Chapter Ten

Author’s note: Thanks again for all the support this story has received (as well as the constructive criticism). I’m afraid to say that it’s actually nearing the point of winding down...I began it with the intention of finishing on the 28th, and while I don’t expect to quite succeed at that goal, it will be finished in the very near future, thus (hopefully) marking the end of my inconsistent fanfiction career as I go away to university. Hope this chapter lives up to expectations...

Disclaimer: I own nothing!

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“Don’t look at me like that, Richard,” Harry Potter muttered at the Ulfric as they proceeded out of the massive meet-and-greet room. Anita and Jean-Claude preceded them, following the over-excited servant creature, while their host had fallen in behind them with Richard, clearly intent on speaking to him. Edward trailed them all, a silent, menacing presence at their backs.

“Like what?” Richard asked bluntly, his eyes narrowed in anger and betrayal as he glared at the man he had come to consider a friend. “Like someone I don’t know and don’t trust? I can’t look at you like I used to look at James Evans.”

The other man sighed in frustration, running his hand through his untamable hair in a gesture of annoyance that he had never seen from James Evans. “James Evans was a construct, Richard; he was never someone real. I’m sorry that I led you to believe I was someone I’m not, but I’m not sorry that I got to know you when you thought I was nothing more than a bookshop owner.”

“But who was James Evans?” Richard demanded, trying to rein in his fury and hurt, trying to reconcile the man who stood in front of him with the man he had come to care about. “You can’t just have pulled him out of a hat.”

Harry Potter—Richard couldn’t decide what to call the other man even in the privacy of his own mind—looked like he was about to answer when they crossed the threshold of another large room, this one a dining hall with an immense table taking up much of the space. There were only five seats situated around one end of the table, and the five people quickly seated themselves, Richard, Anita, and Jean-Claude on one side and Harry Potter and Edward on the other.

“James Evans was the person I always wished I could be,” the wizard informed the werewolf directly. “I thought that it would be easier for you to deal with him for as long as possible; he’s far more congenial and kind than I can ever be. Unfortunately, our timetable has been pushed up and we no longer have time to entertain pleasant lies.”

“What has happened?” Jean-Claude asked, leaning forward in his chair as he watched the young man in front of him. The vampire clearly didn’t know what to make of the wizard; although he was every bit as powerful as they had expected, he lacked the aura of menace that Jean-Claude had been warned to expect.

Potter met his gaze for a moment before looking away in shame. He took a moment to marshal himself, then looked back at the vampire. “Asher has been taken.”

“What?” Anita hissed, standing up so abruptly that her chair overturned. Potter watched her coolly from his own seat, seemingly unruffled and unconcerned by her response. “When? Where? Who took him?” she demanded.

The wizard ignored her, turning to Jean-Claude, who looked even paler than usual. “Asher came to my shop earlier this evening, but I was at home at the time. When my wards alerted me to his presence, I hurried there, but I was distracted along the way by an old acquaintance. By the time I arrived, Asher was gone and my Shoppe was in shambles. I found traces of blood.” He reached into his jacket, causing Anita to reach instinctively for her gun before he shot her a vaguely amused glance and withdrew a handkerchief. He handed it to the vampire. “Anyone you know?”

Jean-Claude raised the handkerchief to his lips, almost as though he was going to taste it, before he inhaled deeply, rolling the scent around in his nose and mouth. At last, he shook his head. “I am unfamiliar with this scent. It is not Asher. It could be a lycanthrope.”

As if he expected that answer, Potter nodded and took back the handkerchief. “I have reason to believe that the lycanthrope involved is a man I know well from a war back in England. His name is Fenrir Greyback.” He seemed to be looking at Richard for a response to that pronouncement, and was rewarded by the Ulfric’s disturbed expression. “You’ve heard of him, Richard?”

“Yes,” the werewolf replied tightly, staring at the blood-stained handkerchief in disgust. “Greyback has quite a reputation among the werewolves. It’s said that he was the ulfric of one of two packs in England a few years ago; he willfully and viciously turned humans in an attempt to form a larger pack than his rival's so that he could dominate them. According to the reports from England, Greyback ultimately challenged the ulfric of the opposing pack, a Remus Lupin, to a fight to the death.” He hesitated, seeing the way Potter’s green eyes darkened in pain at his words.

“What happened?” Anita inquired. She was well aware of the goings-on of the St. Louis pack, but she rarely had the opportunity to learn more about packs in other parts of the world.

“Lupin was killed. Greyback was stronger and more accepting of his wolf, and he took control of the fight almost immediately...Still, Lupin’s was not a quick or painless death.”

“So Greyback became the ulfric of the entire England pack?” Anita prompted when Richard paused again.

“You’d think that’s what would have happened, but no,” Richard said slowly. “The reports about what happened next are very blurry, but from what I’ve heard, a human challenged Greyback.”

“A human,” Anita repeated, her eyes distant as she remembered the times when she had faced off against lycanthropes; none had been pretty, although the fact that she was still alive and uninfected spoke strongly in her favor.

“Yes. And, based on the descriptions I received of the human, I’m guessing that it was you, James—Harry—whoever you are.”

Potter’s eyes were unreadable as he gazed back at him. “It was.”

“How did you defeat this werewolf?” Jean-Claude inquired, entering the conversation for the first time. “With your magic?”

“It was against the rules to use magic,” Potter replied. “However, among wizards such as myself, a few possess the ability to shift into another creature.”

“Like a lycanthrope?” Anita asked.

“Yes and no. Those with that ability don’t have any increased physical abilities as a result when they’re in their human forms, and there’s never a time when they have to shift.”

“You keep referring to ‘them’,” Jean-Claude observed, “but you too must possess this ability if you make reference to it.”

“Yes and no,” Potter replied. He shot a glance at Edward before returning his gaze to his visitors. “Becoming an animagus—that’s what we call someone who can transform—is a complicated process that can take years. I began working on the transformation when I was 20, but I never had the kind of time to work at it with the dedication necessary to master the transformation. The furthest I’ve gotten is a partial transformation; that’s what I used when I faced Greyback.”

“A partial transformation?” Richard felt like a broken record.

Potter nodded. “I was able to completely transform my upper body, and, well, I had a tail, but that didn’t matter much. Because I couldn’t be infected by the lycanthropy virus while in animagus form, I had to make sure that Greyback only scratched me where I had transformed, but I managed to defeat him fairly quickly; I’m a lot smarter than he is, not that that’s saying much, and I had some extra incentive.”

“You wished to use the werewolf pack in your war against your nemesis?” Jean-Claude hazarded a guess.

“Yes,” Potter replied, “but that wasn’t the reason I was so vicious when I went up against Greyback. Among other things, Remus Lupin was the closest thing I had to a father still living.”

“So you defeated Greyback,” Antia said, moving the conversation away from the clearly painful subject.

“Yes, but the coward fled before I could kill him. He never reappeared during the war, and I hadn’t heard anything about his whereabouts until I returned to England yesterday to investigate the possible members of the new triumvirate.”

“Wait—you went to England?” the Executioner demanded, her eyes alight with anger as she glared at him. “I thought we agreed that you’d stay in St. Louis as long as there was any doubt about your trustworthiness.”

“No, I agreed to be in St. Louis tomorrow,” Potter corrected. “It takes only seconds for me to travel to England, so I was easily able to travel there and back in time to be present when you needed me.”

Seeing that Anita was about to launch into a full-blown tirade, Richard asked, “So we know that Greyback is the lycanthrope involved, but do you have any idea about the identity of the human? Could it be a wizard?”

“Greyback fought on Voldemort’s side in the war, which means that he is a blood purist,” Potter said. “He would never agree to form an alliance with anyone other than a wizard, and probably only with a pureblood or someone who had fought on Voldemort’s side.”

Looking at the calculating look on the wizard’s face, Jean-Claude said, “You suspect that you know the wizard involved, do you not?”

Potter hesitated. “I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. The man I suspect—I’ve been wrong about him too many times before.”

“What is his name?” the master vampire demanded.

“You don’t need to know that now,” Potter stated firmly. At Jean-Claude’s outraged expression, he continued, “I don’t trust you or the people who work for you not to do something permanent if you happen upon him, and, like I said, I can’t be sure whether he’s involved. I’m not willing to harm innocents over this, even if they are people as unlikable as he is.”

“I see,” Jean-Claude said, his smooth voice deceptively calm. “Tell me, Monsieur Potter, is it the value of the lives of all vampires or only of Asher's that you hold less than the value of the life of a wizard, even one who may be the aggressor?”

Potter glared at the vampire, and Richard stiffened as all pleasantness leaked away from the wizard’s gaze. “Do not forget whose house you are sitting in, Jean-Claude,” he said, his voice edged with threat. “Asher is a friend; more than that, he is someone who came to me for help tonight and whom I was too late to save. I will do just about anything to get him back, and in one piece, but I will not risk a potentially innocent bystander coming to harm until there is no other option.”

“And what options do you suggest that we do have?” Jean-Claude asked, clenching the arms of the chair he sat in so tightly that the wood molded around his fingers. “Wait until Asher is dead or worse?”

“I’ve summoned the Traveler,” Potter announced, heedless of the shocked gazes his words produced. “He should be here by tomorrow evening.”

“How, precisely, does inviting a member of the Council into my city help matters?” Jean-Claude hissed.

“The Traveler will not cross any boundaries when he’s here by my invitation,” Potter replied coolly. “And he, too, is familiar with and despises Greyback, so he should be a valuable asset in hunting him down. I assure you that the Traveler will be a help, not a hindrance. With the aid of the lycanthropes and vampires, we have to be able to find them before it’s too late.”

“’Too late’ meaning what, exactly?” Richard asked, dreading the answer.

“Meaning we need to find them before they finish forcing Asher to bond the human as a human servant. Jean-Claude could tell you better than I how much time that would take, considering that Asher will fight the compulsion with all the willpower he has.”

Jean-Claude considered, pushing aside his anger at the multiple invasions of his city for the time being in an attempt to focus on the larger problem. “If Asher is truly unwilling, even if a powerful spell is used on him he should be able to delay the process so that each step takes approximately a day. There are four stages to the process, as Anita knows well.”

“So we have four days,” Potter mused aloud.

“Four days until they’re completely bonded,” Anita corrected. “The first stage is all that’s needed to connect them for life, though.”

“But the bond can be broken without lifelong repercussions before the fourth stage,” Potter said. A shadow passed across his face as he spoke, but he shook it off, leaving the triumvirate to wonder at its cause. “We need to find him as soon as possible, but four days will be our outside target. After that...we need to prepare for war.”

“Why are you helping us, anyways?” Anita asked suspiciously. “You could leave right now and never look back, and even I couldn’t blame you. Why help?”

Potter looked at her with that direct, piercing stare that always made the objects of his attentions want to look away. “Because they’ve taken someone I care about; because I can’t stand by and watch people suffer when there’s something I could do to stop it.”

Anita paused for a moment. “Oh.” She turned to Edward. “What about you? What does any of this have to do with you? And for that matter, how do you really know Potter?”

Edward glanced at Potter, who gave him a subtle nod. “Several years ago, I was hired by a wizard who called himself Voldemort to kill a young wizard named Harry Potter. Voldemort told me that this young wizard was more dangerous than he looked and had been a thorn in his side for far too long.”

“How’d you end up working with him, then?”

“Harry paid more,” Edward said simply. “That, and it was clear to see that Voldemort’s side was the one with the real monsters. Being on Harry’s side was much more...fun.”

Potter snorted at that. “Only you, Edward,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“What did you mean by ‘among other things’?” Richard asked abruptly, a thought suddenly popping into his head as he turned Potter’s words over in his mind.

“What?” the wizard asked, blinking in confusion. His dramatic changes in personality were jarring and a little hard for his guests to absorb; at times, he seemed to so perfectly exemplify the all-powerful wizard, while at other times he seemed like nothing more than the young man he had always pretended to be.

“You said that Remus Lupin was the closest thing you had to a father, 'among other things'. What did you mean?”

“Why do you ask?”

Richard stared hard at the younger man. “It was rumored at one time that Remus Lupin was part of a triumvirate. After his death it seemed that the rumors must have been unsubstantiated, but now...” His voice trailed off.

Potter stared at him expressionlessly for a long moment before bobbing his head in a semi-nod. “The rumors were true. I only survived Remus’ death because of my power, and the fact that I’ve always been too stubborn to die. I managed to tether our vampire compatriot to this world via our bond, so he survived as well, although the bond was severed. It was a close thing, and not something I’d choose to do again.”

“You were the human in a triumvirate, and this Lupin was the lycanthrope,” Jean-Claude said slowly, eyes narrowed as he considered the implications of the wizard's statement, “but who was the vampire?”

“I was,” a voice the three of them knew all-too-well spoke, and all five inhabitants of the room turned in surprise to face the newcomer. There were two men standing near the entrance of the room, both of them quite familiar to the triumvirate. A young woman with red hair hovered near the door as well, clutching what appeared to be a pendant in her right hand. She gave Potter what could have been interpreted as an apologetic glance.

“Traveler,” Anita said, voicing the name they were all thinking, and whether she spoke with respect or abhorrence was impossible to tell.

TBC