Chapter 5:
Calm Before the Storm
"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course..."
~Homer, The Odyssey
Romania, Year Twelve
Rain. The heavens opened up during the night and rain poured down upon the mountains. As usual, everything dripped in the castle. Remus woke to the steady plop of water hitting the stone floor in a corner of his room. The ceiling only leaked in one spot, which is why he chose this particular room -- Mihail's old room, actually.
With a sigh, he sat up, no longer able to sleep to the drumbeat of droplets. He felt cross with himself this morning: cross for not fixing some of the simple things that would make life easier (there was plenty of wood lying around to fix the ceiling) and cross for letting the old wizard stay yet another night. What else could he do? He couldn't just turn him out to make his way down the mountain alone, in the dark. And now it was raining.
Sometimes in the summer thunderheads settled on top of the mountain for days, weeks at a time.
He could guide Dumbledore down the mountain, even in the rain. Part of the path had a tendency to flood, it was true. But he'd conjure a bridge if need be.
Remus, uncharacteristically, did not get up immediately. He felt quite fuzzy-headed, still in the grip of dreams. He pulled on a heavy fleece shirt and sat working the knots out of his hair as he tried to remember the elusive phantoms he had dreamt. In twelve years his hair had gotten long -- there seemed no point in cutting it -- and he mused about what students at a place like Hogwarts would think of a professor who looked like... a wild animal.
Dumbledore must be truly desperate to consider him for the post. Not that he hadn't tried to maintain his scholarship during his time here, and he did know Dark creatures well, too well in some cases. But the rest of the faculty might not be as enthusiastic as the Headmaster. He chuckled to think of Snape's reaction to sharing the head table at meals or the staff room with his old friend the werewolf. That might be worth it -- almost.
He scowled at himself for thinking such nonsense. He would be too dangerous at the full moon. Not that he would mind eating some of the staff. Was Filch still there, he wondered? No. It was the students he worried about. Of course, there was always the Shrieking Shack.
With a shudder, he remembered part of his dreams. He dreamt of the wolf, but not the familiar one in which he ran free under the moon's watchful eye. Caged. The wolf had been caged. The sounds came back to him: growls and jeers. People stood outside the cage and jabbed things at the wolf who snarled and snapped back. Turning, turning, turning around, moving in tight circles, trying to face the attackers, feeling the barbs from without.
He didn't need a Seer to know what that dream meant. How could he go back to being a domesticated animal? Twelve years running free, pack or no pack, had changed him, maybe too much.
He ran his fingers through his hair one last time, noticing how many streaks of gray he found. That pleased him. Gray to him meant the beauty and strength of a wolf, not the doddering old age of a human. After collecting his hair at the nape of his neck with one hand, he reached for the heavy gold clip and set it in his hair. He was foolish to keep the thing, more foolish yet to wear it. But her final words to him...that was why he kept it, he knew.
Shaking off recollections, old and new, Remus stood, finished dressing, and shaved -- somehow he couldn't abandon all the habits of civilization. He dodged raindrops in the West Wing, but conjured a proper Bubble Charm when he got to the great hall. As he made his way toward the fireplace, he saw with unusual clarity the piles of debris that he usually stepped around or over without thinking. He wasn't sure he could move the roof beams himself, but most of the rest of the stuff could be moved with a bit of magic. Before winter came, he resolved, he would get the castle in better shape.
By the time Dumbledore appeared in the great hall, the rain had settled into a fine mist. Remus had shaken off most of his melancholy mood and was making porridge in a small cauldron at the hearth.
"Good morning, Headmaster," he said pleasantly, turning as he heard the footsteps entering the hall.
The old wizard approached the fire where Remus stood, but his eyes were riveted upward through the gaping hole in the ceiling, in spite of the drizzle. He watched raptly -- even, Remus noticed, with a hint of fear.
The old man's eyes were still sharp, for it took Remus a minute to realize what he had seen. Both stood and observed, neither speaking, as the object grew larger and larger as it hurtled towards them. The outline of powerful wings appeared first, then vicious talons and a knife-like beak. Seemingly inches from the ends of the roof beams which criss-crossed the gap in the ceiling, the creature deflected upwards as if it had encountered a windowpane, rolled over once in the air with an earsplitting shriek, and glided away.
"A roc," said Remus thoughtfully. "I think I've seen him before. Birds don't seem to understand invisible barriers very well, even magical birds," he added as an afterthought.
Dumbledore had relaxed during the bird's approach, apparently divining the secrets of the protective barrier. "It is a remarkable spell," he commented, approaching one of the crumbling castle walls and putting his arm through. He tried it again, this time holding his wand, and his arm was deflected just as the roc had been. "The wards are unnoticeable except to magic." He looked skywards. "Rain, snow, crows, mosquitos can come and go as they please. Unless I had been alerted, I may not have noticed they were in place for many days."
"I still discover new ones from time to time," Remus admitted. "Alec was a master of the elegant and subtle; have you noticed, for instance, that ultraviolet light cannot penetrate into any area but where the greenhouse used to be? And that voices are inaudible from one room to the next?"
"Indeed," said Dumbledore.
Remus felt silly -- of course the headmaster had noticed. There was very little that escaped his detection. He turned his attention to the hearth, hoping that Laszlo's provisions would be enough to see them through the storm. They would always have plenty of bread, and there was some more of that nasty dried goat that Remus had served last night instead of the sheep he'd killed two weeks ago. It somehow didn't seem right to feed Dumbledore something that he'd slain at the full moon.
He hesitated, too, to delve further into discussions of magical wards. Remus had learned everything he could from Alexandru in order to be able to keep the werewolves in the forest and the people in the village once a month.
But Dumbledore did not seem willing to let the subject rest, so delighted was he with the details of Alexandru's handiwork. As they sat on the stones near the hearth and ate breakfast, feeling the warmth of the fire at their backs, he questioned Remus further about the intricacies of the castle wards.
"You must have learned quite a bit yourself," mused Dumbledore. "I detected a somewhat different hand on the spell in the tower. Lovely way to preserve the books, even with the entire ceiling piled on top of them."
"Mmmm," Remus replied noncommittally, very interested in his porridge all of a sudden. Of course Albus Dumbledore would be able to detect those sorts of subtleties.
"I should think," said the old wizard shrewdly, "that Alec would have taught you how to make moonwards. He was very good at them. He came up to Hogwarts and showed us -- oh, it must have been forty years ago -- when we had a werewolf in the Forbidden Forest, the last one but for you."
Remus looked up with a sudden motion. "But of course I was never in the Forbidden Forest," he fibbed easily, both to test Dumbledore and to cover his surprise. Of course, that explained the remnants of the old barrier he and Padfoot and Prongs had discovered that night.
His recollection of the actual event was hazy, as were all his memories of full moon nights, but he'd never forget the discussion they'd had about it the next day. Sirius had been sure Dumbledore had figured them out but for some reason wasn't calling them on it; James insisted that the barrier was old, so old that its calculation of the lunar phases was slightly off, which had allowed them eventually to slip through. Because of the slight variations in the speed of the moon's orbit, moonwards couldn't simply be activated periodically; there were two ways to do it right: the first was to trigger them with a lunascope, which was the easier of the two but required hardware. The second, Alexandru's specialty, required conjuring a field that was exquisitely sensitive to the pull of the tides. Even these could lose their accuracy in time, though, since the differences between a full moon and the day before and after it were very slight.
So level-headed Prongs had been right, as usual. And Dumbledore still wasn't calling him on his lie; surely he didn't honestly believe Remus had spent seventy months in the Shrieking Shack?
As he began relating his efforts to keep the Romanian werewolves from biting villagers, he was painfully aware that he was only adding to the deception. Yes, within two years of his becoming Alpha, the number of bites in the areas around the mountains had fallen very close to zero; but saying this glossed over the moral conflicts that had tormented him as he did this, made it sound as if he had chosen the side of the humans… Yet he still wondered if he had done the right thing. Especially because his final effort, to reduce the bites from rare to none, had such disastrous consequences.
Even thinking about how it all started was difficult -- so many threads came together that summer -- but it probably started with a map.
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Romania, Year Eight
"Hey, Dad, can I borrow your broomstick to go into the village?"
"I don't know; are you done with your homework?"
The boy appeared in the doorway of the wooden cottage, looking exasperated, the broomstick already in his hand. He was about average in height for his thirteen and a half years, but quite skinny, and his shoulder-length straight black hair was tied back with a piece of woolly sheepskin. "Yeah, yeah…" he mumbled in response to the question. "I guess I'm done."
"Well, let me see it and you can go." The man he called "Dad," sitting at a homemade table of raw pine in the center of the cottage's living room, was old enough to have that role, but looked nothing like the boy. He glanced up from the map and piece of parchment he had been taking notes on and gestured for the other to pull up a chair.
"Just a sec…" the boy mumbled, leaning the broomstick against the wall and reaching for a square object tossed haphazardly onto the floor. He cradled it now gently, as if it were alive, and couldn't hide the pride in his face as he gave it to his father. "See, it really is a breadbox. It's got kind of a tortoiseshell pattern, still, but -- "
"But it's quite attractive," the older man agreed, turning it over in his hands. "Can you bring him back?"
The boy hesitated, then took a wand from the side pocket of his robes. Glancing at his father several times, and finally at the breadbox, he tapped it -- and suddenly there was a turtle crawling across the table.
"Excellent!" said the father. "I'll take him back to the creek a bit later; he's going to get hungry sitting here. And what about your other homework?"
"That's all I did," the reluctant student admitted with a scowl. "I didn't do that Muggle stuff…"
"`Muggle stuff?'" His father raised his eyebrows. "You know, those were the books that I used when I was your age -- at wizard school…" His voice faded. He never talked about his former life.
This brief foray into the unknown intrigued the boy, and he sat at the table. "Really?" he wondered. "Latin declensions? And astronomy?"
"Our kind need Latin more than Muggles do," said the man with a hint of amusement. "I have yet to see a Dementor back off from someone chanting `Expect Patronus,' you know. And I should scarcely have to mention why we need astronomy." There was a wry note in that last sentence that made them both grin. "So, Bela, suppose you tell me what causes the phases of the moon?"
Bela sighed. He wanted to be out enjoying the spring evening, stirring up trouble, not being made to think. "Oh, I don't know. The earth gets in the way, I guess."
"That's what most people think," his father said in a tone of playful "Gotha." "But actually, it's when the earth is between the sun and the moon that it's full -- and when there's nothing in between that it's new."
"Really?" The boy reached for the text, which he'd left open on the table, interested in spite of himself. "If the pictures moved, it would help; that's why I thought it was a Muggle book…"
His father frowned. "They should move," he said thoughtfully. "There used to be a crystal that made them appear in 3-D, and revolve… Maybe it's been lost." He picked up the book and flipped through the pages, then held it up and shook it.
No crystal, but a small triangle of parchment, looking as if it had been torn hastily from another piece, fluttered onto the table between them. A messy scrawl in green ink read, "9 p.m. at WW, Prongs."
The man stared at the note for a moment, then carefully folded it and stuck it into his pocket.
There was a moment's silence, then Bela's curiosity got the better of him. He read English pretty well these days. "Who's Prongs?" he wondered.
"An old friend," said his father quietly, but with a hint of warning that he really didn't want to talk about it.
"Where is he now?"
"He's dead."
Bela nodded wisely. A lot of his friends had died, too. He picked up the book again and thumbed through it, as if it would tell him more about the past they couldn't discuss. Coming to a sticker in the front, with a complicated logo and a name scribbled in faded ink, he read aloud, "Draco dormiens nunquam - " and translated easily into his native Romanian, "'Never tickle a sleeping dragon'? What's that all about? `Remus J. Lupin, Gryffindor' - that you, Dad?"
The man smiled, his eyes far away. "It was, yes."
"What's Gryffindor?"
"It was one of our Houses…" He pointed out the four animals on the logo, telling his son a little bit of the history of Hogwarts, not venturing any later than the eleventh century.
"And why does the snake look like it's, um -- ?"
The man peeked at the symbol, and smiled. "Throwing up? It's not supposed to; one of my friends did that. Gryffindors didn't like Slytherins much… `Those cunning folk use any means to achieve their ends,'" he quoted suddenly, in English. "Bunch of slimy bastards, really."
Bela smiled. "And what did they say about Gryffindor, then?"
"`You may belong in Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart…'"
"Really? Brave?" He considered this, with teenage reluctance to believe anything good about his parents. "Well, I guess you're brave, Dad, but Mum is a much better hunter."
"I know," Remus sighed, trying not to let the bitterness show in his voice. He would readily admit that Liszka was twice the wolf he was, but he wished her concept of parental duty didn't begin and end at the full moon. He'd never expected to find himself with a child to raise (and he did think of him as a child, not a cub) -- but instinct and tradition made the youngest member of Pack Five Remus and Liszka's son as much as if they had borne him.
He'd tried, countless times in the seventy-six months since the boy had joined them, to convince Bela to return to his human parents. They didn't want him, though, and neither did the schools in the villages around Stilpescu. There was still enough wizarding tradition around that everyone knew what the boy was; there was no chance of finding a purely Muggle school where no one would guess, the way the Lupins had done.
Or the way they had tried to do -- until he was nine or ten, his human self still far too much of a child to deal with the monster's adolescence. It was no wonder the Muscaturas had treated Bela more like a pet tiger than a son, and perhaps he was better off here with adoptive parents who understood, who if he got a bit growly would just send him out in the forest to play. Liszka had no trouble controlling him as a wolf, either, even though his head would no longer fit in her mouth. The readiness with which Bela adopted them, calling them Mum and Dad and coming to them with his troubles, made Remus feel both guilty and oddly gratified. He was pleased he seemed to be able to help Bela; he felt bad that he had to take him away from his parents to do it, and that he couldn't do more.
At least Bela had constant companionship here, at Grigore's cottage, where some member of the Fives was always around, and where they all got together once a month at the very least. Remus didn't have to regret days-long absences with Alexandru, who had become monomaniacal in his search for the elusive Cuza -- he just tried to drop in here often enough to teach Bela a little magic, a bit of Latin, and hopefully some self-respect.
"You know, Bela," he said gently, somewhat appalled in the back of his mind at how much he sounded like his own parents, "you're really smart, and if you study a little bit… We'll have to get you your own wand, too; you always get better results if the wand chooses you… You can be almost anything you want to be."
Bela rolled his eyes. "Grigore told me you used to live in the city with humans, but I didn't believe him."
Remus laughed. "It's true."
"It is?" He paused to think. "Did you fly away into the forest for the full moon?"
"No, I just… just tried to stay indoors."
Bela pondered this, disbelieving. "Indoors? Dunno… I think I'd eat the furniture," he admitted with a smirk.
"Yes, well, I tried."
"Really?" His dad was full of surprises today. "So why did you… I mean… Why would you want to do that?"
It wasn't a bad question. "I suppose there were things I wanted to do, to learn, that made it necessary," Remus said after a pause. "Humans don't… they don't realize how important our one night is to us, and I didn't know either…"
Bela shook his head, his look of mild skepticism becoming replaced with one of total astonishment. "So you pretended you were human just like all the rest of them? And they didn't hear you eating the furniture?"
"They did. Some of them thought it was ghosts… Others…" He touched the note in his pocket. "Others figured it out. They don't all hate us, you know."
"The wizards do," said Bela darkly.
"No, not all of them… I never told you this, Bela, but I left my country because all -- all my friends died in a single day." Seeing the boy watching him with rapt attention, he continued in a mild voice, "They were killed by a Dark wizard who had taken over everywhere, he called himself Lord Voldemort. Voldemort lost his powers in the attack, so there was no longer any need to stay and fight… but there was nothing and no one left. The best and the bravest were all gone." He pulled out the note and smoothed it on the table for Bela to see. "My friend Prongs was among them."
"Prongs was human?" Bela wondered with interest. He waited for Remus to nod. "And he didn't hate you?"
Remus nodded again. "In fact, he became less human in order to be more of my friend," he said.
"How…?" Bela was fascinated.
It had the makings of a long, long story, and Remus wasn't even sure where to begin. What could a young werewolf, whose friends were all of his kind, know or care about Animagi? There hadn't been a Romanian Animagus since the 17th century. He smiled vaguely at his son and picked up his parchment again. "I promise I'll tell you. But it might take a while, and right now you have to study."
Bela returned to his astronomy, and Remus to the piece of parchment where he had been carefully sketching the mountains and their passes into the surrounding towns. Despite the moonwards he had set up on all of the known trails, the Sixes still occasionally got into the village of Albimare, south of Stilpescu, to bite people. Descending the treacherous granite away from the paths was impossible even for wolves, so they were using a route that he had not yet discovered.
He knew they weren't going into the village in human form and waiting for the moon to rise. If they did that where there were wards in place, they'd be trapped there until noon the next day. The villagers knew this, and the werewolves knew the villagers knew it -- this didn't exactly make Remus popular, but there wasn't a pack in the mountains who dared to take on the well-nourished and disciplined Fives.
No, they were entering the town as wolves; but how? Stilpescu appeared safe. No one had been bitten there since Bela. North of Stilpescu, where a gradual earthy trail led to a small farming community, his wards seemed to have held up as well -- even the sheep stayed uneaten. There was a complex tangle of trails east of Stilpescu, leading from the Sixes territory toward human settlements; it was possible he had missed one, but in order to get to Albimare the wolves would have to make a forty-mile circuit south through the foothills. To the east of Albimare were granite cliffs, which he had not explored further after a nasty tumble on only the third full moon after his arrival.
The long walk south was not out of the question for a wolf pack -- but it was far for Remus right now. He decided to investigate the cliffs first; maybe he'd find something.
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Romania, Year Twelve
"I probably should have left well enough alone," he murmured to Dumbledore now, as he cleared the breakfast dishes and re-did the Bubble Charm as the rain increased once more. "I'm not sure that it was my actions that precipitated the final confrontation, but I can find no better explanation… and those who might answer more certainly are all dead."
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Romania, Year Eight
"Lamia? You out there?" A firm but worried male voice called into the trees as the sun set over the mountains. Clouds swirled pink, orange and purple behind the peaks with a weird mixture of shades that no human artist in his right mind would ever choose.
Brush crackled as the man pushed aside new spring growth, coming upon a woman standing quite still in a small clearing. Her back was turned toward him and she seemed to be staring down at her feet. Like the man, the woman had black hair; hers was long and braided in a thick plait that extended down her back.
"We were getting worried about you..." he addressed her, in English with flat American overtones.
"I wanted to be alone," she replied, also in English, but with a lilting, Mediterranean accent. She turned to face him, but her eyes were hidden in the shadows of the coming evening. She stared at him curiously for a moment and then appeared to relax, a smile forming on her lips.
"Really, Mike, I can take care of myself. You think a little first-year grad student needs protection?"
He relaxed, too, forgetting whatever had made him apprehensive.
"Naw. But this area is riddled with caves and I -- " he stopped as he drew next to her and saw what she had been looking at. "What's that? Some sort of dead animal?"
"A rabbit, I think," she replied cautiously. "Maybe an owl or something got it. I guess you're right, though. We should get back to the camp."
She brushed past him, finding a path through the trees. He seemed as if he wanted to say more, but followed her silently instead. They both halted as one howl and then several more echoed faintly from the distance.
"There's what ate that rabbit," he said lightly. "Dogs or wolves. Hey, maybe a werewolf. Didn't that old guy say something to you about werewolves?"
Lamia stopped abruptly and Mike nearly collided with her. She didn't like the thought of werewolves somehow and wished he hadn't brought it up. He continued to pursue it, however.
"You know, that guy who drove the truck with all our stuff? He was jabbering at you in Romanian for a while. How come you didn't tell anyone you spoke the language?"
"Well, I haven't spoken it in fifteen or twenty years," she answered as she continued walking, "My grandmother was Romanian and I... I didn't honestly know if I could still remember much."
"It was pretty handy, you being able to talk to him. I don't think we would have gotten him to give us that extra tank of fuel for the generator otherwise."
"He just wanted more money, that's all," she said dismissively, but he didn't seem willing to let it drop.
"And he warned you about werewolves, right? I could really see that around here."
She regretted now telling them about what the old man had said. She thought it would amuse them, a bit of local color, but she didn't want to be reminded of it, especially since the full moon was rising in front of them. Of course, Mike picked up on this next, saying, "Tonight's the night..."
As if on cue, another howl interrupted him. Echoes reverberated for several seconds, telling her that it was close, much closer than before. She stopped again and turned to face him. "Please, Mike, let's talk about something else, okay?" He seemed willing, more than willing to change the subject.
She knew he was attracted to her, but hadn't decided what to do about it yet. It was common knowledge that she was sleeping with Carlo, one of the physics graduate students in their group at the university. But Carlo was back in Bologna writing his thesis. Besides, he was starting to irritate her. He seemed to think that because she went to bed with him he could run the rest of her life, too.
Carlo was on his way out. She'd be stuck with three other students this spring and summer as they set up their high-energy physics experiment in the local caves. There were some possibilities: Mike, who looked Italian but was from New Jersey; Vijay, who was Indian with a degree from Cambridge and a very posh British accent; and the silent Taofang, who hailed from some unpronounceable place in China. Mike thought he was first in line, but she was leaning toward Vijay. He was quieter and seemed less likely to turn into a Carlo.
Lamia sighed inwardly. She was here to start a thesis project on the physics of neutrino oscillations, collecting the nearly massless particles from collider beams in Italy. They were also setting up an apparatus to detect proton decay -- though at a predicted rate of one data point per year, it would take at least a century to graduate on this project. The payoff if they saw proton decay was so great that they were all willing to take part in the experiment, though it sparked many jokes about the need for Undead graduate students.
Maybe it would be better to concentrate on her work instead of who she'd be sharing her tent with. She knew it would create all sorts of tension among the group and interfere with the work.
And she loved the work; until she started studying physics, she never realized the beauty of some of the most difficult of abstract concepts: the dance of sub-atomic particles existing in their own little realm, pure and not contaminated by the ugliness of the world of humans. She had a pretty rough life up until now; she didn't talk about it with the others, although maybe they suspected that she'd bounced around at a few different schools from all the languages she spoke. This project was a chance to get away from her past, she hoped.
"Let's get back," she said with more urgency. They were close to the camp now, passing by the main entrance to the Petrosna Caves in which they had begun setting up their equipment. From the dark cave mouth, came scuffling noises and low growls -- definitely not made by graduate students, even at their worst.
Mike had a flashlight, which he turned on and pointed into the cave.
"Don't -- don't do that," Lamia began haltingly.
"Why not? I want to see if the equipment's okay."
Light played over cardboard boxes and hulking shaped covered by tarps just inside the entrance. Lamia gripped his arm hard enough to make him wince. There. Greenish-orange discs flashed back at them. Two, no four. She had a feeling there was more in the cave than equipment.
The luminous circles vanished, then reappeared suddenly as eyes. At once heads materialized around the eyes, erupting from the darkness like twin rockets on a jet fighter. No dogs, these were wolves, very large ones which were coming at them fast.
Mike threw the flashlight at the attackers, but it bounced ineffectually to the ground, leaving them in nearly total darkness. Lamia could see well enough in the dark, though. She saw one wolf, the smaller one, leap at Mike, knocking him to the ground. The wolf was as surprised as Mike by what happened next. Lamia grabbed the snarling beast by its shoulders and pushed it backwards, yelling something in Romanian. She stepped in front of her downed companion and stood glaring at the two animals. They seemed to be reappraising her, sniffing at her while growling softly. After a moment, they backed away, hackles raised, and then abruptly fled back into the caves.
She helped Mike up, staring into the darkness after the departed wolves all the while. Damned wolves, she thought, I shouldn't have come here; I should have known there'd be wolves.
"What -- what happened? What did you do?" Mike stammered semi-coherently, lacking his usual glib physics student persona.
"I don't know..." she replied distractedly, still occupied by her own thoughts. "Scared them away, I guess."
"You sure yelled something that worked. What language were you speaking, anyway?"
"What? Oh, Romanian, I guess." Funny how a language she hadn't spoken for fifteen years still lurked inside, so ready to come out when she least expected it. "I think I said something like 'Go away, stupid dog.' I'm not really sure. We'd better get back to camp and check on the others."
Mike searched for his flashlight in the dark. He was starting to stumble and Lamia swiftly found the flashlight and turned it on.
"You're bleeding," she said with a sharp intake of breath. "It didn't bite you, did it?"
"How did you -- " Mike gasped too, as Lamia shone the flashlight on the triple trace of blood running down his left forearm, the track of the wolf's claws. "Jeez. It's quite a scratch," he said bravely as he inspected the wound.
He glanced up to see a frozen mask of what looked like terror on Lamia's face. Her unblinking eyes fixed on his arm and the flashlight nervously danced in her hand. Suddenly, she dropped the light, turned, and ran.
"Just a little blood," he muttered as he picked it up and made his way more slowly back to their camp. "What's wrong, Lamia? Am I going to turn into one now? Transylvania," he muttered. "One day and I'm already a werewolf."
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The full moon came and went, without any rumors of attacks on villagers that Remus heard about, but then he was dragged into a three-day arduous vampire hunt with Alexandru that left them both exhausted and edgy. The old wizard refused to say precisely who Cuza was, or why he was hunting him so assiduously, and the old church in Catunescu where they'd holed up for twenty-four silent and tense hours yielded no further clues.
It was second quarter before Remus got around to visiting the cliffs above Albimare. A rainstorm had erased any possible trails or paw prints, and he didn't know where to begin looking. Tired, hungry, and frustrated, he wandered past the cliffs and took a circuitous route into the village via one of the paths that he'd warded some time ago. Maybe he could put magical shields over the individual streets, if need be, but he'd never tried that. The smaller the area, the easier it was to build a ward -- what he really hoped to find was one single, narrow access point into the village that could be taken care of with a three-foot-wide barrier.
From a small café on the edge of town, he could see the stone cliffs, every bit as sheer as he suspected. He knew the werewolves weren't using magic to descend them; they hardly knew any in human form. Munching on a chunk of black bread softened by a rather thin and greasy red-pepper soup, he continued to gaze out the window, hoping to find a clue in the jagged rocks with their clouds of oddly flitting birds.
But no, he realized suddenly -- they weren't birds at all, they were bats. And they were coming and going somewhere in a clump of aspens just by the base of the mountain. Leaving the waitress an extra-large tip because Muggle money was weird and because she looked hungry, Remus left the café and made his way quickly to the stand of trees.
He had to get down on his belly and crawl through the dense grass and wildflowers to find where the bats were coming from. Sure enough, it was the mouth of a cave, about half the height of a man: or exactly the height of a wolf. Sticking his head into the darkness, he sniffed -- then, feeling stupid, pulled out his wand and muttered "Lumos." A nose would be much more useful than eyes, here, but even this inferior sense told him everything he needed to know.
Just inside the mouth of the cave was a nearly skeletonized body, and beside it, a gnawed leather satchel. The largest bones had been fractured and the marrow sucked out, and the imprints of the teeth on the bag were too large for any ordinary wolf. In addition, the bag had been systematically ripped apart with obvious cunning; only a few of the contents remained, some dried fragments of herbs… vervain and moonwort.
As if Remus needed any help failing Potions, they were always being asked to harvest something under a full moon. In the early days, before he could get Sirius and James to help, he'd picked them the night before and feigned cluelessness when the brew didn't work. Their very first assignment in Year 1 had been a Portents Potion: vervain and moonwort.
If he'd had the wolf's 100,000 odor receptors he would've been able to say just which member or members of Pack Six had been here, but with less than a tenth that, all he knew was that the cave stank of bats, decay, and dog pee. Did the tunnel continue upward and emerge somewhere above the cliffs? He increased the light from his wand, but that helped little in the velvety darkness. The path did continue on, but it stayed narrow, and he found himself crawling more than once. This wasn't the ideal form to do this in; if only Padfoot had been here, or Wormtail.
Those thoughts suddenly plunged him into an inexplicable melancholy. He had a vision of Sirius sentenced to life in Azkaban -- and then, as powerfully as if he had been slapped in the face, another image appeared in scattered pixels before his eyes: Sirius Black speaking to Lord Voldemort. "Nothing can go wrong. I am their Secret-Keeper," Sirius hissed, not with the familiar rage of his labile temper but with a cold evil that Remus had never imagined.
"Good," replied the Dark Lord. "But if something happens to me, you will be the first to pay."
They laughed together, and Remus felt a cold so intense he feared the dank cave had penetrated his bones and he would die here. Little that it mattered, since everything and everyone he had cared about had suffered so much more…
A rattle brought him to his senses somewhat, and he murmured "Lumen" in a shaking breath to his wand. The light increased just enough to outline a hooded figure in the passageway ahead.
Dementors. He'd crawled into a cave that was populated by wild Dementors. At the top of his voice, he bellowed, "EXPECTO PATRONUM," and not waiting for the jet of silver to chase them down, he turned around as quickly as possible in the narrow passage and starting crawling his way out.
These were no Azkaban guards. They seemed to enjoy the Patronus the way a cat does a mouse -- they toyed with it for a minute and then shredded it to wisps.
Remus felt the cold increasing, but he couldn't crawl any faster. Three more times he had to roll over on his back in the cave, point his wand at his pursuers, and conjure the protective Patronus. Each time it grew weaker, and each time the Dementors seemed to gain more pleasure from mutilating it.
At last the inky blackness gave way to mere darkness. The light from Remus' wand, though dimmed by the presence of the Dementors, showed him the floor of the cave. He was so distraught that he crawled right over the skeleton, giving a cry of disgust, then heaved himself out the hole to lie panting in the aspens.
Don't explore caves in Romania, he told himself wryly after his heart started to beat more normally. Especially in human form.
Which brought him back to his dilemma.
Were werewolves immune to Dementors? He'd never seen a study of it, but he could easily imagine that they would be. Forget about constructing a magical ward here, then -- Dementors would shred them as easily as they did a Patronus. Escaping from Azkaban required only sanity: the prisoners' minds kept them there, in theory they could stroll right past their blind guards and out to the sea.
In theory, of course.
Remus flipped over onto his stomach in the wildflowers, enjoying their spring scent after the guano and rot of the cave. Again, he thought of Wormtail -- the little rat could easily scamper into a tight passage, construct some physical barrier that would keep the wolves out of the village…
Then he had an idea. A stupid, possibly dangerous, and utterly experimental idea. One that would require him to visit Bucharest before first quarter.
He had two weeks.
________________
Entirely unsure if the stuff should be taken before or after meals, Remus went to the shelf right after dinner and took down the large green bottle he'd brought back from Bucharest. As he uncapped it, a stream of smoke emerged that made Liszka and Bela both pinch their noses. They were the only ones in Grigore's cottage right now, enjoying a cozy evening meal with the door open to let in the fragrant breeze that signaled the start of the alpine summer.
"Daughter of Hyperion, what is that brew?" Liszka exclaimed, pushing away her unfinished dessert.
It smelled vile to Remus, too. He couldn't imagine actually drinking it, though the proprietor had assured him it had a very mild taste.
Maybe the proprietor hadn't had the same need for it, however.
He certainly wasn't going to put his lips on that bottle, so he found a glass and measured roughly one-seventh of the stuff out where he could see it. It continued to smoke. "Liszka, I'm… er… trying a bit of an experiment, so maybe if you could lead the Fives this month…?"
"Experiment? Is it dangerous?" she wanted to know.
He had to remind himself that she wasn't saying this because she wanted to stop him, but because she was ready to offer to fight. "No, no," he assured hastily. "Not in the slightest. Bela, do you remember when we talked about the Wolfsbane Potion?"
The boy had appropriated his mother's discarded apple cake and was jamming it into his mouth. "Uh, sure," he said, between chews. "But you said it was for if I wanted to live in the city. You're not going into the city, right?"
"Or to be around people?" Liszka worried.
"No, no… I just have a little chore to do, and I can't do it as a person. It requires me to stay sane." Remus pinched his nose and took a gulp -- it tasted as repugnant as it smelled. A strange feeling spread over him, like a powerful painkiller, and he had to look at his feet to make sure they were still there.
If the Potion worked as advertised, he'd be able to get into the cave, past the Dementors, and remember why he was there. But this wasn't his only motive for trying this poorly tested remedy that the journals had been debating about for over year now. The thought of someday returning to civilization was always in his mind, as well as the hope that Bela would tire of this rough life in the mountains and decide to attend a wizarding school somewhere outside Romania, or even a Muggle university.
The main reason the invention wasn't hailed as a breakthrough was that it was temporary, requiring werewolves to cooperate for a full week every month. While this caused acrimonious debate among authors of scholarly articles, most of whom seemed to think the monsters couldn't be trusted to remember their own names, it was precisely why Remus was willing to try it. From what he had read, the biggest risk was that it wouldn't work at all -- some ten percent of werewolves and a higher fraction of other werecreatures were resistant to it. Since he had no intention of encountering humans next week, it was the perfect opportunity to find out.
Liszka watched him sip the reeking concoction with hints of a sneer. "Sane?" she guffawed. "You mean, a human's mind in a wolf's body? What kind of sheeprot is that?"
Bela looked at his mother with sympathy. "I tried to tell him that. I tried to say, why have paws and teeth if you don't know how to use them. But -- " They both rolled their eyes in agreement that Lupeni Alpha had crossed the line from eccentric to barking mad.
"Well, Bela." Remus took another swallow, and pinched himself to make sure he wasn't turning into a ghost. "You never know, you might want to try it yourself someday. I'll tell how it goes." He drained the glass and waved his wand at it to dispel any traces; he didn't want the others accidentally touching the stuff. Then he went back to the table to sit down, so unsteadily that Liszka pushed out a chair to help catch him.
"Does it hurt?" the boy asked.
"Er, no… Quite the contrary." Remus shook his head to clear it, his voice coming out as numb as his body. "You'll do fine with the Fives, Liszka; I think they obey you more than me already."
"Just tell me if you need our help," she said.
All that week, as he took the Potion, Remus felt slightly detached. Nothing hurt; he stepped on a vampire stake and cut his foot wide open once while hardly even noticing. He also kept his cool without effort as Alexandru flew into one of his increasingly violent rages against Cuza. There were some things Madam Pomfrey had done to him that made him feel a little bit like this -- but they also usually made him sleep. The Potion didn't affect his alertness much, in fact it gave him insomnia, maybe because the pervasive dullness didn't allow for real dreams.
He didn't go to Grigore's cottage on the night of the seventh dose, since he worried that Liszka would try to follow him in case he got into trouble (she never quite trusted his skills as a wolf). Alexandru let him out the gates as on his very first night, but this time, the air was warm and he enjoyed sitting naked in the grass watching the sun go down.
The pain of transforming was something they were all used to. It even helped to unite them, to get them ready for a night of hunting, like some Muggle warrior initiation rite. Remus was somehow disappointed, then, when he felt nothing but a vague stretching sensation and raised his hand to his face only to discover that it was a paw.
No, it wasn't right at all. Walking on all fours felt funny -- no wonder Padfoot was always a bit slow on the uptake, he was thinking about every move. Remus kept wanting to grab things with his fingers, forgetting that his teeth were better for the purpose, and his mind was cluttered with a stream of interfering thoughts --What was that noise? What was that smell? What should he do next? --precious moments wasted as he pondered rather than acting.
He set out at a lope through the woods to the caves. Before going to Bucharest, he'd found the upper entrance, high in the hills where he would never have thought to set a ward. All he had to do was go in, find a narrow passage with enough available rocks, and cause a cave-in so that the Sixes couldn't pass through. The thought of Dementors didn't even occur to him, which almost certainly meant that he was immune. Memories of Padfoot also brought nothing but simple joy, as he wished his doggy pal was here to compare experiences.
Reaching the entrance to the cave, he sniffed once and plunged through the underbrush. There had been humans here very recently, and he hesitated, waiting for a twinge from the overwhelming killer instinct that had been part of him for twenty-five years.
He didn't so much as growl.
Not even when he broke through into the cave's main chamber and found a complex array of Muggle apparatus: some hanging from the ceiling, some scattered on the floor, huge blocks of metal (iron; it smelled of blood) stacked along one wall. Green videoscreens blipped and bleeped in patterns of smooth or square waves.
There was no one here now, though, and he stepped nimbly through the main cave and into the narrower passage that led down -- presumably into the village of Albimare. Dementors swirled around him, but he felt no emotions whatsoever. It was so dark that even the wolf couldn't see, but his fur and whiskers sensed the size of the passages and where the stone gave way to soft earth.
Some distance from the village, he began to dig at the roof of the cave. It was hard work, and he was there for many hours, but he grew neither tired nor bored. At last, the faintest hint of a breeze alerted him to a breach in the tunnel's structure, and he began to back away.
The cave-in was larger than he intended, stretching ten or twenty feet, and he found himself pelted by clots of earth and falling rocks.
As the cave fell around him, he scrambled up the narrow passageways, bursting into the large chamber filled with incomprehensible equipment, face to face with a very surprised Muggle. Looking angry or scared (reading human emotions was out of the wolf's range of abilities), the man turned and ran. The wolf sniffed the equipment briefly, confirming what he suspected on his first visit to the chamber, and then followed the Muggle's trail. Dawn would be breaking soon; his body told him in strange ways because of the potion, but he knew he didn't have much time left. He preferred to exit the cave as a wolf rather than as a naked human. Fewer explanations were required.
He easily followed the scent of the Muggle and soon stood at a large entrance to the caves. He heard shouting in the distance, presumably the man was alerting others. He slunk through the trees, keeping himself well hidden, until he saw a camp composed of a large pavilion and several small tents. The shouting man was rousing others from the small tents. Three others emerged, two men and a woman.
The man yelled, in English, that he had seen another wolf. That made it seem likely that the Sixes had been using the caves to get to Albimare. Well, he was fairly certain that the way would be barred from now on. As the whole group went along the path, presumably to look for the elusive wolf, Remus thought he'd better be going. He stood up, hitting his head on a tree branch and getting his hair thoroughly tangled in the leaves. The transformation had overtaken him without his knowing.
Now he felt dizzy and the numbness had returned, although not to the degree of the previous week. After freeing as much of his hair as he could from the twigs and leaves (and taking some of the tree with him), he set off for home. It promised to be a long, cold walk, and he was even more exhausted than usual. At least it was almost summer and he could barely feel his feet.
He had a lot to think about. Not just wolves occupied his mind, however. He wondered about the English-speaking Muggles and about the faint but unmistakable trace of a vampire that he'd detected in the main cave.
Dementors and vampires together in the same cave. He wasn't sure they could co-exist. Perhaps that was why they hadn't made a thorough investigation of the Petrosna caves before. The grim task seemed to be called for now, although he wasn't sure how to carry it out.
______________________
Remus left his broomstick hidden in some brush but took his wand, hiding it in the cloth sack he brought along with him. He had tried to dress like a Muggle, putting on an ancient pair of jeans which were frayed with gaping holes in the knees. He seemed to remember that sometimes Muggles went out of their way to look like this, although it had been so long since he had any contact with Muggle society that he wasn't sure anymore.
It was a full week after the full moon before Remus felt up for the journey south to investigate the caves and the mysterious Muggles. In Rosu he learned that the four Muggles at the camp were students from a university in Italy. They were going to spend the summer there, although none of the townspeople he questioned, wizard or Muggle, could say what they were doing. They needed lots of fuel, according to the man who drove supplies up to them every week, and they used it to make electricity. Remus had some vague recollection of a Muggle machine which turned fuel into electricity. He supposed they needed it for all those machines in the cave.
Of course, the students might not survive the summer.
Grim thoughts occupied his mind as he made his way along the dirt track leading to the camp. An argument was taking place as he came in sight of it, conducted in bad Italian. That is, two very angry people, neither of whom spoke Italian well, were yelling at each other.
One of the combatants was the same Muggle that the wolf had startled in the cave, a stocky man in his early twenties who looked Italian, but didn't speak the language well. Neither did Remus; he merely recognized the man's stumbling and hesitation over the words. The other man appeared to be a local, probably from Rosu, who had come up in a battered black car. The only other vehicle in the camp was a newer, boxy car with no top and a squarish frame that had been there the previous time.
Remus went unnoticed for a few moments and from comments that the Romanian made when he lapsed back into his native tongue in frustration, he concluded that the man was trying to shake down the students for money with a story about needing a license for something or other. Smiling to himself, he moved behind the black car and surreptitiously took out his wand.
"Excuse me," he said in Romanian, as he stepped around the front of the car and into the fray, "is that your car? I think it's on fire."
Furious words ceased as both men turned to look first at Remus and then at the car. White smoke with a hint of green (he was proud of that little touch) came pouring out of the back of the car. With a startled cry, the owner of the car yanked open the door and began attempting to put out the "fire."
The smoke quickly vanished, leaving the man surprised and angry. Before he could resume the argument, Remus said to him quietly but forcefully, "I think that you should leave these people alone, otherwise something else might happen to your car." He wasn't really very good at threatening Muggles, but he thought this was how it was generally done.
"You going to curse my car or something?" accused the man. Even non-wizards understood about hexes and curses in the mountains of Transylvania.
"Something like that," replied Remus mildly.
The man glared back, but got into the car without saying another word. With great shudder and a cloud of blue smoke, which came from underneath the car this time, it lurched out of camp and down the track. The remaining student regarded the new visitor for a moment. Incredibly, Remus noticed that another student -- this one an Oriental -- had been sitting in the large pavilion the entire time. His attention seemed to be glued to a computer of some sort, but he would occasionally moving his hands furiously. Otherwise, he paid no attention to anything else.
"Jeez, first a sleazeball and now a damned hippie," muttered the Italian-looking man in English.
Do I look like a hippie? Remus mused. He remembered seeing clusters of people his age at King's Cross when he was a student; they often had long hair and frayed blue jeans. Looking back, he saw that they had a costume, much the same way that student wizards did, although he never dreamed that he'd be adopting their dress one day. However, his life hadn't turned out as expected in most other ways, either.
"I am, er, a botanist, actually," Remus said in English, feeling the words emerge slowly like bears waking from hibernation.
"Oh, you speak English." The other man looked startled and perhaps slightly embarrassed. "Hey, thanks for chasing that guy away. I couldn't figure out what he wanted and Italian was the only language we had in common...Oh, my name's Mike Ferraro, by the way." He stuck out his hand brusquely in a way that would have proclaimed that he was an American, even without the distinctive accent.
"Lupeni," Remus replied, shaking Mike's hand. "That fellow wanted you to give him money, although I don't think he had any good reason for it."
"Too bad Lamia wasn't around," Mike said brightly, "She's Italian -- the only Italian in the bunch -- but she speaks Romanian, and about ten other languages. She would have chased him away." He stopped and looked over Remus' shoulder. "There she is -- Hey, Lamia! We've got company!"
Mike waved and Remus turned to see a woman walking unhurriedly toward them. She was thin with long, dark hair pulled back behind her head. In spite of the overcast morning, she wore a large floppy straw hat and dark sunglasses, looking more like she had just stepped from some Mediterranean beach instead of an alpine forest in Transylvania. Her clothes, however, proclaimed her to be a student: the ubiquitous blue jeans and a shapeless black tee-shirt.
"I speak nine languages, actually, and my hearing is very good," she said as she approached the two. Her full mouth curved into a mischievous smile. She spoke English with a lyrical accent as beautiful as Mike's was flat and uninteresting. "I understand we have a hippie visiting us, or perhaps a botanist?"
"This is Lubin -- I didn't quite catch your name," Mike blustered with the proud air of someone who can't be bothered with such trivial details.
"Lupeni," finished Remus and extended his hand to the woman.
"Lamia Borgheza," she replied taking his hand. Hers was cold, but she smiled up at him warmly. He found it impossible to guess what she might be thinking behind those dark glasses, but was intrigued. The handshake took long enough for Mike to start making small coughing noises. Remus dropped her hand, amused, and wondered about the relationship between the two.
"So, what brings you to our little side of the mountain?" Mike inquired roughly, trying to win back the center of the stage. "You collecting plants? You said you were a botanist, right?" He clearly did not believe Remus, who agreed that his cover story was a bit farfetched.
"I'm collecting some rare specimens of Dianthus callizonus that grow close to cave entrances." Remus wasn't quite sure that it grew anywhere near caves, but it was the best he could do; it was one of the ingredients they had used to cure Professor Herman's fever after his arrival nearly eight years before.
"Ah," Lamia said in round, knowledgeable tones, "perhaps you mean Dianthus spiculifolius? Callizonus, with the beautiful pink flowers, only grows in Piatra Craiului -- but I have seen a few spiculifolius growing around here."
"Yes, of course," Remus replied quickly. It would be just his luck that these students would turn out to be botanists. He wondered how he was going to turn the conversation around to wolves -- why hadn't he said he was a zoologist? -- when Mike, eager to claim the conversation back, did it for him.
"Aw, Lamia, you're not an expert on flowers, too? You're going to make Mr. Lubenny think we're here to study nature or something. We're just humble physicists, y'know." Mike eyed his fellow student slyly and addressed Remus, "You don't know anything about wolves, do you? We seem to have lots of those." Lamia shuddered slightly and he guessed that this was the desired effect of Mike's question.
"You have seen wolves?" Remus inquired levelly. "There aren't too many left up here, from what people tell me. There are quite a few dogs, though."
"Seen 'em!" Mike snorted. "I was attacked by them, right Lamia? And they weren't dogs!"
An attack would almost certainly mean a werewolf. This month or last month? He didn't see any of the Sixes last week when he visited the cave, but he had spent much of the night inside.
"How long ago?"
"Last month, middle of May. Right after we got here. I went chasing after Miss Nature here, and as we were coming through the woods back to camp, two of them jumped out of the cave at me." Lamia seemed calm during this recital, but Remus would have liked to have seen her eyes. Her body seemed to grow more tense and still with each syllable of Mike's story, even though her face was impassive. "Lamia scared them off -- yelled something in Romanian. Not before one of 'em scratched me, though."
"Oh?" Remus asked cautiously. The timing was about right for the full moon before the most recent one. "Just a scratch? No bite?" Lamia looked up at him with a sudden, startled motion and then turned away quickly. "Sometimes those scratches can turn nasty. I have ... had them myself. Did it heal?"
"Stupid thing keeps hurting," Mike said as he shoved up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal three long scratches on his forearm. The traces were black, an unnatural shade of black, with red puckery marks around the edges. Werewolf scratches were not deadly, but they could fester if left untreated. Remus put out his hand, wondering if this was Vlad's work, and lightly touched the scab, causing Mike to wince.
"I know of an...herbal remedy," he said slowly, withdrawing his hand, "that will help that heal. Something I've picked up since I've been here. If you like, I could make some and bring it back for you?"
The wound should heal with a simple Canine Poultice Potion, provided a bit of wolfsbane was mixed in. Perhaps he could get Mihail to help out. That would give him an excuse to come back and learn more about the wolves and the caves.
"Well," drawled Mike, "I don't know. It'll probably heal on its own."
Surprisingly, Lamia spoke up, saying, "Go on, Mike. I'm sure our botanist can mix the right things together. He probably won't make it any worse than it already is."
"Oh, what the hell," Mike grinned with a nod.
_______________________
"So, cleaning up after your friends again?"
It must have been Remus' imagination that Mihail had grown used to him over the years. Not only was he as chillingly rude as ever, but when asked for wolfsbane he'd gone into his bedroom -- probably draped the stuff around him as he slept.
Remus tried to be brave as the servant returned with a flowery sprig, but it went beyond ordinary disgust: the plant just made him back off. It was all he could do not to flee from the room.
Mihail watched with malicious delight as he completed the poultice. "Works well, doesn't it?" he wondered rhetorically. "Like vampires and garlic."
"Something like that," Remus said cheerfully, thinking he should be grateful that these tricks really worked. Garlic had saved him and Alexandru more than once, for it held Romanian vampires at bay indefinitely -- unlike sunlight, which only made them feeble and to which some of the old-timers seemed entirely oblivious. Alexandru had explained that these rules were not universal; as close by as Slovenia, vampires only came out at night. In Russia, allegedly, they emerged at noon. "And luckily, wolfsbane isn't a critical ingredient in the local cuisine," he added.
Mihail turned his liquid dark eyes on Remus, his face full of fear and rage. "Do you think the castle grounds were planted with garlic to season legs of lamb?" he inquired with sarcasm born of helpless terror.
Remus shivered as he realized Mihail's hostility was not directed at him personally, but that he was just as afraid of whatever Alexandru sought as the old wizard himself… if not more afraid. The days of uncertainty, of Alexandru's fraying temper and occasionally irrational demands, had taken their toll.
He thought with amusement of offering Mihail a swig of the Wolfsbane Potion. "No...I supposed it was to keep the vampires from moving back in to the castle," he began, thinking -- but he was cut off by Mihail's harsh cackle.
"Ah, no, they did not move in to the castle before, Mr. Lupin," laughed the old man. "Rotten from within, it was."
Remus thought of the missing portraits in the gallery, and he began to understand. "So then -- "
But Mihail was returning to his duty, and the potion reminded him of who his partner in this conversation was. He wasn't quite ready to discuss his fear of one Dark creature with another.
"Here you go," he said, his expression closing as he handed Remus a stoppered flask. "Why you need it for a mere scratch, I do not know, but -- " He leered. Clearly he thought Remus was lying about a bite.
"It was a Muggle," Remus explained. "They're doing some kind of experiment in the Petrosna caves."
Mihail snatched the flask with an intake of breath, then reconsidered and handed it back. "Muggles don't survive werewolf bites, you know," he said darkly.
"Yes, I know."
"I thought you would," muttered the old man, watching Remus stroll insouciantly from the room with the flask tucked into his pocket.
__________________________
When Remus returned to the Petrosna caves the next day, he found yet another student in the pavilion area. This consisted of a large tent with its sides rolled up and mesh netting hanging all around; the interior contained several tables with computers and piles of books and papers. As on his previous visit, the student -- an Indian by his looks -- stared fixedly at a computer screen, watching bright squiggly lines dance.
"Er, excuse me," Remus began as he stood near the student, just outside the netting.
"What is it?" the other began sharply, without taking his eyes from the squiggles. He had a very precise British accent and reminded Remus of Ashok Patil, who had been at school with him. The student finally looked up, startled to see a stranger.
"Oh. Sorry," he said, still lost in whatever he had been working on. "You're that fellow that Mike told us about, eh?"
"Yes. I'm looking for Mike, in fact. I brought something for him. Is he here?"
"He's on shift," replied the student, as if that explained everything. Responding to Remus' puzzled expression, he jumped off his stool and pushed aside the mesh curtain. "Sorry. He's up at the caves taking data. I'm Vijay, by the way."
Vijay offered his hand and Remus shook it, musing that he had gotten out of practice shaking hands. Sniffing noses was more his style, but he didn't think these students would understand or appreciate it.
"I'll just go and get him, shall I?" Without waiting for a reply, the student disappeared up the path, leaving Remus to stare at the bright wiggles on the computer screen. He wondered if this was similar to Arithmancy or Runes, not particularly good subjects of his. He stepped into the pavilion and surveyed some of the piles lying about, thinking that he could at least understand books. That was wrong, of course, since most of the books turned out to have incomprehensible titles filled with words that Remus didn't even know existed. Muggle Studies had not been a particular strength of his either.
One corner of the tent was piled with books of another sort, books about history and literature in a surprising number of languages. Most he didn't know, but Greek and Latin he had studied at home as a boy, after it became clear that the primary school did not want him any more.
He picked up a copy of The Iliad, turning to the beginning to see if he could still read or understand any of the Greek. Words and phrases came flooding back to him, as he stumbled out loud through the opening lines:
"Rage -- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Acheans countless losses,
hurtling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls..."
He broke off, thinking sharply of Sirius (whom he hadn't thought about in years, had successfully forgotten until his encounter with the Dementors in the cave), not wanting to hear more about the doom of one of the greatest of tragic heroes.
"Well, the hippie knows Homer," said a dry voice from behind him. He turned to find Lamia, her face shaded by the enormous hat, but without her dark glasses today; a pair of intense violet eyes bored into him, as if he were an odd specimen in a zoo. There was something about her eyes, something at once familiar and alien.
"It's been a long time," he said, hastily putting the book down. "I wasn't sure if I could still..."
"I don't care for The Iliad, myself," she said slyly, as she entered the pavilion and appraised Remus carefully. "Not enough interesting female characters: pleading Thetis and dreary, tortured Helen are about it."
"Ah," he smiled at her, "perhaps you prefer The Odyssey and the clever wife, Penelope?"
She shook her head, but smiled back at him.
"Circe, enchantress of men, then," he said, feeling oddly buoyant as his brain worked in ways long forgotten, at playing with ideas the way a clown juggles balls, "or the nymph Calypso, who wants to make Odysseus immortal so he will stay with her forever?"
She approached and he smelled her perfume, musky, sweet and unsettling, and as familiar as her eyes in some odd way. "Calypso, I fancy," she said softly, perching on a stool and looking up at him with a new-found interest. "She lives on a lovely island, far out to sea."
"Isolation is what you crave?" Remus asked, surprised at himself for wanting to continue the conversation. She laughed in response with a trace of bitterness.
"I'm here, aren't I? But I suppose that you must like isolation as well." She didn't give him time to reply, but stood abruptly, saying, "Mike and Vijay got into an argument -- they usually do. I'll take you up to the caves."
He followed her along a path that wound through the trees for about five hundred yards. A wall of granite loomed suddenly, proclaiming their arrival at the flank of the mountain. Remus could see thick black cables on the ground, snaking into the entrance to the cave. An unnatural glow issued from the dark opening, indicating that this wasn't the lair of a dragon or a chimera or any other creature in Remus' experience.
An argument was indeed in progress, making Remus think of some of the arguments he had with Vlad. Although he understood few of the words, he sensed that the two students had some basic disagreement about the arcana of Muggle science which could never be resolved.
"The whole idea of proton decay is based on the simplest possible Unified Field Theory, SU(3) cross SU(3) cross U(1). There's no reason nature has to make everything the simplest way." That was Mike, playing the devil's advocate in what sounded like his usual manner.
"But would it be any surprise that the vector boson mediating baryon number non-conservation would have finite mass?" Vijay replied in a tone of calm reason. "We have already seen the unification of the electrical and weak forces; why not the strong force?"
Hundreds of steel boxes, three feet across and taller than a tall man, were stacked two-deep throughout the cave. Metal tubes of every description were scattered around the stack in chaotic disarray; someone had made a half-hearted attempt to pile them up, and there were two people right now engaged in layering them around the stack. Other metal boxes were arranged so that the conical holes in their centers faced towards the ceiling. Bits and pieces of hardware dangled from every surface, most of it wrapped in tape and plastic so that Remus could not even begin to guess what any of it might be. Dozens of computer screens scrolled constant streams of numbers, and occasionally the streams would stop, causing Mike or Vijay to hammer at the keyboards and curse.
"Hey, you two," Lamia said with practiced tones, "you're not going to construct a Grand Unified Theory just yet." Both men stopped reluctantly. Mike noticed Remus and broke into a broad smile.
"Hey, I didn't think you'd be back," he said, the argument having been forgotten. "Did you really bring some Transylvanian potion?"
Remus smiled. That was exactly what he had brought, although its brewing would be as unfamiliar to the students as their baryons and unified theories were to him.
"Let's see your arm," he said, stepping toward Mike. He forgot his initial confusion at all the unfamiliar equipment and language. Treating wounds was something he could grasp; the Fives got themselves into plenty of scrapes, both in human and in wolf form, although Remus wasn't familiar with the healing powers of Muggles. Mike rolled up his sleeve to reveal the scratched landscape on his arm. Remus got the flask from the canvas bag on his shoulder along with some bandages.
"Can you, er, give me a hand?" he asked, turning to Lamia. He realized all of a sudden that the Poultice Potion, containing wolfsbane as it did, was not something he cared to touch. He handed her the flask as he took Mike's outstretched arm. "Unstopper it, and pour a bit on," he directed her.
The potion smoked slightly as the flask was opened, and even more as Lamia dribbled it along the scars on Mike's arm. He winced slightly, trying to appear as brave as possible, saying, "Whoa. What is this stuff?"
"Mmmm. Herbs mostly," Remus replied as he inspected the wound. The redness was starting to decrease slightly. Mihail had never failed him on a potion, perhaps making it worth the cold stares and harsh words he usually encountered from the old servant.
"Apply it twice a day for five days," he said brusquely as he wrapped a bandage around the wounded arm. "I'll come back and check on it next week. It should be healed by then."
"Think I'll have a scar?" Mike grinned at him. "Souvenir of Transylvania? Hey, at least I didn't turn into a werewolf."
Both Lamia and Remus winced at his words. Remus wondered once again at her seeming familiarity -- sensitivity, at least -- to the subject. He put the remainder of the bandages back in his bag and wished to be gone from the cave. He detected no vampires today, although his human senses were far inferior to those of the wolf. Perhaps it was the lurking presence of wild Dementors, somewhere in the labyrinth of caves, which made him uncomfortable.
"We should let Mike get back to work," Lamia said suddenly. "I'll walk you back to the camp. I'm not due on shift until after dark."
As they left the caves, Mike and Vijay resumed their argument. Perhaps this was as much a part of what they did as all the dancing squiggles. Remus felt sure he would never understand it.
As if reading his mind, Lamia said, "It sounds like gibberish, I know, but careers have been made on less. But, of course, being a botanist, you know all about jargon."
"Well, yes," Remus responded cautiously, "In my field we have a lot of specialized terms. Did you study botany? You seem to be quite familiar."
She strolled next to him, looking down at the path. The hat hid her face and she had put her dark glasses on again. After a minute she replied, "A bit. I've studied a great many things...whatever takes my fancy."
"And that," Remus gestured back at the caves, "is the current fancy?"
"I don't know," she said quietly. Then, she looked up at him and said with more feeling, "More than a fancy -- physics is... beautiful, really. The problems are so hard -- a lifetime could be spent just in preparing to understand -- and your mind has to stretch, to reach out to grasp them -- " She broke off, embarrassed, and looked at her feet once again. "I'm sorry. I don't expect I can explain what it's like for me."
Remus thought about learning a complicated enchantment like the moonwards, about how he had to seek out just the right balance in his mind and in the external world, about how it felt when the spell achieved a wholeness.
"Your mind creates something from nothing," he mused as he walked. "No, that's not right. You take from the chaos around you and build something that didn't exist before. It is beautiful."
She stopped walking and Remus, lost in thought, didn't notice for a moment. He turned back to see her staring at him with an expression rendered unreadable by the dark glasses.
"Yes," she said softly, "Perhaps you do understand."
___________________________
Lamia walked quickly up the path, eager to be gone from the lights and the noise of the camp. Not that it was all that noisy tonight, especially with Mike up in the caves. He could carry on enough conversation for all four of them if need be.
She held a flashlight in one hand, although she didn't need it. She was perfectly familiar with the path now, even in the dark of early evening. As she walked, she thought about Lupeni, the alleged botanist who had been there earlier. He was no more a botanist than she, probably less of one since she had almost taken a degree in botany at one point. She had her suspicions about what he really was, leading her to wonder once again about the wisdom of coming here.
Why had she come? Working for Professor Gamberi at the University of Bologna was definitely an opportunity she could not pass up. All she had to do was to collect enough data this summer and she could spend the next five years analyzing it back at the university; that would be enough to earn her a degree. Four months in Transylvania wouldn't be so bad, or so she thought initially.
But the wolves. She had forgotten about the wolves. And there were other things, too.
"Mike?" she called as she entered the cave, bathed in the green light of the oscilloscopes. He wasn't hunched over the console as usual. Perhaps he was further back tending to a piece of equipment.
Lamia wove her way through the tall racks of instruments, skillfully stepping over cables. He wasn't behind any of the racks either. It wasn't like him to leave an experiment in progress. She turned on the flashlight as she emerged back into the center of the chamber, playing the light into the darker corners.
There. On the cave floor behind a packing crate, the light picked up something white. Lamia switched off the light and moved cautiously to investigate. As she came near, she saw the body of a man stretched out, the head and shoulders bathed in darkness. Those were Mike's shoes, however. She knelt down, shaking him roughly.
"Mike? Are you all right?" But, of course, Mike wasn't going to answer any time soon. That much was obvious from the first touch. More than that, she knew what had happened, something which frightened her even more than werewolves. She stood, conscious that someone or something had come up behind her.
Why did I come back?
Taking a deep breath, she turned, coming face to face with a pale man whose dark eyes leered at her hungrily. Recognition flooded his face, mirroring her own.
"Emil," she said crisply to the vampire, not pleased at all to see him, "It has been a long, long time."