Absit Omen RPG

The werewolf hunter stilled under his boss's gaze, his casual (if a bit nosy) demeanor disappearing behind a guarded expression that was much harder to read. He sat motionless for a moment, dark eyes locked on hers, the line of his jaw tight despite the fact that nothing in the room had changed.

"Naw," he said tersely after a beat, giving a tight shake of his head. "I've never been."

Bruce had always been the adventurous one, taking time off in between their monthly patrols to climb the Himalayas or go diving at the Great Barrier Reef or whatever wild adventure she and her warrior wife had decided to chase after next. Kurby notoriously reserved his adrenaline junkie tendencies for the full moon; aside from one adventure abroad that he'd taken right after the war had ended, he'd never traveled outside of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Part of him just wanted to drop the conversation, to tell her he'd be back later once she signed the papers, but Bruce had picked up the stack that he'd come to needle her about. There wasn't an easy way to extricate himself, at least not without upsetting his onetime mentor by blowing off her werewolf status all over again.

He hadn't been holding his breath on purpose, but Kurby let a slow breath out now, trying to relax some of the tension in his shoulders.

"Y'know," he ventured, much more tentatively than usual, "I reckon Spectre's probably big on international cooperation." He met Bruce's gaze again, visibly uncertain if he was just sticking his foot in his mouth all over again. "I know we'd all be crushed if we had to delay Pickler's workshop from this Friday, but maybe he could loan her to the Spanish Ministry for a month or five to help 'em get a lycanthropy sensitivity training series started."

As his friend started talking, Kurby's expression was obviously completely disinterested. Whatever Duncan had dragged him here for -- whatever emergency business deal involving winged horses necessitated the younger wizard's immediate presence, right now, today, following on the heel of an exhausting full moon -- could only be inconsequential. He'd go along with it, and maybe he'd even help a little, but nothing was going to stop him from dragging his heels and griping loudly the entire time.

He'd been prepared to blow off Duncan's speech with another eye roll, but then the other wizard continued to speak.

“I’ve been lying to almost everyone for roughly the past thirteen years..."

The werewolf hunter went suddenly and utterly still.

A second job. He stared straight at Duncan, eyebrows raised high even as his face stayed expressionless. Back before the Ministry had fallen, the Scottish wizard had worked for Level Four as a beast handler, though one with a particular focus. He'd helped to re-home magical creatures that had been abused or neglected by their wix owners. Kurby had only occasionally crossed paths with him then -- the Werewolf Capture Unit had been part of the Beast Wing, but under Theobald Mainwaring's leadership, they'd kept mostly to themselves -- but it had been clear how passionate the other man had been for his work. That had been part of what had perplexed him about why Duncan insisted on keeping to a quiet life after the war.

But apparently, life hadn't stayed all that quiet after all.

The other wizard had finished his confession. Kurby stayed silent for several beats longer, dark eyes locked on the other man.

"What the hell are you draggin' me into?" he asked tersely at last.

And there it was: the reason why he should never be expected to have to deal with teenaged werewolves.

Kurby shifted awkwardly, his movements very clearly uncomfortable as he attempted to look anywhere in the room but at the upset teenager. At least Greer Grant had been fairly stoic when her family had finally been forced to confront the consequences of her condition. Lucinda Temple had always clearly been much wilder in temperament. Now, as her voice wavered and tears obviously threatened to start falling, it was also clear that she was dealing with much more wild emotions as well.

If it had been anyone but Zelda, he would have just turned on his heel and left. This sort of mess was better left to Capture Unit members like Bruce Ballentyne or Tessa Fenneken, both of whom were far more patient than he was and either of whom he would have been very happy to summon with an eager Patronus. But the fact that it was Zelda meant that his boots stayed firmly planted on the floor.

At least Zelda had two teenaged sons of her own, didn't she? Even if they were boys, she must have dealt with crying children before. Kurby shot the older witch a distressed look, though she probably didn't need the glance to tell her that she was going to be on her own when it came to soothing the whimpering werewolf pup.

There was something about the other wizard's cocksure smile that made Kurby immediately wish he could just punch him. For all that he was a bit of a fop, Spectre reminded him all too well of the things he hated most about other pureblooded wizards: the self-assured ambition, the offhanded disregard for the rules, the fact that he'd conveniently 'been abroad' during the war and that he saw no problem in casually associating with dark wixes like Ira Almasy.

As tempting as it was to tell the Department Head just what he could do with his extra wand, Spectre was also hard to get a read on. Kurby preferred to know the exact length of someone's wick; he'd spent years egregiously pushing the buttons of everyone around him and consequently, he was usually a pretty good judge of what it might take to set a particular individual off. (It hadn't, for instance, taken him very long to get a sense of Spectre's extremely irritating now-husband.) But for all of Spectre's usual foppish charm, Bruce was right that neither of them knew exactly what he might do when pushed. The same ambition that had seen the Scottish wizard rise in Level Four's ranks so quickly could easily hint at something darker.

That meant avoiding outright war, but it didn't mean that he had to be nice.

"Why, were you lookin' for somewhere to put it?" Kurby inquired politely, his attention mostly focused on his team further down the corridor.

They were coming up on the bend in the hallway now. Kurby watched them for a moment, his mouth pressed tightly shut. They'd have to navigate the sharp corner carefully to keep the wobbling werewolf suspended in the air without knocking it on the walls or dropping it -- which would at best earn them all an earful from the Registry team in the morning and at worst cause a horrific nightmare if the thumping roused the werewolf from its slumber.

"You know, Spectre," he remarked steadily, not bothering to glance in the other wizard's direction, "sometimes it's better to let a team struggle through things on their own. If they don't get a chance to puzzle through things when the stakes are low, they'll go to pieces when everything falls apart while they're out on patrol."

The werewolf hunter flicked his gaze briefly toward the ceiling, a show of annoyance intended to ward off too many uncomfortable questions. But there wasn't an easy way out of this one: either he admitted to having an inauspiciously-timed dream the night before, or he played it down as being so common-place that it would raise other lines of inquiry.

"There...wasn't a lake," he admitted uneasily. "We were back in that crypt under the church in Godric's Hollow. The one with the light.[1]"

He hadn't mentioned that to Nemo again either, not since it had happened over eight months ago. They'd never really talked about it afterwards: not about the great and terrible light that had filled up the underground cavern, nor the sarcophagus that had opened up at the song from Nemo's flute, nor the ladder inside it reaching down into the darkness. His head had felt fuzzy for days afterwards, up until the portentous Wolf Moon had shattered any attention he might have paid to the haunted shop.

Kurby shrugged, giving Nemo an awkward sideways look as he took another sip of the Firewhiskey. He'd already given up enough that it felt wrong not to confess the rest of it.

"There was a song," he said simply. "You were in front of me. When the light hit you, it turned you all golden, and you just --"

There wasn't a helpful way to end that sentence, so he just gave a flutter of his left hand, leaving the rest up to imagination.

1.	January 1, 2012 - Hollows and Staves, Ghosts and Graves

It wasn't so much that no one was allowed to worry about him as it was that worrying about him was a complete and utter waste of time. Unfortunately, arguing with Nemo about this fact felt about as futile as trying to brush off Rosheen. Kurby refrained from responding. Instead, he took another sip of the Firewhiskey while watching the little witch warily. As he swallowed, the burning liquor gave him something to focus on, a way to ground himself outside of the unsettled feeling that was rising in his stomach.

Death dreams. In his mind's eye, he could see Alec Carter's body as they'd found it in the study, sprawled bloody and lifeless under the silent grandfather clock. It was too easy to slip into the memory of standing in the middle a darkened room, shadowy furniture all around, staring at the inside of a shuddering door as the pounding from outside grew louder and louder. Nemo's comment that this had happened to her before did nothing to calm the precarious sensation that was making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

The mention of Grimshaw's was somewhat a relief. The werewolf hunter let out a breath, his shoulders relaxing slightly. It probably said something that a spooky tailor's shop was the preferable threat.

He paused for a moment, clearly gathering his thoughts as he glanced up at the ceiling.

"I've been havin' dreams about Grimshaw's, too."

He hadn't really admitted this part out loud much before -- he'd mentioned it only briefly to Nemo back when they'd first fallen into this mess,[1] and not at all to Aileen Reid, who had become something of a fellow hobbyist when it came to the haunted shop. It was much easier to focus on the obvious mystery; doing so allowed him to ignore the parts he didn't want to think about, like the storefront's seemingly strange magnetic pull, the eerie whispers, and the uncomfortable connections to other parts of family history.

"What'd you dream?" Kurby glanced sidelong at Nemo, brows knitting. "Was it about the light?"

1.	December 19, 2011 - Holly and Ivy, Wood and Stone

The werewolf hunter's motion stilled as her words registered. Slowly, silently, Kurby glanced up at her, his face inscrutable. But if there was something that he was looking for in the little witch's own expression, it clearly wasn't there.

Wordlessly, he draped the chain mail over the back of the wooden chair, taking a moment to balance it so that it wouldn't slide off. Then, still silently, he headed past her into the kitchen.

The little room was heavy with the smell of roasting dinner. He'd been much more of a Firewhiskey drinker when he'd been younger, but he still kept a bottle on hand for the nights when ale wasn't enough. It took Kurby a moment to find the bottle stashed away on top of the icebox; a moment longer to unscrew the cap, his movements perhaps a bit less practiced than usual. He stayed quiet as he located a glass, and then carefully poured out a generous helping.

Finally, resignedly, he turned back to face the kid, leaning back against the counter behind him. Further conversation stayed on pause until he had taken a sip.

"Well, good news," he said at last, finding her gaze. He gave a half-shrug, as if the opposite thought had just occurred to him. "Or bad news, maybe. I didn't."

Everyone felt like they had a bleeding right to comment on his appearance. Kurby made an exaggerated show of rolling his eyes, unimpressed with Duncan's observation or offer. He'd followed all of the Scotsman's stupid rules and dragged himself out of bed and all the way to the McBoid farm, and he'd be damned if he were going to drink some gobshite potion just to keep up with his comrade. If Duncan was going to insist on getting his help the morning after a full moon watch, then Kurby was damned well going to make sure that his old friend had to put up with his constant griping.

"You dragged me all the way here to go horse trading?" he asked disbelievingly.

It wasn't that he thought poorly of his friend's profession. It was just that it was -- ...well, boring as hell was not an unfair way of describing it. Kurby logically understood why Duncan had given up on the Ministry after the war; he, too, had not been entirely thrilled with returning to an institution that had proven it could become so corrupted. But if he were ever to give up his adrenaline-filled profession in favor of a boring, placid life helping his taciturn older brother peddle winged horses, sheer boredom would probably drive him to jab a wand in his eye before the month was out.

But now here he was, still bleary-eyed after the full moon, about to spend his supposed day off trailing along behind his friend while he...bartered and negotiated? Chaperoned the winged pony to its destination? Kurby didn't even know.

"I'm not ridin' one of those things," he informed Duncan sourly, crossing his arms. "Are you sure Angus can't help you? The damned horses are probably goin' to bite me, anyway."

The werewolf hunter had stayed silent through all of this, though his dark gaze lingered on the girl. Zelda was far better at managing her than Greyfriar was: where the Hogwarts headmaster cajoled and pressed and bargained, Zelda simply expected, and Lucinda Temple stormed and snarled, but ultimately let herself fall into line.

If it had been anyone but Zelda that had summoned him here, he would have simply hexed the pup and carried her back to the Ministry, but now there was an unspoken understanding that he'd stay his wand. The girl was probing every inch of her situation, though, just like she might worry at a loose tooth: prodding and testing, searching for a reason to get out of this, as if her paranoia was a valid reason to go back on the run.

Did she even have money to buy wolfsbane illicitly? He doubted it. Ironically, the only wix that Kurby knew of who gave it away was her fuzzy professor; he would have paid at least a galleon to see the kid try to beg some off Greyfriar now.

"Lass, no one's goin' to sell you wolfsbane," he put in, raising his eyebrows at Lucinda. "You've got a choice in what happens next. Your best option is that you and I head out of here together, and we get you squared away with wolfsbane and somewhere safe for the full moon."

The alternative would be much less annoying for his immediate future, as he'd no longer have to actively deal with a stormy, argumentative fourteen-year-old who seemed mostly interested in snarling at him and contemplating whether she could jump out of a first floor window without breaking a leg, but it would probably cause him far more headaches in the long run.

Whatever was wrong, it was so urgent that Nemo had had to come straight to his flat on a Thursday night. But now it was weird. And he wasn't allowed to make fun of her.  And now, suddenly and in inexplicably quick succession, she had an urgent need for a glass of water.

Kurby widened his eyes at her, his frustration showing. Part of him couldn't help but wonder if maybe he should have spent longer quizzing her at the door, if maybe this was all some sort of conniving trick to gain access to his flat while his guard was down, but most of him was simply annoyed.

Rolling his shoulders back in exasperation, the werewolf hunter looked up to examine the ceiling. It didn't do any good to get mad at Nemo. If he snapped at her now, she'd accuse him of crawling up her arse, or would stomp off and refuse to talk to him, or she'd run and vent everything she knew about him to her newest bestest best friend, who probably worked for the Ministry in the most inconvenient position possible. (Bruce's assistant was a good guess.) None of those things would address the situation that had brought her here -- and as teenagerly annoying as Nemo could be, the little witch had never been one to drag a problem to him without reason.

Even so, she knew where his damned sink was. The kid could get her own bleeding glass of water.

In a painfully dramatic show of acquiescence, Kurby jerked his head toward the kitchen, as if giving the girl permission to intrude further. Then, rolling his eyes, he stepped over to begin organizing the discarded chain mail that he'd left on his desk.

Somehow, it didn't seem likely that he was going to get anything else that he'd planned done tonight.

He'd been about to crack a grin at the now-infrequent visitor, but then Nemo went and did exactly as he should have probably expected: corrected him and implied that he had nothing better to do on a boring weeknight than sit around by himself in his flat. Kurby gave the little witch a sour look, although he didn't hesitate too long before pushing the door all the way open. At least the kid's attitude made him relatively confident that she was exactly whom she appeared to be.

Any sense of eeriness he'd felt at her sudden reappearance had been pushed aside by annoyance at her greeting. Kurby waited for the kid to enter before shutting and locking the door again, shifting his wand back to his left hand to reset the wards. These past few months had been relatively quiet, but the werewolf hunter still kept up his usual watchful guard. Lorelei Hunt and Cinaed Tawse were still out there somewhere, and he wasn't about to let carelessness be what finally tripped him up.

The small flat still looked much like Nemo may have remembered: the main room was simply furnished, with a gray sofa and a dark blue armchair arranged around a wooden coffee table. A couple of ancient-looking books had been left carelessly on the coffee table, along with a stack of crinkled parchment. A tall bookshelf stood along one wall, filled mostly with what looked to be reference books on defensive charms and magical metalworking. Next to it, a section of silver chain mail had been spread on top of a wooden desk; post-full moon repairs had apparently been underway on the werewolf hunter's gear.

Across the room, a large window let in the faint light from tonight's half-moon, providing a view onto Diagon Alley below.

Sighing, Kurby crossed his arms as he turned to carefully survey his teenaged visitor. Tonight, Nemo looked much more Muggle than witchy. She'd cut her hair since the last time he'd seen her, but other than that, she looked to be all in one piece: no missing fingers or other body parts, no strange signs of a pentral's change to her appearance, nothing to signify that anything serious was amiss.

But he wasn't about to believe for a moment that this was a social visit. There was a prickle of dread starting deep in his stomach, but Kurby firmly pushed it aside; that wasn't how the magical world worked, and he wasn't about to let himself get sucked into worrying about it. Any number of troubles could have driven Nemo here: a run-in with the Aurors, drama with Abigail, an encounter with the haunted tailor shop.

"What's wrong?" he asked, brows knitting. Dry humor never landed with Nemo, but somehow he still felt obligated to try, even if only to lighten the tone for himself. "If it has somethin' to do with the Ministry, I'm off work until eight sharp tomorrow."

For a long moment, it seems as if the American witch may have poorly chosen the night of her visit: no sound came from inside the flat, and there was no hint that anyone was home. But then the surface of the wooden door seemed to shimmer like a pearl for a moment, and then came the click of a lock.

A moment later, the doorknob turned and the doo eased itself open, revealing the werewolf hunter.

 Kurby Bagnold looked as if he were solidly in the ebbing phase of his monthly rhythm of stress: he looked a little worn, but he'd shaven recently and his fatigue seemed more like the typical result of a long day at the office than the drained exhaustion that immediately followed a full moon. He was dressed in all black, though his clothes looked more suitable for lounging at home instead of stalking around Knockturn Alley, with just a glinting chain around his neck and a couple of rings instead of his usual visible complement of silver. Past him wafted the faint smells of something roasting in the kitchen.

He regarded her silently for a moment, one eyebrow arched and right hand still firmly on the door, looking more cautious than truly surprised to see her. If Nemo No-Last-Name was going to drop in to see him, of course it was going to happen right around dinner.

"Y'know," he informed the little witch, with the straight face of someone imparting gravely serious advice, "owls still work even if you're tryin' to reach someone without numbers."

Kurby cast a sidelong look at the other wizard. A while since he'd seen one live? It was hard to imagine foppish Balfour Spectre tangling with a (air quotes, "fantastic," air quotes) werewolf, even if he'd once done the same thing with dragons. Then again, Spectre had also spoken openly about his involvement with Ira Almasy[1] not so long ago. The mother of his son had been deeply entangled in the werewolf fights of a couple of years prior, and while Spectre's involvement in that disaster didn't seem possible...

The other wizard's question immediately put an end to the werewolf hunter's wary inspection. Kurby gave an irritated roll of his eyes, his expression instantly set in stone.

"Oh, it's been grand," he retorted, unwilling to give an inch.

The generally disheveled look of the group ahead of them didn't entirely support the certainty in his words. Kurby pressed his mouth into a tight line as he kept his gaze locked on them, his jaw set. Gervais Bellingham's absence was perhaps the biggest giveaway, although he wasn't about to let his thoughts linger on the status of his longtime teammate and friend. But there were plenty of other details -- Sasaki's slight limp, the messiness of Fennken's hair after she'd shifted from human to fox to human and back again, the wobbliness of the floating werewolf, the fact that it was floating down the hallway at all -- that made it clear that not everything tonight had been routine.

"You want to step up and help out, though, there's a stack of paperwork back in the Capture Unit office that you can get started on," he added sardonically, crossing his arms against his chest. At this point of the full moon watch, even a reprimand for insolence was preferable to having to pretend to be chummy with Balfour Spectre. "Just leave it on Bruce's desk by the mornin'."

1.	February 19, 2012 - The Gift That Keeps On Giving

"His penmanship's not as neat as yours," Kurby fired back, laying claim to the guest chair in front of Bruce's desk and lowering himself to sit.

That wasn't all there was to it and they both knew it. As far as Kurby was concerned, they were all better off without giving Spectre a direct invitation to nag the Werewolf Wing. It wasn't just because the Scottish wizard was tiresome for him to deal with, although there was some of that too: the werewolf hunter went out of his way to avoid other pureblooded wixes and their politics unless he really had to wade in. But Balfour Spectre -- just like Cepheus Gamp and Solomon Carstairs and Ed Pratt and all the rest of them -- seemed a bit too inclined to walk over Bruce when given a wand's length. (Pratt technically wasn't pureblood; he was just a gobshite.)

Kurby had seen it back in the days when Bruce had been the Muggleborn female Head of the WCU. Back then, it had mattered less: camaraderie and competency had always trumped blood purity and everything else for the Capture Unit. But now that she'd stepped into more of a leadership role and added 'werewolf' and 'disabled' to her list of descriptions, he'd seen how easy it was for the others to not take his onetime mentor as seriously as she deserved. If he needed to bare his teeth now and then to remind the rest of the Level Four management team to clear out space for her, so be it.

Still, he wasn't about to admit to that in a conversation. If Bruce didn't like the line he was drawing with Spectre, well, she could find herself a new Capture Unit head.

"What was wrong with Madrid?" he asked, brow furrowing. The topic change served a dual purpose: it moved the conversation away from Bruce pestering him about Spectre, and it was clearly not something she wanted to talk about, which meant she'd sign his papers faster so she could be rid of him. "I thought you lot were all excited for a beach holiday."

Friday, August 3
Just past four in the morning
Two hours to moonset
Werewolf Wing, Level Four

It had been a long night, and even though they were close to the end of it, the Head of the Werewolf Capture Unit was feeling the weight of it in the very core of his bones. Summer full moons were always the worst: even though the nights were considerably shorter, there were so many more people out and about, wixes and Muggles alike, that everything felt as if they faced much higher stakes.

After a couple of false calls earlier in the evening, they had finally gotten a report of the real thing: a werewolf attack near a tiny Muggle village in the Gwydir forest. It should have been routine, but one could never count on that in practice. Difficult terrain had fouled up the first team to arrive on the scene and a couple of their members had gone down, though luckily with what seemed to be scratches and a twisted ankle instead of bites. Their second team had managed to subdue the werewolf, but it had been on a riverbank within spitting distance of a popular bridge. Their usual practice of waiting for moonset, so that the 'wolf would transform back into its less dangerous human form before they tried to transport it, would have put them at risk of getting spotted by Muggles.

And so here Kurby was: tired and sore after the scuffle by the river, trying not to think about the fact that two of his teammates were in St. Mungo's, and having to supervise as a potions-drugged, magically-bound werewolf was levitated unsteadily down the corridor of Level Four so that they could secure it a holding cell.

Unfortunately, his very-young teammates were expressing their exhaustion in another way.

"Goodnight, paws and goodnight, claws," Charlie Harris was reciting to a chorus of punch drunk giggles. "Goodnight hairy, scary jaws. Goodnight, wolf with lolling tongue. Goodnight, prints and goodnight, dung."

Someone let out too loud of a laugh at that last one. As their wand drifted, the unconscious werewolf took a sharp dip towards the floor.

"Watch it!" Kurby barked, his voice cutting sharply through the singsong.

That was enough to get them re-focused on their task for the moment. Irritated, the werewolf hunter crossed his arms, glowering as he watched the floating werewolf stabilize and resume its slow forward progress once more. He understood the desire to release some of the tension -- hell, he'd been the overconfident, snarky young kid on the team at one point -- but the thing still had the potential to be dangerous until they got it secured in the cell. The last thing he wanted was to have to deal with the nightmare of another werewolf loose inside the Ministry.

He heard footsteps in the hallway behind him, and Kurby cast a glance over his shoulder. When he spotted the source of the sound, he didn't try very hard to conceal the enormous eye roll that resulted.

On second thought, dealing with a werewolf loose inside the Ministry was only the second-most annoying thing that he might still have to face tonight.