, and all he saw were the yellow eyes and the teeth like shattered bones in the skull behind its transparent face.

He kept his hands at his sides, and he did not cringe.

The wolf passed through him, a chill that even he could feel lifting the fine hairs of his hackles. He had just time to notice that there was no snow heaped on its coat as the snow heaped on Sebastien's shoulders and his hair.

For the snow had fallen through it.

* * *

Mrs. Smith was already sleeping, worn out with travel, but Garrett was still engrossed in a book beside the fire, her hated reading glasses perched on her nose and Mike drowsing on the hearth edge beside the orange cat in a détente composed of scorn, when Sebastien came in to her room with a snowflake cupped in the hollows of his ungloved palms. He lifted the upper hand to show her how it lay on his flesh like white embroidery on a white nightgown, as pristine and as crisp.

"A gift," he said, and reached out to her as she stood. She cupped her warm hands around his—cold enough to burn—and bent down to see. It was symmetrical, more fragile than spun glass, and she imagined the delicacy it must have taken to catch it unharmed, and carry it to her unharmed.

Her breath melted the crystal into a bead of water on his skin. "Oh," she said, and straightened.

He put the cold hand into her hair and kissed her with lips like ice, and said, "Forgive me. I've been too long from the fire."

"Sit," she said, and moved to bring another chair. Mrs. Smith, awakened by voices, sat up in her bed. "Sebastien?"

"Back safe," he answered. "Any word from Jack?"

"Not yet." Garrett shoed him into her old chair and settled in the new one while Mrs. Smith slid from under the covers and shrugged into her dressing gown. Her glasses were perched on her nose within instants; Garrett slipped hers into her pocket and patted them to make sure they would stay. "So," she said, "What happened?"

Before he could answer, Jack came in and had to be plied with brandy and hot water before he stopped shaking. When he, too, was huddled by the fire, wrapped in the coverlet from Mrs. Smith's bed, he insisted that Sebastien speak first. "My story might be longer."

From the snow thawing on his lashes and the dark circles under his eyes, Garrett believed him.

Sebastien stared at Jack contemplatively for a moment, but then he shrugged, and told them. When he got to the wolves, though, she stopped him with a hand on his wrist. He'd taken his coat off by then and sat by the fire in shirt sleeves, cravat untied and collar unbuttoned, cuffs rolled up so the warmth could soak in, but the skin still didn't feel human. It was resilient, but too. . .dry.

"Wait," Garrett said. "Amédée Gosselin? The ghost spoke to you? And called you by the name of a character in a book?"

Sebastien smiled. His forelock fell into his eyes, but he didn't pull his hand from her grip to smooth it back. "Not just a character in a book."

Jack roused himself enough to grin. "Oh, yes, Dumas père is well-known for historical accuracy. The D'Artagnans still operate a chain of pubs and hotels, I understand."

"Actually," Sebastien said, "the story predates Dumas by more than

a little. In the seventeenth century, it was easy enough to pass among

men in a city such as Paris, where the salons were full of glittering clothing and the faces hidden under layers of powder and rouge. Amédée Gosselin

was real, I assure you. It caused a scandal, when it came out that most of

the court had known what he was, and none had been willing to unmask him. It's said there was a portrait painted, even, though I do not know if it has survived."

Mrs. Smith had helped herself to the brandy when she prepared Jack's toddy. She dipped her nose over the glass and said, "And now you're going to spin us some tale of the real existence of Dracula, I suppose?"

"The Draculas existed," Sebastien said, chafing his hands together delicately. "Exist, I should say. They are not of the blood. And I can vouch for the absolute nonexistence of Lord Varney and his nonsensical tricks with moonlight."

"Camilla?" Mrs. Smith asked, bright as a robin after a worm.

"Millarca von Karnstein, quite real. Although not by any means an

actual German Countess. Very few of the blood have any trace of mortal

nobility, though many of us—"

"Adopt the titles, Don Sebastien?"

"Surely one ancient bloodline's as good as the next?"

Garrett fiddled her ring, the silver ring he'd given her, and interjected, "You're actually Amédée Gosselin."

"No less so than I am actually Don Sebastien de Ulloa," he said,

gently. "Or Mr. John Nast. One uses up a good many names in but a single century, and the centuries. . .add up."

"Ah," Jack said. "You never told me—"

"Never gave you a list of my abandoned guises? No, I never did. Why should I?"

"You never told me you were famous."

"Infamous."

"Still."

"I made a series of rather bad mistakes," Sebastien said. He looked very directly at Jack, until Jack glanced down, and then he gave the same courtesy or perhaps begged the same indulgence of Garrett. "And now Don Sebastien de Ulloa is infamous as well, and so lost to me. And in a hundred years—or less, my dears, mi cariño, mis corazones—there will be some scandalous novel about him as well. We learn to let go of our former selves, if we are to live in the world forever. Or we burn."

Garrett, dimly aware that Sebastien had stopped speaking, that Jack was staring at the floor between his feet, nodded. She let go the wampyr's wrist and rubbed her hands together, to chafe some warmth into her chilled fingers. "And when ghosts come looking for your former self?"

"All debts are paid when the ship sails," Sebastien said, but he did not sound as if he believed.

Jack sank down in his chair and snorted, tossing back his head. He spoke as if to the shadowed ceiling. "I thought there were no werewolves."

"There are no werewolves," Sebastien answered. "Anymore."

* * *

During the following silence, Garrett was drawn to the window again. She had long since given up any hope of sleeping. The snow was still falling, though, and the nigh-unheard-of spectacle of the streets of Paris clogged with six inches of accumulation drew citizens onto the pavement to marvel. The earlier emptiness had given way to a flood of people. Among them walked children, boys and girls, awakened by their parents to wander through a city filled with rosy reflected light, a sweet amorphous glow.

It was beautiful, and eerie. It was like another city all together—Prague, or Vienna. Not Paris at all.

Except for the radiance that filled every crevice.

"We won't see the sunrise," Mrs. Smith remarked.

"Good," Sebastien said. He sounded weary, but he had insisted he did not require sustenance. He turned to Jack, and nudged him. "I know you're not eager to tell us about your night. But I'll ring for coffee, and you can start."

Jack jerked alert, and cleared his throat. "Of course," he said, as Sebastien rose to find the bell-pull by the door. "I've been to the police. There was a dead man under a streetlight, you see."

Sebastien had raised Jack Priest, and for all his fey flighty affectation, Garrett's estimation of the young man was that he was a keenly trained observer, and one who knew that the most relevant clues were sometimes those that seemed incomprehensible at the time. And that that ostensible delicacy masked a galvanized will.

She kept a terrier.

She knew the type.

In any case, she leaned forward—not slouching: even with her corset hung for airing, Garrett still was far too much a product of finishing

school to slouch—and listened carefully while Jack explained what he

had witnessed.

She saw Sebastien's eyebrows rise when Jack described the dimming streetlights, one of the considered gestures by which he practiced courtesy to his human associates. It meant that he was listening, and that he'd have something to add in his turn. But then Jack detailed the condition of the corpse, the gnawed hands and torn throat, the clawed footprints in the snow, and the information that this death was not the first—and Sebastien sat back and crossed his arms.

Jack stopped, and spread his hands. "You'll probably take the blame for that, the way our luck is running lately."

"I also saw the lights dim," Sebastien said. "When I was on the building."

The coffee arrived, and Mrs. Smith arose to answer the tap on the door. Although the winter dawn would not break for hours, it was by now late enough that the bakers had warmed their ovens, and the tray arrived with fresh crescent rolls, steaming and crusted lightly on the top with egg wash, and a little glass pot of strawberry jam.

Jack and Mrs. Smith fell upon the breakfast, with rapt attention and willing assistance from Mike. While Garrett was still stirring cream into her coffee the adjoining door to the valet's chamber opened and Mary came in, wearing her dressing gown. "I would have gone down," she said.

"You're in Paris, Mary," Jack said. "Sleep in."

Her laugh was strained, Abby Irene thought, but she sat down by the fire and folded her hands on her knees.

"We could leave," Jack said. "Leave Paris."

Sebastien didn't shake his head as a human might, but he inclined

it perceptibly. "After we've come all this way? That will never do. We've

business."

"And you're coming to the interview with Monsieur Renault today, are you not?" Garrett asked.

"I wouldn't sacrifice any of you on the altar of my politics, is all." Jack sipped his coffee, set the china cup aside. It rattled on the saucer, and his fingers left buttery prints on the delicate gold-painted handle.

"We've all our personal reasons," Sebastien answered, and Garrett restrained herself from pointing out to Jack that he, himself, was Mrs. Smith's own personal reason.

And then regretted her self-discipline, when he looked Sebastien in the eye and said archly, "Which is sweeter, Mr. Nast, love or remorse?"

"Love," Sebastien answered. "For it is fleeting."

* * *

Even the Parisian sunrise papers carried news of the American revolt, although it was below the dispatches on the French war with England. Garrett finished her coffee while Mary chose the clothes in which she would beard Monsieur Renault.

When she had laid out the garments and combed Garrett's hair, Mary stood behind her, hands on her shoulders, and caught her eye in the mirror. "Ma'am," she said, "I don't mean to be impertinent—"

"There's a first time for everything," Garrett said, softening it with a smile. Mary's tone honestly concerned her: it wasn't like her to be so hesitant. "Please, Mary. Speak plainly."

"Ma'am, I'm just wondering. Are we staying in Paris?"

Garrett looked at Mary's tensed fingers, the lines etched between her nose and the corners of her mouth. "I don't know yet," Garrett said, taking pity. "But you'll have employment with me where ever I may end."

"Thank you." Garrett gestured her to go on, or excuse herself. But she paused and hesitated. "Ma'am?"

"Mary?"

"Then will you teach me to speak French?"

Garrett smiled into her coffee cup. "Of course," she said.

* * *

"You travel with interesting company," the prime minister said by way of introduction, as his secretary permitted Doctor Garrett—and her companion—into the office. His English was flawless.

Jack stepped in at Abby Irene's back and made sure the door latch caught as the secretary departed again, a discreet push with the gloved heel of his hand. Then he flanked the sorceress as she stepped forward.

She carried her own bag, to his chagrin, though he couldn't fault her the caution. And she set it down on the corner of the prime minister's desk and commandeered a chair opposite before she answered.

Jack preferred to stand.

"We apologize for the dramatics," Abby Irene said, also in English. "Monsieur Renault, this is Mr. Jack Priest. It is he, actually, who wishes to negotiate with you."

"Then what are you here for, Lady Abigail?"

If Jack hadn't been waiting for it, he wouldn't have noticed her cringe at the hated shortened version of her name. She also seemed impervious to the lack of any courtesy, an offer of refreshment or even a chair. "To reassure you of his bonafides, monsieur. Communications with the Americans are not what we would wish, and"—she shrugged delicately—"the new government wants you to understand their commitment to a lasting French-American friendship."

"And the word of an agent of the English crown is meant to reassure me?"

"Former agent," she said. Jack almost set his hand on her shoulder. He could see the tension therein, but she spoke delicately. "I have a reputation for forthrightness that I had hoped might precede me even here."

Renault smiled at his desk blotter. "You have another reputation as well, Lady Abigail. One as a sort of distaff Nimrod. A mighty slayer of monsters."

She shrugged, lacing her fingers together, Jack thought so that she could fiddle with the haft of her ebony wand unobserved. "A career I've left behind in New Amsterdam."

The prime minister still hadn't looked at Jack, except in brief dismissive flickers. He did not alter the behavior now. "Pity," he said. "We appear to have a monster here in Paris that is in want of slaying. Three victims each month, for a year and a half, always on the three nights of the full moon. The city is all but paralyzed those nights: no one walks the street unless he must. I imagine the government might be far more amenable to offering aid if they were not distracted by these crimes."

Jack started. "Certainly, you're not going to blame that on. . .on Amédée."

"When he has only just arrived in the city, in your company, Mr. Priest? No, of course not." Renault snapped his fingers. "In any case, he is a national hero, your wampyr friend. I've seen his portrait, you know. It's a very good likeness. Let us hear no more of that. No, I'm simply suggesting that, if you wish the ear of the assembly, especially in a time of war, it might not be remiss to present them with a token of your esteem."

"The head of a monster," Jack answered slowly.

Renault's bright soft smile vanished, leaving graven jowls to hand sternly beside his abruptly narrowed mouth. "It does seem suited to your part-

nership's particular skills, young man. And it would lend a little weight to your request."

Doctor Garrett turned to catch Jack's eye. He nodded, trusting her to take the lead. "Why would you wish to help us, then?"

Renault turned a half-sheet of paper on his desk with a forefinger, but he met Doctor Garrett's eyes, and then Jack's, with apparent candor. "I'm not inclined to trust Phillip any further than I can toss him. We're sharing a continent with you—and the native nations—no matter what happens, we have enemies in common. And there's a monster in my city, Doctor, or there's someone pretending to be one. I don't believe for an instant you're stupid enough to require an explanation, when you came here yourself in the expectation of assistance."

"I'll want to see the bodies," Doctor Garrett said.

* * *

The earlier dead were buried, although not in the ancient and notorious cemetery of Les Innocents, where in medieval days the bodies had sometimes floated up from the flooded, death-soaked earth. It was all tidied these days, charnel houses and sorted bones, centuries of plagues and murders and childbed deaths stacked and organized by femur, tibia, jawbone, skull.

The dead were buried outside the city now.

The most recent victim, however, still lay cold on a marble slab, a white sheet tucked about him to keep the chill not out, but in. The coroner had been with him, but had not dissected, and Garrett was anything but squeamish. She drew glass rods and oiled gloves from her bag, probed wounds, measured lacerations, examined the depth of bruising on throat and thigh and arm. Jack proved an able assistant, which should not have surprised her as much as it did, and strong enough to help her roll the body up.

The marks of jaws were mastiff-sized, she thought, and the femur had snapped under the pressure of that bite, though living bone was not so easy to break. Fibers from the victim's workman's dungarees had been driven into the wounds. His flank had been torn open, postmortem she thought, and the innards feasted on, as was the way of predators. The rich organ meat would always be devoured first.

What was strange, however, was that the man's skull had been stripped of flesh. His dead eyes stared from lidless sockets, and his clenched teeth gleamed like pearls in the lipless jaw. His tongue had been torn out and—Garrett presumed—devoured. In her experience, that did not seem very like a wolf.

"Are you learning anything?" Jack asked, as she probed delicately in yet another wound with the forceps and a rod.

"Yes," she said. The end of the glass rod caught and scratched on something at the bottom of the wound. "May I have a scalpel, please?"

He gave it to her, and with a few slices and scrapes she laid the red bone bare. The marrow showed in the break. She thought of a sawn soup bone.

A little work with the forceps, and she tugged the imbedded object free and held it up, ivory-yellow on the conical surface and whiter on the shell-shaped, concave break. "Do ghosts chip teeth?" she asked.

* * *

Later, when Jack and Abby Irene had returned and joined Sebastien and Phoebe in the café, Sebastien heard their story related in hushed tones. "Jack," he said. "The giant-killer."

He glanced up, trying to catch Jack's eye, but Jack's attention was firmly fixed on his hands. Even Phoebe's hand on his shoulder didn't rouse him, although he winced when she squeezed.

"So it would appear." Phoebe said. "Jack? Are you with us?"

"Not a bit of it." He shook his head, though, and grinned brightly. "I was just contemplating our options. Renault said you were a national hero, Monsieur Gosselin—"

Sebastien stuck his tongue out, feeling it slide cool and bloodless between dry lips. "Don't do that in public," Abby Irene said, from her bench beside the fire. Her dog lay along her knee, chin on his paws, ears up, eyes shining. "Unless you eat first."

"Explain?"

A mirror would benefit him not. The dead cast no shadows; nor did they reflect. It was Jack who said, "Your tongue is the color of chalk, Mr. Nast. Are you certain you're not hungry?"

"I'm fine," Sebastien said, knowing he lied. He could last another day. Perhaps two. "So we're hunting monsters, then?"

"If you'd seen the dead man you wouldn't be so facile," Jack said. But of course he would, and of course Jack knew it. They'd seen any number of dead men between them. Sebastien steepled his fingers and waited. "Yes, damn you. We're hunting monsters. And I haven't the barest idea how."

"I do," said Abby Irene, and at the tone of her voice Mike picked up his head. "But it will have to wait for nightfall. First we have to catch a werewolf."

"There aren't werewolves," Sebastian said. "They're dead. Long dead."

"And yet, they eat people," Jack said, but when Sebastien stared at him he sat back and folded his arms over his chest.

"The ghost wolves could be a coincidence. I swear they meant to warn me, not to threaten."

Abby Irene smiled. And when she did, Sebastien loved her, that brittle mortality and all its mad, fragile bravery. "Which is fortunate," she said. "Because catching ghosts is easy, and that, I have practice of."

* * *

The snow broke after lunch, and the party returned to their rooms. Only Phoebe had slept, and she insufficiently, so Sebastien was left to his knitting.

He was to rouse the others at moonrise, but when he went to awaken Jack he found him sitting up in bed, his arms wrapped around knees drawn up under the bedclothes and a pinched expression above his eyes.

"You're not worried about a little monster."

"I'm worried about you."

Sebastien put his hand over Jack's interlaced ones, knowing his hands were warm from sitting beside the fire. "Because of David?"

"Because you're starving yourself, and you can't hide it."

"A little hunger won't hurt me," Sebastien said. "I need you all strong, and I'm not about to go running off to clubs unless I must."

"Hah. By now, you know, I'm capable of estimating if I'm strong enough. I don't need you to daddy me, Monsieur Gosselin."

"Of course you don't. I just—"

Jack stiffened, shuddered. Sebastien was already leaning in, drawn by the enticing heat of blood, when he recollected himself and jerked back.

"Jack! What have you—"

Jack silently held up a glistening pin. A smear of red dulled the tip.

Sebastien's teeth sharped, his mouth flooding with anticoagulant saliva.

"Just a prick," he said, and while Sebastien sat frozen he smeared his left hand across the wampyr's mouth.

Hot. Sharp. Rich and round and full-bodied, full of life. Sebastien moaned and caught Jack's wrist. "Jack."

"What do you think you prove by waiting?" Jack pushed him back, knelt up, let the covers slide down. "That you're its master? That you are more powerful than the hunger?"

"That I'm free," Sebastien said, though the scent of blood roared through him, brain and fingertips and quivering need.

"As free as I am of the need to breathe," Jack said, and freed himself entirely of the sheets. He kept pushing, his unbloodied hand on Sebastien's chest, until Sebastien lay on his back and Jack knelt over him. "Darling, you're ridiculous. Drink."

There was no resisting. Sebastien released Jack's wrist, wrapped his arms around the young man's thighs, and obeyed. And with the hem of Jack's nightshirt falling across his face, the thumping of Jack's heartbeat in his ears, the taste of blood and the weight of Jack's body on his chest, he wondered. He wondered if a werewolf's bloodlust, its passion, its compulsion, could possibly be more unendurable than his thirst.

Which of them was weaker?

And how on earth were ghosts grown solid enough to rend and tear?

* * *

Garrett knew as soon as she saw them what they'd been up to, and made a point of her pretense of equanimity. It wasn't exactly that she was jealous, though she was jealous, irrational as she knew the reaction to be. It was more that her pride had been worn down to the unyielding nubbin by years of playing the other woman, and what was left of it was adamant. Admit nothing. An iron dignity is the unbroachable defense.

Bloody but unbowed, she thought, packing her velvet carpetbag, and then laughed at her own pretensions. When Jack, wan and pale and gulping beef broth from a mug, arched an eyebrow at her, she laughed. "Me and Lucifer," she said, by way of explanation.

Jack set his mug aside. "Don't be ridiculous. You're much better looking, for one thing."

Out in the side streets, there was still a certain depth of snow, and in places even untrammeled. One tended to walk where another had broken trail, and so there were great muddy washes of slush in the middles of the streets, where gallant cart-horses had dragged the beer waggons through, and then along the walls were narrower trails like the winter paths of deer. Garrett was amused: six inches of snow would not have provoked more than a shrug and a shake of the umbrella, in New Amsterdam.

Of course, these streets had emptied out again with the dimming of the day as those afraid of the full-moon killer stayed close to home, and that made the going easier. And the ruts more apparent.

"So," Garrett said. "Who would want to train the citizens of Paris to stay off the streets on the night of the full moon?"

"The English," Mrs. Smith answered. "If they wanted to send in troops."

Garrett hmmed her answer, and wondered about New Amsterdam.

Perhaps because centuries of living in them had given him a sense of how they were constructed, Sebastien had a gift for cities. Mary and Mike and el Capitán were left behind at the hotel, but he brought the other three without hesitation back to where he'd met the wolves, though by then the sky had burned black and the only light was from the streetlamps and Mrs. Smith's new electric torch, which ran off the same radiant power supply as the street lamps. Jack eyed it covetously; Garrett had to admit that he was not alone in plotting the purchase of such an item as soon as time permitted.

"The wolves were here when I saw them," Sebastien said, gesturing around the narrow street rowed with slouched Gothic buildings. Garrett noticed that, with his new identity, any trace of a Spanish accent had left him. It shook her; she never would have known it for an affectation, and usually she excelled at such things.

She thought of him shedding names and lives and lovers across the

centuries, and wondered how he bore it. And then he turned and caught her eye and smiled, and thought that rather, perhaps the shedding was how he bore it.

Open your hands and let go.

She went to stand behind him, where he crouched at the edge of the light, close by a patch of less-trammeled snow. He didn't need it. She

would, for a while yet. The moon wasn't over the rooftops, but merely silvering the East.

"Second night of the full moon," she said. Or the true full moon, if one preferred. "Are the ghosts of lycanthropes bound to the lunar cycle?"

"You're the expert on ghosts," he said, and she nudged him in the back with a knee.

He absorbed the impact easily, without losing his balance. "No footprints," he said. "No scent. Is that ghosty?"

"It can be. They follow their own rules."

He grunted and stood; she stepped back to give him room when he turned. "Well, this is where they were, anyway."

"Good," she said. She tucked her carpetbag under her arm, contents shifting. "Then there's residue. Let us catch one."

Casting a circle in the trodden snow was a challenge. She used salt and ashes, as she would have on stone, but of course the results were anything but permanent. The snow would melt, the salt dissolve, and the ashes blur. At best, a temporary measure.

Fortunately, she had three willing—or at least compliant—assistants, and apprentices to mark off the cardinal points could only reinforce the spellcasting. In a few moments with a compass she established north and placed Sebastien in it. He was eldest and coldest, after all. By the same logic, Jack went to the south, and that was easy.

But Garrett found that east and west, for a few moments, eluded

her. She and Phoebe were simply too similar, in too many ways: sharp old bluestockings, the both. In the end, she took east and placed Phoebe to

the west.

Phoebe had been married. Symbolically, that made her the matron, and Garrett, no matter how laughable such a description might be in fact, the maid. Garrett tucked her wand into her bodice (it would not avail her against an immaterial enemy, but anything that had teeth to rend with might not be entirely a ghost) and pulled from her carpet bag four twists of lead foil that she had prepared before they left the hotel. She gave one to each of her companions and kept the fourth for herself. Then she leaned her umbrella against the wall of the building beside her, hung her bag from the handle to keep it out of the snow, and took her place at the circle.

There was, as far as Garrett understood, no actual reason why incantations were in Latin or Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew, other than tradition and mystique. But she found the discipline useful.

She took a breath, and began to speak, enumerating the parameters and limitations of the spell. When she worked in her own laboratory, many of the protections were built in to the architecture—the design of the floor, the resonances laced into the slate-topped tables. Here, in the field, she must construct those limitations on the fly, as she built the structure of her spell from scratch and will and the salt and ashes strewn upon the snow.

"This is a spell of summoning—" she began, and tried to ignore Jack smirking at her.

Of course, Sebastien having seen to his education, he would understand what she said. And its absolute lawyerly mundanity. Which was another reason for the dead languages.

Everything sounded more official in Greek.

Once the parameters and limitations were set, however, there was a refrain. She had drilled her companions, and they came in on the chant when she lifted her hands, the twist of lead foil in the left one.

Sebastien stood as if carved, only his jaw moving as he spoke, and of them all only his words escaped without a veil. Mrs. Smith wrung her hands together around the twist, her shoulders contracted with chill and her face scrunched around her spectacles. She never took her eyes from Garrett's face.

And Jack watched all three of them, glancing from face to face, a perfect counterfeit of placid confidence. Garrett would have believed it if she hadn't seen the tremor transmitted through his twist of foil.

The chant went on. She would have expected them to draw a crowd—in New Amsterdam, they would have been surrounded by now with gawkers—but on the rare occasions that someone passed the mouth of the side street or appeared about to turn down it, that person glanced down quickly and turned away. The Parisian attitude toward sorcery—that its public practice was little more interesting and certainly more gauche than sex in doorways or pissing in the gutter—was refreshing.

And the Parisians were, she realized, afraid of the death in the moonlight. Which in honesty Garrett was as well.

By the third iteration of the chant, Garrett noticed the mist clouding her breath was no longer dissipating, but instead drifting to the middle of the circle on long streamers, curved like tendrils of ink dripped into a vortex. Jack's breath did so too, and Mrs. Smith's, and the air seemed to grow thicker. Jack's eyes widened when he noticed, and he moved as if to clap one hand over his mouth, but stilled himself when his forearm had only jerked up parallel with the earth.

Garrett fixed her attention on the shape forming in the center. It grew, resolved, sharpened. Fur, delineated in lines as sharp as a pencil sketch. Eyes full of the cold blue radiance of moonlight on mist. Great paws, arched nails that left no dimple on the snow. One wolf. Two.

A third, with soft jowls over its teeth and plumed tail held high, ears up, flanks rising and falling with the rhythm of its breathing.

The rhythm of Garrett's chant.

The first wolf stepped forward. She felt a tug, a sharp uncomfortable sensation as if she had swallowed a portion of a string and someone was drawing it back up her esophagus. Her breath came faster, with the wolf's, and she saw Jack's free hand go to his throat. Sebastien turned to stare, grimacing as if he reminded himself forcefully not to break the circle, not to reach out.

Jack's voice was strained, Mrs. Smith's thin, like that of an untrained singer at the end of a breath. The wolves firmed, darkened. Garrett saw the gray shadows of their masks, the dusting of dark color over their rumps and hackles. The biggest breathed in and tilted back its head.

She grasped the free end of her foil twist, held it straight before her, and snapped both hands as if pulling a Christmas popper. And the packet detonated like one, the thump of gunpowder like the bang of a revolver, so that her hands were shrouded in a fine mist of silver dust and powdered aconite.

Her gesture was echoed around the circle in near-simultaneity, and then they each stepped back in haste and held their breaths, as she had instructed. She wanted no-one breathing the wolvesbane: it was deadly.

In the silence that followed, the wolf that had been about to howl dropped its head again and snuffed audibly. It was still translucent. Within, she saw the hard outline of bones like straws in watered milk. "Sorceress," it said. "Why have you bound us?"

Its teeth meshed like the serrated edge of shears, behind the cloudy lip. Its jaw did not move when it spoke.

There was an art to talking to ghosts, when you could trap one long enough to give it a talking to. "Is it you that kills in the city?"

All three wolves laughed, white tongues lolling. Their teeth were white and straight. I wonder if anyone's ever thought of looking for strong teeth as a sign of lycanthropy. Garrett ran her tongue across her own crooked ones.

"Ghosts don't bite."

She thought it was the same one speaking. The voice in her head sounded identical.

If they had individual identities. If the haunt of three wolves was more than one consciousness, more than one. . .creature. If a ghost was more than a pattern of memories and responses graved by violence into the city's stones.

"Then what does bite?"

"Besides your lover?" The wolf on the right turned to regard Sebastien—who did not so much as shrug. "Beasts. Beasts bite, sorceress."

She tugged off her glove—remembering at the last moment not to use her teeth, lest there be any lingering aconite or lead upon the leather—and reached into her pocket, where the tooth rested in a glassine envelope. "This beast?"

Now six eyes watched her. "The Beast." La bête, it said, and she heard two other voices echo.

"Why would you care that another beast hunts here? Why would you want to help us?"

"This was our city to hunt. Ours. Our pack-earth. Not the beast's that comes by moonlight."

"Like you."

"We are the wolves of Paris," the lead wolf said, and was there perhaps something unwolflike about the shape of its skull? It was bigger than any wolf had a right to be, as tall at the shoulder as a wolfhound. But its jaws, she thought, were not so broad as the jaws of the beast that had done the gnawing, after all. "We come in the bright of the moon or its dark. For us, it matters not at all."

"You lie. Werewolves hunt at the full moon," she said. Les loups-garou.

"There is no man in us," it answered. "No. No man. Though we endure in the memories of man. Break the circle. Let us free, Sorceress."

Her breath still misted when she breathed, but now it flowed to the invisible wall that circled the wolves and parted upon it, and faded into the air. "You would steal my breath if I did."

"You used your breath to lure us here." Delicately, it sniffed. Three plumed tails waved gently, and she saw that the tail of the leader was bobbed halfway, cut or bitten off. "Your breath would give us strength, strength in our jaws and strength in our tendons."

"And you would hunt again."

"We are the wolves of Paris," it answered. "We have hunted here since your kind cringed behind walls and would not walk in winter, lest we gnaw their bones. We are the wolves of Paris, and even the stones remember us, Sorceress. Your pitiable werewolves feared us, in our time."

"Abby Irene," Sebastien said, with all the gentle quiet of a man who does not wish to startle someone in the presence of a snake, "please look up."

She raised her eyes from the wolf who was too big to be a wolf, and turned her head, and bit her tongue so as to stifle a breathy and uncharacteristic shriek.

All around her, shadows with moon-silver eyes stood blinking. One, two, twenty, three dozen. So many ghosty wolves that they filled the narrow street, ringed the spellcasters, vanished half-concealed into walls of brick and stone. Garrett could not count them; they were a troop of wolves, a garrison, a regiment. "Oh," she said, and even across the width of the circle, she heard Mrs. Smith breathing through gritted teeth.

"If our teeth still tore meat," the lead wolf said, "doubt not they would rend thine."

"Well," Sebastien said. "Shall we visit your corpse's place of dying, Jack?"

* * *

The body had been found at the base of a streetlamp, and the snow around it was gone, trod into mire by the feet of coroners and officers and inspectors. Sebastien could still smell the blood, however, and a deeper, ranker scent. That smell made him cringe. Even he. No predator cares to encounter another as wicked.

He snuffed deeply, lips curled to concentrate the odors. "Well, something was here."

Jack and Phoebe clustered in silence by Abby Irene as he ranged out. The sorceress was doing something arcane with chalk and tiny candles, a task the other two seemed content to be pressed into. Sebastien was following the scent.

The fear that emptied the streets favored him. The snow around the body might be trodden, but that further back in a connecting alley was pristine, crusted, frozen firm so it had not blown in the wind. There was a third scent here, under the musty one, under the blood.

Sebastien crouched, his coat brushing the ground beside his boots, and touched cold fingers to the marks of pads and claws in the snow, and the marks of a man's boots beside them.

* * *