Chapter Twenty-Two of 'Keep This Wolf'- Attack the Enemy
Chapter Twenty-One.
Title: Keep This Wolf (22/?)
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 Twenty-Two-Attack the Enemy
The howl that woke Draco woke him rolling, reaching for his wand before he was consciously aware that he was doing so. That was a howl of the kind that he heard regularly in his nightmares, from the time that Fenrir Greyback had haunted the Manor.
Then he remembered where he was, and sat up, shaking his head. It was probably some sort of signal for the pack, and although Draco couldn’t interpret it, he could still decipher the events it produced.
When Draco heard rushing feet, he nodded and stood up. The artifacts on his belt swung along with him. Draco touched the crystal cube dangling from its chain around his neck. A pity that he had always informed his superiors about what his artifacts did the second he had figured it out. He could have had some more surprises for them if he’d been more reserved.
A fortnight ago you wouldn’t have been able to imagine rebelling against the Unspeakables at all.
There was that. Draco knew he had a dangerous smile on his face as he strode to the door of his guest house and opened it, and for once, he didn’t try to hide it or worry about who was going to see.
Another howl sounded. Draco saw a few more shapes gliding through the trees. He joined them, making sure to keep back and out of the way of the ones already wielding wands. He didn’t know the whole of Potter’s battle plan, but his artifact was too precious to risk in combat until everything was ready.
“Malfoy.”
Draco nearly leaped out of his skin. Potter had melted out of the darkness to stand at his side, his eyes wide and reflecting the moonlight that hid under the trees. Not a full moon, Draco saw, which deprived the werewolves of their most fearsome weapon. Then again, it would have been a nightmare procuring Wolfsbane for this many.
Unless they do it on a regular basis. There was too much that Draco hadn’t had time to learn about Potter’s pack.
“You said that you needed to be at the center of the Forest, right?” Potter hardly waited for him to nod before he turned and began to lead Draco into the shadows of the highest branches. “You need to come with me, make sure you’re in the right position when they sweep down on us. They’re coming fast. Openly.”
“I don’t need to be in the exact center,” Draco said, jogging after him and trying to imagine what the Unspeakable attack would look like from their side, the side he would have been on until less than a fortnight ago. Well, he wouldn’t have been in the middle of the attack unless they really needed someone to wield certain artifacts, but it was the principle of the thing that counted. “I need to be in the symbolic center. Can you arrange that?”
Potter glanced at him, and didn’t ask the stupid questions that Draco had anticipated. Instead, he nodded. Impossible though it was without the moon to change him, Draco thought he saw a pelt of grey fur shimmering down the middle of his back, tipped with dew, as Potter made a sharp turn to the left and began guiding him along the course of a little creek. “This way.”
Draco fell silent, content to follow Potter and watch the nape of his neck. They worked together better than they should, he thought. They were incredibly well-suited, they knew the moment when the time came to shut up and do as they were supposed to do, and that was…
He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know what it meant. Maybe he didn’t need to decide on that right now, only make sure that he and Potter were really as much in accord as he thought they were, and they could bring down this enemy.
“Here.”
Draco jerked to a stop. They were in front of Potter’s little house. He snorted a bit. “Is this the symbolic center just because you’re the leader of the pack?”
“Of course it is.” Potter stepped away from him and faced towards the edge of the wood that was still ringing with howls. Draco thought the howls probably did convey information, but he wouldn’t put it past the werewolves to also use them to frighten the Unspeakables into pissing themselves. “It was the house where the former leader lived until I deposed him. And we don’t have a central clearing where we conduct rituals or something.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Do what you need to do.”
Draco knelt down in the center of the clearing and briefly dropped his mind into the crystal. The maze he had created shimmered in response. Draco half-smiled. Yes, this was going to work the way he had thought it should. He reached out and cupped one hand in the air.
Nothing touched it. Draco sighed, glad that he hadn’t trusted in his communion with Potter too much after all. “Potter. I need a drop of your blood.”
“What for?” Potter’s voice did sound deeper than it had. Perhaps he was simply not repressing his growls around Draco right now.
“You’re the symbolic center of this territory,” said Draco. “Not the place where you live. I should have thought of that before.”
He expected a scolding for not thinking of it before, but Potter didn’t actually do that. He reached silently into his chest instead, and Draco heard the wet sound of flesh tearing open. He shuddered a little and turned his eyes back to the crystal. But he had to say something, even if he couldn’t watch. “You could have used your wand to cut yourself across the hand, you know.”
“I could have, but the blood from near the heart is more symbolically powerful,” said Potter, and then he extended his hand and placed a careful drop of blood on top of the cube. “This is enough?”
Draco nodded without saying anything. It was, and he appreciated, more than Potter could know, that he didn’t have to touch the werewolf blood. It probably didn’t carry much risk of infection, but there were debates about that in the Department of Mysteries, and they had few werewolves available to experiment with.
Draco snorted in the next second. And I still think more like an Unspeakable than is comfortable to remember.
“What?”
Draco shook his head and glanced into the distance. The cries were getting closer, he thought, but they were in the confused sort of state where he couldn’t tell who was winning, if the howls were plain howls or also sounds of despair, and he also couldn’t distinguish the telltale noises of artifacts. “Nothing.”
Potter was at least enough in tune with him to know when to let it go. They were still, and it was the stillness that let Draco feel the magic building in the air a second later.
He turned his shoulder to Potter and said in a light tone, “They’re going to ring a bell that fills your mind with images of your worst fears. Be ready.”
Potter shifted, and Draco thought he was bracing himself, the way Draco was. But instead of hunkering down, taking hold of something real to remind himself of what was solid in the midst of those hallucinations, Potter howled.
The sound picked up Draco, swirled around him, filled his ears and his world with pouring sound. Draco shuddered and fought the urge to bring his hands up over his ears. This was too much, this was exploding and expanding around him, and he was-
The ringing of the bell had ceased.
Draco lifted his hands from his ears. For a moment, he wondered if Potter had really prevented anything by the howl. But then he heard the triumphant noises from the rest of the Forest, noises like howls, and no human sounds.
“You gave them strength by your voice?” he murmured to Potter, not turning to look at him, his mind slipping into the crystal maze so that he almost missed the answer.
“And you. It seems that you consider yourself part of my pack after all, Malfoy, even though you aren’t able to transform.”
Luckily, Draco didn’t need to answer that, because he didn’t know what he would have said. He was in the middle of the maze, and it opened around him as shadows of walls, silhouettes of traps. He reached towards minds he knew well, minds without the tinge of wildness that marked the pack, minds with the familiar tang of steel. The self-control that Invisible Heldeson encouraged in all trainee Unspeakables was going to be their undoing.
And hers. Draco had been too often under her tutelage not to recognize that particular shimmering, bladed mind on the edge of the Apparition point.
The maze was suddenly around them, and the transition between the cube and their own interiority was blurred, the way that the magic of an artifact blended with the magical core of an Unspeakable working it. Draco heard screaming, more like the screams of hawks than humans. The vicious cries shredded at the edge of his control, but he ignored that, clapping his hands together. The maze turned and moved with his hands, changing shape like tissue paper.
Then their thoughts were trapped inside the maze, and Draco opened his eyes, knowing their bodies would be standing still, their minds drifting captive. They would try to find their way out of this particular puzzle, but they had no experience with the Forbidden Forest that was comparable to what they would have had if Draco had made the maze into an image of the Department of Mysteries.
Draco turned his head, opening his mouth to reassure Potter that they had won.
And saw Umbridge there, her hand upraised and her mouth curved with triumph, clutching a medallion shaped like a white disk-like a full moon, Draco realized a moment later-and Potter was shivering and twisting in the wake of its rays, his body warping and rushing with fur.
*
The beast’s mind was dark, filled with blood, the rage leaking in around the corners through the hole that he kept tamped shut most of the time.
The blood told him what he had to do. It filled his mouth with teeth. It lined his toes with nails that could infect anything. It made his muscles coil, and he knew that he could spring on everything, and nothing would resist him.
The moon was up.
He spun around, rot in his nostrils, meat and salt and blood under skin beynd that. Beside him was a member of his pack. He knew that he didn’t smell like a wolf, but he was a member of his pack nevertheless. He stared at him with fear, but at the same time, the beast could hear the lingering echoes of his own howl in the air, and that howl had marked and freed the staring one. There was no need to attack him, not when he was pack.
That left someone else.
The beast faced the moon, the moon that was on the earth with no clouds or stars around it in the sky. That was strange. But the beast had seen stranger, and he knew that standing here with no blood in his mouth was worst of all. If there was the moon, that meant there had to be sky beyond it, open sky he could jump through.
The beast sprang, and hit what he hadn’t seen for the light, hadn’t smelled for the rot and forest smells everywhere. Something that squealed and went down beneath him, and the moon disk spun away into the distance.
It wasn’t the moon, it was magic. And that made the one who had used it to threaten him a wizard. Not pack. Something soft and pummeling and stinking of the need to run.
Food.
The beast tore into it, into her, because there was a smell of eggs and growth beneath it all, thick and spent. He rejoiced in the screaming. His prey screamed like this when it was best, when he was speeding through the trees with his pack beside him, and there was wind under his tail and shadows fleeting across the ground.
“Potter. No.”
The first word didn’t matter to the beast, but the second word struck like a maddening whip into his flank. He knew that word. He hated it. He turned towards the member of his pack that had dared to disobey, a howl building up in his throat that would be more of a roar this time. He knew how it could rip, sometimes worse than claws.
The member of his pack knelt down in front of him. That made the beast pause, because he knew that this one didn’t go on four legs. Pack though he was.
The intense eyes, not as intense as they should be, looked into his, and then the member of the pack shook his head. “You can’t murder her,” he murmured. “You’ll hate yourself when you wake up. If you were killing her to defend your territory, that would be one thing, but not like this.”
The beast prowled back and forth, slowly. Some of those words, he knew, but they slashed and slid into strange patterns in his mind. Some of the patterns were like muscles in the bodies of prey. But he didn’t know what they were doing there, and that made him snarl.
“It’s all right,” said the member of his pack. He reached out. The beast focused on his paw. No, his hand. The word came back to him out of the blood and the dark. The hand landed slowly on his head. “I know you’re in there. Maybe more of you is in there than normal, because the real moon didn’t turn you. Can you listen to what I’m saying? Can you obey?”
The beast threw back his head and howled once, and then pounced towards the member of his pack, because obey was a word he knew, and that wasn’t something he did. In seconds, he had the member of his pack on the ground underneath him, caged by his legs, their chests brushing, his teeth hovering above his pack member’s throat.
The reek of fear was all around him, worse than the deep mildew and damp song of the fallen leaves. The beast wanted to bite. The reek was terrible. He wanted to gain clear air. He wanted to eat.
But the pack member closed his eyes and tilted his head to the side, baring his throat. The beast made the desire to bite sit still, the way he would have tamed an impatient youngster. He lowered his head and sniffed in the space between the pack member’s neck and collarbone, trying to understand why this one was close to him when he wasn’t a werewolf.
The pack member let him, and then reached up with a hand again. He had a stick in it. The beast growled at it. He remembered that he disliked sticks, but not why.
“Finite Incantatem.”
The pain flooded through him in reverse, the smells dropped away, the blood was no longer there. He could see, he could hear, he was on all fours, and he remembered his name, and Malfoy was beneath him.
Harry writhed to the side. It was the only thing he could think of to do. His body hurt in a way that he hadn’t experienced since his first transformation. Well, this particular change had been caused by a magical artifact. That was probably the difference.
He was thinking very, very carefully, so he didn’t need to think too closely about what he had almost done.
Then he turned around, and saw Malfoy slowly rising to his feet, and Umbridge’s mangled body lying on the ground, and a whine erupted from his throat. Malfoy caught his breath, and then he was standing in front of Harry with a peculiar look on his face, one hand reaching out as if he would catch Harry’s mouth and clip his jaws shut.
“You can’t,” he whispered. “Think about the way that your voice affects your pack. Even me. They’ll panic and run when they hear you whine, won’t they?”
That was true. Harry slammed his eyes shut and dropped to his knees again, shaking. He wrapped his arms around himself and breathed through his mouth.
“You kept me from killing Umbridge,” he said, when he could speak again. “Thank you.”
“It might still need to be done,” said Malfoy, surprising him utterly. Harry looked up at her, blinking. “But not this way. You would have hated yourself for what you did. And it would have been murder. You would have been hunted down for it.”
“You think I’m not going to be hunted down for infecting someone?” Harry turned his head to Umbridge, then turned away again. Despite being well-acquainted with the damage a werewolf’s claws and teeth could inflict, he found that he could barely look at those wounds without wanting to vomit.
I made them. Just because the bloodlust was driving me, not because I wanted to. Malfoy was right. If he was going to kill Umbridge, it should be execution and not murder.
“I think that we won, and we have a right to choose how we want to respond now,” Malfoy said shortly. “Listen. Can you hear the Unspeakables attacking any longer?”
Harry lifted his head and let his senses spread their cloak around him, the cloak that protected and defended him, and which most of the time simply brought him all the scents and sounds and sights of the Forest. There was silence in response. Harry swallowed a little. So everything was all right, then.
“You put them in your maze?” he asked, and looked at the crystal cube in Malfoy’s hands.
“Their minds,” Malfoy corrected him sharply, and then turned around and gave a smile in Umbridge’s direction. “But she isn’t an Unspeakable, so she wasn’t caught by the trap. I didn’t expect her to actually be here.” He gave Harry a quick glance, seemed not to find the comprehension he was looking for, and said, “What I mean is, we’re the ones who can determine what happens to her right now.”
Harry made himself look at the wounds, and this time he nodded. He had tried to live with the consequences of his transformation and his decisions since then as best he could, not backing away from them. That was how rogue werewolves were born.
“She’s infected now,” he said. “I can command her.”
Malfoy gave a little sigh, but Harry could smell the satisfaction rising from his body.
We’ll talk about how I recognized you as a member of my pack and that was enough to keep the beast from attacking you, Harry thought, as he made his way over to Umbridge. But later, when there’s something else to insulate us from the effects a little.
Even if that thing was the punishment of an enemy.
Chapter Twenty-Three.
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