A Dish Served Cold

Chapter 40 – Wolf

Percy took a deep breath and straightened his robes. He was feeling rather nervous about tonight. After all, it was one thing to say that you were going to replace the Minister of Magic and something else entirely to actually go and do it.

His wife was brushing out her hair and frowning at herself in the mirror. Dora had changed the color to brown and shifted her face to make herself look like a perfect duplicate of Fudge’s secretary.

The rest of the group had all arranged for legitimate reasons to be in the Ministry this evening. It was important that no one ever suspect them of having “influenced” the Minister. They would all arrive at his office by separate routes and if all went well, no one but the Minister would ever know that they had even been there.

Even so, it was dangerous, illegal, and probably unethical. Percy had never even imagined himself capable of such behavior.
Maybe he wasn’t as different from the rest of the Weasleys as he had always thought.

Severus watched Pansy’s face with a great deal of interest. Her eyes were fever bright and darted around the room as though she was certain that some Muggle boy was lurking just out of sight ready to pounce on her and rape her at any minute.

It was rather disturbing.

“I just can’t do it, sir!” she insisted and he nodded at her with understanding. He did understand too. All her life Pansy had been taught to fear and hate Muggles, to work her way up the rungs of society and to be a perfect little Pureblood debutante. The Ministry’s new law turned all of that on its head.

Pansy wasn’t imaginative or flexible enough to adapt.

“I have been contemplating the problem, as you requested, Miss Parkinson,” he replied, soothingly. “I think that I may have a solution to your dilemma,” he continued. He had thought about this for a long time and knew that by helping Pansy now, he was saving three lives, her future husband’s and any children that she might bear to him.

“Thank Merlin!” she breathed out.

“Some people that I know are arranging “exits” for purebloods who wish to leave without the formalities that the Ministry requires.” His voice was liquid silk and he kept it very low. It would be bad if he were to be overheard having this particular conversation.

Pansy gave him a hopeful look and Severus realized that he would be glad to help her escape the law. For all that he was becoming reconciled to Hermione, he still wished that he could have avoided the matrimonial trap altogether himself.

At least he could get Pansy out of it.

Bill woke to find himself surrounded by the Yidoni clan. However, he noted the conspicuous absence of Sarit Yidoni herself. He was in a stone room with rugs thrown on the floor and a bed built into one of the walls beneath a window. It was simple, elegant, and surprisingly friendly.

“Boker tov,” Yonaton Yidoni, Sarit’s son, intoned with a sardonic air.

“Good morning to you too,” Bill replied in English. He could see Yoshua watching him from a corner, but where Bill had expected a look of betrayal there was instead an expression of transcendent hope. It was a little baffling.

The Yidoni clan consisted of Yonaton, his wife Rifkah, his sister Tzipporah, her husband Adam, their daughter, Aviva, and Yonaton’s children, Yoshua and Avram. They were all regarding him with curiosity and undisguised happiness, which wasn’t at all what he’d been expecting.

“If you had told Yoshua what you intended we could have let you without so many problems,” the plump Rifkah scolded gently. Her
English was only slightly accented and Bill had no problem following her. He wanted to bang his head into the wall though at her words.

“You mean I could have avoided the dragon, the snakes, the djinn, and the very uncomfortable lunch?” he asked with something close to a wail. The amused expressions of his hosts only sank his spirits lower.

“But of course; you think we come through all that?” Tzipporah asked with a frown. She was a tiny woman, very like Sarit, but with compassionate eyes and no haughtiness.

“No, of course not, but I didn’t know you would want to help me,” he answered with a touch of exasperation. After all, he was invading their house to break a curse their grandmother had cast.

“The curse has hurt all of us, it was only supposed to hurt the Snapes, but we suffer too,” Yonaton explained in his thick accent. He was hard to follow, but Bill could make it out with some effort.

“I’d noticed,” he shot back dryly. The portrait of the young Sarit had told him a great deal already.

“Then you will break the curse?” Yoshua asked him with shining eyes. Bill grinned at the young boy.

“I didn’t come all this way to fail now.” Bill got up from the bed and pulled a collapsible suitcase from his pocket and set it on the floor. He tapped it with his wand and opened the now rather large trunk with a flourish.

Inside were the tools of his trade, and the eager Yidoni gathered round to stare in wonderment.

Looking around at his appreciative audience, Bill knew that this was going to be fun.

Hermione put her feet up on the tuffet with a sigh of relief. Hagrid was bustling around his cottage, fetching tea and scones for her, but she was just happy to be off of her swollen ankles and still.

“I fetched ‘em down from tha kitchens,” he told her as he set a particularly un-Hagrid like snack down in front of her. The tea was liquid rather than solid and the scones were soft rather than rock-like. It was the most edible meal she had ever had there before.

“Thank you Hagrid, but you needn’t have gone to such trouble,” she assured him, not wanting him to think that his usual fare was less than appetizing.

“No, no, Mistress Tamarind, she was insistent tha’ you only eat things tha’ she had cleared fer ya,” he replied and Hermione made a mental note to thank the mediwitch the next time she saw her. Maybe she could buy her flowers or heap her with gold.

“She’s very protective,” Hermione temporized. Hagrid beamed at her and she knew that she had hit the right note. “So, how is Grawp?” she asked, changing the subject to something less potentially explosive.

She listened to Hagrid burble on about his baby half-brother for the next half hour or so, feeling comfortable, safe, and well cared for.
Harry and Ron came bursting in midway through a discourse on Grawp’s amiable nature, panting and out of breath.

“Sorry we’re late,” they chorused. The boys were dirty, bruised and carrying their brooms. Looking at them, you would never know that they were sober, married men with children on the way. They just looked like any teenage boys who’d been playing Quidditch.

It made her very happy.

Remus read over the ritual one last time and sighed. Severus had gathered everything that was needed and had even provided a cage for the wolf to be confined in, once it was separated from him. Glancing around the ritual room, he couldn’t see anything that had been forgotten or left out.

The ingenious glass cauldron that Hermione and Severus had created together was innocently suspended above a small flame, ready for the rest of the elixir to be brewed. If all went well, within an hour, Remus would be cured.
Or he would be dead.

With a wicked grin, Bill cast the last warding spell and unrolled his silk cords. He laid them in a circle around the group and then tied the ends together. Nothing short of an elder god could break through a circle so cast and he let out the breath he had been holding in relief.
There was nothing Sarit could do to stop them now.

Harry and Ron had been assigned the task of forcing the wolf into the cage. Ginny was to hold onto Remus and monitor his vitals during the ritual. Moira was to wield the sword that would do the ritual separating and Hermione was assisting Severus to finish brewing the elixir itself.

Hermione was quite confident in Severus’ ability to pull off his end, but she was less certain of Moira. The Ravenclaw came from a long line of War Wizards, so she ought to be up to it, but her pregnancy had worn heavily on her and she looked nearly transparent in the shaft of light that poured through the stained glass window and bathed her in shades of blue.

“Are we ready?” asked Severus and Hermione noticed that he too was looking at Moira in concern.

“Ready!” Ron and Harry chorused and saluted them with their drawn wands.

“Ready,” Ginny choked out, her face pale and filled with concern.

“Ready,” Remus answered with a quiet strength that seemed to steady the others.

“Ready,” Moira assured them with a fierce look on her face. She grinned at them and Hermione tried to have more confidence, but all she felt was scared.

With a sweep of his black robes Severus grabbed the monk’s hood blossom and crushed it quickly in the mortar and pestle. The scent rose up and he dumped the contents of the pestle into the glass cauldron. Smoke billowed out and up, twisting and writhing as it escaped into the air.

He reached for the dragon’s blood and poured in the right amount and then stirred quickly with a silver stick, three times widdershins. The smoke changed direction and gathered around the blade of Moira’s sword.

With a smooth motion that belied her weakness, Moira swung the sword at Remus.

Bill pulled out two golden hooks and began to pick at the fabric of the curse. Like old knitting, time had tangled it and warped it and he had to find the original shape of it before he could pull it apart entirely.

The door to the room banged open and Sarit came running into the room, her face white, and her mouth open in a scream.

From within the circle, Bill could hear nothing that she was saying and merely bent his head to his task. He had a curse that needed breaking.

The sword went through Remus passing through his body and coming out the other side. He screamed and seemed to split open from the inside. A wolf, brown and scarred leapt from his chest and lunged at Ginny.

Harry and Ron were right there though, and with sharp bursts of fire they herded the creature into the waiting cage, slamming the door behind it and locking it in safely.

Ginny was on her knees beside Remus staring at him as he lay upon the floor. His body, cut open a moment before was now miraculously whole and his chest rose and fell in steady rhythm.

The wolf howled and threw itself against the bars and with a swift movement Harry cast a sleeping spell it.

“Good God, I think we did it,” Hermione whispered into the sudden silence and they all stared about at each other in awe. Severus was the first to recover.

“As if there was ever any doubt,” he tossed off with sublime arrogance, but Hermione could see the way his hands were shaking and knew the truth. He’d been just as scared as she had.

Bill found the last strands and pulled them apart. The silent explosion knocked them all to the ground and he lay still for a while staring up at the ceiling and seeing sparks.

“What have you done? Stupid meddling fool!” Sarit was screaming yet Bill could barely hear it, his ears were still ringing from the explosion. “Don’t you understand? He’ll know now! He will know everything!” she continued, tears running down her face and an expression of horror in her eyes.

“What?” Bill asked, muzzy and disoriented.

“The curse was the only thing that kept Grindelwald from knowing until it was too late and it was all that kept Voldemort from knowing either! But you’ve destroyed the last protections and doomed us all!” She was shrieking in his face and there was such despair that Bill felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach.

“Knowing what?” he gasped out, still weak and dizzy. He had somehow missed something important and he needed to know what it was.

“From knowing how to escape the doom laid on them. The curse kept the Seers safe from his control. Now we will all die or be enslaved, because you could not keep from meddling!” Sarit was screaming and her family was cowering against the walls of the room, looking terrified.

Bill had a feeling that things were about to go from bad to worse.

Lucius read the note from Trevesco and sighed. He supposed that it had been too much to hope that Voldemort wouldn’t notice his change of heart, but he had planned for this eventuality as well.

It was time to go, before Voldemort decided to remove him permanently. Besides, he missed Narcissa.

The vision hit him in the bathroom. His first impulse was to be deeply irritated by the timing, but the vision itself swept aside such minor annoyances.

Severus saw himself bound and drugged, telling every vision to Voldemort, his Seer powers guiding the mad wizard around every hazard between him and world domination. He saw Hermione, her dead body on the ground before him, the baby ripped from her belly, as cold and dead as she was.

He came out of the vision shaking and ill. He ran to the toilet and heaved the entire contents of his last meal into the porcelain. The bathroom was a very good place to have these visions, he realized, especially ones this bad.

“Severus? Are you all right?” Hermione’s voice came sharp and worried through the door.

“I’m fine,” he called back. It was a lie, of course, but the kind of white lie that every man told his wife. “I’ll be out in a moment.”
He had thought that he could keep the Seer gift from her, but he realized there was no way to do that now.

She had to know and Severus needed to talk to Albus … and his grandmother.

Blaise Zabini watched his wife pacing back and forth in their new, highly warded chambers with a touch of concern. Ever since their conversation with the Headmaster, she had been nervous and silent. She obviously didn’t believe in the safety of Hogwarts and he wished there was a way to reassure her.

Lisa turned a strained face on him and he wanted nothing more than to reach out and comfort her, like he would have any human being in pain, but her fear of him was palpable.

He had done his duty by her, been gentle and considerate, he hoped. His own lack of interest in the proceedings had probably been obvious but he had performed reasonably well considering.

Yet, she still drew away from any contact with him at all, as though he were the worst rapist in history. It made him sad and a little irritated. He wished that she would stop playing the martyr.

“What will your mother do, when she gets the letter?” she asked him suddenly and he sighed.

“There isn’t much she can do. I have told her that Professor Dumbledore has warded all the rooms and there is no way that I can arrange your death in the circumstances. It’s not like she can get to you here,” he added, trying to keep his exasperation out of his voice.

“Don’t get all shirty on me. It’s not your life at stake, Blaise,” she retorted. He tried to look apologetic, but it was hard.

“Actually, if my mother ever figures out what I’ve done, it is my life, Lisa.” He spaced out the words, trying to get through to her with patience and small sentences.

“She’d kill you?” Lisa looked horrified and he tried not to bang his head into the nearest wall.

“And I thought all Ravenclaws were smart,” he snorted.

“Well, I thought all Slytherins were evil.” It was an apology, he knew, so he took it as such, nodding graciously back at her.

It wasn’t much, but at the moment, he would take what he could get. He had a feeling that it was the most he would receive for a very long time.