Disclaimer: Weasleys belongs to Rowling, Nox and everyone else non-canon belongs to Starkiller.
AN: This is a AU based off Starkillers Twin Vice Paranormal Detectives because a plot-bunny simply wouldn't leave me alone for a while. It jumps back and forth a bit, but I hope it's possible to keep track. The part in italic is completely Starkiller's work and I only borrowed it because I wanted to be able to jump right into the story and steer it my own way. And maybe because I'm a bit lazy. (I hope that doesn't go against any rules in here. Not that I'm greatly concerned.)
Nox Wolfe had found a quiet and shadow-full place in the backyard of The Burrow to slowly sip her beer and watch the slow pace of the sun towards west, thinking back on the events a month before that had brought her there today. She still had a hard time believing all of it had really happened, even if the scars on the back of George's hand should be a reminder enough. Nearly dozing, the scenes played themselves before her inner eye.
–
Nox raced down the path through the apple orchards, Ben's rifle slung across her shoulder. Behind her lay the dark bulk of Rosewood estate, looking monstrous with its one lit window gleaming like a golden eye in the head of a giant Cyclops. The copses of trees moaned and swung in the rising wind. Nox decided this wasn't doing her nerves any good, and when she caught the grim face of a stone soldier through the trees, she gasped, lost her footing, and went crashing to the ground in an undignified heap.
When she opened her eyes again, she found her nose inches away from the base of one evil looking statue. Nox half expected the lump of stone to turn its Goblin-esque head around and roar at her. Thankfully, the statue kept its beady eyes staring blankly forward and its ugly mouth shut, but something else about it had her attention rapt. There was writing, she realised with a start, scribbled across the soldier's chest: two sets of initials, JT and CB, inside two interlocking crescent moons.
Nox stored the piece of information away and scrambled to her feet, setting off again at an even faster pace. She didn't relish the idea of roaming the lonely, ill-omened moor all by herself, but as she made her way out of the Estate she caught sight of a little bobbing light crossing the wild country, moving briskly towards a patch of drifting fog.
Relief flooded her. 'There you are,' but just as soon as she'd thought this did the light wink out of existence. Her heart lurched and she pumped her legs furiously down the path, across the road and onto the marshy moors. Nox couldn't find any sign of a path and she was forced to plough headlong onto the wild moor, leaping from tuft to rock and using the heather for leverage. The sucking, wet marsh swallowed her feet, sometimes right up to her knees.
A hideous howl broke around her, followed by a long, awful silence where even the wind seemed to drop as if in anticipation for a battle that was about to break.
Then suddenly, a dreadful clamour broke the silence - barking and yammering; an inhuman and barely canine tumult. Nox clambered over a high, rocky tor, and found Fred and George in a wide pit, facing off an enormous hound bathed in moonlight. The giant dog was not unlike the hound in her book, only flesh and blood and slavering wildly, its yellow eyes rolling in its beastly head.
Nox grasped inertly for her rifle, lips parting in amazement. Her mind fell utterly paralysed by the spectacle before her.
George spotted her on the tor and shook his head in warning.
"Get back!" he whispered fiercely. "You can't kill a werewolf with that poxy Muggle thing!"
Fred's head shot towards Nox and he groaned in despair. "Meddlesome and deaf!" He rolled his eyes skyward. "You ever going to listen to me?"
"You didn't listen to George. Why should I have listened to you?" she mumbled back, never taking her eyes from the hellish creature before her that had just now noticed her arrival and was beginning to pad softly towards the tor she was perched upon.
"Yeah, and look where it's got me." Fred jabbed a finger at the savage werewolf. "If I were alive, I'd be dead."
The monster raised itself to its full, terrifying height, its hackles raised and bristling, and snapped its head between George and Nox, as if trying to decide who to maul first. Fear flooded her, paralysing every nerve so that the rifle in her hands shook madly. As if sensing her fear, the hound snarled and with long bounds it began leaping towards Nox. George plunged forwards, grabbing the werewolf by its tail and pulling hard. It roared in outrage and spun around to bite him, but George was too quick for it and ducked the attack, all the while dragging the werewolf further and further from the tor.
"Who's afraid of the big bad wolf!" sang Fred, smacking the monster across the head again and again with rocks and clods of mud. "Come on, George, you almost had him there! Put a bit of muscle into it!"
"I would, but I'm trying to avoid the teeth at the other end," said George, just as the werewolf spun around and lashed its tail wildly in the air. The sudden, fierce movement caused George to lose his grip, and he went crashing against the edge of the pit and flopped to the ground, barely conscious.
Fred shouted after him, fearfully. The werewolf was snarling and making a steady pace towards his twin, its slavering lips drooling in anticipation.
Just then, the air exploded as Nox fired a trembling shot, but the bullet missed and split a small limestone boulder ten feet away. The werewolf sneered at her, and then resumed its steady stalk towards the twin who was pinned against the edge of the pit, half-conscious. Nox swore and cracked the rifle, shoving more bullets in and locking them into place as fast as her shaking hands would let her. The werewolf growled and leapt towards George as she aimed the trembling rifle once more. There was a CRACK and a pair of cold arms wrapped around her, steadying the barrels as much as they could. She fired.
There was a yelp of pain, but the shot to the hind leg seemed to do nothing more than aggravate the beast, which kicked off with its three good legs, leaping through the cold air. George acted on instinct, lifting his fists to battle, glaring through eyes that were nothing more than menacing slits. Both beast and man fought for life and death, not caring what was the outcome for themselves in the short moment it took the werewolf to fly through the air.
The air was filled with screams of terror, grunts of effort and the smell of fear as George's right hand met the snout of the beast, feeling short coarse hairs a split-second before it was engulfed in warm flesh and teeth, sticky saliva and gushing blood.
Yellow eyes glared into hostile black, both pairs only reflected a small part of the moonlight, and malice. George's face contracted in hatred as he shoved his fist further into the animal's mouth, feeling the sharp teeth reek the skin and flesh off his knuckles and the back of his hand.
He didn't stop. He kept pushing, feeling the enormous mound of muscles and hair trying to force closer to him, get more of him between the snapping jaws. The adrenaline pumped in his blood, he could feel his pulse in his head and the searing pain from his hand, but he didn't stop until he had his fist down the beast's throat, bending its shaggy head backwards as it began choking, but it made no move to get the blockade out of the way.
Somewhere far away he could hear encouraging yelling and terrified rambling telling him to let go, but he couldn't. His eyes were locked with the yellow ones, slowly realising the battle was lost, even if it had got in some good hits. The chest tried heaving, the throat contracting around his trapped and mangled hand, the only real thing as time stopped.
After an eternity the eyes went blank, the muscles went slack and the beast that had been roaming the moor laid unmoving. He kept his entire body still, as if the slightest movement would cause it to wake again.
"George!" The feminine cry of his name snapped him out of the trance and his eyes to Nox, Fred standing so close behind her as to almost float inside her. George blinked and slowly grabbed the werewolf's lower jaw to extract his bleeding fist.
"Bloody hell, Georgie," Fred whispered, his transparent face suddenly only inches from his twin's, searching it for... For what? A hint of bestiality?
"Yeah." George's voice came out as a hoarse croak as he slowly cradled his injured arm to his chest, his body beginning shaking and his eyes half-closing as the pain pulsed up his arm in time with the gushing blood to his shirt.
"Nox, run!" Fred yelled suddenly, his hands on George's shoulders, as if the wish to keep him still was enough.
"Why? What'll happen to him?" she answered, her voice shrill with fear.
"Just go, for goodness sake!" Fred roared, his face snapping around to stare at her. "Now!" The urgency of his voice seemed to vibrate through her bones, the concern setting her in movement like a mental slap. "And don't you dare come back before sunrise!"
She whipped around, stumbling across the wild moor with tears of fear and worry streaming down her cheeks, the last sound from the duo Fred's mockingly scolding of George to keep him awake.
OOO
The spoon of hot onion soup hovered in front of her mouth. Her lips parted enough to allow it in and the warm, fragrant food ran down her throat as her eyes stared unseeing into the flames of the kitchen fire. Anther two spoons of soup was needed before enough heat and life was restored in her chilled body to blink and move her glance to the frowning face of Martha.
"I'm sorry, lad," the woman said, then put the soup bowl down on the table beside her.
So am I, Nox thought numbly, not sure about what. The soup had seemed to do her good and she picked up the spoon herself and scooped the content of the bowl into herself, still a lump of ice laid in her stomach.
"How are you now?" Martha asked, getting up to wipe glasses clean. Nox watched with absent eyes, maybe it was a comfort for someone to keep in activity in the middle of this whole bloody mess.
She didn't understand quite what had happened in the last hours, only that George had to have lost the last marble he and his twin had between them to cause him to storm out in the dark after a werewolf that had just killed a girl, and then proceeded to shove his hand halfway down into the beast's stomach.
The sight of his blood had scared her, not because she had thought of him as invincible, quite the contrary if one could find the right button to push, but because of the sudden reality of it all. She had never doubted the seriousness of their business, but the surreal idea that a stale Jammy Dodger should put her life upside-down and topsy-turvy with ghosts and ghouls and what worse was, wasn't a thought that would ever have entered her head prior to stepping over the threshold of Weasley Manor.
Taking a deep breath and trying to gather her mind into its usual organised mode, she pushed the gory picture of George sitting there against the stone wall, shaking and bloody, out of her mind and began thinking of the outcome of current events.
If her knowledge of folklore didn't betray her, and she doubted that, George would now become a werewolf. Unless he bled to death where he sat with Fred joking about how he hadn't been scared of the big, bad wolf, the blood slowly seeping out of his body.
She shuddered at the thought. No, it didn't do any good thinking like that, and if there was any danger of George dying Fred would get help, somehow, somewhere.
"What's the time?" she muttered, not waiting for the answer from Martha or looking at the clock. Instead she stared out of the window, the dark was less dense now, more of a dull grey that allowed her to make out some shapes.
"Too late for you to be up," Martha answered. "Go up and try getting some sleep."
Nox didn't reply, just kept still on the hard wooden chair, shrugging slowly so the woollen blanked fell from her shoulders and caught on the back of the chair instead. "Not before sunrise," Fred had shouted at her. Not before any danger of George being dangerous passed. It wasn't exactly like he could mangle his nut-brain of a twin, either.
For once she had taken direct orders out of sheer fright of what would happen if she didn't. What she thought she knew about ghosts as moaning spirits looking for lost love or peace of mind in another way had been hastily rearranged the moment she met Fred, she had no desire to find out the same was true for surviving victims of werewolves.
She had ran, stumbled and waded her way to Rosewood Hall as fast as her knobbly legs would carry her, then banged on the front door like a maniac with both hands, screaming that they would let her in if they knew what was best for them, then collapsed in shock under Martha's care.
The minutes slowly snailed past as the light outside got stronger, the dawn drawing up a gloomy day submerged in fog. At last she got up to get her first aid kit, not sure what good it would do, except maybe preventing a nasty infection in George's hand. The idea seemed silly, the man had just inflicted himself with a future as a werewolf, still it offered her some small comfort as she felt she might be helping with something she knew far to little about to actually make a difference.
The reason of her presence there at all returned to her mind as she made her way to her room. The case that had seemed like a piece of cake at first, a bit of mystery to spice up her day. Not that her life had needed any more spicing up after meeting the Twins of Terror.
"To hell with it," she muttered as she emptied her rucksack on the bed. The case didn't seem to have an easy solution and she wanted nothing more than to pack her bag and leave Dartmoor for good now that Lucie and the werewolf were dead and George injured. She did not admit to be a coward, but didn't much desire to dig deeper in the bog of secrets the place held.
She would get a normal job, lead a normal life and never think about George or his ghostly twin again. After she had seen to at least one of them kept his life. The sun had risen properly now, hanging like a white speck in the clouded sky over the horizon, much like the moon had done not that long ago.
–
Draining the last of her beer, Nox stood up and dusted dry grass from the bottom of her trousers before heading inside to find something more optimistic to occupy her mind with.
AN: And now a warning; I have a couple of more chapters to this but have hit a dry spell and it might never get completely finished. Hoped I have made somewhat of a decent job with what I have, though. Plus, I was extremely lazy with the finishing of the case because I couldn't for the love of it figure out how to write it well.
