Early evening


Balfour had received an exclamation of surprise from his secretary when he returned to the department, where he had been ordered to leave just a few hours ago on account of it being a Sunday - Mrs Lanningham believed in the therapeutic effects of not being an utter workaholic. She was quickly informed of recent events[1] at Hogwarts, however, and sent for an owl to deliver a message[2] to Johann.

Most of his anger was abated by the writing of the letter, but was still necessary to fortify himself with a little whiskey. There was nobody to whom the anger could be directed, which helped. No Ira Almasy to duel, no Sandy Misslethorpe to hex. Only a sense of deep unease.

"Thanks Mrs L." Balfour kissed the old witch on the cheek before ducking out of his office and heading towards the Werewolf Wing, carefully cradling the package[3] in both hands.

It being a Sunday, there were not many people about level four. They weren't even close to a full moon so it wasn't all-hands-on-deck in this wing either. He stopped by Ballentyne's office just in case she was in - her door was shut, secretary absent, so Balfour went on ahead to the WCU in search of anybody who could safely take the bloody gloves off his hands.

He found Kurby Bagnold in the WCU office, surrounded by parchments and folders and looking about as disgruntled as always. Bal suppressed a sigh. Just his luck, wasn't it?

"Bagnold!" he approached the busy desk, glancing around at the work. "Hope I'm not interrupting? Got something here for you lot. Another anonymous package, Hogwarts. Thought you might want to have a look before we call two down."

1.	The Present is a Gift
2.	In the Field of Human Affection
3.	O Mother Tell Your Children

The werewolf hunter leaned back in his chair, balancing it precariously on its back two legs as he massaged his temples and looked tiredly up at the ceiling. 

Behind him, arranged in neat piles across the floor, were the stacks of materials that he'd come in today to work his way through: piles of log books from the safe houses, collections of scrolls, and even a jumble or two of wayward files.  In many ways, Sunday was the easiest day to get work done.  Nearly at the midway point between full moons, there were no other employees in today that he had to manage, no Bellingham to ask nosy questions or Ballentyne to try and avoid.

The apparently broken Sneakoscope in his desk drawer was still randomly going off at annoying intervals, so he'd taken over Bellingham's desk in the WCU's main office when he'd come in late that morning.  It had been a relatively quiet full moon, even though the Ministry-run safe houses had unsurprisingly seen many fewer werewolves than usual, and so his team had had plenty of time for the necessary follow-up over the past week.  He'd come in today to try to take care of the other cross-checking -- going back even farther as he looked through the records, in hopes of finding some sort of pattern or discrepancy that might suggest how frequently a werewolf had missed a check-in back during the days of the underground fighting ring, or whether any others might have been in two places at once.

But now it was getting late -- much later than he'd meant to stay -- and Kurby was just beginning to blearily think about packing up for the night when a voice cut in behind him.

Spectre.  There was no mistaking the posh Scottish tone.  Barely keeping his groan from being audible, the werewolf hunter dropped all four legs of the chair back on the floor and turned around slowly to face the new Head of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.

Over the past month, he'd done his studious best to avoid Level Four's recently promoted leader.  As much as Kurby knew that he'd been testing Ballentyne's patience with his refusal to cooperate, she had been helpful with that; his onetime mentor clearly saw him as a problem that she preferred to deal with herself.  But there was no easy way of ignoring the politicking Scotsman when he came barging into the Werewolf Capture Unit office at nearly seven in the evening on a Sunday, chattering on about -- what had happened at Hogwarts?

Kurby blinked at the intruder, his weary expression quickly giving way to baffled confusion. 

"What?" he asked, brow furrowing, as he tried to quickly replay Spectre's commentary in his head.  Anonymous package... Hogwarts... a third mysterious werewolf-hunting artifact?  "What the hell happened?" he said sharply, eyes narrowing.

It was hard to ignore the fact that Bagnold was never happy to see him - the werewolf hunter was an exception to a rule. Most on level four either liked the new department head or pretended to like him or conveyed professional indifference. He didn't much mind as long as everyone did their jobs and as long as the dislike didn't get in the way of things. Kurby wasn't a slacker anyway. Almost the opposite.

            "What the hell happened?"

"My sentiments exactly when Greyfriar summoned me." Bal set the package down on top of a stack of parchments and then reached into his jacket pocket to retrieve a copy of Feliks' testimony.

He nodded at the gloves. "That dropped into my son's arms earlier today. No letter or note, and I cast a preliminary detection charm - found nothing."

A deliberate absence of anything. Balfour pressed his lips together, thinking of the way Feliks had eyed those gloves. It was clear that whoever was doing this knew their trade; a werewolf hunter. He kept thinking of Ira, of the Almasys and their ways. But the Almasys didn't do that anymore, did they? And it could be anybody who knew about the werewolf games, who saw Feliks in Witch Weekly.

"Here," he handed over the testimony for Bagnold to read. "Greyfriar and I signed off on Feliks' statement of events."

The werewolf hunter's dark eyes flicked over as Spectre set a brown-wrapped package down on top of a parchment stack, and then back as the other wizard drew something from his pocket.  Silently, Kurby took the proffered sheet, quickly scanning it over.  There at the top, sure enough, in the careful, measured handwriting of a child, was today's date.  At the bottom, just as the other wizard had described it, were the signatures of Knox Greyfriar and Balfour Spectre.

Eyebrows raised, Kurby returned his gaze to the top of the account and coolly began reading.  So Felix Spectre had been walking back to his dorm around sunset after visiting with his uncle Sylvain when a large black owl had dropped a package for him with -- Kurby's gaze shifted instantly back to the paper-wrapped object -- werewolf hands inside it.  There had been no note.  He'd taken it straight to Greyfriar's office, which was rather an improvement on what had happened the last time around, when Felix and Nicola had decided to send him misleading correspondence about the mysterious Tenacious Twine and werewolf hunting handbook.  Greyfriar had called the kid's father, and that was that.

It all felt rather too neat.  The werewolf hunter stayed silent for a long moment, examining the letter for a third pass through, as if he might have missed something the first two times.  Like so many pureblooded wizards, Balfour Spectre seemed to have a knack for weaseling his way out of trouble.  Everyone on Level Four knew that Level Two had let him bounce right out of trouble after there'd been trouble with Gen and Witch Weekly.  And hadn't there been some rumors about Spectre and Ira Almasy, right around the same time when this very kid had supposedly appeared out of nowhere? 

And now his son seemed to have covered all of his Quidditch goals, in a way that felt far too orderly and restrained for a first year Hogwarts students.

But the sequence of events wasn't entirely unrealistic, Kurby thought as he set the written account down carefully on Bellingham's desk.  The kid had probably had a whole slew of Ministry Decrees read to him after he had concealed his first mysterious gift.  If he had been the one responsible for the boy, he probably would have drilled it into him to go straight to Greyfriar the moment anything else suspicious happened, too.

Kurby rose to his feet, holding out his left hand towards the desk.  His wand, which he'd left sitting on the desktop as he'd parsed through the log books, jumped instantly into his fingers.

"I didn't realize that werewolf souvenirs were the rage at Hogwarts these days," he remarked grimly, as he stepped past Spectre to the brown-paper parcel.  Silently, Kurby flicked his wand, waiting until the shimmer of Specialis Revelio settled over the package before he glanced back at the new Department Head, one eyebrow cocked.  "Why does somebody keep sendin' 'em to your kid?"

Not wanting to disturb the organised chaos of the desk, he perched himself on the edge of a nearby chair while Bagnold read the note. This was new to him in many ways - Balfour was not familiar with how closely the Werewolf Wing and level two worked together, when it came to these cases. It meant that the WCU had to approach their case with the same forensic precision as the MLE.

He felt like this was unfair in some ways; that the overlap probably led to a kind of power struggle if the officers involved couldn't get along.

             "Why does somebody keep sendin' 'em to your kid?"

The question brought him back from the bureaucracy of the Ministry to the events which were disturbing him most. He fished a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, shaking out a stick distractedly.

"He's Ira Almasy's kid[1]," Balfour shrugged like a man trying to shake a weight off his shoulders. "And Ira probably had dangerous enemies. Friends, too. She was a big part of those werewolf games, wasn't she?"

Talking about Ira to anyone (besides Johann) was tricky. He had years of practice doing it when the witch had been alive and well and poisoning hospitals but he hoped one day it would be unnecessary to bring up her name in relation to work-related events. Bal lit his cigarette and drew deeply from it.

"They're a nasty piece of work," he nodded at the gloves, smoke clouding his face as he tried to draw the subject away from Ira. "Don't think I've ever seen a pair in-person. Not a fresh pair, as it is. What about you?"

1.	24th Sept 2011 - Secret Lovechild of a Murderess

The last time he'd questioned Spectre about his son's mysterious packages, back before Carter had been murdered and it felt like all of Level Four went to shite, the Scottish wizard hadn't exactly given him a straight answer.[1]  Hearing him make the obvious connection so plainly now -- he's Ira Almasy's son -- made the werewolf hunter pause.  That was more of an honest response than he might have expected from Spectre.  Perhaps the other wizard hadn't come here merely to cover his own arse after all.

But even as he might have reconsidered his approach, the subtle, acrid smell of smoke hit his nose.  Kurby looked up, nostrils flaring.

"If you're goin' to light up in here, then use a Bubble-Head charm," he said sharply, with an annoyed look at the cigarette.  What was this, Spectre's personal smoking lounge? 

Kurby had been irked enough when Nemo had started puffing on gillyweed inside his flat without asking, but at least she'd had an excuse for her lack of manners in the fact that she was a sixteen-year-old street kid.  If their new Department Head was going to start treating all of Level Four like it was his private parlor, then the werewolf hunter was going to have a second damned reason to march into Ballentyne's office bright and early on Monday.

Irritable, he returned his attention to the paper-wrapped package.  There was no sign of any kind of magic on the outside of it, no flicker of light or color that might signify that the Specialis Revelio charm had encountered the traces of a prior spell.  With a flick of his wand, the two objects that had been wrapped inside the paper floated into the air, settling at about eye-height as they began to slowly rotate in front of them.

There was no mistaking what they were.  Kurby examined them impassively, his expression stoic save for the hard set of his jaw.  Werewolf paws, their sharp claws still intact, removed from their owner so that they could be preserved and cured and turned into gloves that would fit human hands. 

There was no mistaking where they'd come from, either.  Werewolf fur could vary in color, from pale gray and tawny yellow to red or brown, or even to a deep, dark black.  The fur on these paws was rust-colored, presumably matching the color of the only werewolf pelt that had recently turned up at the Ministry.[2]

"Been a bit," he said at last, responding to the question that Spectre had posed earlier.  His eyes were still trained on the grisly gloves, watching them as they rotated, but something was twisting in his stomach.  Here was a direct connection between the January attack on the safe house and the strange hunting gifts that were being sent about, and Feliks Spectre wasn't the only wix who had previously received a mysterious, threatening package. 

"It's usually the heads, but I've seen paws get taken as trophies before.  Not so much here," he said, giving a quick shake of his head.  British pureblood families occasionally maintained a historic collection -- his relatives on the Whitman side were one of them -- but very few, if any, were still actively adding to it, and he figured he didn't need to say that bit out loud to the pureblooded Spectre.  "I think it's more common in Europe, or over in the Americas.  Reckon the last time I heard of a 'wolf gettin' skinned on our watch, it was because it ran afoul of a couple of centaurs."[3]

1.	"Feliks doesn't have a clue. He led a, um, secluded life before this. Not many people in his personal past, and he can't think of anyone at school either."  A Gift, A Curse, 27 December 2011.
2.	13 January 2012, Calling Card.
3.	In 2006, during To Hoof or Hoof Not.

Balfour raised his eyebrows, failing to suppress a smirk as he was reprimanded for the cigarette. Kurby and Mrs Lanningham would get along like a wild fire, in all probability. He took two quick drags and breathed the smoke out over his shoulder before licking his finger to pinch the tip of the cigarette. It sizzled with a pinch of pain - his hands were calloused against much more intense burns.

            "It's usually the heads..."

The image of werewolf heads, mounted in one of Ira's parlours, came unbidden to Balfour's mind. He pressed his lips together firmly and wondered if the Werewolf Wing knew about those, if level two had mentioned after their dissection of Atreus' collapse[1].

"Aye, that sounds about right. The Almasys hunted and mounted," he alluded with a vague gesture, as if referring to well-known rumours, "but I'm given to understand that the tradition of hunting wasn''t contemporary until it's, ah, revival by Ira."

Feliks' cousin and Ira's niece, Raine, had clarified certain things[2] over Christmas time. Some of these Balfour was already aware of from his affiliation with the psychopathic witch but he felt glad of Raine telling them... if only so he could have an official source without implying just how much he knew of Ira's criminal activities through their relationship.

"You'll have to cross-reference with two - they must have some kind of list of her associates." Balfour added thoughtfully. "I can't help but feel it must be friend rather than foe," he glanced at the gloves. "This doesn't feel like a threat to Feliks. It's not like he's a werewolf."

1.	1st May - A Deadly Double Life
2.	18th Dec 2011 - One Day this Boy will be Fine

Kurby's gaze flicked briefly back to the new Department Head, appraising him silently.  The last time, back before the Scottish wizard had given him any reason to be so intently irritated with him, Spectre hadn't made any mention of the Almasys or their werewolf hunting past.  Was he worried, now that his son had been targeted a second time?  He had to recognize the link to the safe house attack and Richard Dunnigan's skinned pelt.  Maybe the fact that the son of a murderess was getting sent gifts by some arsehole who'd committed murder him- or herself was enough to make him nervous.

Spectre was so damned smooth most of the time, so perfectly sure of himself, that it was hard to tell.  Crossing his arms, the werewolf hunter returned his attention to the two gloves.

There were a few traces of magic here -- faint flecks of color shimmering over the fur -- but he didn't know enough to identify the spells for certain.  Maybe an enchantment to keep them in werewolf form after death, the same as had been applied to the pelt.  But as far as he could see, they looked clean of any kind of hexes.

He'd been half-listening as Spectre continued to talk.  At the mention of Level Two, Kurby glanced up again, one eyebrow cocked.

"Only thing Two's goin' to tell us is that we ought to stick to dog catchin'," he said darkly, flashing the other wizard a quick, sardonic smirk.  "You want to try to convince Pratt or Carstairs to part with their precious Almasy case file, feel free."

The second half of Spectre's comment made him glance back at the gloves again, brows knitting. 

"No," he agreed, crossing his arms.  "It feels more like harassment of Greyfriar."  Not something that he would normally disapprove of, considering how the Hogwarts Headmaster still glowered at him like he wanted Kurby to remember that he'd once almost once bitten his head off, but this was hardly how anyone should go about it.

Or it felt like a threat to Greer Grant.  That was the other possibility that he couldn't help but mull over.  The second mysterious package, the child-sized silver handcuffs, had not been sent to Feliks Spectre at all, but had rather been left on the desk of Harper Graves the night before Greer's trial.  Someone had armed a first year with werewolf hunting gear, extolled the need to eradicate all werewolves after murdering two of them, and then crafted custom restraints for a young Hogwarts werewolf that had been in the news.  It seemed like a reasonable leap to think that Greer might be another target.

At least he could rest assured that Greer and the Temple pup were safe at Hogwarts under Greyfriar's watchful eye. Harper, though, was likely at home with George, with no reason to suspect that anything else had happened.  The American defense attorney was smart enough to keep her wards up; for all he knew, she might not even live alone.  But it was probably still worth sending her a warning before he left here tonight -- along with Bruce, who seemed like another possibly obvious target.

"You must've known Ira Almasy for a bit if your kid's in his first year at Hogwarts," Kurby remarked after a beat, glancing casually at Spectre as he finally reached for one of the floating gloves.  "At least what -- twelve, thirteen years, aye?"

The thought of negotiating with two over case files was... not appealing. He would have to decide how best to do it; already he knew that Pratt denying it by memo was grounds to go straight to Carstairs, which might produce better results. Either way he was prepared to use as leverage the fact that the Head Auror hadn't acted on the warning from nine in January.

Bagnold, meanwhile, speculated. Balfour nodded grimly when it was suggested that Greyfriar could be a target.

As Feliks' father, it was easy to believe events revolved around his son. As department head, he needed to be able to think outside of that involvement; it was entirely possible for someone to be harassing the Headmaster through his students. Likely, even.

            "You must've known Ira Almasy for a bit..."

Balfour's jaw drew taut and he glanced sharply at Kurby. He had been caught in the paradox of a lie[1] when Feliks turned up: the dates did not match up with the one he gave Auror Gamp, claiming to have met Ira only once she had taken up residence in London... six years ago. A lie of omission; he'd been asked about his tenancy, not friendship.

Regardless, he was interviewed with Johann and nobody could blame a wizard for omitting details of past flings in front of a current (and superior) lover.

"Something like that," he replied as he glanced away with a sigh, pretending to observe Kurby's examination of the gloves. "It was more in the vein of a few one night stands whilst I was travelling in Europe. Didn't know her proper until I came back to London a few years ago."

Balfour felt a kindle of something awful and hot in his chest. Anger. When would he stop feeling it towards her, he wondered? Merlin knew it had been mounting[2] for years.

"In retrospect it's obvious why she wanted to keep me close to her..." the Scotsman muttered; he was being honest while also playing the role of an embittered man. "I don't know much else about the Almasys outside of that," he brought himself back to the case at hand. "Just what I could cobble together for chats, and from her niece. Trainee on two."

Ira was dead. Maybe these events had something to do with her but he had to keep reminding himself: she's dead.

1.	3rd May 2011 - Living in the Devil's House
2.	June 1999 - Our Queen of Peace

Kurby could practically feel the cutting look that Spectre shot him, but the Scotsman continued to talk.  He turned the glove over in his hands, running his fingers over the rough, rust-colored fur as he watched the other wizard out of the corner of his eye.  It felt like there was some sort of unseen thread running through all of this, from Almasy and the werewolf fighting ring to the unlucky Dunnigan brothers, from Alec Carter to Tawse and his direwolves to Figaro and back again, and if only he could figure out how to catch the end of it, maybe he could tug something free.

Listening, he wasn't quite sure if Spectre was being surprisingly cooperative without having a lot of use to share, or if the other wizard used indiscriminate chatter as a defense mechanism to distract from more pointed questions.  For someone politically-talented enough to ascend from dragon handler to Division Head to Department Head in just a few short years, it seemed hard to believe that he could have known Almasy intimately for over a decade and not pick up on any hint of her nefarious activities. 

"Yeah, I've met the niece," Kurby said, somehow managing not to grimace.  He'd first encountered the fiery-haired Almasy girl at the disastrous Royal Opera a couple of years back, and then again at Gen Garcia's flat.  The latter experience somehow felt exactly as traumatic as both paying witness to the Opera House murders and examining a pair of severed werewolf paws, and so he kept his attention focused on the glove. 

"Met Ira Almasy once, too, just in passin'," he added conversationally, as he flipped the glove around to examine the claws.  "She invited my grandmother to sit in her box at that Opera where everybody got lynched a couple years back, and I got dragged along."

The claws at the end of each digit still looked sharp; Kurby carefully avoided touching them directly.  Scratches from a werewolf couldn't confer the curse, but they weren't pleasant.  One mis-aimed swipe wearing these gloves, and whoever was on the wrong side was likely to end up with an unpleasant scratch.

"How much'd you pick up on her ideas about werewolves?" he asked Spectre, brows knitting as he spared a glance in the other wizard's direction.  "When you say she revived hunting 'em, you mean outside of that fightin' ring where they used 'em to murder Muggles?"

This visit was becoming a walk down memory lane - a reluctant one.

He remembered the Opera House[1] murders. That is, he remembered being surprised when Ira did not invite him to the opera, so accustomed he was to being the handsome bauble upon whose elbow Ira could dependably rest at all her events; gods knew he'd been to enough of those to expect an invitation. Then the murders happened. He had felt relief. Only now, in retrospect, did he see how she kept him away from her stench of death. Even the hospital[2] poisonings.

            "How much'd you pick up on her ideas about werewolves?"

Balfour turned from his thoughts, visibly returning to their conversation with a tired shake of his head. Focus.

"She didn't like them," he replied with a dry smile. "The implication was that she... she thought they were less than human, that they were amusing. But Ira found most things amusing. I could never tell when she was being serious."

It was all a game to her. And even to him, until it suddenly wasn't. Until Johann. "I heard about the revival from Raine. I think she meant outside of the werewolf ring... something about hunting werewolves in Russia when Ira was younger, hunting for sport rather than... well, you know." Balfour gestured at the office in general, meaning the worthy cause of the WCU.

He could well imagine Ira hunting werewolves. The wizard rubbed a hand over his face and pocketed his half-smoked cigarette.

"What do you think of those, then?" Bal indicated the gloves. "Feliks put them on when he got them, thinking they were a joke. Hell of a shock for the poor lad."

1.	3rd Jan 2010 - Murder at the Opera
2.	19th Feb 2011 - Reflex

Spectre, maybe surprisingly, gave him a thorough answer.  The werewolf hunter kept his attention half-trained on the other wizard as he flipped the glove around and peered inside it.  The interior felt a little rough -- cured, not finished leather -- and though he could see the some even stitching, there was no identifying mark, no concealed symbol to indicate the artisan who had crafted it.

He could make his own wagers, anyhow.

Based on what Spectre was saying, a werewolf hunter from Russia seemed like the convenient answer.  Kurby might have bit on it too: werewolf hunting, real werewolf hunting, had fallen out of favor long ago in the United Kingdom, but it had continued in plenty of other locations.  With an Almasy werewolf hunter, the connection to Feliks Spectre and to the werewolf games would make sense.  The only thing that didn't fit was the damned book, the copy of The Lycan that had obviously been borrowed from the Hogwarts library sometime in the 1980s.[1]

This felt frustratingly like the opposite of his normal monthly hunt. Usually, the Werewolf Capture Unit was tasked with piecing together vague clues so they could identify whoever the hell it was that had transformed into a hideous beast during the last full moon and mauled some poor idiot outside of town.  But even in the most complicated werewolf cases, there were still limits: connections to a location, a limited number of locals who might think to take shelter in a particular part of the woods. Here, with their mystery assailant, it felt like he was trying to spin a web without knowing what to anchor it to.

Spectre's question drew him back to the problem in front of him.  Kurby paused, pressing his mouth shut as he considered what kind of answer to give. 

"Looks like they match Richard Dunnigan's pelt to me," he said at last.  With a flick of his wand, he sent the first glove spinning back to levitate again and reached for the second; it was doubtful that the interior would be any more revealing, but it only took a second to be thorough.  "I'm sure Two'll bless us all with their wisdom and confirm it after they get their fill of blusterin' about tomorrow morning."

1.	October 15 2011 - Spill This Blood for You

If Bagnold supposed it was Richard Dunnigan, then his suspicion was confirmed. One mind or group behind the mysterious packages and the safehouse infiltration - someone capable of entrapping a fully transformed werewolf, a feat otherwise reserved for this Wing's particular hunters. Even then, hardly a solo affair. There had only been one person according to safehouse witnesses.

Balfour snorted at mention of level two.

"Aye, our knights in red robes," he muttered dryly, borrowing the term from his old Haunting Hour broadcasts. "I'll talk to Carstairs about sending down Almasy's case files for you lot. Find out what they've missed."

The last thing he wanted was for people to examine those files too closely, lest they find details that might lead them to either Johann or himself. There was no helping it now, though. He would have to trust nothing incriminating popped up; they could always explain away coincidences. After all, he was marrying a very clever wizard.

The Scotsman glanced over his shoulder at a wall clock. It was about the right hour for a later dinner.

"I'd best kick off for now." Balfour stood, hands in his pockets as he continued addressing Kurby. "Keep me updated, won't you? I'll send a memo if I remember anything else about Almasy. You're better off asking her niece, but I'd try to catch her off guard if I were you."

Knights in red robes.  The werewolf hunter flicked his gaze upwards at the analogy.  That was certainly how the wixes of Magical Law Enforcement perceived themselves, an insufferable self-conceit that seemed to hold strong no matter who worked in the Auror Office.  They weren't going to be happy that these gloves had come to them by way of Level Four. 

There was nothing of note inside the second glove either.  Kurby tossed the pair back into the packaging.  If there was anything else to glean from them, he wasn't a skilled enough wizard to do it.

Spectre's promise to talk to Carstairs made him glance at the red-headed Scotsman again.  Kurby wasn't entirely thrilled at being turned into the Department Head's errand boy for the evening -- obviously, Spectre wasn't going to be the one expected to walk these down to Level Two and deposit them with the Aurors -- but the other wizard also wasn't exactly telling him to stay on his own broom.  Even Carter, who was probably the best Department Head that Kurby could ever remember helming Level Four, hadn't explicitly condoned his habit of veering outside the Capture Unit's mandated purpose.  If he had to fly interception between Spectre and the Aurors in return for getting his hands on the Almasy case file, that was a trade-off he was happy to make.

Kurby flicked a two-fingered salute after the other wizard -- acknowledgement that yes, he would actually send an update and not simply ignore any memos this time -- and gathered up the package with the werewolf-pelt gloves inside.  Raking his fingers through his hair, he looked over the rest of the office, still cluttered with the stacks of log books and parchment, and heaved a sigh.

Before he could finally get out of here tonight, he still had some cleaning to do.