Dugan MacDuff
Knockturn Alley

Daily Prophet Headquarters
Diagon Alley

Dear Daily Prophet Reporters,

I thought that you might be interested in knowing exactly how much the aurors seem to care about the safety of the public. Just two weeks ago I sent an owl to everyone in the auror office- threatening their families, loved ones, and using anything I could to get a rise out of them. They responded swiftly, placing guards around their family, and working to track me down.

What the aurors have not taken into consideration is the safety of the wizard community. I thought you would like to know that I have taken it upon myself to make sure that the wizarding world becomes aware of the fact that the aurors don't give two shits about whether or not they survive- as long as their own loved ones are safe.

I do not think the aurors have discovered it yet- in fact, their own families might not have realized they were missing- but early in the evening last night I broke into the upstairs apartment of an elderly couple who run a shop in Diagon Alley. I made the old man watch as I killed his wife and his dog before I killed him, too. They had quite a large family, and were well loved, so I have no doubt the loss will be felt.

Along the way I ran into a young couple who recognized me. Rather than let them alert the aurors to my presence in Diagon, I killed them as well. I have attached a map with their location. You may use this to verify my story if you think that I am bluffing or not the real Dugan MacDuff.

If you do not publish my letter in an article which lets the entire wizarding world know that the ministry only cares about themselves, I will kill a family every night until it runs in the morning edition of the prophet.

Sincerely,
Dugan MacDuff

Mature warning for language!


Maggie was on a roll. She'd gotten a lead on the direwolf attacks, Hyskos' trial, and if luck would have it, the Egyptian curse. Her name was popping up more and more in the papers, and tonight she'd swung by the Prophet to submit a piece for the morning edition. Only a few other people were still at the DP Headquarters so late this Tuesday evening. After Mags dropped off her article on the assignment editor's desk, she passed through the dimly lit cubicles, looking for one dread-locked head. Maggie was in a celebratory mood, and thought she'd grab a pint or two with Niobe before going home.

Her progress was halted when an owl swooped in from one of the open windows and dropped a letter on what was dubbed the 'you snag it, you write it' desk. Maggie walked faster, barely noticing how quickly the owl departed. With a grin and a glance around the empty cubicles, she snatched the letter up, opened it, and sat on the desk, preparing to read.

Maggie's smug smile vanished as soon as she processed the first few sentences.

Maggie read it a second time, then stared at it blankly, as if the words would shift in front of her eyes to say 'haha! Joke's on you!'

But that never happened. The clocks kept ticking, and the few reporters left in the office area kept scratching at parchment with their quills.

Upon reading this letter, some people might have burst into tears, or calmly contacted the authorities. Maggie did neither. She loosed a flurry of swears, hopped off the desk, and rushed for the window, even though she knew the owl had flown away. Maggie pushed open the pane and peeked out, just in case some shadowy figure was watching the building. No shadows, that she could see. Which only meant she had no one to direct her cursing at.

She had the sudden, selfish and irrational thought of ripping up the letter and flinging it outside, pretending that it had never arrived at all. Maggie clutched it in her hand, glanced down at it. With a racing heart and an angry, upset look in her eye, she strode for one of the lit cubicles where Niobe normally sat.

"Thursby!" Maggie hissed at her friend, slapping the letter down on her desk as if Niobe had somehow caused all of this. Truth be told, she was so relieved to see her that she could have cried.

She crossed her arms and gave her a panicked sort of glower. "Fuck! Shit. Read it," she gestured at the offending parchment.

Niobe's old auntie's voices lilted about her shoulders, their chiding teasing reminding Niobe that a witch of her age ought to have something to do on a Friday night.  'No we don't mean babies, ye daft tangle-brain! Men! _{Or women!} Just have a life, Niobe."

The thirty-something witch bent her head even harder over her work.  What did old aunties know? Sure - she'd love to be out having useless fun tonight, but there was more fun to be had that actually did something for the world, fun that meant something.  And so it was an article about a goblin who'd been found with a wand that was keeping her warm tonight.

Oh yes, and Maggie Groust's ever glowering visage.  "You're radiant..." Niobe began when the freelancer swung by her cubicle in a frizzle.  But she stopped her cheeky greeting short when a letter was thrust in her face with a great deal of anxiety.

"What...?"  Niobe got her bearings looking from the letter to Mags and back.  As she read, her brows furrowed and she let out a nervous laugh.

"What is this...?"  She read on, and arrived at approximately the same conclusion that Maggie had. 

"Shit the bed!"

She pushed back away from her desk, leaving the letter there like a hot coal.  Her hands were in her hair, and her face was open and shocked.  But she was smiling.

"This? Is wicked! We have to go to this address, Mags! D'you have a camera? Oh, we have to.  Can't believe the balls on this one - lunatic, psychopath...!"  Her speech was rapid and stilted, still not exactly sure how to respond or to feel about all this.

"Should we?" she blurted out just as suddenly, her face now screwed in genuine conundrum. 

Maggie knew that look in Niobe's eye, but didn't want to believe it. Some people laughed or smiled when they were alarmed; Maggie had seen it before! Niobe must have some semblance of sage wisdom buried in those dreadlocks of hers!

When her friend vaulted away from the desk and piped up with her idea, Maggie fumed at her. No, no, no! She did not want to play the role of practical curmudgeon while Niobe insisted on sacrificing another finger!

"Are you batshit!?" Maggie paced around the tiny cubicle. "I'm not doing that, Niobe!" She jabbed her finger at the letter, having completely missed the address earlier in her panic. "And neither are you!"

The unsettling interview with Frank and the stories she'd heard from Margo about MacDuff breaking into her home sprang to the forefront of her thoughts. Maggie was fond of skirting the line, but she had no desire to leap over it and land in deep shite.

"You know what would happen if we sped off to Knockturn with just our brains and our quills? We'd make his fucking night! He'd catch one whiff of the ink underneath our nails and laugh his ass off about two little piglets showing up on his doorstep! And then! Then," Maggie shook her head, "Just for funzies, Cinaed Tawse would pop out of the shadows and say hello! Cujo and the yeti, Niobe! We don't stand a chance."

Silence fell in the office area and Maggie clamped her mouth shut, trying to calm down.

"We have to tell someone."

Didn't they?

"Augh!" Niobe wailed and slumped in her seat.  "You're right...!"

She moaned and took a deep breath.  Everything Maggie was saying was dead on.  This wasn't a game.  Threats from MacDuff were serious business.  The body count was stacking and Level Two was terrorized.  For all Niobe's bluster and go-get-em, her outburst had been the same unchecked recklessness that had got her into humiliating close scrapes - scrapes that Maggie was all too familiar with.  She wouldn't admit it but under command from the Wizengamot itself, but Niobe relied on Maggie to keep her head on sometimes.

"You're right, you're right, you're right," she muttered, shaking her head.  This wasn't a scoop, this was an emergency.

"He'll really do what he says, won't he?  Damnit, I wish I knew how to do all that scrying hocus pocus..." she said, getting up and going to look down at the letter again. 

She furrowed her brow and tilted her head.  "Find out if it's legit...If we hand it over to the Aurors, we'll never see it again.  We'll lose it."

Maggie was slightly mollified when Niobe said she was right not once, but multiple times. Mollified, but the anxiety was really setting in now. She wanted Niobe, or someone, to pipe up and tell them the proper solution, to say that this sort of thing had happened before and they knew what to do.

She leaned against Niobe's desk and gave her a frustrated look, "Yeah, sure, I'll just whip up some Divination on his handwriting. It'll only take me five hours to brush up on the crap I never learned at Hogwarts."

Maggie rolled her eyes. Who actually took Divination seriously? Not her!

But before she could fall completely into unhelpful grumpy-grump mode, Maggie hopped up again and picked up the letter, then dug her wand out of her bag and waved it, "Geminio."

Two copies sprang into her hands. "Here," she shoved one at Niobe with an embarrassed, defensive tone. Sometimes solutions were simple. Maggie folded her own copy up and tucked it in her bag, leaving the original letter on Niobe's desk.

"I know a bloke," she offered after a pause. "Level Two."

She left that hanging in the air, ready to jump to action if Niobe told her to go for it. Though she'd never admit it, she understood her friend's excitement, her rush to investigate and find some sneaky way to outsmart the bastard. But Maggie had already been that disastrous route, and now they had muggle lives to consider on top of it.

"No!" 

Niobe in a panic jumped up and threw out an open hand towards Maggie, entreating her to go no further. 

"We can't! Not yet...!" 

She couldn't nail down just what it was that was holding her back from calling the law.  She took up the original, reading through it again, searching for some clue.  Some loop-hole.  Some way around the serial killer werewolf's ultimatums.

"We have to publish, but we seriously cannot publish.  The Aurors - hell, Mags, the bloody Aurors are not going to let us run this!  They're going to swoop in, gag us, and handle it themselves - and if we do publish against their orders, we'll find ourselves in front of the Wizengamot, I've seen it before.  But how are they supposed to protect everyone from...this!" She flapped the threatening letter.

"They don't have him now.  Can they really gamble they'll catch him before tomorrow!?  Bollocks!  We've got to run it morning edition.  I dunno, send the Aurors an anonymous tip about those people.  Merlin, those people - do you think it's true?"

Niobe hadn't ever looked this freaked out at work.  And maybe only Maggie had ever seen her worse.  Her own compass was spinning erratically; Niobe had no idea what was Gryffindor Right.  Journalism Right.  Personal Safety Right.  Legally Right.  Capital R Right. 

"Ugh, Niobe!" Maggie groaned and put her head in her hands. Mags was starting to regret dumping the letter on the woman's shoulders, because they could argue all night about what to do while MacDuff celebrated his jackassery in Knockturn.

"How do we know the arsehole is even going to keep his word?" She burst out, throwing down her hands and giving her an exasperated look.

"I bet he kills people like he makes his weekly grocery list!" Maggie flapped the letter back at Niobe to make her point. "Just pops off to Diagon, picks up some ketchup at the store, and then grabs his main meal off the street. Now he's making it official so we feel guilty about it!"

And it was working. Pacing the cubicle again, she glanced out the window, looking like she was going to shatter the glass with the force of her frown.

"If we don't contact the Aurors and wizards still die, that's going to be on us. He's making it like that," she grumbled. "But if we publish, if we actually do it, everyone's going to panic. People do really stupid things when they're scared. So either way, we're screwed!"

After a sigh, and more angry gesturing, and boring holes through the walls, Maggie stopped and looked at her. They weren't going to stop him with an anonymous tip or by bumbling through Knockturn. But Niobe had a point about the MLE swooping in and calling all the shots if they went that route.

Niobe and Maggie were glaring at each other, glaring at the letter.  Both stewing so hard as the clock ticked at them.  Maggie didn't know what to do anymore than Niobe did, or so Niobe thought, or she'd have done it before coming to Niobe with it.  Part of Niobe really wanted to hand it all over to the Aurors - it wasn't her job to shoulder this kind of onus.  It was fair that Macduff should make her and Maggie (or other poor sod who could have found the letter first) be the ones to navigate his crazy demands.

She sighed and groaned in both anger and frustration.

"Fine.  We go to the Aurors, but we are going to use my contact.  I've been working with him - he won't shut us out," she said firmly to Maggie, hoping to stay in control of this situation.  She didn't know who Maggie knew at Level Two but Niobe wasn't going to trust anyone but Trevelyan to respect her interests as a journalist. 

"Ok, Miss Bossy," Maggie scowled, secretly relieved they'd finally decided on a course of action. And that the course of action involved people who should know what they're doing.

"You want to tell me who you're sending an owl to, or should I try my best not to hex whoever pops in?"

She took Niobe's chair, turned it around, and flopped in it ungracefully, still glowering into space.

Niobe stood up straight, looking over the labyrinth of cubicles and snapped her fingers over her head.  An owl flitted over from the perches high in the rafters.  The brown-feathered bird alit on her cubicle wall while she scribbled a note to Jonas.

"Oh, you can just wait and see..." she said back snarkily.  Threats of murder had obviously frustrated Niobe who'd lost her patience with Maggie's grousing.  Constant grousing. 

JT

I don't mean to bother, but you need to get to DPHQ ASAP.  No joke.  Big deal.  Keep it quiet.  RSVP.

NT

She sent off the owl and then sat on her desk.

Then a horrible thought occurred her.

"You don't think Macduff is watching, d'you?" 

Suddenly the nearly empty Daily Prophet head quarters seemed cavernously dark.  Niobe's innocent, naive, asked-too-late question could only be followed by drawing her wand. 

"I wouldn't be surprised," she replied in a half-hearted grumble. "I didn't see anyone lurking out the window but that doesn't mean he's not there. Or inside the building."

Maggie sounded too casual. She slowly rose from Niobe's chair and cast a glance around the empty cubicles, heart thudding. She too, had her wand in her hand now.

"Shite. Is your Auror bringing a buddy? They usually run in twos," Maggie frowned.

"Send another note to make sure," she shoved parchment and a quill back at her and snapped her fingers for another owl. Who was the bossy one now?

If they got lucky (or unlucky) and stumbled on MacDuff trailing bacon bits back to his lair, they'd better have more than one Auror after him.

Maggie's affirmatives that there could be a direwolf lurking in the dark did not allay Niobe's jumpiness.  She batted away the parchment and quill and instead, dimmed her lamp. 

The Daily Prophet headquarters were located in what appeared to be a gorgous old warehouse.  The ceiling was many stories above them, and webbed with rafters under the sloped roof.  The moon was in it's last quarter, slivvering away to a new moon, but still the light outside seemed brighter than the darkness inside, the city's lights reflecting back onto itself from the clouds and mist that always hung about London.

Maggie and Niobe were not alone in the giant building, but they may as well have been.  With her cubicle lamp dimmed, Niobe fell silent and peered out of her cubicle which was framed in scrolling iron spandrelling.  The corridor between the office spaces was dark.  And mostly silent.  Any noise seemed to warp and echo in the big open space.

"Shush, Mags," she ordered.  "Just shuddup and wait. Unless you know any good warding spells." Niobe always had to look up stuff like that in her old school books or grimmoires.

It had been years since he'd found himself in the hallowed halls of the Daily Prophet.  Even back when he'd been an Auror, Jonas had never been a frequent visitor to the headquarters of the magical world's main newspaper, and he'd yet to return there since his reemergence with Level Two.

They'd appeared in the front entryway with a crack.  Jonas, who had shoved the crumbled-up note deep into his pocket, had promptly started through the wrong doorway; it had taken a gentle reminder from Cavanaugh, as thoroughly patient as always, to steer him back in the right direction.

For Niobe Thursby to send him a note so directly, especially one so late in the day, something had to have happened.  Thursby valued the secrecy of their arrangement as much as he did.  She wasn't one to get jumpy.  They'd traded information before, but their clandestine meetings had never been so immediate; word was passed carefully and secrecy, so that Jonas wasn't at risk of being outed in the office.  The urgency of the current message had been enough to spur him into action, but even if he could have apparated on his own, this wasn't a visit he wanted to make by himself.  It would be simple enough to lay a trap at the Daily Prophet headquarters as anywhere.

It was obvious that most of the staff had already gone home for the day.  The main news room of the Daily Prophet was nearly empty, the high ceilings making even footfalls echo through the enormous room.  It was easy to spot the dim lamp burning over Thursby's desk; Jonas frowned in its direction, and then glanced back over his shoulder, nodding for his accompaniment to follow him.

"Oi," he called quietly, lifting his chin in greeting as he strode quickly toward them, his limp giving an uneven quality to his gait.  Blue eyes flickered from Thursby to Groust and back again.  Jonas stopped just short of the desk, concern creasing his forehead as he took in the details of the scene, the nuances of their expressions.

"You both alright, then?" he asked with a frown.  "What's happened?"

Berkeley had been working late but then again that came as no big surprise. Ever since the threats had come from MacDuff she had been working round the clock, filing paperwork like mad, getting approvals on extra protection for those threatened and making sure everything was in order, while also trying to funnel as many further threats from MacDuff through her. She knew she wasn't officially on the case yet, she wasn't primary on it anyways but when so many lives were so directly threatened she wasn't about to take on something smaller or insignificant. Not to mention the fact that Berkeley just didn't want to go home anymore. She supposed she could always stay at her father's house with all the protection she had put there but where she felt the most safe was the Auror HQ, so that's where she often was.

When Trevelyan approached her about checking out a lead she barely batted an eye, packed up her wand and swiftly apparated them to where he instructed. As per usual Berkeley was mostly silent, not asking questions that she'd no doubt get the answers to eventually. Ever since their little chat that first night Berkeley felt as though she had formed a somewhat bond with the older man, one she certainly didn't have with any of her other officers. She hid her surprise that they were going to the Daily Prophet main building but didn't hold back when she saw how empty it was. Such a drastic contrast to the constant bustle and white noise of the round the clock Auror office. The sudden silence was almost deafening.

Berkeley only spoke when she politely redirected Trevelyan, staying just a step back in an instinctual 'I've got your back' partner stance. She wasn't entirely sure why he had chosen her over his usual partner but she wasn't about to complain either.

She stood stock still with her hands folded behind her back, the dim firelight making her porcelain features, platinum blonde hair and ice blue eyes look colder than they usually did. She simply observed the other women taking in every detail she could about their harried, and distressed expressions. She didn't know either by name though she had read their articles countless times. It was obvious something had happened and Berkeley found herself eager to know what it was but let Jonas handle it for now, after all he was her superior even if this wasn't an official partnering.