Bob almost seemed to smile. "Just for that, you get my best effort tonight, Harry. Maybe you're not such an idiot after all."
"Great," I said. "I want to work up a couple of potions, and I want to know everything you know about werewolves."
"What kind of potions, and what kind of werewolves?" Bob said promptly.
I blinked. "There's more than one?"
"Hell, Harry. We've made at least three dozen different kinds of potions down here ourselves, and I don't see why you wouldn't-"
"No, no, no," I growled at Bob. "Werewolves. There's more than one kind of werewolf?"
"Eh? More than one kind of what?" Bob tilted his skull over to one side, as though cocking an invisible hand to his ear bones.
"Werewolf, werewolf."
"There wolf," Bob replied solemnly, his voice seething with a hokey accent. "There castle."
I blinked at him. "Uh. What the heck are you talking about?"
"It's a joke, Harry. Stars almighty, you never get out, do you?"
I eyed the grinning skull and growled in frustration. "Don't make me come up there."
"Okay, okay. Sheesh. Aren't we grumpy tonight?" Bob's jaws stretched in a yawn again.
"I'm working another murder case, Bob, and I don't have time to goof around."
"Murder. Mortal business is so complicated. You never hear about murder charges in the Nevernever."
"That's because everything there is immortal. Bob, just shut up and tell me what you know about werewolves. If there's a bunch of different flavors, tell me what they are." I got out a notebook and a fresh pencil, then a couple of clean beakers with alcohol-flame burners to heat whatever liquid I put in them.
"All right," Bob said. "How much do you know?"
"Exactly nothing about werewolves. My teacher never covered that with me."
Bob barked out a harsh little laugh. "Old Justin had a lousy sense of just about everything. He got what was coming to him, Harry, and don't let anyone on the White Council tell you any different."
I stopped for a moment. A sudden rush of mixed feelings, anger and fear and mostly regret, washed through me. I closed my eyes. I could still see him, my teacher, dying in flames born of my will and anger. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Hell, the Council even suspended the sentence on you. You were vindicated. Say, I wonder what ever happened to Elaine. Now there was a sweet piece of-"
"Werewolves, Bob," I said, in a very quiet, very angry voice. One hand started to hurt, and I saw that my fingers had clenched into a fist, the knuckles turning white. I turned my eyes to him, glaring.
I heard the skull make a gulping sound. And then he said, "Right. Okay. Werewolves. And, uh, which potions did you want?"
"I want a pick-me-up potion. A night's rest in a bottle. And I want something that will make me imperceptible to a werewolf." I reached for the notebook and my pencil.
"First one's tough to do. There's nothing quite like a decent night's sleep. But we can make some super-coffee, no problem." He spouted out the formula to me, and I noted it down as he went, my handwriting too dark and angular. I was still angry from the mere mention of my old master's name. And the welter of emotions that rushed up with my memories of Elaine wouldn't subside for an hour.
We all have our demons.
"What about the second one?" I asked the skull.
"Can't really be done," Bob said. "Wolves have just got way too much on the ball to hide from every one of their senses without doing some major work. I'm talking, like, a greater Ring of Invisibility, not just a Shadowcape or something."
"Do I look like I'm made of money? I can't afford that. What about a partial-hiding potion, then?"
"Oh, like a blending brew? Look like an unobtrusive part of the background, something like that? I would think that would be the most useful, really. Keep you from being noticed to begin with."
"Sure," I said. "I'll take what I can get."
"No problem," Bob assured me, and rattled off another formula, which I jotted down. I checked the ingredients list, and thought that I had them all in stock among the countless containers on my shelves.
"Fine. I can get started on these. How much do you know about werewolves, Bob?"
"Plenty. I was in France during the Inquisition." Bob's voice was dry (but that is to be expected, considering).
I started on the first potion, the stimulant. Every potion has eight parts. One part is a base liquid to hold the others and provide a medium for mixing. Five parts are symbolically linked to each of the five senses. One is similarly linked to the mind, and another to the spirit. The basic ingredient to the stimulant potion was coffee, while the base for the scent-masking potion was water. I got them both to boiling. "Lot of werewolfery going on then?"
"Are you kidding?" Bob said. "It was werewolf central. We had every kind of werewolf you could think of. Hexenwolves, werewolves, lycanthropes, and loup-garou to boot. Every kind of lupine theriomorph you could think of."
"Therro-what?" I said.
"Theriomorph," Bob said. "Anything that shape-shifts from a human being into an animal form. Werewolves are theriomorphs. So are werebears, weretigers, werebuffaloes … "
"Buffaloes?" I asked.
"Sure. Some Native American shamans could do a buffalo. But almost everyone does predators, and until pretty recently, wolves were the scariest predator anyone around Europe could think of."
"Uh, okay," I said. "And there's a difference between types of werewolves?"
"Right," Bob confirmed. "Mostly it depends on how you go from human form to wolf form, and how much of your humanity you retain. Don't burn the coffee."
I turned down the flame beneath the beaker of coffee, annoyed. "I know, I know. Okay, then. How do you get to be a wolf?"
"The classic werewolf," Bob said, "is simply a human being who uses magic to shift himself into a wolf."
"Magic? Like a wizard?"
"No," Bob said. "Well. Sort of. He's like a wizard who only knows how to cast the one spell, the one to turn him into a wolf, and knows how to get back out of it again. Most people who learn to be werewolves aren't very good at it for a while, because they keep all of their own humanity."
"What do you mean?"
"Well," Bob said, "they can reshape themselves into the form of a wolf, but it's pretty much just topology. They rearrange their physical body, but their mind remains the same. They can think and reason, and their personality doesn't change-but they don't have a wolf's instincts or reflexes. They're used to being sight-oriented bipeds, not smell-oriented quadrupeds. They would have to learn everything from scratch."
"Why would someone do something like that?" I said. "Just learn to turn into a wolf, I mean."
"You've never been a peasant in medieval France, Harry," Bob said. "Life was hard for those people. Never enough food, shelter, medicine. If you could give yourself a fur coat and the ability to go out and hunt your own meat, you would have jumped at the chance, too."
"Okay, I think I've got it," I said. "Do you need silver bullets or anything? Do you turn into a werewolf if you get bitten?"
"Bah," Bob said. "No. Hollywood stole that from vampires. And the silver-bullet thing is only in special cases. Werewolves are just like regular wolves. You can hurt them with weapons just like you can a real wolf."
"That's good news," I said, stirring the potion. "What other kinds are there?"
"There's another version of a werewolf-when someone else uses magic to change you into a wolf."
I glanced up at him. "Transmogrification? That's illegal, Bob. It's one of the Laws of Magic. If you transform someone into an animal, it destroys their personality. You can't transform someone else without wiping out their mind. It's practically murder."
"Yeah. Neat, huh? But actually, most personalities can survive the transformation. For a little while at least. Really strong wills might manage to keep their human memories and personality locked away for several years. But sooner or later, they're irretrievably gone, and you're left with nothing but a wolf."
I turned from the potions to scribble in my notebook. "Okay. What else makes a werewolf?"
"The most common way, back in France, was to make a deal with a demon or a devil or a powerful sorcerer. You get a wolf-hide belt, put it on, say the magic words, and whammy, you're a wolf. A Hexenwolf."
"Isn't that just like the first kind?"
"No, not at all. You don't use your own magic to become a wolf. You use someone else's."
I frowned. "Isn't that the second kind, then?"
"Stop being obtuse," Bob chided me. "It's different because you're employing a talisman. Sometimes it's a ring or amulet, but usually it's a belt. The talisman provides an anchor for a spirit of bestial rage. Nasty thing from the bad side of the Nevernever. That spirit wraps around a human personality to keep it from being destroyed."
"A kind of insulation," I said.
"Exactly. It leaves you with your own intellect and reason, but the spirit handles everything else."
I frowned. "Sounds a little easy."
"Oh, sure," Bob said. "It's really easy. And when you use a talisman to turn into a wolf, you lose all of your human inhibitions and so on, and just run on your unconscious desires, with the talisman-spirit in charge of the way the body moves. It's really efficient. A huge wolf with human-level intelligence and animal-level ferocity."