It wouldn't have taken much in the way of excuses to convince Kurby Bagnold to flee the Werewolf Capture Unit Headquarters that morning. 

He'd gotten in early to gather the paperwork together -- some of these files weren't ones that he wanted to go through with anyone else around.  Unfortunately, his early arrival hadn't been early enough to finish before the kids arrived, even though they had been loudly talking the day before about how they planned to go out.  The first group burst into the office at a quarter to nine, chattering about some drama that had gone down at the pub the previous night.

For the most part, he tried to tolerate the younger members of the WCU.  The two years that he'd now spent as Head of the Capture Unit had given him a begrudging appreciation of what it took to keep the team together.  Facing down monsters month after month wasn't for the faint-hearted, and without a sense of camaraderie, there was little to keep the average witch or wizard coming back for another fight.

The group they had right now had been together, more or less, for about a year.  For the most part, they were good kids.  They kept their heads down and got things done.  That was why he and the handful of other veterans tolerated the drama that dominated slow weeks.  Kurby had mostly reached an unspoken compromise with the younger WCU members: he ignored the chatter, and they knew to quickly shut up if he ever gave them a Look.

But on a day like this, the noise was already making his head ache like a bad hangover.  Gritting his teeth, Kurby exchanged a long-suffering glance with Bellingham, one of the few other senior members of the WCU, and gathered up the files as quickly as he could.  Making a show of rolling his eyes, he strode from the office.

In comparison to the WCU Headquarters, the quiet of Department Head Carter's office almost felt too good to be true.  Kurby breezed through the outer office with the ease of someone on time for an appointment, pausing only to be acknowledged after he knocked on the door to Alec Carter's personal office.

"Mornin', boss," he greeted the other wizard matter-of-factly, closing the door behind him.  He freed a piece of parchment from the stack of folders as he strode across the room, sliding it across the desk to the wizard on the other side.

"That's a list of all of the attacks in the past three years where we didn't use lethal force because of Ministry regulation."  Kurby swung a chair over, eased himself to sit, and then cocked an eyebrow at Carter.  "You want a few of the highlights?"

He already had a pounding headache as he read yet another report about the disaster with dementors and the mists overtaking the country. Why hadn’t he stayed in Norway where they weren’t facing this crisis and the creatures and being department was efficient and well-ordered with staff who had respected him? His morning had gone from bad to worse, having received yet another owl from Malin refusing to take the boys back to Norway. That had been followed by the gift left by his assistant on his desk. More paperwork, more complaints from the general public and more badly written reports from witches and wizards who did much better in the field than behind a desk.

Alec was on his fourth coffee of the morning when Bagnold walking into the office and closed the door.
“Mornin’.” The wizard mumbled, not yet looking up from the parchment before him until he finished the paragraph he’d been trying to get his mind to comprehend.

The werewolf capturer was staying, evidenced by the chair being dragged over to the desk and the parchment slid towards him on the already busy desk. It wouldn’t do to send Bagnold away, he was probably one of Alec’s only real supporters on Level 4 and was currently partaking in some extensive research to aid Alec’s aims for their department.

“Does it reiterate our proposal? I’m listening.” Carter looked up, raising his eyebrows.

In the fifteen years that he'd been on Level Four, Carter stuck out as the only Department Head who actually gave a damn about public safety or bringing order to the department.  It actually gave him hope that this wasn't just talk; that Alec Carter would take this to the Minister and get the ordinances changed.  Werewolf attacks were on a downward trend at the moment, but there was no telling when they might spike again, when something might happen that would throw his team back into the thick of it once more.

At the confirmation to continue, Kurby gave his boss a sharp nod.  He didn't need to reference the files to remember. 

"The worst ones start back a couple of years.  December 2009.[1]"  He spoke matter-of-factly, unemotionally.  "We were tracking a werewolf up in the Scottish Moors.  It had killed three Muggles over two months. Subdued it using non-lethal force, but when the team was trying to Stun it, it broke free.  Ripped out the throat of a witch on my team, and mauled another.  It took us another month to track it down again, and another Muggle died." 

That had been the last straw for Kia Ferris -- she'd left the WCU soon afterwards, broken and disheartened. It had been the last of anything for Farah Rashid, who had shown such promise in her early weeks.  He'd had to tell her parents.

"March 2009.[2]  That was the first time we had to deal with those goddamn dire wolves transformin' during the day, and then something went wrong with the wolfsbane potion on top of it."  Kurby shook his head, grimacing.  "Four people died, including one when a couple of bleedin' wolves escaped from the Ministry's holding cells."

Ramona Flickwick, which he still didn't like to think about.

He shrugged uncomfortably, making a face in Carter's direction.  "There's plenty of others, too.  Those things are a goddamn safety threat, and it seems like the Ministry always cares more about hurtin' their feelings than actually doing something about it," he griped, shifting unhappily in his chair.  He knew Carter agreed with him, but it was still infuriating.  "If a werewolf is out somewhere where it could attack the public, we should be able to use whatever goddamn means we need to in order to stop it.  None of this pullin' punches because some monster might get hurt." 

1.	Only the Moon Howls
2.	A Grisly Aftermath