Vulpe perched on a chair in the Slytherin
common rooms, a few weeks after Jack had enterd into
Hogwarts. She eyed Blaise Zabini
who was sitting across from her and smiling slightly. Pushy little bitch doll
of a girl. Crystal blue eyes met red as she laid her cards across the table.
“Full house.”
The fox snorted and laid down her cards. “Fold.
Dammit. You’re good at this, usually I can beat
anyone.”
Blaise smiled as she picked up the playing cards and
shuffled, tapping the worn edges of the handpainted
cards together into something resembling order. The backs were painted with a
green snake against a black background, and the royal cards of each suite
displayed creatures not unlike Vulpe herself. The
Diamond suite had foxes for its royalty. “So, Wyvern never cautioned you
against playing cards with me?”
“Draco warns me about a lot of things. That doesn’t mean I listen to
him,” Vulpe sniffed as she picked up her new cards.
“Don’t play with Jack.”
“And whyever ever not, dearest Foxie
love?” Blaise said as she studied her hand.
“He’s a thief and a scoundrel and a rake and a bad bad man. Bird. Hmmph.” Vulpe
wrinkled her nose thoughtfully as she looked at her hand. “You’re cheating,
aren’t you?”
“How can you even ask?” Blaise pouted, then smiled. “Well, yes. Of course I am. I’m a Slytherin.”
“Funny, funny, very funny.” Vulpe frowned at Blaise, then slid two cards face
down across the table. “Two.” Blaise dealt Vulpe two more cards, and gave herself three. They both
looked at their cards, then at each other. Vulpe
smiled. “I raise.”
“Match and raise,” Blaise said. They both
looked at each other as they slid the stakes into the center
of the table.
“Raise.”
Blaise looked at Vulpe consideringly. “Match. Show?”
“Show,” Vulpe agreed. “Pair of
“Three twos.”
“Reynard take your black little heart,” Vulpe said admiringly. “That’s it for me, I’m out.” She
watched Blaise pack up the cards. “You know what?
Let’s go torment the lightning boy.”
“Oh, I’m over that. He’ll win or not. Probably win, he’s got the
luck of a fox,” Blaise said, and then looked up. “No
offence.”
“None taken, we’re very lucky.”
“Anyway. I have a detention tonight.”
“With who?”
“Flitwick. I, ah, misused a
charm.”
“What?” Vulpe’s eyes sparked with
mischief.
“A. . .lust charm would be the best name
for it.” Blaise coughed delicately. “I missed who I
was aiming for, and hit the precious Boy-Who-Lived. And why that’s such a
special title, I’ll never understand. After all, we all live. Or we die. Not
exactly Alchemy.”
“No, not really,” Vulpe said thoughtfully.
She got to her feet, tail flipping around her ankles. “I’m going to roam a
bit.”
There was flame in her eyes as she left. Blaise
just nodded thoughtfully and laid out her cards for a game of Solitaire. The
first card she turned over was the Queen of Diamonds, followed by the King of
Spades, a black dog. She hmm’d in concern, then
decided to dismiss it as a coincidence and kept playing. Her extremely minor
powers of foretelling couldn’t be in operation. Could they?
~*~*~*~
Vulpe walked out of the school. Her fur prickled.
Something was not right. A jackdaw spiraled down out
of the sky and transformed. Jack shook out his hair and flicked his cuffs out,
fixing the lace.
“I saw something in the wind.”
“And I felt something pass in the earth.”
They looked at each other, then out at the lake.
The earth shuddered and cracked. Jack leapt into the air, feathers
sprouting and then he was whirled around by an errant wind. His frightened cry
was swallowed by the rushing of the storm that was growing as Vulpe was thrown backwards. The earth
beneath her feet shuddered and jolted like a frightened horse unused to a rider
on it and protesting violently with bucks and loud whickering.
Screams rose from the castle and the sound of breaking glass. A roar. Draco held onto his desk as the floor beneath him
rolled and rippled. He caught Snape’s eye and they
both looked grim. Harry caught the look.
“What’s going on?” he cried out.
“When it is over, we will know,” Snape
said seriously.
Harry grabbed Hermoine before she sent her
forehead into the corner of a desk and knocked herself
out. “With all due respect, sir, that wasn’t a very good answer!”
“When I have a better one, I’ll be sure to get back to you,” Snape snarled. Not even now could he stop being an
absolutely insufferable brat. His head was starting to hurt, but his forearm
wasn’t. So as far as he knew, it was nothing to do with Voldemort.
. .but Voldemort wasn’t the only evil in the world,
no matter how much he influenced the world of wizardy.
He was at best, a scratch in the rock no matter how much space he took up in
the pages of history. History was an all too human concept. The
Vulpe fixed her claws into the earth as it bucked and
shook under her, clinging to it tenaciously. She had no idea where Jack was. He
could be anywhere. A jackdaw wasn’t very big, and that wind had been very mean
and hungry. She flicked her eyes upwards as two immense furred forms dropped to
their bellies beside her.
“A fine day, this, fox!” Nuala growled.
“Something from darkness sent, seeks to return,” Malgaunt
said. “We know of death. From the other side of the veil, something seeks to
pass through.”
“Something has permission, and something does not,” Nuala corrected. “The other something is the problem. The
earth cries out. The little snake wizard will know of this happening and the
power channeled through the earth today.”
“Reynard take it!” Vulpe
yapped. “I knew of the first something. I came to meet her. This is not needed
now! We have much to do, and not much time in which to
do it, the way we count time.”
“Which is not at all,” Nuala said.
“Not the point, yarp!”
The earth, *howled*, there was no other word for it. The waters of
the lake boiled and Vulpe could see the tentacles of
the giant squid lashing in terror. She could hear the screams and garbled songs
of the Mer. They could be lost, in this. They could deal with storms of a
normal nature, but not like this. Not like this.
A gate appeared, a form crawled through it. Followed
by another body, holding onto the heel of the first one with a grip like a
bulldog on the nose of the bull, knowing that to let go was to die. The
storm disappeared. The earth returned to itself. The waters calmed. A blue sky
reappeared over head, and a bird broke the amazed stillness with a chirp,
before bursting into song.
“Well, let’s go see who’s come,” Vulpe said, getting shakily to her feet. She walked down
the slo[e
to the two still bodies. Nuala and Malgaunt followed her at a lope. She bent to turn the first
one’s face to the side. Upswept earlobes surmounted by a slightly furred and
pointed tip, tawny browngold hair and almond shaped
eyes, closed for now in a tanned face. “Tamsin,” Vulpe said, in mixed tones of relief and remembered anger.
She turned to look at the other one now, the unwanted one. “And who are you, to cling so hard to the one we wanted’s
foot like Jacob to Esau’s? Let’s hope you don’t end as ill for her, as Jacob
for Esau.” She sniffed his black hair delicately. “Dog.
But human. Not one of us. A wizard
then.”
“Not all human,” Malgaunt corrected. Vulpe shot him a look.
“Well, if he had been, he couldn’t have come back through the gate.
But a lot of wizards have a trace of Wildfolk blood
racing through their veins. We are the wildfire magic. Devilish
hard to get in, but even harder to get rid of. But he’s yours, if he’s
anyone’s.”
“One supposes we should find clothes for them,” Nuala
remarked. “Humans take so much care in wearing clothes.” Malgaunt
snorted and lifted the blackhaired man over his
shoulder in an easy carry.
“Let’s just get them inside. We can worry about who he is, later.”
“But he must be needed, they wouldn’t have let him come back
otherwise,” Vulpe said.
“Needed. . .but for who?” Nuala said in a stern voice. “There are worse things then
wizards who seek to pierce all mysteries. <I>They</I>
could have sent him.”
Vulpe looked confused and angry as Nuala
bent to pick up Tamsin. “I don’t know!”
“And until we do know, we shall not say anything of importance to
him,” Malgaunt growled. The two wolves and the fox
set off for the infirmary, two unconscious bodies carried with them. They loped
easily past the confused students babbling and milling in the corridors. A
glance or two of either wolf’s teeth and all were very willing to let them
pass, despite the fact they were carrying two nude people. Draco joined Vulpe’s side as the company moved quickly through the halls
to the hospital wing.
“What happened?”
“She was meant to come through. I went to meet her, he just turned
up,’ Vulpe informed him quietly. “He made all the
mess. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. He’s not meant to be here at
all. He’s meant to still be dead. She had another life.
. .has another six, I think.”
“Another six?” Draco inquired, lifting an eyebrow.
“Well, yeah, she is a cat,” Vulpe said as
if he was stupid for even asking. “The thing is,
wizards who are straight wizards, can’t come back. They become ghosts. Paintings. Something else. They
don’t come back like this.”
“So, he wasn’t strictly human,” Draco mused.
“Well, neither are the Malfoys so that’s
nothing to be priggish about,” Vulpe snapped.
“SIRUIS!” Harry yelled as he saw the man’s face. “What. He.
HOW?!”
“Well, we have a name,” Vulpe sighed. “You
take care of shouting numbskull, we need to figure out
some things. He’s wolf, back a few centuries.”
“He’s a Black,” Draco said simply, then moved to intercept Harry before a snarling Malgaunt bit his hand off.
“That actually explains a lot,” Vulpe said
thoughtfully.