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.
* * *
The collective resources of an authoress, a sorceress, and a wampyr and his valet are not to be underestimated. They visited, in quick succession, a certain dusty-windowed bookstore bearing no sign except the name of the proprietor in scraped gold letters on the glass; a library wherein Abby Irene had been obliged to unpin her pleated shirtwaist and display the sorcerer's tattoo over her breastbone; and last, the home of a certain Monsieur Armitage, noted author of Gothic romances and dear correspondent of Mrs. Phoebe Smith. He was not only overjoyed, if startled, to meet her in the flesh, he was equally thrilled by the opportunity to speak with Sebastien and Abby Irene. There was, they conceded, no point in pretending any longer to be other than they were, as it seemed their presence was not secret and never had been.
In any case, Monsieur Armitage had an extensive—and esoteric—library, and was certainly well-equipped to help them educate themselves on the weirder aspects of French history. Sebastien supposed there were worse deals he might have had to make for information than an hour's conversation with an earnest and pleasant author.
When the four of them returned to the hotel—long after dark, but barely after suppertime—Sebastien and Jack were both mightily weighed down with books, and even Abby Irene and Phoebe were not unencumbered. Within short order, they were arranged around the room, and the silence was broken mostly the sound of flipping pages.
"Courtaut," Phoebe said, holding up a slender blue-bound book with gilt page-ends. "I have found him. You lived here, honestly, Sebastien, and never heard of