[Wednesday One-Shots: Chapter Two of 'Camelopard Dreams'- Mingled With Blood, G/L, R
Chapter One.
Title: Camelopard Dreams (2/5 or 6)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Ginny/Luna
Rating: R
Content Notes: Gore, violence, minor character deaths, angst, murder mystery
Summary: Ginny’s a consulting detective called in to investigate a series of strange deaths where the victims appear to have been clawed apart by some sort of wild beast. Unable to identify the beast’s tracks, Ginny goes to Luna for help-only to find Luna’s the next target.
Author’s Notes: The next in my series of Wednesday one-shots, for an anonymous request that asked for Ginny/Luna and Ginny investigating a case where Luna gets involved because of her expertise on magical creatures. This will probably be at least five or six parts.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Chapter Two-Mingled With Blood
Ginny didn’t waste time chasing after the beast. Without Luna, she wouldn’t know how to capture or slow it down anyway.
And Luna was the most important. Whether she ever understood what Ginny had been hinting at all these years or not.
Ginny’s wand moved in twisting circles above the bloodied wound in Luna’s side, and, slowly, the crimson liquid rose in answer. This was a delicate spell, but Ginny had always been able to perform it. She chanted it long and slow, and the blood spiraled around her wand and formed into a glittering pole like a unicorn horn.
Ginny forced herself to ignore the way Luna held onto her wrist, with a slackening grip, as more and more blood was lost. This was the best way to heal her, and Ginny didn’t intend to succumb to panic. She gently slid the formed unicorn horn into Luna’s wound.
For a long moment, the magic stirred and foamed around Ginny’s wand as if reluctant to leave it. But Ginny thrust her will, hard, into it, and the unicorn horn changed into a blast of liquid that hit the sides of the wound and coated them like a bandage.
And it kept going, returning Luna’s blood to Luna’s body, giving back what the beast had stolen-as well as a little more. Ginny couldn’t push her own magic that deeply into the blood and not give up something of herself in return.
She only breathed, though, eyes fixed on the returning color in Luna’s face.
Luna gained enough strength to sit up, and Ginny supported her with one arm while she conjured a glass and filled it with the Aguamenti Charm. Luna sipped slowly, her eyes serious, locked on the footprints made of her blood.
“This has changed things,” she said.
Ginny nodded. “Yeah, whoever sent this thing wanted to target you as well. Maybe he knew that you could help-”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Luna said, glancing at Ginny and shaking her head. Her hair brushed Ginny’s knuckles, pale and feathery. Ginny hoped the breath she drew in wasn’t obvious. “I meant I can speak of the beast outside the house now. This incident has reversed the polarity of Saturn.”
Luna speaking like a centaur was always at her most incomprehensible, and Ginny didn’t bother asking for a translation. “Okay. What is it, then?”
“A camelopard.”
“A-something like a camel and a leopard?” Ginny was trying to remember if she’d ever heard that word or anything like it before, but no memories leaped out at her.
“Worse. Much worse.” Luna was solemn. “It’s something like a cow in the front-that part made the hoofprints-and a leopard behind. It’s not a natural creature. But it can arise, if not be born.”
Ginny didn’t feel a hint of her usual impatience with that kind of statement, given that she knew she was lucky Luna wasn’t bleeding out in St. Mungo’s right now. “Do you mean certain circumstances come together, and a camelopard is born?”
“Not born. Never born. But yes. Like a storm comes together, or a sunset, or a Humdinger.”
Once again, Ginny could ignore part of that. She focused on the part that made sense. “Would someone have to call up these conditions, or would they just happen on their own, regardless of what someone wanted?”
Luna paused, and darted a look around at Ginny that was like a fish coming out of coral. “Very good,” she said, so soft and distant Ginny bent down to hear her, and felt Luna’s hair against her cheek again. “Yes. Someone could call the camelopard up. And until it dissolved, it would serve that person. Not without attracting Wrackspurts, of course.”
Ginny smiled at her. “Of course. What do you mean, dissolving?”
“Camelopards are such unstable creatures.” Luna struggled to stand, and although Ginny winced a little when she thought about the blood, she helped her up. Then she waved her wand to banish the blood from the cobblestones. “It comes of not existing the way people thought they should, you see. They were called giraffes, and sometimes people thought cattle and leopards bred to create them. Or cattle and hyenas. There are all sorts of legends.” Luna squinted at the house. “I still want to see it.”
“All right,” said Ginny. She had another question, though. “Could the person who called up the camelopard get it to attack a certain person?”
“Certainly. What would be the point, otherwise?”
Ginny hesitated, caught. “Well-I thought maybe someone would call up a camelopard just because they wanted to study it. Or maybe use it in the kind of study that would contravene the Experimental Breeding Ban.”
“Camelopards can’t breed. They think their children are the clouds, and then get upset when the clouds change. It’s very tragic.”
She can feel sympathy for the creature who nearly killed her, Ginny thought, as she steered Luna towards the house. She’s so remarkable.
*
Remarkable or not, Luna’s eyes still widened when they stepped inside the house. Ginny followed her gaze and grimaced a little. Yes, the Aurors had cleaned the blood and taken away most of the objects that had received the stains, but they couldn’t get rid of the impressions in the carpet or the general sense that something had happened here.
“How quickly did she die?” Luna whispered.
“The vision made it seem pretty instant.”
“That doesn’t mean it was.”
Ginny shrugged, feeling awkward when Luna only stood and stared at the crushed footprints in the carpet. “I only know what the vision tells me. It chose what it thought was the most important moment of time.”
Luna walked over to the desk without answering. She touched the edge of a drawer, and then knelt down in front of it. Ginny followed, although she doubted she would see whatever drew Luna’s attention. She usually didn’t.
Luna tapped her fingers several times on the wood, then paused, then tapped them again. By the time Ginny realized there was a distinctive rhythm there, Luna had already stopped and almost bolted across the room, heading straight for the place where Ginny had seen her in the vision.
Ginny swallowed and tightened her grip on the wand. She reminded herself that, even if the camelopard attacked again, she had managed to protect and heal Luna last time. And Luna must be feeling better than she looked if she was moving around like this so soon after being gored.
Luna turned to face the desk, and raised her hand in the warding motion Ginny had seen in the vision. “Oh, no,” she whispered.
“What is it?” Ginny came up to stand beside Luna and looked at the desk.
And this time, she did see it, even before Luna could say something. There was a carving on the edge of the desk, so small and in such an odd place that it wasn’t visible to someone staring at the desk from any other angle. Besides, even if Ginny had had a notion such a thing was there, it probably would have been covered with blood before.
She was surprised the Aurors hadn’t seen it when they cleaned off the blood, though.
“They would have seen it and not known what it meant,” Luna murmured, answering her thoughts. “An odd carving and an odd fancy, they would have thought it.”
“And it’s not?” Ginny found herself keeping her voice low without thinking about it, her eyes tracing the carving. It was simple enough, a circle almost complete, with a small gap in the side where the lines that made it flowed out to join a cloud shape.
She remembered, then, Luna saying that camelopards thought their children were clouds. She caught her breath. “She summoned it?”
“She arranged for it to happen,” Luna corrected. Her voice was deep with sadness, and she still hadn’t dropped her hand. Ginny realized now that she hadn’t been holding some predator away after all in the vision. She had been trying to prevent herself from looking at the carving. “That does not mean she meant to die.”
“I don’t think she did. She was reaching for her wand when it struck her down.”
Luna nodded, her eyes closed. “And now she has no control over it. Unless she was a necromancer?” She looked at Ginny inquiringly.
“If she had been, the Aurors would have found her books and shut down the house so tightly no one could get access to it.” Aurors didn’t mess around with necromancy, as Ginny had discovered when she got caught up in a particularly nasty case last year.
“Then there’s no chance of speaking to her until her spirit calms down,” Luna said, with a long sigh.
“Do you know why the camelopard attacked you?”
“It was sad and hurting. And the woman who died was blonde, wasn’t she?”
Ginny closed her eyes, trying to imagine the color of the hair she had seen under the endless drapes of blood. “I think so. It was a little-hard to tell.”
“Then it might have thought I was her. They’re not very smart, camelopards.” Luna sighed again. “Unfortunately, they also don’t like being deprived of prey, and they come back and stalk it until they catch it.”
“So you’re in danger until the case ends?”
“It seems so,” said Luna, with the kind of unconcern that drove Ginny absolutely mad. She concentrated on the carving again. “But I’ve never seen this kind of carving before. At least, not when it was used to arrange a camelopard. Some magizoologists just use it to represent camelopards in magical texts.”
“I’ll protect you.”
“Thank you.” Luna flashed her a smile. “I would hate to die before I find out what the carving means.”
And I hope that someday I can get through to you. But Ginny restricted herself to giving Luna a small smile and asking, “Is there anything else you need to see here?”
Luna turned her head, her eyes wide and dreaming, focusing now and then on corners of the room as though she saw visions there like the ones Ginny could create with her True Sight spell. “No,” Luna murmured at last. “I thought there might be something to tell me why she would have arranged for such a dangerous creature to happen, but…no.”
“What will happen to it once we keep it from reaching you?” Ginny asked, making sure she was slightly in front of Luna as she stepped out of the house. But nothing attacked them on the house, and Ginny relaxed and walked towards the Apparition point again.
Her hand rested lightly on Luna’s elbow. It was no more than an indulgence, she told herself. Especially since Luna didn’t object.
“It might seek out other prey.” Luna’s eyes were shut, her breathing even, as if she was trying to work herself into a meditative trance as she walked. “But because it manifested in a human house, I fear that it will seek out others, under the mistaken impression of comfort there.”
Ginny grimaced. “Wonderful. I don’t suppose there’s a way to track it?”
Luna glanced down as if she expected to see the camelopard’s bloody footprints in the street.
“Besides that,” Ginny said, and she must have sounded impatient and worried enough to attract Luna’s attention, because Luna stepped walking to look up at her. She reached out a hand a second later and rushed her fingers gently through Ginny’s hair.
“I will be fine,” she said. “A camelopard has hunted me, but there are many other things that have happened to me that are worse. My imprisonment during the war. My mother’s death. They have protected me.”
“Protected you?” Ginny blinked and tried to ignore the way her scalp tingled from the touch of Luna’s hand. “What do you mean?”
“They have kept me from feeling fear, because nothing else is going to be as bad as them,” Luna said simply. “I couldn’t witness my own death in the same way I witnessed my mother’s, and being killed by a camelopard is quicker than imprisonment.”
She turned and held out her arm for Ginny to Apparate them. Ginny swallowed and took her hand.
*
Ginny lay in bed that night, and breathed softly. As long as she lay absolutely motionless-sometimes pretending that one of her arms had turned completely to stone, so that she couldn’t move it even if she wanted to-she could sort through the emotions and thoughts bubbling to the top of her mind.
She would have to hunt for the camelopard with Luna’s help.
That help would put Luna in even more danger than she was currently.
But no one else had any idea about them, or where the beast would strike next, or what would happen if the woman who had died had caused it to manifest deliberately. Ginny would need Luna’s help even to explain the legal issues to the Aurors correctly. She needed so much help…
This time, Ginny had to count backwards from one hundred, reaching almost fifty before the tension that had slipped into her limbs let her relax again.
No. I’m not the one putting Luna in danger. My vision said she was going to be there anyway. And she was there.
“I just wish I wasn’t as attracted to her as I am,” Ginny whispered, her eyes falling shut again and closing out the dim outlines of the chair to the side of her bed, and the small table where her lamp sat.
There. It was said. Ginny had known it for a long time, since the habit she had of stealing glances at Luna had helped her realize that she never looked at Harry the same way, but she had never spoken the words.
I thought maybe they wouldn’t be true if I kept them silent. And now I sound like I’m parroting Mum.
Ginny closed her eyes more tightly and concentrated on the sensation of keeping her arms still. She wouldn’t be alone. The Aurors would also want to know how to contain the camelopard, and they would join her in protecting Luna. Ginny had already sent an owl explaining what had happened tonight and what they’d discovered.
It might not be enough. But on the other hand, the world was full of mights. Charlie might get killed by a dragon tomorrow. George might snap out of his grief and act more like the man he had once been. Mum might decide she had enough grandchildren and stop bothering Ginny to provide her with more.
That thought made a burst of quivering laughter move through Ginny’s chest. No, she really didn’t believe that. It was impossible to make herself believe it even when she tried her hardest.
Ah, well, she thought, comfortably, and was at last able to sleep, in the wake of her cheer.
Chapter Three.
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