The Ravening Wolf

Part Five: The Ravening Wolf

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?

And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

Matthew 7:22-23

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Yvonne re-entered her lounge in what felt like a daze. She had read descriptions of people in books being 'ashy', but she had never really understood exactly what made a person look ashy until she had examined her reflection in the mirror a moment ago. 'Ashy' described it perfectly: pale to the point of turning slightly grey. Ashy was how she felt – like a fire had run through her, and all that was left behind was crumbling wisps of carbon.

Christine started to ask her something and then stopped. Yvonne knew on some level that she must look a complete mess – she hadn't had the courage to towel her hair dry, because that would have meant looking away from the shower for just a second, and she was pretty sure she had misaligned the buttons on her blouse – but this was as far from her mind as reassuring Christine was. She wasn't sure she could have reassured her, anyway; someone had just lain at her feet and died in her shower. That was a thing that should have ordinarily been physically impossible, but what was that thing you called acts of impossibility becoming possible? Could you call it a miracle?

Yvonne sank into her armchair and fixed her gaze on nothing in particular. Christine asked her what had happened and, then after a moment, asked again. Another long moment passed, and then Yvonne told her.

"Archer is dead."

"How... how do you know?" Yvonne could hear the wide eyes in her voice, even though she was watching the blinking light of a plane flit across the sky through her window. What a question.

"How else would I know? I saw it! It makes me see things! I don't want to keep seeing them!" Yvonne leapt to her feet and seized Christine by the shoulders. She didn't resist, just continued to look more afraid than Yvonne herself felt. It was as if the only place this woman could show she was scared was in her expression. Or maybe she was trying to hide her fear, but her face betrayed her. Something about this suddenly infuriated Yvonne – she wanted to either see some proper panic or get some goddamn answers.

"What happened to me?" she shouted at Christine. "Why were you studying the stone? Didn't either of you know it was dangerous?"

"Yes," said Christine, her voice barely above a whisper. "But that's what the Department of Mysteries is for."

"Playing God?"

"Mysteries," she said simply, as if this was final. Yvonne relaxed her grip but did not let her hands drop from Christine's shoulders. Not yet. Christine was watching her – if she seemed uncomfortable about Yvonne being on edge so close to her, she was doing a better job of hiding it than whatever it was that worried her so much.

"He said this might happen," Christine said. Her voice was flat, but the unnatural fear on her face gave the statement an ominous overtone.

Yvonne finally let her hands drop. She took a step back, unsure of what was going to happen next, unsure of herself, the feeling of dropping down the rabbit-hole rising higher and higher. "That I might get angry with cryptic answers?" she asked, trying to be snide and failing, knowing this wasn't what Christine had meant. The comment didn't seem to faze her.

"What we were doing was dangerous, yes. Is dangerous. Not everyone in the world is honest, like Moss and I. He told me at St. Mungo's that someone inside the Ministry might want to terminate the translation project after they found out what had happened. He told me they might have been using the whole project as a way to become godlike themselves. He didn't know this for sure, but..."

"He saw things," Yvonne said, her arms folded across her chest. "While he slept."

"He may have. He said he knew so much more than he did before."

"And why should I believe you?" There was still something that felt like it was missing to Yvonne, some itching, nagging thought that couldn't materialise properly. Maybe it was Christine's attitude that seemed off.

Christine paused a moment and then started to laugh. "You would know if I lied," she said, still smiling a little. "What do you think has been happening to you when you've seen things?"

Yvonne faltered a little. The conversation seemed to have taken a savage turn to the left. "Thoughts," she attempted, "or nightmares, something like..."

"You've revealed what has been concealed, brought to light truth that was in darkness. That's a rough translation of some of the tablet. People... can't lie to you. Look." She held a hand behind her back. "Ask me how many fingers I'm holding up."

Can't lie? But Mrs Brightman... the girl on the bus... what the hell kind of truths were those? "I don't see..."

"Just ask me: how many fingers am I holding up behind my back?"

"Well, how many are you?"

"Two."

Not a second had passed after Christine had spoken before images began to assault Yvonne's mind. She remembered a dozen, a hundred, a thousand things all at once: dancing a waltz with her grandfather at her aunt's wedding; being taught how to hear the right beat of the music to sway to; sitting at a school desk and marking the numbers next to the little curved lines that indicated angles, 60-60-60, thinking this question was such an easy one; chanting in unison with the rest of her class back at the teacher, memorising by rote that one three was three, two threes were six, three threes were nine, four threes were twelve; juggling balls flying through the air; stacks of Toblerone chocolates...

She held a hand to her temple and took a sharp breath, aware that she was acting just how everyone in a bad movie that involved psychics or mental superpowers acted whenever a particularly bad thing happened to their thoughts.

Stupid movies got it right, after all, she thought without much humour.

"So how many fingers did I really hold up?" asked Christine.

"Three," said Yvonne, "it was three fingers." Christine said nothing to this, but had a kind of 'well, there you go' tilt to her head.

"Moss said that if he was right about this, he was in a lot of danger and so was anyone that had been in contact with him. He told me to find you..."

"Me specifically?"

"He called you 'the girl who saw the memory', but he knew who you were, yes. He told me to come here and that he would try to find the Healer that took his thoughts before whoever might have been coming to kill him did."

Some good being almost God does, if you can't save a simple life, Yvonne thought in a flash of bitterness, but held her tongue.

"And you say your Archer is dead, and that has to be horrible for you, but I don't know what happened to Moss, and I'm supposed to wait... here with you and hope he... hope he comes." Tears were rolling down her cheeks, and in that instant Yvonne understood perfectly what it was she had been missing: Christine and Moss were lovers.

Yvonne rose from her seat and, after a moment of internal deliberation, put her arms around the crying woman. Christine heaved against her shoulder, taking deep, greedy breaths. Yvonne didn't offer any words of comfort, because she knew those would very likely set her off in a crying jag of her own, and what good would that serve? She swept her eyes over the row of pictures and knick-knacks above her television set to keep her mind distracted and felt a stab of panic in her stomach when she saw a gap, a missing frame, but then remembered it was lying on her coffee table. Christine had moved it; she had been holding it when she, Yvonne, had come home.

Eventually, Christine's sobs quietened, and she pulled herself away from Yvonne and buried her face in her hands for a moment in an effort to clear her face. "I'm sorry," she said, her face red and wet. "I'm sorry."

"I understand," Yvonne said.

"Do you mind if I...?" Christine began and gestured vaguely in the direction of the bathroom.

"No, go. It's alright."

"Thank you. I'm sorry," she said once more and disappeared through the door.

Yvonne took a deep breath and closed her eyes. This night...Jesus. Letting out her breath through her nose, she turned and picked up the picture frame that lay on the coffee table. It housed a picture of two girls of about twelve or thirteen. One had plain, brown hair; the other had a curly blonde mane. Both girls had their arms around each other's shoulder and broad identical smiles, although the blonde girl's smile was somewhat diminished by a set of braces. Yvonne put the picture back where it belonged – between a wizard photograph of her parents, who kept looking about and marvelling at how they were moving inside a picture, and a weighty glass duck that Yvonne thought equal parts cute and ridiculous. She sat down in her chair again and cradled her head in her hands, wondering if there was anything else today was going to throw at her. She heard sniffling coming from the bathroom, and for a few moments it was all she could focus on, her mind otherwise completely blank.

"Alright. Okay. Alright," she said, looking at a decorative wrinkle in her carpet. She sprung to her feet, walked past her CD player and tapped the big ON/OFF button in a practised gesture. She flicked through the albums standing in neat rows in the case next to the television. It often took her several minutes to find something to listen to, if it was going to be listened to and not just play in the background as she read, but not this time – she pulled Rumours from the shelf, knowing instinctively where it was despite the poor organisation of her CDs, and put the disc in the CD tray. The opening lines of 'Second Hand News' playing, she Summoned a wine bottle and two glasses to her coffee table and went to her armchair. After a moment of thought, she Summoned a corkscrew, set her wand on the table and opened the bottle. This was not going to be an escape, and this was not going to be a wake, but it might be something that lay in between those two things. One of the reasons she loved Rumours so much, beyond having heard it many, many times as a child, was Fleetwood Mac's story about the time it was being recorded – all the members of the band had ended relationships and were writing songs about it on some level, and it made the recording session uncomfortable and tense, but the album came out so strong, it lifted the whole band out of their collective depression. That, in Yvonne's opinion, was the best kind of art – the taking of pain and channelling it into something beautiful.

Just as Yvonne was popping the cork from the neck of the wine bottle, Christine emerged from the bathroom looking much more composed than she had when she had entered. She spied the pair of glasses on the coffee table and began to decline. "Oh, no, I don't normally..."

"If this was a normal situation, I would listen," Yvonne said, holding Christine's eyes with her own as she sat on the couch, "but this hardly counts as normal, and God help me, I'm going to try and make it as normal as I can." She poured two glasses and slid one over to Christine, who regarded it with some curiosity before taking it in her hand.

"I suppose we should drink to something," she said at last.

"Dreams," Yvonne said without hesitation.

"To dreams, then."

"To dreams." Yvonne touched her glass to Christine's and then took a long sip while Stevie Nicks noted that thunder only happens when it's raining, the players only love you when they're playing.

---

They talked with very few pauses about inconsequential things – cocktail party chatter, almost. Yvonne talked about the mundane aspects of being a Healer and recounted all the patients she had had a hand in curing in the Janus Thickey ward, and Christine talked about what curse-breaking was like, as if they had agreed with each other that they would refrain from any heavy subject until the sun had risen. At some point, Yvonne Summoned the loaf of bread from the kitchen – plain food to go with plain conversation. It was almost sunrise when Yvonne realised she was seeing by more than the few lights in the lounge, and she had not noticed the CD had stopped playing. She stood up to put some music back on, unsure if she would find a new disc or just repeat the one in the machine, when the knock came at the door – three quick taps, followed by a male voice.

"Christine?"

"Moss!" Christine called and jumped from her spot on the couch. She rushed to open the door, flicking open the lock and opening it before Yvonne had a chance to react. A man stood in the doorway, hair unkempt and wearing the darker green robes reserved for patients at St. Mungo's. Christine threw her arms around him, and Moss embraced her firmly with one arm. Yvonne watched as Christine seemed to melt into his embrace, and then a cold feeling came over her, one that began in the depths of her stomach and spread all over, the same feeling that followed climbing up thirteen steps when there were only twelve. She watched Christine's head slump to the side, slack and lifeless, watched her sink to her knees then fall to the side, watched her land on the floor in a heap. Yvonne saw what would have been impossible for anyone else to have seen – how Moss had effortlessly slid the knife into her, how his face had looked as he had lied to her at St. Mungo's, how he had come upon Archer in the dark and cut his throat, how anything in him that had once been human now cared only for preserving its power, turned to an enlightenment-seeking banzai soldier by the ancient ritual inscribed millennia past on a slab of stone. The thing that stood in Yvonne's doorway had been a man named Moss, but now was also a rabid wolf with its muzzle drawn back in a snarl that encapsulated hate in the same way Christine's face had encapsulated fear, a shark with eyes black from the scent of blood, a vulture flying out of the sun, these and ten thousand other beasts. The knife in its hand was a claw, was a fang, was a jagged tooth.

"No gods," said the beast, levelling its paw, brandishing its knife, baring its fangs at Yvonne. She suddenly realised her wand still lay on the coffee table, and a chair separated it from her.

"No gods," repeated the impossible figure in a voice that was the grunting of pigs, the yowling of wildcats, the spectral laughter of a hyena. "No gods but me!" it roared and ran at her, loped at her, charged at her across the lounge.

Yvonne would think later that if the presence of God was in her apartment that morning, He was not present in Moss, or in her, but in Archer's empty vial. Without thought, without realising what she was doing, Yvonne pulled the empty vial from her pocket and swung her arm in a single smooth motion, her fingers nimble in turning what was essentially a little glass dagger so the point faced the right way. The smooth, clear path of her hand ended at Moss's head, the glass vial driving through his right eye and shattering into uncountable tiny fragments. The thing that had been Moss dropped its knife and held its head with one hand, then gave an inhuman scream that was more like the howling of a dog. It staggered backwards, its other flailing arm sweeping over the shelf above Yvonne's television and sending the objects it held crashing to the floor, before it fell to the ground.

Had Yvonne been the hero of a novel – a hard-bitten private eye, or a rookie cop with something to prove – Moss would likely have been killed by a single lucky hit. But as Yvonne was only a Healer whose purpose in life was to restore the sick to health, she was granted no such good fortune. Moss writhed on the floor, one hand still held over his eye; the moans that came from the back of his throat, although clearly human, were still horrible and unsettling. Yvonne was frozen, partly hunched over and staring. She knew she had to do something, anything – call for help, try and fix wounds, shut her goddamn door before one of her neighbours called the police – but she was fixed to the spot. She watched Moss roll to his side, give a deep groan, and then something began to happen to the hand covering his eye. It was like it was changing colour somehow, growing lighter, then Yvonne realised it wasn't getting lighter but brighter, illuminated by a light burning deep in his head. He pulled his hand away, and a substance that was not light and was not liquid flowed from his ruined eye, impervious to gravity and sending erratic waves of bright white light all over the apartment. One of these beams shone right in her eyes, and she saw...

...herself in school, tears in her eyes, sad because she had no friends, sad because the other girls had said she had no friends, and she hated them hated them hated them so much...

Yvonne fell to her knees, driven down by the force of the memory. Had the light done that? She closed her eyes and turned her head away, but that was no good because she was...

...looking at a mound of dirt in her backyard, her father holding a spade and her mother holding her hand, saying it was going to be okay, Buster was getting old for a dog and he'd had a happy life, but it wasn't helping because she didn't get to tell Buster goodbye...

She crawled towards Moss's body, not knowing what she was going to do – not knowing if there was anything she could do. She only understood that this was the knowledge Moss had been consumed by; the thoughts of a dying god were pouring from his head, and the ones that were hers were finding her, somehow, but she knew they were only going to be memories of pain, fear and loss, because what she had seen in the Pensieve was imperfect. She was an imperfect god, capable of only glimpsing hidden truths. She was flawed. She was...

...called upon by Mrs Hamilton when she didn't know the answer, when Mrs Hamilton knew she didn't know the answer, and the other children in the class were waiting for her to fail, waiting so they could laugh, snigger, point...

...in a room with a nice man with a soft voice, and shouldn't she be lying down on the couch, and he asked her questions she couldn't answer because she was a witch and he was a Muggle, a doctor, a psychologist, and all she did was stay silent, and he kept asking, asking, asking...

...being stopped on the train and taken to a carriage at the back...

...sitting in the room when another student was brought in...

...asked for her wand...

...led away from the school, away, away to the Ministry, underground. The two men that took her were tall and broad and spoke in official tones and acted like she had done something wrong, but she knew she hadn't, so she was okay. She would be okay because Mary was here with her, Mary her friend, Mary who had also had two normal parents and also had been so scared on her first day instead of excited, Mary who was her best best friend despite being a year younger and in a different House. Yvonne loved her curly hair and said she wanted hair like hers, and Mary said she hated her hair and wanted straight hair she could do pretty things with, like Yvonne's. Mary, her best best friend.

They were both in the room together underground with the thing in the rags in the corner, and the tall broad men were asking them impossible questions. Where had they found the wands they were carrying, who had they stolen them from, how had they found how to do magic? And Yvonne and Mary had not known the answers, could not have known the answers, because they weren't Muggles like the men thought, they were witches, they had been told so, but the men wouldn't hear it. The thing in the corner in rags was growing restless with each question that went without an answer. It was hungry, the thing in rags, the Dementor. It didn't care for blood purity, for Dark Lords or Chosen Ones, it only cared to eat, and it knew it had been promised food.

The men would question. Yvonne and Mary could not answer. The thing in the corner in rags would stir and drive the men to more questions. This circle turned faster and faster and faster, whirring, blurring. Then came the question. The last question. The final question.

Mary could not answer. Mary did not answer. She began to cry instead. Crying was not an answer. It was an invitation to the thing in rags in the corner. It flew across the room and brought with it cold and fear and loneliness and made the men step back, and Yvonne screamed, and Mary kept crying and crying until she fell silent, and the men drove the thing in rags back into the corner with horrible blank white light.

Oh great, what do we do now? said one man. We? This was your bloody fault, said the other. They argued over blame, because something had not gone according to procedure. Yvonne stared at where Mary had been. She wasn't Mary any more. She was like the thing in rags, cold and lonely. She didn't dare to cry, because then the thing in the rags would come for her, and she couldn't speak another word to the official men, and they would soon take her to a room she couldn't leave, and she would be with other people who said they weren't Muggles, said they should be let out, but nobody would listen to them either. Yvonne wouldn't speak, wouldn't tell anyone there what had happened, why two girls went in to be questioned and only one came back. She would think of her parents and would not allow herself to ever cry.

But because this was a memory, she knew what was going to happen. Because this was a dream, she could do something else.

Yvonne rose to her feet, not the little girl but herself now, able to tower over the two official men, and she took the chair she had been sitting on and broke it over the head of one of the official men. He fell to his knees, and then slumped over on his side. Yvonne took one of the broken legs of the chair in her hand and tackled the other man to the ground, now on top of him and pounding the lump of wood against his head over and over and over, punctuating each blow with a no! no! no!, striking again and again and again with wood that felt heavy, felt more like glass, more like a...

...heavy glass ornament in the shape of a duck, equal parts cute and ridiculous, and Yvonne was not in the Ministry but her apartment, not on top of the body of a Ministry official in the employ of the Dark Lord, rounding up Muggle-borns and blood traitors and depriving them of their wands, but over Moss Browning, failed god. She was striking him over and over and over, with each blow driving the horrible white light away, and she was crying, crying, crying.

---

Epilogue: The Way Which Leadeth Unto Life

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Matthew 7:14

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Yvonne sat in a folding chair in the Janus Thickey ward, even more quiet than usual since the Longbottoms were out on their weekly trip with their son. The early morning sun coming through the window illuminated the only occupied bed. In the light, the girl's curly, golden hair looked magnificent. The curtain that normally surrounded the bed was bunched against the wall.

"They're holding a funeral for Archer tomorrow," Yvonne told her patient. "I'm going to say something. I haven't got anything written down; it's not something I think I could plan for. I know I can get him across. Not many people knew Jean Paul, really. They should know him." She looked at the floor for a moment before continuing.

"I don't know what's happening with Christine and Moss. I don't think I'd go, even if I knew. I know someone will ask me how I knew one of them, and I can't answer that. I didn't know them. I was just... there, at the end. I'm sorry for them, they're not to blame. They were just... I told the Aurors what happened, if anyone needs to know." She sighed and paused again to brush away a tear in her eye.

"I'm going to discharge you after I get back from the funeral. You'll be going somewhere with others that... with other people like you. I can't fix you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I can't. Maybe someone will, one day, but... not me." She stood, leaned over the motionless body lying on the bed and kissed her on the forehead. Yvonne was mindful to wipe away any tears that fell down onto the girl in the bed, not caring to wipe away any from her own face until she was leaving the ward.

"Goodbye, Mary," Yvonne whispered.

09-10-28