Chapter Thirty - Blame

Their escape from the safe house had, typically, been a narrow one, and one that could have been stymied the second after Parr opened the wardrobe door. She'd taken one step out and had to suppress a yelp as her head failed to move the same distance as the rest of her. She twisted around awkwardly to glare at Snape.

"What the hell are you doing?!" she hissed at him, eyes wide.

He stared back at her, still jammed in the wardrobe with Lupin's elbow crushing his ear. Tendrils of her long hair had anchored her like a struggling fish to the front of his coat. Their close proximity in the wardrobe had managed to snarl her hair around one of his buttons. Parr was glaring at him as if he'd done it deliberately.

"Stop moving!" he mouthed at her, trying to unwind the hair and free the both of them.

Lupin didn't help by shoving him out of the wardrobe, fussing about his cramped back. Once the werewolf caught sight of what had happened, he further complicated matters by trying to help separate the two of them. Parr kept pulling backwards, tightening the knot and gritting her teeth, one hand pushing at Snape's torso. They were all making a ridiculous amount of noise for three people who were trying to make an escape undetected. Parr must have realised this for just as Snape had slapped Lupin's hand away and was close to ripping the button off his coat to save time, Parr yanked her head back sharply and tore the trapped hair straight from her scalp. It made a small but unpleasant sound that caused Lupin to wince.

Luckily, there had been no-one in the hallway, and from their vantage point, the kitchen also appeared to be unoccupied. Going up the stairs was like running the gauntlet. Every step creaked; it was just a matter of degree. They had to settle for a wide-stanced tread that put their weight on the outer edges of the steps. It didn't stop the creaking, but it did minimise it somewhat. The effort was ruined by Lupin tripping on the top stair and falling with full force into Snape, who had been mid-step at the time and therefore unable to prevent himself from staggering forward heavily. The sound of the two men's fumblefootedness was extraordinarily loud, like a stack of books falling off a shelf.

The front door opened.

All pretence at stealth went down the metaphorical toilet, and the three of them charged towards the bathroom. Getting out the window would have been a farce in any other situation. It was ridiculously small. Lupin had to be bodily shoved through it in such a fashion that he nearly plummeted to serious injury. Fate smiled on him, and he managed to get a precarious footing on the slanted roof of the house next door. The structure groaned alarmingly once all three of them were standing on it.

Lupin dug his wand out of his coat and cast his Patronus, which leapt away from them, its bluish-white brightness painful to their eyes and a shining beacon to whomever was watching the safe house.

Snape swore at him.

"Kingsley and Tonks are supposed to be here any minute," Lupin whispered harshly. "They have no idea that the house has been Nullified!" That was a bit of unexpected foresight from the werewolf in Snape's opinion. At that point, the bathroom door had crashed open, and with Lupin's Patronus indicating they were outside the Nullifier's range, they Apparated back to Hogwarts, though whether it had been before they had been spotted by whomever had entered the bathroom was unclear.

Parr's vomiting after the Apparating was especially spectacular. She promised Lupin she'd buy him new pairs of trousers and shoes.

Snape, Lupin and Parr had been in Dumbledore's study for less than a minute before Moody had come barging in like a shabby ox, demanding to know what had happened. Apparently he'd seen them crossing the school grounds and felt it his duty to get involved. So typical of the man, thought Snape, his lip curling in a sneer. The Auror was probably outraged that something had been going on without his participation. Moody was always jumping into the fray with scant thought as to how it would affect the outcome. Even now he was pushing himself forward, chin thrust out pugnaciously and finger jabbing in the air. Much of his success relied on determination and persistence rather than any particularly brilliant flashes of insight. It was miraculous that the man was still alive...his self-preservation skills seemed to be almost non-existent.

With a sniff of disdain, Snape realised that this was probably due to the fact that the man had never been in the sort of situation that required careful or subtle treatment of circumstance. If Moody had the choice, he'd have his entrance into a room heralded by blaring trumpets and explosions.

It was a frequent, if brief, squabble between Snape and Moody. The latter would accuse the former of sneaking about, lurking in shadows and prevaricating in his responses to direct questions. The former would then point out to the latter that not everyone needed footnotes and crudely drawn diagrams to know when silence was better than shouting, that belligerence was an inferior tool to subtlety, and that standing back wasn't automatically an indication of guilt. He knew that Moody hated it when Snape stood behind everyone else where he couldn't be easily seen. It was interesting that it bothered Moody so much since the man would have been able to see Snape with that ghoulish charmed eye of his no matter where he was standing.

Snape had learned the hard way not to stand forward. Standing forward was how one got singled out. Standing forward allowed everyone to see where one went wrong, where one was different from them, where one's weaknesses were. Standing forward could mean pain. That lesson had only been reinforced as he had gotten older. The Death Eaters were a supreme example of people trying to find the best place to stand. Most of them desperately wanted to be in front, to show how impressive they were, how much better they were than others, but not too much better, not to be threatening to the Dark Lord. Useful. Important. But not threatening. The blending of dominance and submission was an art, a skill that most of them never fully mastered...a deficiency that left them dancing back and forth like fools with a Jelly-Legs Jinx.

So Snape stood off to the side, watching from a vantage point where he could see everyone in the room. Most of them were clustered in front of Dumbledore's desk, content to let Moody speak, if not for them, then over them. Shacklebolt and Tonks had turned up a handful of minutes after Moody, and they'd all clumped together like frog spawn, agitating in unison. That was until Moody started his diatribe.

"We're lucky it didn't end up a whole lot worse! I told you it was a bad idea," the grizzled Auror was near-bellowing.

"Mad-Eye!"

"Well, it was!" said Moody, turning on Tonks, whose scandalised expression at the man's open denouncement of what had originally been Dumbledore's idea failed to quiet him. "I don't see why I shouldn't voice my opinion about it. Perhaps if I had been listened to in the first place, this debacle would never have occurred."

"I really don't see how this is helpful," sighed Lupin, shrugging slightly and leaning up against the bookcase he was standing in front of.

Moody redirected his ire from Tonks to Lupin. "I'm not interested in being helpful," he pointed out harshly, his charmed glass eye rotating in one lazy revolution. "There's too much laxity, and it's going to bite us all if we're not more careful." He stumped closer to Dumbledore's desk. "We've got to have a lot more precautions in place to stop the wrong people finding us. A safe house with no security is just an invitation for disaster." There was no doubt at just whom he was making the accusation at, and most of the room tensed at the audacity of the Auror. Moody was fractious at the best of times, but this was pushing the limit of even his scanty manners.

Dumbledore didn't bat an eyelid at Moody's words, but the crease line between his eyebrows deepened a touch. "I've never claimed to be omniscient, Alastor, but regardless with whom the fault lies, the fact remains that someone has been paying much closer attention to our activities than we had thought." He tapped the arm of his chair lightly. "With that said, your input is always welcome in such matters."

The back of Moody's glass eye gleamed at Dumbledore, his natural eye fixed on the Headmaster's face. A faint, yet wry smile cragged its way along his mouth and there was a pause, which the man no doubt used to turn over in his mind how much further he could rub Dumbledore's face in it. He decided, judiciously, to let the blame game rest. After all, no-one had gotten hurt unless one counted the gash that Parr managed to procure whilst squeezing out of the bathroom window. But Moody was correct: it could have been a lot worse.

Normally, it was easy to fool Muggles into ignoring things they weren't meant to see, frighteningly easy in fact. Magicfolk were harder to hoodwink, and if it had been only them involved, then perhaps the situation would not be as concerning. Snape pulled a face. This was assuming that the involvement of one Muggle...one that he was familiar with...meant that more were involved. That small revelation had not yet been brought up in the conversation, but it was only a matter of time.

The others were already squabbling over what new precautions should be brought into play for any future safe houses. Shacklebolt was having an uncharacteristically terse exchange with Moody about booby traps whilst Tonks was flicking surreptitious glances at Lupin when she thought no-one could see. Snape shook his head slightly and wondered if she knew that Lupin had as much a taste for men as he did women. Knowing her, she'd probably morph into a male to please him. That idea made him snort in amused disdain.

That was the last they would ever see of that safe house. Not that it was any great loss. It was broken down, cold, smelly, and one could never shake the sense that fleas were about to erupt out of the carpet and hurtle onto the nearest owner of a heartbeat like a tiny, ravaging army. Even the thought made Snape itch. Yet, now he thought about it, he'd spent a considerable amount of time there himself, despite its inherent unpleasantness. Uninviting surroundings never fazed him, except perhaps for the risk of being set upon by pestilential insects. Spending time at the safe house had proved preferable to having to dodge Karkaroff and his bleating questions and shrill demands. The wretched man had found out where Snape's private quarters were and had taken to hammering on his door at frequent yet irregular intervals. Folter had held him at bay with wide-eyed stoicism that never tipped into actually lying, but Karkaroff could smell the subterfuge like the scuttling rat he was. The Durmstrang Headmaster decided that abrupt appearances at Snape's door might bear fruit in catching the Potions master, but all he succeeded in doing was giving Snape the shits. Trying to grade student papers was unpleasant enough without having to drown out Karkaroff's hollering and door-bashing.

Snape had managed to find a room in a disused section of the castle up on the fifth floor to get some peace and quiet in, but it rankled that he was forced to hide from Karkaroff. He'd much prefer to bind the stupid man's lips together with a sticking charm. However, it probably wasn't very diplomatic, and Dumbledore would certainly have problems in seeing the benefit of Snape taking such course of action.

His new hidey-hole was sufficient to allow him to attend to the grading aspect of his teaching role, but he found that being away from the dungeons meant that Moody felt free to grub through his classroom whenever the whim took him. Between concealing himself from Karkaroff and warding Moody away from another smashing escapade, Snape got increasingly foul-tempered and decided he had to get out and off the school premises before he went berserk. The safe house had initially been a reluctant option, but since he had needed to travel to London most weekends, sometimes during weekdays as well, he figured that irritating Lupin between errands would prove entertaining. The werewolf seemed to have decided to put up with Snape's jibes for a majority of the time, which made the whole thing a lot more challenging. When he was on his own, he was a lot easier to rattle. Parr's presence had a diluting effect on Snape's efforts to piss Lupin off, so he was finding himself working more than twice as hard in order to aggravate two people.

Both Parr and Lupin seemed to spend scant time in their tutor and student roles. Lupin was always scratching away at his "research", the nature of which appeared varied. Snape had seen books on astronomy and folklore, messy notes on lycanthropic theory and metallurgy, and carefully printed parchments on genealogy and politics in Lupin's hands, and was at a loss as to what the common theme was. If indeed there was a common theme.

Parr seemed to always have her backside planted firmly on the couch, ostentatiously not doing her studies and telling obscene jokes that had Lupin either guffawing in amusement or gasping in red-faced embarrassment. At first, Snape really couldn't understand why Parr had to be outside of Hogwarts to do that, but he recalled one particular joke she had been telling when he'd walked into the safe house and realised that it was best that such lurid tales be kept out of the auditory range of impressionable children. He'd stood just outside the door to the lounge, out of sight, listening to what was a recitation of probably one of the most disgusting and perverted jokes he'd ever heard involving a mermaid, a centaur and a snake. Lupin had gone into a prudery-induced fit of apoplexy after the explicitly erotic punch-line, sending Parr off into gales of laughter. Any thought that Snape had entertained at making his presence known to the two of them went out of his head as his brain froze into shock at what he'd just heard. What was even more distressing, for Snape at least, was the fact that he couldn't put the joke out of his mind for the rest of that evening back at the school, which subsequently ruined his concentration and therefore the potion he had been working on. That had put him in such a confused pique that he'd abandoned what he was doing and fled to his private quarters to try and work through the mental loop with something a bit more drastic than he would ordinarily have considered. His right forearm had ached for two days afterwards, and it was a whole week before he could look at the Slytherin crest without going scarlet in the face.

He flicked a glance over to where Parr was standing, half in shadow over near Fawkes' perch; the phoenix was absent, abroad doing only Dumbledore knew what. Parr had her eyes narrowed and fixed on Moody, her face set in a stony expression that was noticeably like suspicion.

Moody was ticking Tonks off about being the foolishly trusting Hufflepuff she was, and the girl's hair was starting to go as red as her cheeks. Everyone knew that Tonks took whatever Moody ever said to her to heart, regarding the rough Auror with something akin to hero-worship, so having a dressing-down from him in front of others must have been especially humiliating. Snape snorted. Serves her right, he thought uncharitably.

What Snape had found interesting was the way Moody reacted to Parr. It was subtle, but from where he was standing, Snape noticed that Moody kept his charmed eye cast roughly in Parr's direction at all times. In the few moments that the man's mouth hadn't been emitting noise, his expression had almost mirrored the one that Parr held on her face right now. It was like watching two strange cats eye each warily across a room, not sure what the other's presence meant, but certain that it boded ill in some way.

Obviously exasperated by the arguing that was going on in front of him, Dumbledore stood up slowly from his chair and, unnoticed, made his way slowly over to where Snape was standing, a copy of the Daily Prophet in one hand.

"Since I have been accused of forgoing input from others, I think I'll let them snarl themselves up in differing viewpoints for a while," the Headmaster revealed dryly. "Brain-storming sessions can be so... invigorating."

Snape thinned his lips and sniffed.

"Who were they?" Dumbledore asked quietly, pretending to peruse the front cover of the paper, a small frown on his face.

Snape turned his head to look at the man.

"I didn't see any of them clearly," he replied, keeping his voice low enough as to not be heard by the group over by the desk.

"Indeed?" Dumbledore opened the paper and began to scan the pages through his half-moon spectacles. "Their faces were covered?"

There was a pause. "No, not Death Eaters," Snape answered. "We were not in a position to see them when they entered the house." He continued before Dumbledore could get the fact that the three of them had been stuffed in a wardrobe when it happened out of him. "I recognised one of them by his voice."

"Mmm?" Dumbledore squinted at an advertisement for self-cleaning robes as if seriously considering purchasing one.

"An informant of mine," Snape reluctantly admitted.

Dumbledore inhaled noisily through his nose and turned a page to the sports section with a crinkle.

"I'd be most interested to hear how this... informant of yours came to know the location of the safe house," Dumbledore mused, noting the latest Quidditch league scores.

Snape looked at the floor and scowled. "So would I, Headmaster." He glanced up to find that Dumbledore was staring hard at him, his blue eyes boring into Snape's sooty ones with the light of accusation glinting in them.

"I can't help but wonder, Severus, if you truly understood me when I said that it was dangerous to go digging in uncertain ground."

Snape blinked at tone of the man's voice and let his mind go blank.

"I'm certain you will do whatever is necessary to put this... informant off the scent and heading in another direction," Dumbledore mentioned in an even tone, his eyes burning a hole right through to the back of Snape's skull. "Uncovering their affiliations would also be of use."

"He is a Muggle," Snape admitted, finally managing to wrench his gaze away from Dumbledore and back to the floor, carefully avoiding looking anywhere in Parr's direction. He didn't see Dumbledore's brows lower abruptly.

"Interesting," was the Headmaster's eventual summation. "It seems the line between the two worlds has become blurred, although not in the manner in which I had hoped." He closed the newspaper and folded it carefully. "You will, of course, be able to determine the extent of this new alliance, won't you, Severus?" The wizard glanced up at the group in front of his desk, noting that Moody was starting to swear rather loudly at Lupin about being water-spined.

Snape suppressed a sigh. "Yes, Headmaster." He tried not to dwell on the rising sense of annoyance at the way Dumbledore could calmly reroute his daily activities in whatever direction he chose. He settled for glaring at the man's back as he walked back to his desk and wondered if the lack of a personal life was of his own choosing or a deliberate punishment from Dumbledore for Snape's past transgressions. It seemed that some mistakes could never be atoned for.

"– pointless nonsense that's being discussed," Moody finished crossly, his straggly hair sticking out like a growling dog's fur.

"Of course, Alastor, you must be anxious to getting back to finding out who has been making it their goal to make Potter dance like a puppet on a string," said Dumbledore soothingly. "How are you progressing with that?"

Moody clutched on to his staff and pressed his lips together tightly for a few brief moments. "I have some... suspicions," he growled, looking slowly and obviously over at Snape. His charmed eye still showed white, doubtlessly fixed on Parr. Snape stared back at Moody blandly.

"Ah," said Dumbledore, nodding. "Then I have no wish to delay your investigations further. We'll pick this up tomorrow, I think." He sat down in his chair with a sigh and began to busy himself with something of pressing urgency.

Moody gave Snape a nasty smile and limped heavily from Dumbledore's office, clearly on his way to another destructive inspection of Snape's own study. He bared his teeth at the Auror's back and vowed to hex his artificial leg into giving way whilst halfway down a staircase.

Shacklebolt, Tonks and Lupin milled about uncertainly, clearly not knowing whether they too had been dismissed. Lupin shrugged at Tonks who gave him a goofy smile in return. Snape rolled his eyes.

"Wait just a moment," Dumbledore said quietly after the door had closed behind Moody. He continued to write with his quill for some moments, the sound of the nib scratching across the parchment floating up to the shrouded ceiling, while everyone stared at different points around the room. Parr had her eyes fixed on the door that Moody had left through, a calculating expression replacing her previous one of suspicion.

"Remus, what have you been able to find out over the past week?" Dumbledore's voice broke the rather uneasy silence, startling Tonks who was millimetres away from fiddling with something breakable on the Headmaster's desk.

Lupin blinked a few times and scratched his head. "No-one seems to want to talk to me," he admitted. "I mean, even less so than usual," he added wryly, his head tilted in a self-deprecating fashion that Tonks seemed to find appealing, judging from the slightly slack-mouthed wonderment her features had rearranged themselves into. "There's a den between Tottenham and Walthamstow that are normally approachable."

Snape suppressed a snort. The notion that any group of werewolves was approachable was ludicrous.

"At least two of the werewolves there know something's going on but refuse to elaborate. They got quite agitated when I pushed them, so I had to leave before I risked what little standing I still have among them."

Dumbledore sighed and scratched at his chin with a knuckle.

"However," Lupin continued, "as I was leaving, I found someone who would talk to me."

Dumbledore's hand came down from his face, and he sat up a little straighter in his chair.

"Or rather, she found me," said Lupin, stuffing his hands in his pockets and shifting slightly from foot to foot.

Snape saw Parr's head turn from the door and over to Lupin, a half-smile turning up the left corner of her mouth. Her face was beginning to get that greenish cast to it. Surely she wasn't going to vomit again?

Lupin inched further forward towards the edge of Dumbledore's desk, an unusual pleading tone entering his voice. "Albus, please, she's only ten. I need to get her away from the others, now. Before they... you know." His gaze dropped to the floor for a moment before returning to the Headmaster's face.

Dumbledore gazed at the man for some time with a faint frown. He bounced the palm of his hand gently on the arm of his chair, the cogs of his mind turning in a soundless, intricate choreography.

"Remus..." he began, sounding tired and a little exasperated.

Lupin's hands came out of his pockets to clutch the edge of the desk, the upper half of his body slanted towards Dumbledore in entreaty. "Albus, I had to! I couldn't leave her there!" He paused. "I couldn't."

"Remus..." Dumbledore repeated, sitting forward and crossing his hands.

"I'll take responsibility for her. I promise!" Lupin implored, brow furrowed.

"Remus, I'm not disagreeing with you that she should be removed from the den," Dumbledore pointed out. "I have an issue with the manner in which it was done."

Lupin removed his hands from the desk, stuck them back in his pockets and exhaled heavily.

"You say that you have no wish to lose any influence over the werewolves who will speak to you, yet you spirit away one of their number, and one that you full well know they would have wanted to keep hold of," Dumbledore continued rather tersely.

It seemed that a few of them were being treated to reprimands this evening.

"How on earth do you expect to look after her?" the Headmaster asked Lupin. "To be brutally frank, the Order needs you unencumbered by a dependant, and I rather think you have enough on your plate to deal with without having a child, and a lycanthropic one at that, on your hands."

Lupin had nothing to say, but the stubborn set to his face indicated clearly that he was not about to change his mind. The man was not only water-spined, as Moody had put it, but soft-hearted as well. Snape shook his head slightly at Lupin's dichotomy: he could be oddly blasé on some matters and immovably resistant on others. At times it was a mystery what internal set of ethics and morals the werewolf followed. Sometimes it changed from one moment to the next; one of Lupin's more exasperating personality traits.

Snape gradually tuned out of the conversation as Dumbledore continued to list all the negatives of Lupin's ill-considered actions. Although one of the more even-tempered examples, the man had not outgrown Gryffindor impulsiveness since leaving the school. Very few of them ever considered the consequences of their actions, citing their beliefs in justice and fairness that Snape found amusing since it usually required that everyone else to suspend theirs in order to excuse the behaviour.

Parr had the fingers of her right hand up to her closed eyes, her left arm tucked under the right across her chest. Snape watched her for a while, turning questions over in his mind. He had a suspicion about something that had occurred earlier in the evening and wondered if a simple approach would give him the confirmation he needed. Taking another look over at the Headmaster's desk to check that the others in the room were adequately distracted by the lecture that Dumbledore was giving Lupin, Snape walked slowly across the room and over to where Parr was standing, giving every impression that his destination was of little importance...merely another location in which to wait until being dismissed. After a cursory glance at some of the portraits on the wall, some of which were paying quite careful attention to what was being said, he turned slowly on his heel until he stood directly to Parr's left, facing in the same direction. She gave no indication she knew he was there, but it would have been foolish to think that she was unaware. Her hand remained pressed to her face, shoulders rounded forward and moving smoothly with each breath she took.

"...may be something that we can do," Shacklebolt was saying. "After all, we cannot refuse aid to a person simply because it could prove to be inconvenient to us."

"Kingsley, that isn't the point I'm trying to make here," Dumbledore responded, shaking his head slightly, fingertips lightly touching his temple. "I can't stress enough how long it took for the fallout from the last incident to die down. You should know; you were the one that had to remove all the documentation from the Ministry."

Snape was about to open his mouth to say something when his stomach beat him to it, making an impressive growling noise that only vaguely represented the colossal hunger pangs he'd been attempting to ignore for the past hour. It wasn't the way he would have wanted to start the conversation.

"Tell me about it," said Parr to her own chest, her voice low. "I've been desperate for something to eat since mid-afternoon."

"Even after all that vomiting?"

She let her hand drop from her face and fixed him with eyes that were beginning to turn bloodshot. "Especially after all that vomiting," she replied and fossicked about in her pocket for a mint. Crunching it up enthusiastically, she squinted at him, nostrils slightly flared. "Well?"

He raised an eyebrow at her. "Well what?"

Parr smacked her lips and turned them up in a half-smile. "You didn't come over here to play your hunger out loud for me, Professor. Therefore, I am guessing you want to ask me something."

He blinked at her, summing up every experience with her he'd had up to this current point, and decided to dispense with the roundabout approach.

"That barking noise back at the safe house. That was a seevy." It was not spoken as a question. He got the impression that if there were any indication of doubt in the statement, she would use it to her advantage. She would lie, agree or disagree, or not answer at all. Would he be able to tell if it was to be a lie? She was looking straight at him, and ordinarily that would be enough, but recalling his prior attempts at Legilimency with her, she'd give him the mental version of a slap. More likely a brass-knuckled punch.

She took a deep breath through her nose and screwed up her mouth before replying.

"Yes."

Simple as that.

"...know that Remus would never do anything without the best intentions, Professor," Tonks was saying. "I would have done the same."

"My dear girl, I would expect no less of you, but I would hate for our efforts to help so many more end in naught because we assisted one," said Dumbledore soothingly in an effort to palliate the rising agitation in Tonks. "So. The deed is done, and now we have to ensure that..."

Parr's red-rimmed gaze never wavered. He didn't know whether to be surprised or not. With the affirmative answer, Snape couldn't see how a lie would advantage her.

"Why do they wish you harm?" he posed with a tilt to his head.

Again that upward curve at the corner of her mouth. "Professor, if a seevy wishes to capture someone, they don't give away their presence intentionally."

"A warning."

Her single nod confirmed his statement.

"Why?"

Her forehead puckered as her brows drew up in a line of momentary uncertainty. "One would conclude it was to alert us to whomever it was intending to catch us unawares." She huffed and opened her eyes fully so that white showed all around the grey irises. Snape could see the thickening blood vessels in the sclerae, like creeping scarlet threads. "Who was he?" she asked softly.

Snape said nothing and feigned ignorance with a shake of his head and a shrug of his shoulders.

Parr's face snapped into flintiness.

"Professor, it is exceedingly rude to repay my honesty with dissemblance," she told him. "In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it is insulting." She bared a great many of her teeth in a cold moulding of a smile. "Though I can appreciate that could be your intention, I know that, at least in this case, it isn't."

That brought an unexpected curve to his own mouth. "How well you must know me," he replied, wrapping the words in sardonicism.

"Know?" She shook her head. "Smell? Yes." Her right hand floated up to her eyes, her words slightly muffled by her hand.

Snape clenched his teeth at being reminded at how much he had underestimated Trint and saw no point in responding. He noticed Parr sway ever so slightly.

"What's wrong?"

She dropped her hand and frowned. "I'm, er, having some trouble focusing." As soon as the words were out of her mouth, colour drained from her face, and she bent over with her hands on her knees.

Snape stepped back quickly, anticipating being hit with another spectacular example of vomiting, but Parr started to wheeze in deep, gulping breaths, a tremor running along her arms.

Unseen, miles away, an eye that had been closed for eleven months slowly opened.

"Remus, what's wrong with her?" Tonks asked shrilly, trying to hold Parr up and off the floor. The hand she had around the woman's arm confirmed what she could not believe her eyes were telling her. Parr had become emaciated right before them, as if her bulk had boiled away leaving only skin and bone.

Lupin was struggling to get Parr to look at him, torn between forcing her head up and kneeling in front of her to look up into her face.

"I don't know! I've never seen her do this before," he replied, panicked. "Chara? Damn it, Chara, what's happening?!" The agonised sound of breath scraping in and out of ruined lungs increased, and the hollow-eyed expression on her face terrified him in a way he hadn't experienced for some years. She was wasting away in his hands like ice seared by heat. A rivulet of blood escaped from her nose, and the skin of her lips cracked and split. "Chara, can you hear me?" He looked to Dumbledore. "I don't know what to do. Albus, I don't know what to do!"

Dumbledore turned to Shacklebolt. "You remember where to find Poppy?" Shacklebolt nodded. "Then go. And quickly." The man left.

Parr started to choke.

"Circe, don't die on me, Chara, please?" Lupin pleaded, renewing his efforts to raise her head.

"Severus, isn't there something you can do?"

Snape looked at Dumbledore, caught slightly off-guard by the question. He'd been stunned by the way Parr seemed to be almost collapsing in on herself, as if some parasite were sucking the life out of her at an alarming rate.

"Headmaster, you know that I never..."

"I think we're a little past worrying about official qualifications, Severus," Dumbledore interrupted him.

Snape grit his teeth and shoved Lupin aside. He gripped Parr's jaw with one hand, but he may as well have tried to move the head of a statue. He turned his head to look at Dumbledore.

"We have to..."

Parr stopped breathing, the rattling cut off as sharply as a knife wound. Her hand shot out and grabbed unerringly for the collar of Snape's coat. She pulled down forcefully, and his right knee slammed into the floor, sending a lightning strike of pain from knee to hip and making the right side of his body erupt in gooseflesh. The face above his was almost unrecognisable to him. Her skin was drawn so tightly across the bones that he could see the blood vessels underneath, her eyes seeming to be abnormally large in their sockets, pupils so dilated that there was barely a ring of grey iris around them. The blood from her nose had pooled in the corner of her mouth, leaching its way into the cracks of her parched lips, leaving them scarlet valleys. The ever-present bandage around her neck was dark with blood, and her breath was as foul as the air from a midden. Her iron grip on his coat prevented him from recoiling.

Parr's eyes stared straight through him. Then she swallowed him whole.

"You said you could find her!"

The four other men in the room flinched at the sudden roar of words.

Greyback kicked his chair, and it shattered into awkward pieces.

"You said you could bring her to me!"

He picked up a heavy chunk of the chair and threw it forcefully against the brick wall. It exploded into splinters and dust.

"Useless son of a two-legged whore!" the werewolf raged, shaking in red-faced fury.

"Someone tipped them off!" Trint explained, desperate to deflect Greyback's ire as quickly as possible before his throat got torn out. "We only just missed them."

Greyback balled his hands into fists and shook them. "I don't care if you missed them by five seconds or five days, you stupid bastard! The result is the same!"

Macnair opened his mouth. The werewolf covered the distance between them in two long strides.

"Just say it, Macnair. Just say one... fucking... word... and it'll be your last," he vowed in a low voice, glaring with the ferocious intensity of a rabid animal.

Macnair wisely closed his mouth. Greyback whirled away from him and began to pace back and forth across the room.

"I thought I had made it abundantly clear that finding and trapping Chara Parr was the most important thing you will ever do, Trint. Did I not indeed make that very... very clear?" The sound of bones crunching under the werewolf's boots added a pointed threat to the question.

Trint's hands clenched at his sides. "Yes."

"Then I confess to being somewhat bemused by the ratio of expended effort in relation to importance, Trint," Greyback pointed out, eyes narrowed shrewdly. "I am also aggrieved to find what I consider to be a lack of contriteness on your part for having failed me."

Trint pressed his lips together tightly and dropped his gaze to the bone-littered floor. He knew that there was nothing that he could say that could possibly ameliorate the situation. It remained to be seen if he would escape unscathed. Greyback was notorious for spectacular overreactions to the slightest obstacles. Waiving of fee would be considered compulsory now. However, to mention that at this precarious juncture could quite easily result in a forfeiture of more than earnings.

Put up, shut up, and keep still, Trint told himself, panic gusting in and out through his flared nostrils. He didn't like being in this position. This was the kind of situation he tended to put others in, which was the reason why he knew how best to deal with the role reversal. What mollified him appeared to be mollifying Greyback who, whilst still scrutinising him with the cold light of barely restrained fury in his eyes, didn't appear to be gearing himself up for further retribution. It seemed the storm had passed. For now.

Greyback turned away painfully slowly, his eyes locked on Trint until the last moment, the lighthouse beacon of his focus swinging to the man crouched on the floor.

"I am hoping my little medicine man has a balm of good news to alleviate this rather... unwelcome sting of disappointment."

The man in question cringed, his fingers tightening around a cold, thin wrist.

"I..." he began in a thick, choked voice, and had to pause to clear his throat. "I have given her all the serum." His eyes blinked rapidly in a staccato of anxiety. The pulse beneath his fingers was stronger than before, but still very slow. Much slower than it should have been.

Greyback pursed his lips and folded his hands together behind his back. "And?" he inquired with a politeness that was never a genuine facet of his character.

"She... ah... perhaps we need to wait a little longer," was the reply.

Greyback nodded slightly, as if to himself. "And how much longer is that, Pirino? Minutes? Hours? Days?" He shrugged his heavy shoulders and waited until the man opened his mouth to reply. "I no longer have such time!" he roared in Pirino's pale face.

The man, caught completely off-guard by the werewolf's abrupt change of disposition, fell back against the wall, instinctively raising his right arm to shield his face. "You have seconds! That is all I am giving you, Pirino. I don't care if you have to thrash her back into consciousness, but you will do it or you will be administering aid to yourself with the one limb I will allow you to keep attached to your body!" He grabbed hold of the arm the mediwizard was shielding himself with and pulled him roughly to a standing position. Pirino gave an emasculated squeak and flattened himself against the wall. "What's the matter, Pirino? Could it be that the pride of St Mungo's is not as good as he boasts? Could it be that he is just another useless, ball-juggling ignoramus who spends more time self-aggrandising than carrying out his duties diligently? Could it be that you think this challenge beneath you and your lofty abilities and wish instead to waste my time in retaliation?" Greyback shook the man vigorously so that his head bumped repeatedly against the powdery bricks with a hollow sound.

"No!" Pirino managed to cry out. "I am doing the best I can with what I have!"

Greyback stopped shaking him. "What's that? Surely not buck-passing, Pirino? Are you now blaming your tools instead of your lack of ability to work a simple cure?" He let go of the mediwizard's arm and spun to face Todianus. The fat man shrank back and slightly behind Macnair. "Well, Toadianus, it appears Pirino is intimating that your materials are insufficient to the simple task of reviving someone."

The accusation brought Todianus out from behind Macnair. "No! My supplies are ne plus ultra! I have provided precisely what I was told to provide...nothing less!" His flabby cheeks wobbled in sweaty outrage.

"And yet she remains unconscious!" Greyback fumed, one dirty and scarred finger pointed accusingly at the crumpled heap at Pirino's feet.

"I gave her enough stimulants to wake a dead troll!" Pirino whined, his knees shaking beneath his robes.

Greyback's gaze swung back to him.

"Perhaps it isn't obvious to you that you're not treating a dead troll," Todianus shrilled, his response pulling the werewolf's head back to him. "You do, after all, seem incapable of the simplest task set for you!"

"I am required to adhere to the basic tenets of my profession," Pirino retorted angrily, finally finding his spine. "Whatever turpitude you bring to your profession has no place in medicine!"

"I do what I must in order to get the job done," Todianus replied smoothly, brushing his chubby digits across his chest, light flickering along the rings cutting lavishly into his fingers.

"Enough!" Greyback roared, slashing at the air with his arm. He pushed the mediwizard back against the wall. "I have given you ample time to examine her and more time than I should have for you to treat her. You have been unable to determine how she can survive so long without food, unable to determine if she is fertile, and unable to revive her. Since you have proved so inept, your services are no longer required."

Pirino looked about nervously, his chin pressed painfully back into his neck in an effort to remain as far away from the werewolf as possible. "You mean... I can go?" A hopeful light entered his eyes and he glanced towards the doorway.

Greyback's mouth twisted into a smile. "I have one more task for you before you... go." He turned suddenly and grabbed for Trint. He moved too fast for the man to avoid the werewolf's grasp around his neck, and Trint was on his knees before he'd even realised what was happening. Greyback's ragged fingernails dug into the flesh of his neck, and the cowed man made to bring his hands up to try and pry the tightening noose away. Greyback grabbed his left hand and sank his teeth into the outer edge of the palm. With a sharp jerk of his head, he tore Trint's little finger straight from his hand with a wet, wrenching sound. The bone splintered all the way to the wrist and then gave way, and blood splattered like hot rain onto the floor.

For a few seconds, Trint was so shocked that the pain failed to register. Macnair flinched and backed away to avoid having his shoes ruined by the blood spraying from Trint's ruined hand. Todianus went white and pursed his mouth into a tight moue, holding down a rising tide of bile and pressing the fingers of one hand delicately to his lips. Pirino's jaw fell open as Greyback downed the mangled flesh like a wild dog, not even bothering to chew, and scrubbed his hand across his chin. Crimson streaked across his face like war paint.

Trint began to scream. Greyback kicked him in the face, knocking him backwards and cutting off the tortured vocalisation abruptly.

"One finger for every failure, Trint," Greyback vowed hoarsely, flecks of blood accompanying the words leaving his mouth. "Perhaps you just need greater incentive, eh?" He turned his head to Pirino. "Fix him," he grated. "Don't grow back his finger. Just patch him up. He still has a lot of work ahead of him and very little time to lose."

AN: 'ne plus ultra' is Latin for:

2. The most profound degree of a quality or condition.