Chapter Fourteen of 'Keep This Wolf'- Avenge the Insult
Chapter Thirteen.
Title: Keep This Wolf (14/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Warnings: Creaturefic (Harry is a werewolf), violence, some gore, angst
Rating: R
Summary: Draco knows full well that he’s being set up. There is no other reason to pull an Unspeakable out of the Department of Mysteries and assign him to negotiate with a werewolf pack. But when he learns the werewolf leader is Harry Potter, Draco wonders if the setup isn’t a different kind than he anticipated.
Author’s Notes: A fic for enamoril, who asked for a story like my “Business Meetings,” where Draco is the leader of a group of vampires and Harry their Ministry-appointed negotiator, but reversed, with Draco as the negotiator and Harry as the werewolf. This story will be updated every Tuesday until it’s finished. The title comes from the poem “Wilderness” by Carl Sandburg:
THERE is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood-I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fourteen-Avenge the Insult
Draco came to a stop at the Apparition point in front of Malfoy Manor, and spent a few moments studying it in silence. He didn’t even touch the iron fence that ran around the grounds as yet. For right now, he wanted to contemplate the place he had grown up in and come from without distractions.
The Manor still stood behind its gates and wards, untouched-from the outside. Draco was the only one likely to come here who would know that it had lost all its house-elves, just like his family had lost most of their money in the waves of “reparations” after the war. The house was decaying now, the way that any old house not protected by magic would. Draco hadn’t been here in years. It was too depressing.
Silence came from the house, and Draco could feel that same silence echoing in depressed little ripples through the wards. They endured for now, and would probably last longer than the stones themselves, but only in ghost form. Already they weakened, without a wizard to live inside them and give them heart, and strengthen them when they needed it.
That was what they didn’t understand, the people who hadn’t grown up in houses like this, and who denied themselves the knowledge of the wizarding culture that had raised such homes. The wards and the house-elves and the grounds might be separate from the wizards on a physical level, but not on a magical and emotional one. Without wizards of the appropriate family to serve, house-elves would descend into madness. Without a wizard to protect, the wards would attain their own version of madness. And the grounds would decay.
Draco stood there and noted the thin dark wavering of ivy up the sides of the Manor, the way that whole trees had sprouted on the grounds as if they’d had decades to grow there, and the derelict breath of the wards. Then he brushed his hand down the gates.
There was a sensation like someone drawing in and holding a breath. Then a chime shuddered through the whole Manor. The ground under Draco’s boots warmed. He heard a crack as some of the ivy froze and fell off the side of the house.
Then the ground was open before him, the gates swinging wide down a path that had suddenly lost the shade of monstrous trees.
Draco nodded graciously to the powers that watched him, and walked forwards, down the path that was made of gravel softly crackling underneath his bootheels. The ivy above him reached down with one tendril and touched him as he passed, and then shriveled. The wards were brighter and stronger when he glanced back. Draco smiled and laid his hand flat in the middle of the front door, beneath the knocker that was carved in a large M.
There was a shudder, a sway. The knocker changed shape into a silver dragon, and rose and flung itself against the door. This time, the chime was audible, and the door swung open. Draco entered his home.
Draco could feel the house stirring to life around him, whispering puddles of dust spiraling away from his feet, windows clouded with grime or plants glowing, and the walls brightening to a shine that showed off the portraits and mirrors that hung on them. Draco let his hands trail down the walls, ignoring the dust that gathered on his fingers. This was the first step in reclaiming his heritage. He had stayed away because-
Because the Unspeakables convinced me that my heritage was worthless. They weren’t the only ones, but they completed the work the war had started. Every time I said something about my family in training, they told me that was pretentious and against the spirit of the work. They broke my pride.
Draco knew it wasn’t personal. They had done it in different ways to different trainees, humiliating them for their intelligence or wealth or whatever they had been proud of. But that didn’t make the anger that burned in him now less.
They made us less proud so that we would be humble and easy to manipulate. So we would be less likely to take artifacts and keep them for our own. So that we wouldn’t seek to advance on our own ambition, but wait for the approval of the Department and ask them for everything.
Draco halted in the middle of the arched doorway that gave entrance to the dining room. Here he had seen the Dark Lord’s snake devour the Muggle Studies professor, a memory that had haunted him for years. But as he looked out into the room, he thought he could accept the past. Everything that had happened here was intense, carving little ripples and grooves in his memory, but he would rather have those memories than the blank dullness the Unspeakables had tried to instill in him.
The minute they put me in a situation where I had to use my own pride and my own degree of intelligence, I faltered. I couldn’t do anything. They made me weaker, not stronger.
That did argue that it wasn’t Invisible Heldeson or any of the other Unspeakable superiors who had chosen him for that mission. Then again, Draco had known that from the time Minister Hinsley came to visit him. And he suspected, now more than ever, that his past rivalry with Potter had a lot to do with it.
They didn’t value me for myself. They didn’t even know how to wield me as a weapon, because so much of my pride was beaten down that I couldn’t just go in there and plan to undermine Potter the way that I would have when I was still proud of being a Malfoy. They tossed me in there and expected something to happen without a plan, and when it didn’t happen, they blamed me for it.
Draco curled his lip. They had treated him with contempt-the same contempt he regarded them with now. How many times had Invisible Heldeson emphasized, over and over, that the greatest treasure the Unspeakables could have was a trained mind? But she hadn’t kept her word. She had turned on Draco simply because he had obeyed the precepts they’d taught him, trying to keep himself focused on the job and nothing else. So it was only certain kinds of trained minds they valued. When another Department in the Ministry wanted an individual, they would give him up without a qualm, as long as they got to keep their secrets and their artifacts.
Well. Now I can use the same skills and detachment that they trained into me and turn them against them.
Draco walked through the dining room and into a corridor beyond it, where he turned sharply left. Even though the windows were shining along the length of this corridor the same way they were elsewhere in the Manor, there was still a sense of brooding darkness here that Draco liked and his ancestors had encouraged. Draco finally came to a stop in front of a small door set deep in the wall, its edge exactly flush with the wall itself, and took a deep breath.
The runes carved on the door exhaled a sense of cold when he reached out to lay his hand on them. Until recently, this would have been as close as he could come to the treasure behind the door. Only the head of the Malfoy line could handle it, and that had been Draco’s father.
But Lucius had given up all responsibility and care for the Manor. Draco had known that intellectually. It had taken coming here for him to confirm it; the Manor would never have so warmed and thrummed around him if it would still respond only to Lucius.
So he curled his fingers as though he would turn the handle-shaped rune in the door, and murmured, “My birthright has come.”
The handle-shaped rune glowed for a moment, gold instead of silver, the color of the rest of the runes on the door, and the cold that it had radiated turned into soft warmth against Draco’s skin. Draco swallowed and pulled his hand back, making sure the shadow of his fingers fell squarely on the rune.
The rune glowed one more time, and then sank entirely into the door, forming a thin line of light on it that looked like the thin lines you got more generally around a door. Draco pulled again, and this time it opened.
The alcove it had protected was a single niche, carved of black stone that made Draco’s breath turn into frost until he fully ducked inside. Then it warmed up the same way the rune had. Draco half-knelt, half-crouched there and gazed into the niche, glad that the legends and tales his father had told him were true after all.
The structure inside looked like a simple cube at first, made of crystal like so many of the artifacts Draco had worked with, but it had silver lines carved into its sides that created a series of geometric figures. Then, Draco’s eyes watered as he realized the lines ran through the inside of the cube. Then he saw them bending back on each other and throwing shadows and achieving angles that were simply impossible even with the clarity of the cube. Then he saw them as a series of tangles or ripples spreading out from a center, a small silvery dot, that floated in the middle of the cube.
Draco closed his eyes before he could see any more. He knew now why so many outsiders had failed to handle the cube properly, even Malfoys who had believed they had succeeded to the headship of the family line. It was hard to pick your way through that maze of light and shadow. The center might not even exist. The shapes would be different in half a minute’s time. It was a good way to guard the artifact’s power, which was considerable even by the standards Draco had learned as an Unspeakable, and make sure that only the strong of will would even consider using it.
Luckily, that training as an Unspeakable now would enable him to control the artifact and channel its power. He stayed there, breathing, until he was in the cool grey frame of mind that Heldeson had trained him into. The artifact wouldn’t find a hold in his mind with fear or temptation to twist his thoughts.
Then he reached out.
The cube made his hand cool the instant he touched it. Draco refused to let that bother him. He had come to claim this artifact as the current head of the Malfoy line, the only one in the world with the right to touch it. It could hurt him. He respected its power. But he had respected the power of all the other things he had handled and touched and reshaped in the Department of Mysteries, and that did not mean fleeing in terror.
He reached up with his other hand and grasped the other side of the cube. For a moment, the slithering of the silvery lines on the cube against his hand felt like the twisting of snakes. He ignored that and cradled the cube in front of him, at chest height. After a few moments, he opened his eyes and looked into it.
The silvery lines writhed once more, an enchanting tangle that could draw someone in and drown him. Then they calmed, and Draco saw a maze staring up at him-the map of a maze, something he could thread.
Draco smiled. The cube could create a maze of protective wards for the Manor, and a map to every secret in it, and that was the reason it had been saved to be handled only by the head of the line.
But he intended to do something else with it, to fuse his Unspeakable training and a Malfoy artifact into a weapon the Department of Mysteries would never forget.
They lied to me. They offered me a place that they said my training would fit me for, and then they threw me away the minute the Minister asked for me. The value they placed on me was a lie. They might have people who still hate me for my family name-
Draco gave an impatient little shrug and soothed the anger back into nothingness. Whether they hated him or had done it for some other reason, he would find that out later. What mattered was that he had the ability to take revenge on them now, and the tool that would do it would be complete in a few days.
And then…
Then, he would take revenge. Oh, he would.
*
“But the Unspeakable isn’t going to suffer for betraying us?”
Harry had called a meeting of the whole pack just in case anyone wondered why Malfoy had vanished, and explained the situation as best as he could without getting into details that were too personal. The pack had listened in silence while he explained that Malfoy had been manipulated into being a negotiator when he had no skill at it, and therefore it was more than likely that someone in the Ministry wanted the negotiation to fail. All of that was true, as far as Harry knew. What else might have happened in Malfoy’s mind and heart, Harry didn’t know much about, and would have kept to himself if he did know.
He didn’t think it was betrayal of the pack. He had told Malfoy how much he would put himself out, and it was clear that Malfoy was going to turn against the faction in the Ministry-whichever one it was-who had used him. That meant his enemies would be Harry’s.
The pack had heard him out in silence, most of them gathered around him in a ring on the grass. It was Lisa who spoke up first, with a slight frown and shake of her head that told Harry how deeply she was disturbed. Most of the time, she wouldn’t have said anything against any of his decisions.
“But why should we help this Malfoy? It’s strange that the Ministry wanted to use him, but it should be of no concern to us.”
“This is the part where I have to speculate,” Harry said, looking at Sarah to see if she had anything to add. She stood still and looked at him benevolently, however, so he went on. “I think that they wanted to use Malfoy mainly because he and I were once rivals. Nothing else makes sense. I don’t know anything about Unspeakable artifacts. He didn’t know anything else. As far as I can work out, he didn’t even go on missions to find artifacts. He just worked with them and made them into other things.”
“Did you ask him that?” That was June Norcom, raising herself on her elbows.
“No,” said Harry. “That, admittedly, is an impression I only got from his being utter pants when confronted with a real situation.”
June chuckled, but she didn’t take her eyes from him, either. “I think that you’ve neglected to ask him some hard questions. Questions that you would have asked of other negotiators who had come so close to betraying our secrets to the Ministry.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Harry. “And I think it’s because of the personal relationship I had with him before. There’s no one else we’ve come in contact with who was like that.”
“You seem to be calling a rivalry a personal relationship,” said Sarah, looking at him and then looking elaborately down at her fingernails.
“Well, I have a talent for letting even people who annoyed me find a place in my life,” said Harry, and waited until she looked up before he smiled. “But as far as that part of the Ministry’s plan goes, it was brilliant. Malfoy provoked me like few other people have done. I doubt they thought that I would give him so many chances, though.”
June stirred restlessly. “You keep talking about they. Who do you mean? The Minister? The Unspeakables?”
“I don’t know,” Harry admitted. “That’s one thing that Malfoy wanted to find out, and I hope he succeeds. I know that this goes beyond Tyr Thornsberry, though. Otherwise, Malfoy would have left when I gave him my first answer about intending to invite him into the pack, or focused more on persuading me not to do that.”
“How do we find out more than this?” Sarah was listening to him intently again, her eyes gleaming. “No offense, sir, but I don’t want to depend just on someone from outside the pack to bring us information.”
“For the moment,” said Harry, “let me use my contacts in the Ministry. They’ve served us in the past,” he added, seeing the skeptical eyes trained on him. “But I’ll wait just a day for them to get back to me. Otherwise, we can set other efforts in motion.”
They nodded slowly. Harry knew that he might not have got them to agree even this quickly, but they’d just seen him fight Ninian, and Sarah, who usually spoke up in opposition to him at meetings like this, was acting agreeable. That prompted some other werewolves who might have caused trouble to go along with her.
Now, I just have to convince Paracelsus.
*
Paracelsus took a long time to show up once Harry went into the Forest and called him. Harry was thinking about spilling some of his blood on the ground, an emergency measure, when the shadows trembled in front of him and Paracelsus appeared.
He looked at Harry in a way he never had before, the lines of his face like old bone. Harry waited. When Paracelsus said nothing, Harry gave up and broke the silence. “I’d like you to go to the Ministry and find out who really sent Malfoy to negotiate with my pack, and to what purpose. I don’t think it had much to do with Thornsberry.”
“I’ve been patient,” Paracelsus whispered in response. Harry started. Paracelsus’s voice was running up and down the scale. Harry felt a snarl bubbling to his lips, and repressed the instinct to back away. It would do him no good here. “I’ve taunted and teased and engaged in contests and waited. I want your blood. I want it now.”
“I have no reason to give it to you if you won’t do this for me,” said Harry coldly. “We need that information, and I need to be strong for the battle to come.”
Paracelsus closed his eyes, and his face looked like one of the horrible eyeless masks that Harry had discovered during one of his first cases as an Auror, being sold in Knockturn Alley. He held back a shiver.
“I will find the information for you,” Paracelsus whispered. “And then I will come back, in the evening. There will be no battle, not if you wisely use what I will give you.” His eyes snapped open and focused on Harry. “And when I tell you what I know, you will give me your blood.”
Harry waited, poised, until Paracelsus’s nostrils flared open like his eyes. “Agreed,” he said.
Paracelsus gave him a sarcastic bow and turned, leaping into the trees and vanishing. Harry let out a shaky breath.
Now he just had to figure out a way around that little problem.
It shouldn’t be that hard, for someone who made an alliance with Sarah Woolwine and Draco Malfoy and conquered Frederick Ninian, all in the same day.
Chapter Fifteen.
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