Abby Irene ran both hands through her hair, strands pulling between fingers, the insides of her wrists pale as skimmed milk and veined with blue. "Damned if I—oh."
They waited while she lifted her butter knife and turned it over in her hand, examining her reflection in the silver blade. She tucked a stand of hair behind her ear and frowned, then flicked the metal with a fingernail to hear it ring. You'd get no such tone from flatware.
"Doctor Garrett?"
Jack's voice seemed to break her contemplation. She held the knife vertical beside her face and smiled. "Basic thaumaturgy," she said. "What's the alchemical symbol for silver, Mr. Priest? What's the symbolic association between a beast killed by a silver bullet and the moon?"
"Oh." Jack's tone of voice was almost exactly what hers had been. Sebastien prevented a chuckle only through strength of will. "You're brilliant, Abby Irene."
She inclined her head. "Thank you, Jack. And yet, it also doesn't help us catch the monster."
She bit her lip and lay the silver knife across the gold rim of her plate. Her fingers stroked the lilies in its handle. Dawn was breaking outside, finally, the indigo sky—washed of stars by Paris's hungry steetlights—paling to pewter.
Sebastien stood to draw the windowshade, the light already too much for his eyes although the sun was safely below the horizon.
"We're asking ourselves the wrong questions," Sebastien said. "So we know why it attacks on the full moon. The right question is, what happened to trigger the killings? What happened in Paris eighteen months ago? What changed."
"The Metro," Jack said, promptly, but Phoebe touched his wrist and said, "Three years."
He gestured to the window. "La Ville-lumière, Abby Irene. The broadcast power. Do you suppose it's intentional?"
Abby Irene closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "A sacrifice to power the system? Possible, but—you must speak with the theurgist, then. After my conversation last night with Pr—with Henry, I must speak to the prime minister, I'm afraid. This morning."
"Well, any visit by me to the. . .theurgist will have to wait until sunset," Sebastien said. "So you may certainly expect to come. But I shall advance him a letter, so he'll know to expect us."
"Oh," said Phoebe, her face crumpled in feigned disappointment. "You mean we'll not just show up on his doorstep and crash our way in?"
"I have heard he has a death ray," Sebastien answered. "I shall prefer caution, just this once."
* * *
On the second occasion when Garrett presented herself to Monsieur Renault, she did so alone. Jack and Phoebe were still at the books; Sebastien was probably knitting and reading the papers.
The cold, if anything, was worse, and Garrett had stomped into boots and layered on petticoats before she ventured outside. This time, she dared the Metro. She had ridden the subways of New Amsterdam, and also the Tube in London—if Paris was the city of light, London was the city of the Underground, it having been the first in the world—but somehow the character of the Metro was different.
For one thing, there was even more smoking. And there was a beautiful black woman—Algerian, she supposed—tall and fine, gold flashing in her ears when she moved. Her hands burrowed into a fur muff; her kohled eyes watched moodily above her shawl. She huddled even in the comparative warmth of the tunnels. Garrett, accustomed by now to New England's bitter winters, could not imagine the suffering of those born to tropical climes. Paris should, this time of year, be far warmer than New Amsterdam.
The blacks of Paris were nothing like the blacks of America. Garrett tried to imagine Mary among them, and bit her lip in consideration.
She wondered if either of them would ever be returning home. She didn't think she'd stay in Paris though. Not because of the uncharacteristic cold, the snow, the Seine freezing in the night—those, of course, were only temporary, and she had proven to herself that she could bear New Amsterdam. No, Paris was not usually so cold.
Although it had been in the winter of 1439, hadn't it? She remem-
bered Phoebe's story of the wolves entering medieval Paris, loping along the icelocked Seine, and heard again the crack of the ice as it sealed over the mighty river.
She almost missed her station stop.
Ghosts might not, in general and with a few notable exceptions (such as the shades Sebastien had mentioned) have much wherewithal for harming the living.