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McKeever from the Seattle Human Enclave, curator of the Archive of Human Works; and my dog.
    Yes, I said my dog. Galahad’s a dog were, one who spends his days as a St. Bernard and transforms into a large, potbellied man with a patchy brown-and-white haircut when the sun goes down. So far he’s one of my best students, when he’s not trying to snarf down everything on the refreshment table—though he has a distressing tendency to lick his opponent’s face during grapples.
    Teresa puts up her hand. She’s a matronly woman in her fifties, in pretty good shape, currently dressed in a maroon tracksuit. “Jace?”
    “Yes, Teresa?”
    “I’m sorry, but my phone is vibrating.” She sounds apologetic. “We’re getting in a shipment from Paris, and I made them promise not to bother me unless it was urgent.”
    “Go ahead,” I say. “Everybody else, back into position—”
    Xandra puts up her hand. She’s a sixteen-year-old thrope I met through her uncle when we worked together, and we somehow became friends. Xandra likes to experiment with body modification, which in a world filled with magic translates into things like corpsing—using charms to imitate the rotting flesh of a zombie—or blading, where razors are embedded into the skin edge-out like some sort of lethal fins. I forbid either one at class, which made her a little grouchy.
    “What is it, Xandra?”
    “Can I put my earbuds in while we’re practicing? Listening to some tunage helps me get into a rhythm.”
    “This isn’t aerobics, Xan. What are you going to do when you find yourself in a fight, ask the other guy to hang on a second while you make sure your iPod’s charged?”
    “But this is just practice .”
    “No, it’s programming . That’s what we’re doing, programming your reflexes by repeating the same actions over and over. That way, when you find yourself in a dangerous situation, you won’t have to think; your instincts will take over.”
    She frowns. “But I already have instincts. Thrope, remember? Fur, four feet, waggable butt extension?”
    I sigh. She’s got me there. “You already know how to use your fangs and claws, sure. I’m trying to give you some new instincts—ones that deal with leverage and pressure points and using your mass effectively. And that’s not going to work if you need to have the latest top forty pop song blasting in the background to jog your memory—”
    Now Csilla puts up her hand. She’s a tall, strikingly beautiful pire, a refugee from a tiny war-torn country in Eastern Europe that I can’t even pronounce the name of. She and Ludmilla Radzic were smuggled here by the Gray Wolves and forced to work as prostitutes until Charlie and I put a stop to it. She swore she’d never let anyone force her to do anything against her will ever again, and I believe her. “Csilla?”
    “Yes. When do we learn how to kill?” Ah, these Slavic types. Blunt, practical, ruthless.
    “I’ll get to that, believe me. But you have to learn how to walk before you run—”
    Which is when Gally tears to the front of the room and starts jumping up and down, yelling, “Walk! Walk! Walk!”
    I decide now would be a good time for a short break.
    *   *   *
    As it turns out, Teresa isn’t the only one who gets interrupted by a call. We’re hardly getting warmed up when I get a call myself, from Gretch. Stoker’s sent us another message.
    I adjourn the class, tell everyone they’re doing great, give them some homework to practice on their own, and say I’ll see them next week. Then I take Gally home and get back to the office as quickly as I can.
    “Our shaman’s just finished checking it,” Gretch says as I sit down opposite her desk. She taps the screen of her tablet a few times, and one of the flatscreens switches to a shot of Stoker’s face. “No surprises, just a masking spell to make it impossible to backtrace.”
    I study the monitor. The best description I can give of Stoker is a brainiac caveman;