Chapter Two

The werewolves sat in the basement of one of Knockturn Alley's closed down shops. The place was hardly spectacular accommodations, but one of them really had nowhere else to go, the other couldn't return to the life that awaited him until he had answers.

Fenrir swallowed back another mouthful of perhaps too-perfectly aged Fire Whiskey as he simply watched Remus.

"So, we've a deal? A story for a story? I tell you what really happened, you tell me how the fuck you're alive?" And maybe share a bit about that sweet little witch, but for now, Fenrir would settle for one mystery solved.

Closing his eyes as he exhaled slow, trying to keep himself together, Remus nodded. Ever since he'd come to in the silent stillness of the battlefield a few hours earlier, he'd felt like an exposed nerve. It made the discovery of his father's secret—something he'd been repressing for weeks, now—leap to the front of his mind, demanding his attention.

"Your dad's story is right in parts," Fenrir began with a sideways tilt of his head. "We first met when I was picked up on suspicion of being the werewolf who was attacking Muggles, along with a bunch of other werewolves. Your dad, who fancied himself an expert on lycanthropy, was convinced it was me. He was made to leave, but not before looking me square in the eye and telling me all werewolves were soulless, that we were evil and deserved nothing less than death. I think he just didn't like the look of me, to be honest, but those words stung. They cleared me, and were letting me go."

Remus ignored how much hearing what his father had said to Fenrir hurt. He's always been told his father had loved him, but as he'd grown older, as he looked back on his childhood through an adult's eyes, he began to suspect Lyall's fatherly devotion toward him was exactly that—simply what he was told, like so many other things.

"The story goes that you were being released when you and the other werewolves overpowered the wizards escorting you out, and fled," he ventured, grabbing the bottle Fenrir was offering by the neck and taking a long swig.

"That did happen." Fenrir shook his head. "But it was only because they were going to memory charm us, and I wanted to remember your father's face. The man didn't know me from a bloody hole in the wall, but he decided that I—and everyone who shared my affliction—deserved to die. Can you imagine? People who are infected with a curse and shunned for it as though it's their own fault, being told they don't even deserve to live? He became the reason I hate normal wizards. You became the reason I believed those who are bitten young should be raised away from normal wizards . . . away from men like Lyall Lupin."

Remus took another drink at that.

Fenrir threw up his hands. "I know! You were told I choose to bite them young. That I prefer it, that I do it intentionally with hopes to raise them away from normal wizards and teach the pups to hate them." At the way Remus' brows shot up, Fenrir scowled. "I've kept up on what's said about me. I'm 'savage,' not stupid."

"Go on, then." Though it seemed a reluctant movement, Remus handed back the bottle.

"All right, so you get that what I actually felt and what I said was taken and twisted—exaggerated—to fit the needs of a campaign against werewolves by the Ministry."

Remus' narrow features pinched in a mildly fuzzy look of disbelief. "But you served Voldemort."

Fenrir rolled his eyes so hard his lids fluttered. "That was nothing more than a business arrangement. I went to him for protection. In exchange, I had to do what he said. I just wanted to be left the fuck alone, but the Ministry didn't want to let that happen. Anyway, I got it in my head that I wanted to set your father straight . . . wanted to rip his head off and set it on a pike was more like it, but I thought I'd figure it out how far I'd take things when I got there."

"Is anything he said about that night true?"

At the hurt in the other werewolf's strained tone, Fenrir's eyes narrowed. He'd been correct all along, Lyall Lupin was a complete and utter shit. "I didn't break in through the bloody window. I showed up on the doorstep and knocked. Like an actual person. I suppose, though, that didn't fit the mold of a 'savage monster' enough for his liking. And oh, yes, I bit you . . . but I certainly didn't go there with the intention to bite you."

Remus thought he'd have fallen down on the spot at that, were he not already sitting down. "You meant to . . . to . . . ." He could scarcely believe the words.

Taking another drink, Fenrir nodded. "I meant to turn your father into the thing he so hated. To make him live as what he condemned."

Lowering his gaze, Remus thought for a few strained heartbeats on whether or not he wanted to ask the next logical question. Of course, he knew he had to—that was the very reason he was here. He couldn't bear to face any of his friends who'd survived the War with this secret hanging over him.

He needed the truth confirmed, even if no one else would believe it.

"Then how did you manage to bite me, instead?"

Fenrir blew out a breath from between pursed lips and sat back. "There was a fight. You, brave little snot you were, tried to get in the middle. And, rather than pushing you out of the way, Lyall . . . pulled you in front of him. It all happened so fast, my bite that was meant for him caught you, instead. I knew the moment it happened there was no way out for me. He was the good guy by nature of his position, and I, some scraggly werewolf. So I ran.

"Next thing I know, there's this story making the rounds about how I broke in through your window while you slept and bit you to get back at him. That he came in and 'fought me off', but it was too late. But now, you see how the reality of the situation was bent to fit his needs? He came out the dutiful father defending his son, while the incident 'served to prove' that I must've been behind the Muggle attacks. And the stories about me, about my so-called savagery only grew from there."

"What about the Montgomery boy?"

Fenrir made an ugly scoffing sound. "Never laid a finger on that boy when the Death Eaters went after his mum." At Remus' incredulous look, he shrugged. "Fine, claw, fang, whatever. The point is I didn't kill that witch's son. That boy died because he was ill, it was just bad timing. Well, bad for me, anyway. And while we're at it, I'm not a fucking cannibal, either."

"So I'm just supposed to believe everything said about you has been a lie? You don't think that's a bit of a stretch?"

Shaking his finger in the air, Fenrir frowned. "Not everything, and not lies, warped and exaggerated versions of real events. Very wide margin, there."

"So there is something that's true?"

With a sigh, Fenrir knocked back a long swig of the whiskey. "Tales about me . . . trying to build an army might not be too far from the truth."

"For fuck's sake, Greyback."

"I wasn't trying to build an army! You'll never understand," Fenrir said, shaking his head as he gritted his teeth. "You're too domesticated to understand what I was trying to do."

Remus pointedly locked his newly amber eyes on the other wolf. "I'd say something's changed in me recently, wouldn't you? Try me."

Another sigh rumbled out of Fenrir as he winced, wondering how this would sound, after all. "Fine. One of the things that's never been a lie about me is that I'm more wolf-than-man than any wizard who was ever bitten. To that end, I was trying to live like a wolf. I was trying to—"

"You were trying to build a pack."

Nodding in agreement with Remus' awed voice, Fenrir scratched at his chin through the bristle of his beard. "Yep. But, of course, every time I bit someone who survived the transformation, they wanted fuck all to do with me and went off on their own. So then, I'd be onto the next. The only reason we seemed like something as cohesive as an army was because we knew that with Voldemort, we had a chance to not all be locked up just for existing. You got special treatment in that regard."

"For all the good it did me," Remus said in a sour tone, propping his elbows on his thighs and dropping his head into his hands.

He had no reason to disbelieve a word Fenrir had said just now. Why? Because Fenrir had nothing to gain from lying to him. If it was something so simple as not wanting to be jailed, Fenrir could kill him and go on about his business, or could flee the moment Remus Apparated away to alert the new Ministry and be long gone by the time authorities returned.

He'd spent so much time hating this man. Now? Knowing how much of that anger had been misplaced? Remus wasn't sure how to feel about that, or what to do with that excess of rage he was so accustomed to keeping tempered in the back of his mind at every waking moment.

No one had any idea how angry he was on a day-to-day basis. He sometimes thought the effort to hide that, alone, was what kept him so damn weary all the time.

"Now, what happened to you?"

Remus lifted his head, meeting Fenrir's expectant gaze. "Strangely? I've no idea."

Fenrir's shoulders slumped. "Well, that's disappointing."

Holding up one hand in a placating gesture, Remus sighed. "No, no. I recall being struck down, I remember feeling myself die. Just, I knew that was it, I knew the battle had ended me. And I was furious. I wanted to live. I wanted to find the truth behind this." He spared a moment to fish the torn pages from his father's journal from his pocket and toss them on ground at Fenrir's feet. The other werewolf merely arched a brow at the gesture. "But I knew in that moment, I was going to my grave without an answer. I died enraged."

"And yet, here you sit."

"Your guess is as good as mine as to how the bloody hell that happened."

Fenrir frowned in thought, stroking his beard idly as Remus snatched the bottle from his hand and polished off the last of the Fire Whiskey. "Maybe, now, bear with me on this, maybe it's because of what you are. I mean, your eyes, alone, are enough reason to think something in our affliction pulled you through."

Remus pinched tiredly between his brows as he squeezed his eyes shut. "Surprisingly, that hadn't occurred to me. It's been a hell of a few hours, and it seemed all I could think about when I awoke was the very same thing I'd been so furious over when I'd gone."

"Well, let's trace it back. Who cast the fatal charm?"

Sitting back, Remus folded his arms across his chest. His mouth pulled to one side as he considered the other man. "Why are you so interested in this?'

"Mate? You pulled your own arse back from the dead. Seeing as the only thing we have in common is our affliction, I'd like to know as much as there is to know."

"Worried for your own mortality?"

Fenrir snickered and nodded. "Always."

Closing his eyes for a quiet moment, Remus thought back on that terrible moment. He knew perfectly well who'd felled him. He'd seen his face, he'd watched that flash of purple flame cut through the air toward him, too quick to defend against.

"Antonin Dolohov."

Fenrir shook his head as he emitted a low whistling sound. "Then it's got to be due to what we are. No one's ever survived a direct hit from that curse of his, but I don't recall him ever using it on one of us, before."

The younger werewolf chewed at his lower lip as he considered that. "No, no, that's not true. Hermione survived it. I mean, she needed a veritable concoction of daily medicinal potions in the days that followed, but she pulled through on her own, initially."

Fenrir's brows had drawn upward as Remus talked. "Hermione?" He smirked. Now they were getting somewhere, and without any effort on his part. "Granger? The Mudblood girl Potter's always hanging all over?"

He knew it was his newly sharpened instincts that alerted him to it, but Remus could tell Fenrir's curiosity was piqued by this information about Hermione, in a way that was by no means innocent. And he did not like that one little bit.

"The word you're looking for is Muggleborn, Greyback. And what do you care?"

"I don't care," Fenrir said, a smirk curving his lips. Was that a hint of jealousy edging Remus' scent, just now? Oh, this just got more and more intriguing, didn't it? "I just have a . . . we'll call it a vested interested in her."

Remus could feel that now-so-familiar anger sparking through him as he fixed the other werewolf with a glare. "What sort of vested interest?"

Tipping his head back in a defiant look as he held Remus' fuming gaze, Fenrir uttered a rich chuckle as he answered, "The sort that ends with me shagging her pretty little brains out, over and over again."

Remus didn't know what came over him, only aware that he was launching himself at the other werewolf after he'd already started moving.