Chapter 1

Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to their respective owners.

"I wish," Petunia Evans muttered one autumn day, while her younger sister Lily was just starting her first year in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, "that I had magic as well."

She never noticed another person (admittedly partially obscured by fog) who took one good look at her, and muttered back: "Wish granted."

That night, however, Petunia had first out of many dreams that would follow her for the rest of the life, dreams of running through the streets, unbound and free, somehow terrifying everyone in her path and enjoying it immensely, her jaws snapping like a bear trap.

Coincidentally, a number of pets, and even guard dogs, began to disappear during that period of time, only their remains were found, and those kills were made by something other than a pack of feral dogs or even wolves; a neighbourhood watch was started and dog catchers began to make rounds through the neighbourhood, but the perpetrator was never captured, though sometimes it was seen – a big, striped, misshapen dog that ran away from people, though snarling and angry.

Petunia did not care about this at all but continued to go to school and experiencing the changes in her body. Always on the tall and skinny side (unlike Lily), she continued to grow taller and skinner, even though she was never really hungry, and would become actually quite angry if someone tried to push a meal on her.

Then again, those days Petunia seemed to be constantly angry – or at least irritated – with everybody, though when it came to her family she tried to keep her feelings under control. But it was hard; it was as if she was subconsciously fighting any control, even self-control, and wanted to just run free and be herself, whoever she really was.

Consequently, it was not too long before she became a much more active participant in her school's gym activities and that was good, before academically she was floundering. However, firstly, Petunia discovered that with a quick smile and some giggling practically anyone would be ready and willing to do her homework for her so that she would not physically hurt him or her (not that she would, but she did imply, apparently), so she kept up the appearance of decent grades to her parents and their friends, and secondly she was the new darling of the school's girls' coach, Ms. Morris, a rather unpleasant and unfriendly (and also slightly obsessed with the physical prowess) woman herself, so what she failed academically, she made up in the gym.

Of course, it did not hurt that the school's headmistress really cared only about the school and how it looked to her superiors, not about the students – as long Petunia kept up the appearances, the headmistress did not really give a damn as to how she did it.

With Lily's friends it was harder. As the years went by, the Evans sisters did became estranged, but they also made an effort to get along, at least for their parents' sake.

And yet Lily's wizard friends have somehow seen something in Petunia that they did not like – not that the feeling was not reciprocated, of course. The smallest of her friends took one look at the elder Evans girl and did his best to stay the Hell away from her; the other two, Remus and Sirius, did their best to stare Petunia down, but Petunia had plenty of confrontation experiences by now: as the two young men glared at her, she dug her heels and grinned back with her trademark grin, and after one tense standoff, they never really challenged her again.

The crux of the matter was Lily's new swain, of course, James Potter. When he was waiting for Lily one day (Lily was doing her cosmetics – for someone supposedly so deep she never objected to self-beautification), Petunia approached the young man, looked him in the eye and told him, that if he broke Lily's heart, she would break him – and it seems that he took it to heart.

But it also practically broke any remaining bond between the two sisters other than that of the sisterly obligation to each other, and they never spoke to each other again unless they had to.

(Incidentally, the same thing had apparently between Lily and her former best friend Severus Snape – he too apparently had drifted away from Lily, though Petunia never really commented on that, for she had never liked him much or at all.)

However, Petunia did not really care – as Lily's career in witchcraft and wizardry went apiece, Petunia went to a university on an athletics grant, and provided that she could keep up the grades, her career was assured.

And Petunia did. Somehow, being away from home, being away from Lily, calmed her down a bit, and though she was a blond, she was not stupid either – she was able to keep up academically enough so that her career in light athletics (she was wiry rather than brawny) was certified.

And then her fate changed. There was a young man in her classes, an overseas student from Middle East or northern Africa, and somehow he just rubbed Petunia wrong, even more so than Lily's wizard friends did – and this time it was mutual.

For a while the pair kept apart from each other (and the fact that the university's campus was sizeable and full of buildings made it easy to do that), but one night, when Petunia had to stay late in the evening to catch up on her homework, she ran into Aristides Zabini, and he was drunk and apparently angry to take on the world.

For some time the pair just stood there, in the light of the rising moon glaring at each other, and then something seemed to burst out of Zabini, and he became some sort of a misshapen dog – only it was not a dog, but rather a hyena, something that Petunia just instinctively knew as she shifted herself, to meet Aristides jaw to jaw.

For a while they circled each other, sniffing and snarling, and neither gave ground until some other university students began to appear and the pair separated, each one fleeing their separate way.

And the next morning, when Petunia was human once more, Aristides approached her, clearly in peace. "You're like me," he told her in his accented English, "you hyena man, hyena woman, with a second mouth on the back of the head, correct?"

Petunia just smiled as she ruffled her hair – she had become aware of her second mouth quite a while ago, even as no one else apparently did – and said nothing.

Aristides took this silent reply as an affirmative and continued: "Marry me."

And Petunia, who had a very thoughtful night, agreed.

The wedding was relatively small and private: Petunia has become even more estranged from her parents a while ago, and the Zabini family was just Aristides and his father, who appeared to have napped through most of the ceremony. And neither of them had many friends, magical or otherwise, so it was really just a civil service, albeit one with magical, rather than "muggle" overtones. That did not stop one witch, one Zara Favor, from bursting in on the ceremony, trying to hex the bride – apparently, her family had plans for her marrying Aristides without even notifying him, and now it had backfired, as had Zara's hex and the auror, who was part of the chapel's security staff, had Zara removed from the premises and into the Ministry, once it became obvious that her backfired hex wasn't contagious, and the newlyweds left shortly afterwards.

The married life suited Petunia well; Aristides did not object when she converted a portion of his family estates into a training muggle gym and took charge of it. The reason for that was twofold – Lily Rose Evans-Zabini and Gillian Rose Evans-Zabini: the Zabini family really liked matching names for their twins (and there were many twins in the Zabini family, though not in this generation), the language of the names was not important.

As an added bonus, Lily did not invite her elder sister to her wedding: though the Zabini family was no big supporter of the latest Dark Lord, "You-Know-Who", they were quite dark themselves, obviously, and Lily's letter, though apologetic, was also very clear on this point – and Petunia didn't contest it. Their parents' health has deteriorated, they were also unable to attend Lily's wedding (they still did not know about Petunia's new married life and family), and without them Petunia did not really want to hang around with her sister at all.

And then, a year later, the headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Brian Percival Wulfric Dumbledore came to the Zabinis with a baby whose name was Harry James Potter and a heavy heart – the Zabinis were a dark magic family, and though they had never really supported Grindelwald, they weren't big friends of Dumbledore either: in fact, Aristides was already making quiet arrangements of sending their girls to the Zabinis old alma mater in Arabia or Yemen, where teachers were much more welcoming of the hyena-people students.

Dumbledore could not approve of that, but Petunia was the last family member related to baby Harry by blood, and after looking at him lying so helplessly in his basket, she and Aristides shared a quiet look, and Harry James Potter became the ward of the Zabini family.

TBC