Streets, Paris, Evening, 9 Jan. 1902

[bitten_notshy]

The 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, the broken paths through the snow easier to find and follow.

"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 only mumbled thoughtfully in response, and Jack had nothing to say at all.

Perhaps because centuries of living in them had given him a sense of how they were constructed, Sebastien had a gift for cities. He brought his courtesans 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; if he'd had the chance, he would have brought half a dozen better ones back from 2011.

"The wolves were here when I saw them," Sebastien said, gesturing around the narrow street rowed with slouched Gothic buildings. Jack noticed again that, with his new identity, any trace of a Spanish accent had left him.

He'd doubted the wampyr could do that -- a stupid underestimation, and Jack wondered again at how little he knew about this man he'd spent 13 years of his life with. Jack had already shed several names and years and lives; he thought of how many more Sebastien must have let go. Perhaps moving on was in itself a kind of rebirth. Perhaps it was what allowed him to go on.

Jack watched, returning Sebastien's smile, as Garrett went to stand behind the vampire where he crouched at the edge of the light, close by a patch of less-trammeled snow. Sebastien 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. "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. Jack understood that: He was eldest and coldest, after all. And then the two men smirked at each other across the circle as, by the same logic, Jack was directed easily to the south.

But east and west, for a few moments, seemed to elude Garrett. 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, as Jack tried not to smirk at her.

Sebastien had seen to his education, and she knew from having had him as a student that the vampire had done a good job of it. He understood what she said -- and its absolute lawyerly mundanity. Which, he supposed, 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 counterfeit of placid confidence upon his features. It would have been perfect if he'd been able to still his hands and stop the tremor transmitted through his twist of foil.

The chant went on. Jack would have expected them to draw a crowd -- in most 2011 cities, 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, it seemed, afraid of the death in the moonlight. Jack could hardly fault them for that, as he was as well.

By the third iteration of the chant, the mist clouding Doctor Garrett's 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. It wouldn't do to act frightened.

A shape was 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 and seemed to breathe faster. Jack's free hand went to his throat, feeling a tightness encircling the windpipe. 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. The gray shadows of their masks appeared, the dusting of dark color over their rumps and hackles. The biggest breathed in and tilted back its head.

Garrett 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 wolfsbane: 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.

"Ghosts don't bite."

"Then what does bite?" Garret asked, and Jack was grateful she had the strength to speak. He didn't.

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

Garrett 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, Jack thought, were not so broad as the jaws of the beast that had done the gnawing. "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."

"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."

And then, as suddenly as they had come, the wolves were gone. It took a long moment for any of the Court to speak.

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

That 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. 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.

[OOC: NFB, NFI, revised from New Amsterdam. Part of this. Four posts left!]