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