turned back to Abby Irene. "I'm afraid I must hurry on ahead; it won't be long before it's light. Jack will see to your luggage, and pay the power tax for all of us."
Sebastien and the others had all been watching the clock anxiously, having timed their arrival in Paris with great care. Abby Irene nodded, and squeezed his wrist quickly before turning away. No farewell, and no words of caution. She was very much herself, and her assumption that he would
understand anything she might care to say was a good deal of her charm,
although he imagined other men might not find it so.
He let the crowd sweep him up, and was carried on the tide out of
the station.
Paris gleamed in the early morning. Here, there was no longer any darkness, except the darkness that lay puddled in shadows between the electric lights. Here there were no wires, no cables, no unsightly trenches. Rather, Paris was the first major city of the world endowed with broadcast power, the technological marvel of the twentieth century. Yellow light glazed her ancient cobbles, her muck-stained granite curbs, her ice-ringed puddles.
Paris' broadcast electricity was free for anyone to use, which meant
that everyone paid for it. Typical of any human society, wasn't it, that the ones who benefited least carried as much of the burden as those who benefited most?
The sweepers with their birch brooms were already in evidence, scraping the previous day's rubbish into piles that would be washed into the cathedral sewers. On their caps they wore electric lanterns, powered by the same miasma of energy that lit the streets. Drunks slumped in doorways, and the iron-shod hooves of a milkman's carthorse rattled on cobbles. But other than that, the streets were strangely barren under the light of the high waxing moon.
It had been a long time since he was in Paris, and the memories crowded close. Not close enough to ease the complex ache that Epaphras' destruction had left him with—this was an additional sorrow, rather than a distraction. Sebastien tucked his nose into his collar, though he felt no chill. It would hide his absent breath, if anyone was watching.
And he did feel someone watching. Not with chill presentiment, as a mortal might, but by the soft prickled lifting of the hairs across his nape, a sense of pressure between his shoulderblades.
He knew better than to turn. Chances were, it was only some bold streetwalker or cutthroat. But there were shop windows, and though he avoided walking too close before them (for even by lamplight, his lack of a reflection might be noticed) they could be twisted to his uses. He watched from the corner of his eye, and at first saw nothing. He heard the shush of the garbagemen's brooms, the clip of his own heels, and something else. A rattling click, the clatter of a dog's nails.
Paris was full of dogs, both leashed and feral. But what Sebastien finally glimpsed in reflection wasn't a dog of any breed he recognized. Its coat was shaggy and gray over lean sides, the eyes pale under prick ears, and it slunk from shadow to shadow like a giant cat.
But surely there could be no wolves on a Paris street.
* * *
He said as much to Jack, when the others—luggage in tow—caught up with him at their reserved hotel, and Jack found him in their room and dropped a stack of papers on the floor beside the bed they were to share. ". . .but in any case, it was a great hungry-looking dog."
"Werewolves?" Jack said, glancing up from his breakfast with wide eyes and lifted brows, as if he couldn't believe Sebastien hadn't considered it.
"There's no such thing as a werewolf," Sebastien said, pushing his
tiny glass of orange juice across the small table in their room so Jack could reach it easily. They ordered two meals, and Jack consumed both. Young men were always hungry, and it didn't hurt Sebastien's charade if he seemed to be dining.
Jack finished his own orange juice before reaching for Sebastien's. "You know," he said, "every time a vampire says he doesn't believe in lycanthropes, a werewolf bursts into flames."
Sebastien eyed him for a moment, trying to decide if his reciprocal sarcasm extended to slow clapping, and instead contented himself drawing on the tablecloth with a finger dipped in water. "I didn't say there were no such thing as lycanthropes. I said there were no such thing as werewolves. There are plenty of other were-things in the