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