0916 hours, following on from this thread.


Adrestia Gamp groaned, turning over on the stone floor where she had collapsed in a heap. It was morning. She knew it was morning because she was conscious of herself and of the fact that she was human. Naked and sore, the witch rose to her feet, arms wrapped around herself. The bare room was a mess. Its wallpaper long ripped apart, the walls beneath it bore marks of the night before. Long and painful looking scratches streaked across the floor.

She stumbled, slowly moving towards the little safe box in the corner. Her clothes were inside.

The safe house seemed quiet to begin with, as she dressed. Weird. Not even the Wireless was on and she couldn't hear footsteps outside. Usually, the attendants gave them some time to... well, to try and feel human again. Even so, she expected to hear doors swinging open. Life happening.

Someone in the cell over knocked on their door. A muffled voice, calling out. What was the time?

Fully dressed in her blue velvet tracksuit, Adrestia approached her own door. She pressed her ear to it and heard other werewolves calling out. Where were the attendants? Or rather, the attendant! That rude little boy last night! Tia scowled, banging on her door irritably.

Oh she was not in the mood for this! "Hey!" she yelled, growling. "What the hell! Let us out!"

Ji-Won was gasping and crying and trying to move a larger body off of hers. 'Help, help, help,' she was murmuring weakly in a panic. She remembered everything. She'd arrived for her shift and been attacked by the new attendant. Her leg was broken and the closet was dark and someone was on top of her. He could be dead! Figaro woke up slowly and the rest came much faster. The pain hit him in a shocking, nauseating wave. He couldn't move, he couldn't breathe.

"Get off me, get off, get off, get off," Ji-Won cried feeling Figaro finally start stirring in the dark. Figaro tried.

"My leg's broken," Figaro gasped. "Shhhit, it's &#*$ing broken!"

"Everyone's legs are broken!" Ji-Won half-screamed at him. Then, she asked him if he could reach the doorknob.

Every moment was agony, but Figaro could reach if he stretched. He fumbled and click the latch opened and the closet door swung open. And Ji-Won started screaming. Really screaming. Peel paint of the hull of a ship screaming. Make a banshee jealous screaming. And she was screaming at Figaro. She was kicking at him with her good leg. Figaro had never seen anyone so afraid.

"It's okay, it's okay, it's okay!" he tried to tell her, but she was too loud. He remembered now, the connection shocked his system. Figaro tried to crawl away from her out of the closet but he ran out of space behind the counter.

"It wasn't me! I swear, it wasn't me! It was a spell, it wasn't me! Stop!"

He couldn't hear anything over poor Ji-Won. Morning light poured in through the thick-paned windows, keys jangled on their hooks above his head, and he couldn't see where his wand was. He could see his leg though. It was not supposed to look like that, even under his trousers. His breathing started to come faster. What if he was still here? What about all the werewolves? What he'd said...!

     "Eradicate the werewolf threat."

They needed to get help or they were all going to &#$ing die. He reached up to pull himself up onto the counter, but instead dragged the register book down on top of him. A wand clattered down as well. Ji-Won's screams only got louder when Figaro took the wand (not his), aimed it high and fired off a round of red sparks.

"Ngh...!" Figaro grit his teeth. It felt like every muscle in his body was outraged and it was hard to see.

Any and all first aid training he ever learned left him. If Moira were here, she'd cast a perfect Patronus charm who'd trot off to get Kurby Bagnold, but Figaro had never trained his up well enough. Also, who could summon a happy memory with Ji-Won Kim screaming at him!?

"Stop screaming!" he cried. "Please stop! We need to get help...!"

With a crack, the Ministry atrium had blurred and shifted into the damp gray-green of the Scottish countryside, and they were left staring up at a two-story house built out of cool gray stone.  The remains of fading red sparks, slowly disappearing against the gray sky overhead, reflected off of the wet grass by the edge of the path. 

A half-second later, it registered that a high-pitched voice was screaming inside the safe house.

Jaw set, Kurby started forward. With a hard jerk of his wand, he wrenched the front door open with an invisible spell, slamming the heavy wood back hard enough against the stone wall that it nearly bounced off its hinges.

The werewolf safe houses that dotted the countryside were Ministry-sanctioned and regulated, although they weren’t normally the subject of much attention.  Their locations were supposed to be unknown to the average witch or wizard, situated far enough from high-density Muggle areas that there was a low likelihood of accidents, even if the numerous other safeguards placed on them failed.  But their locations were publicized to werewolves.  If Tawse wanted to sneak one of his direwolves into a safe house to let it run rampant the following morning when the staff came to let it out of its locked room, there would have been few precautions in place to stop him.

Next to him, the shape of Tessa Fenneken was quickly shrinking, losing height quickly as she transformed into her second form as a red-brown fox.  Kurby pulled the silver chainmail hood up over his head as he moved past her and entered the stone building, his wand raised and at the ready.

There was no rush of teeth and fur to greet them; no metallic scent of blood; no sign of a direwolf here on the ground floor.  Just the normal interior of the safe house: the main desk that had the look of a roadside inn, as if the creatures spending the night there were merely checking in on holiday, with a stairwell just past it.  The source of the screaming was a young girl sprawled on the ground in front of what looked to be an open closet, her face streaked with tears.  He could see the boots of someone else half-hidden behind the counter, just out of sight.

Keeping his wand raised, Kurby stepped around the side of the counter, dark eyes quickly scanning the interior of the room.  As he came around the edge of the counter, he refocused on the two figures laying on the ground. 

Suddenly, he stopped short enough that the small red-brown fox slammed into the back of his leg.

”Figaro?” he asked incredulously, doing a hard double-take at the blond youth laying on the floor.

"Oh, fucking hell," Figaro swore in relief, his voice cracking. When the door'd blown open Figaro had raised the wand prepared to cast, prepared for the worst. But it hadn't been the doppleganger returning to kill them all, it was the bloody Werewolf Capture Unit.

Ji-Won's voice was getting hoarse from the screaming, even so she and Figaro began shouting over each other at Kurby.

"He - he - he - he attacked me! It was him! Don't listen to him - " Ji-Won's accusing finger was shaking and her dark eyebrows were screwed up in rage.

"No! Shh! Kurby, someone got in! He said he wanted to eradicate werewolves -"

"He's going to hurt them! He's dangerous! He's lying!"

"Shut up! I didn't break my own leg, did I!" Figaro chucked the wand at Ji-Won, but it went a bit wild as his hands were beginning to shake. They'd been in that closet a long time. Ji-Won fumbled for the wand and pointed it at Figaro with both hands.

"He might still be here," Figaro told Kurby, just not noticing the little fox by his feet. "Hey," he greeted it in that automatic way people greet animals.

"Maybe everyone's dead. You should probably check," he said. "Please go check."

"Be cause you killed them, dumbass," Ji-Won hissed.

In a second, the boy who looked like Figaro Sellaphix and the girl who’d been screaming for help both exploded, turning the small room into a cacophony as they tried to shout over each other.

Kurby took a step back, nearly trodding on the unfortunate fox.  Flabbergasted, he looked from one to the other, trying to make sense of the fact that Figaro Sellaphix was lying on the floor of a werewolf safe house in the middle of this bedlam.  The Figaro look-alike was yelling something about exterminating werewolves, while the girl was shouting loudly and screaming about how Fig had tried to murder people.

It was enough to make his head ache, and he almost wanted to hex them both silent so that he had a moment to rub his forehead and try to decide what to do about all this.  But then maybe-Figaro threw his wand at the American girl, and the girl clutched it in both hands and aimed it back at Fig, and Kurby was forced to snap out of his bewilderment.

”OI!” the werewolf hunter barked, raising his voice so that he would be heard over both of them.

“You!” he ordered, with a hard look at the girl.  He hadn’t moved his wand to point directly at her, not with an unknown person potentially masquerading as Fig in front of him, but the sharp note to his voice made it clear what the next step would be if his command wasn’t followed. “Put the goddamn wand down.”

He looked back at the boy who looked like Figaro, the line of his jaw tight.  Fig was probably the only person careless enough to throw his wand at a wix who was shouting angrily at him, which was almost enough to convince Kurby of his identity.  But considering that Cinaed Tawse was a frequent user of Polyjuice potion, it was far better to be safe and thorough than careless and sorry.

“And you,” he said quietly, dark eyes locked on the teenager.  “What prank did your brother play on you at Christmas?”

Ji-Won acquiesced to the sharp order from the werewolf hunter and set the wand down, her anger beginning to give way to a quivering lip and shaky breaths.

Figaro let his had fall back against the reception desk with a thud and shut his eyes. Seeing Ji-Won start to hyperventalate reminded him he needed to breath steady or he'd probably pass out. The pain in his leg radiated in waves and threatened to drown his brain. He pushed himself up higher and winced.

"Little shit turned me blue," he said through grit teeth. He knew why Kurby was asking and the sooner he convinced everyone he wasn't some psycho, the sooner they'd go help all the poor people locked up. Shit, if any of them were still in there, if any of them were still alive.

Then he and Ji-Won both looked up past Kurby at once. With the screaming died down, they could hear the banging and muffled yells from upstairs.

"We're fine," Ji-Won said between shaky breaths. "You have to go help them."

Figaro nodded in agreement. "Not going to run off."

‘Just go furry,’ Bagnold had said to her once.  Werewolves weren’t driven to attack other animals the same way that they were people, so that was what she was supposed to do whenever trouble threatened.  Everyone on the Capture Unit knew it; they even included it in their training scenarios, so that no one would freak out on a moonlit night when a small, furry creature that wasn’t close to the size of their quarry went streaking past them.  But here they were without even a werewolf about and her boss nearly stepped on her!

Indignant, Tessa dodged back out of the way and scrambled around to the base of the stairs, happy to get away from the clumsy werewolf hunter and all of the yelling.  Flicking her ears towards the upper floor, she took a moment to listen while Bagnold dealt with the two wixes.  She could hear knocking and shouting, but nothing that sounded like the snarls or heavy breathing of a werewolf.

Turning back towards the others, she began to change again, shooting upwards as she reverted to her normal human form, rippling red-brown fur transforming back into a black jumpsuit.

“I don’t —“  She stopped to shield a series of sneezes, and then started again. 

“I couldn’t hear any wolves upstairs,” she told Bagnold, her gaze flicking between the two wixes laying on the ground, who at least had stopped yelling.  Neither looked well — the other witch, whom Tessa thought she remembered from seeing once or twice at a meeting in the Werewolf Wing, looked like she was on the verge of hyperventilating, and both she and the teenager had a leg twisted at a weird, unsettling angle. 

“Should I send up green sparks, then?” Tessa asked, a bit boldly as she turned back towards the door.

At Figaro’s response, the werewolf hunter visibly relaxed, his shoulders dropping slightly.  That answer was enough to verify his identity.  Whatever the hell else he didn’t understand about this situation, at least he felt relatively certain that the real Figaro Sellaphix was somehow in the middle of it again.

Now that Fig and the girl had stopped trying to shout over each other, other cries and banging could be heard from the upper floor.  Kurby looked up at the stairs, his brows knitting.  Werewolves, no longer snarling and raging, ready to try and rip him to pieces, but probably exhausted and anxious, waiting to be let out of their safe rooms.  Assuming that they were all alive.

“Go ahead,” he instructed Fenneken, ignoring the attitude.  She’d been sore at him ever since the December full moon incident, but he wasn’t going to deal with it now. 

The check-in log had fallen behind the counter near Figaro.  Kurby bent to pick it up, standing as he flipped it open and found the most recent page.  There had been eight werewolves who had checked in the night before, each with an assigned room number.  Silently, he scanned the list.  Adrestia Gamp, who’d been assigned to Room 14, was the only one he knew more than by sight, although the other names were familiar.

He cast a glance behind the counter to the small row of cubbies.  There, he counted eight wands, each still in place under a dangling key. 

Eight names, eight wands.  Eight werewolves.

“Wait until the Ministry team gets here, then come up,” he instructed Fenneken, who was just turning back from shooting up a shower of green sparks outside.  “I’ll start sendin’ them down one at a time.  Once we get everyone out, they all come back to the Ministry with us.”

Tucking the register book under his arm, he turned back towards the stairway, raising his wand.  ”Homenum revelio,” he murmured, sending a burst of magic racing upstairs.

He paused, head tilted to the side as he waited for the spell to circulate on the upper floor.  As it swooped over each of the werewolves still locked away in the safe rooms upstairs, it would reveal their presence to him.  If there was anyone hidden on the upper landing waiting to ambush him, he’d be able to tell that they were there, too.

He sensed the spell as it pinged once, then again.  Then again and again, and twice more.  But then it stopped.

Six.  Only six.

Jaw set, Kurby tucked the register book under one arm and started up the stairs, holding his wand still at the ready.

---

There was a certain smell to werewolf holes that he knew he’d never forget: the dusty, musky scent of matted fur, mixed with the sharp stench of urine and a metallic hint of recent blood.  It set the hair on the back of his neck on end, made him feel just as jumpy as it had when he’d been a stupid kid.

But before he reached the landing, Kurby could tell that there was something wrong with this hiding place even beyond the fact that it had been sanctuary to eight werewolves the night before.

The cigarette butt at the edge of the stairs was the first thing to catch his eye.  But then, as he reached the upper floor, he saw it all.   The roof between the last two rooms looked as though it had caved in, filling the hallway with rubble and letting the light mist of the Scottish morning drift into the hallway.  There was a streak of blood across the floor, more blood on the walls; matted fur scattered everywhere across the floor, sprinkled with more cigarette butts.

And then, dotting the wooden floor boards, were tiny spots of something shiny.  He paused to peer at one more closely.  It looked like a flake of silver.

Kurby wanted to stop, to take a minute to see what the hell had happened here, but the werewolves in the cells were banging and shouting, still frantic.  Behind at least one of the doors, he thought he could hear someone sobbing.  Swallowing, he set his jaw, tearing his attention away from the scene in front of him.  His first priority had to be getting everyone who was still here out.

“Oi!” he called out sharply, punctuating the racket.  “Capture Unit!”  That should have been enough for all of them to stop their squalling, but just in case anyone didn’t get it, he decided to elaborate. “Shut up and have a seat, and we’ll be lettin’ the lot of you out shortly!”

That was enough to quiet down at least some of them. Kurby checked the book a second time, tracing down the list until he found Gamp’s name again.

Silently, he went to the door marked with a number 14 on it and dug into his pocket for the keys.  It took him a moment to find one with a label that matched the number on the door, another few seconds to fit it into the lock and turn it. Keeping his wand at the ready, Kurby pulled the door slightly open, staying in the doorway to block the rest of the hallway from view.

He didn’t know Adrestia Gamp very well, but there was at least one bit of trivia that he could use to verify her identity, much like he had for Figaro.  He regarded the petite werewolf silently for half a beat, nothing about his expression suggesting that he was kidding. 

“Gamp,” he said tersely.  “What’s your nickname for Fauna Blake?”

            "Oi! Capture Unit!"

Tia froze, stepping back from the door she had been banging. What the hell were they doing here? What happened last night? Maybe it was the attendant... he seemed pretty incompetent. A werewolf could have gotten loose. Killed the boy. Something felt cold and heavy in her stomach and she crossed her arms, hunched anxiously. That was always the secret fear: escaping in that form, the one that couldn't tell apart friend from foe and would kill any person in its way. The form she didn't want anyone else to ever see. It was for her and her alone.

The door opened a crack and she saw the face whose voice she had recognised. It was hard to mistake Bagnold's growl for anyone else's. “Gamp. What’s your nickname for Fauna Blake?”

The werewolf stared for a solid second, mouth open and brow wrinkled in confusion. Of all things...? But then it hit her, why he was asking, and Adrestia's expression cleared.

"Sexy auror, of course...." even under these circumstances she couldn't hide the little smile threatening to pull at her lips; thinking of Fauna made her feel a bit less anxious. Because Fauna is totally a sexy auror. "Bagnold. What in Rowena's name is going on?" Tia stood straight, drawing her shoulders back and uncrossing her arms. She felt more sure of herself and less like a prisoner being held.

Kurby wasn't great but she trusted him not to be totally unjust and slam the door in her face. Bruce trusted him too.

Gamp’s simple question made him pause.  Kurby pressed his mouth into a tight line.  His gaze flicked towards the destruction in the corridor, though it was hidden by the partially open door.

“Someone broke in,” he said after a beat.

There was a hard knot starting to form deep in his stomach, a wave of anger building inside him.  They’d been so focused on preparing for what might happen during the January full moon, planning how best to protect innocents and figuring out where the next werewolf attack might take place, that they’d never thought about the possibility that the strike could happen some other way.  Now Tawse or someone else had hit them in a place that they’d never even considered that they might be vulnerable, and someone was likely dead because of it. 

He hadn’t had time to process what he’d seen, hadn’t had a moment to hear Figaro’s story or question the safe house attendant who had been downstairs, but he could begin putting together the pieces of what might have happened.  Silver flakes scattered over the floor, smears of blood on the walls, the caved-in ceiling.  Eight names, eight wands, six living people.

The important thing to do now was to get everyone out of here safely and quickly, while making sure they didn’t bring any trouble unknowingly back with them.  He hadn’t been present for the Leaky Cauldron explosions, two of which had happened after help had arrived, but they’d all learned a lesson from that.  Just because the danger seemed over didn’t mean that the storm had truly passed.

“We need to get everyone downstairs and over to the Ministry,” Kurby said levelly, meeting Adrestia Gamp’s gaze.  He held the register book out to her, open to the most recent check-in log.  “You know any of the names in here well enough to be able to screen them with a question?”

Back downstairs ...

"Oh, hello, Fenny." The little red fox transformed into someone he'd known from school. It took him a moment to recognize her, but it was Tessa Fenneken. She had been well ahead of him in school and played on the Quidditch team, if he remembered right. Not as if it was a class reunion, though; as much as he might've liked to chat or whatever, he was preoccupied with trying not to pass out. He ran his hand through his hair.

"Sorry, but my leg's all ... wrong," Ji-Won said by way of informing young werewolf hunter who looked nothing like a nurse. "And ..."

She pointed at Figaro, her hand shaking.

Figaro set his jaw not interested in being accused again, but Ji-Won lowered her hand to point at Figaro's injury. Figaro relaxed his shoulders and nodded.

"Healers are coming," he said to Ji-Won. Tessa had sent off emergency sparks, but Figaro knew those Healers weren't for them. Something terrible had happened upstairs. He had the sucking feeling that he and Ji-Won were incidental to something much worse.

A crack sounded outside in the growing dawn and then the crunch of boots in the gravel path. A tall blonde witch in a long white coat had to duck on her way into the cottage. It was Athena Marrowbone, head healer for the Creature Injuries floor at St. Mungo's - but more to the point, she was coming off a full moon field healing shift for the Werewolf Capture Unit. She looked tired, but moved with a business-like energy.

"Ay up, where we at?" she asked even as she took in the space.  The bulletin board was off the wall, the counter was a bit of a mess, but the scene of a werewolf attack this was not. Tessa Fenneken was there watching over a pair of kids on the floor who looked like hell, but there wasn't even any blood. They were awake, hearts beating, lungs breathing.

She approached Fenneken.

"They can't be all of it," she said more quietly. "Where's that Bagnold?"

Someone had broken into a safe house?

Adrestia blinked several times, trying to understand it. That didn't sound like a smart thing for anyone to do, not even the anti-werewolf lot. They knew, better than anyone else, how dangerous the full moon could get! Why break in? She stared numbly at the book Bagnold was holding out. Her heart was racing, grappling with an emotion she couldn't quite name; it was like a violation, in some way, knowing that anyone was here when they were all in their worst forms. A period she did not care to ever share with another living being and somebody had waltzed in.

             “You know any of the names in here well enough to be able to screen them with a question?”

The witch nodded, then gave herself a shake. Come on, Tia! Wake up! She placed a finger on the page, running it down.

"Santos here is my mentee, and I'm mates with Kissinger," she tapped the second name. "Rooms nine and eleven. Do you want me to deal with them?" Adrestia glanced up to meet Kurby in the eye, unsure if there was something else he was supposed to be doing or if the safe house wasn't really 'safe' right now. It was the first time she felt grateful to have a werewolf hunter around.

Tia was on high alert but also aware, as a mentor, that she had a responsibility to act rather than get shepherded around. "I'll need my wand first, though. And if they're alright, I can ask if they can verify anyone else on the log."

Tessa had been standing near the front door, with one eye on the stairwell that led upstairs and one on the front yard outside the safe house.  She’d been half-debating whether she should send up another round of red sparks as well, a signal to Trevelyan and whoever else was back at the Ministry that they indeed needed back-up.  But shouldn’t the green sparks suffice?  If she were watching somewhere for a signal and she saw green sparks go up, she decided, she’d treat it as a call for assistance just the same as she would if the spell were the complementary color.

She’d barely been paying attention to the two safe house attendants on the floor when the boy referred to her by name.  Tessa blinked, looking back at him in surprise.  Was that Figaro Sellaphix?  He’d been several years behind her in Hufflepuff, but everyone in their house had known him since he was a loud, awkward first year.  She barely recognized him seeing him in this setting...how was it that he could have graduated already?

But before she could respond, there was a loud crack outside and the Capture Unit’s Sawbones came marching through the door.

She hadn’t thought that she needed to give Marrowbone any direction — she’d assumed the healer would just appear and set about any obvious tasks — but the older witch took one look around the room and then approached her, seeking more information.

“He went upstairs,” she said, looking over at the Healer.  “He said to wait down here until the Level Two team arrived, and he’d start sending everyone down.  We need to get them all back to the Ministry.”

Tessa looked over at Figaro and the other safe house attendant, who were both still laying on the floor.  The legs that they’d indicated just looked...wrong, and both their faces were looking more than a little gray.

“Can you help them quickly?” she asked, waving a hand at the two injured wixes.  “We’re going to have to move them, too.”

For a moment, he thought he’d lost Gamp, but then the werewolf seemed to pull herself together.  She ran a finger quickly down the list of names, pointing out two. 

Kurby pressed his mouth shut for a second, considering her request, and then shook his head.  There wasn’t time for grabbing wands.  He wanted to get everyone out of here as quickly and efficiently as possible.  If someone had attacked the safe house, they could have left some other danger behind.

“We need this to be quick,” he told her curtly.  “You stay behind me, and I’ll unlock each door.  If you think you can clear those two with a question, then do it.  If not, help me keep everyone movin’ until they all get downstairs.  We’ll bring ‘em all back to the Ministry and check anyone else there.”

It felt like he knew werewolves better than he knew people sometimes, and this time of the month, they’d all be exhausted, anxious, and feeling vulnerable.  The second they saw the destruction in the hallway, they were likely to freeze up or panic.  He could use his authority to bully them along, but if Gamp could stay level-headed enough to urge them on as a peer, all the better.

What would happen if they found a monster instead of a human behind one of those doors, he left unsaid.  He’d deal with that nightmare when he got to it.

Kurby gave Gamp one last measuring look, and then pushed the door the rest of the way open, revealing the rest of the destruction in the hallway as he started for the door labeled with the number 11.