Chapter Eleven

When first Luna and Paul and then, seconds later, Hermione and Sam came back into the house, Severus's eyes immediately jumped over to both girls from where he stood talking to Carlisle and Edward. He was reluctantly gratified to see that Luna retained her usual neat and ethereal appearance; it appeared Paul was treating her with the utmost reverence, and it was clearly doing her a world of good, as she looked to be more at peace than she had since long before the disaster of the battle where she'd been raped.

His eyes narrowed, however, when next they landed on Hermione. Her eyes were sparkling in a way that they hadn't since her sixth year and her cheeks were flushed becomingly, but it was the slightly swollen, as if bee-stung, appearance of her lips, the faint reddish spots on the side of her neck, and the leaves in her hair that brought the scowl to his face. And taking in the rumpled appearance of her dress only made him scowl more deeply. So. It seemed the alpha pup's self-control was dismally lacking. The gods help him if it were anything other than a lack of self-control, such as a lack of respect for a woman. No intentions right now, my arse, he thought to himself, the scowl darkening on his face.

The two Cullen males with him noticed the change in his demeanor, and as usual, their perceptiveness did not fail them. They both made the connection rather immediately between the wizard's scowl and the appearance of one small witch with wild hair, and they both immediately ascertained the conclusions to which Snape had jumped. Unlike him, however, they knew he was wrong.

"They didn't do much beyond kissing," Edward murmured just loud enough for him to hear.

Severus's eye twitched. "And I suppose a leaf-throwing contest would explain the leaves in her hair, then? Perhaps they decided to see who could throw leaves with more accuracy, and she lost? I didn't see any leaves in his hair," he murmured even more quietly.

Edward rolled his eyes. "You make quite the over-protective parent, Snape. Trust me, we'd be able to smell it if they had done what you're afraid they did. Give him a little more credit. Perhaps they indulged in a little heavy…what do you call it in England? Snogging? But if they did, it was done with clothes on. And even if they did otherwise, she's an adult who can make her own choices. It's not as if he'll ever leave her. He can't, remember?"

Severus was loath to admit it, but he knew the vampire was right. He hadn't missed the look of devotion in either wolf's eyes when they looked at the two witches. He knew that how quickly or slowly the relationships went would be ultimately decided by the girls, because the wolves would not be able to bear upsetting them by pushing too hard.

He sighed, finally admitting to himself the same thing every devoted father – or father-figure as in his case – must admit to himself eventually. The real reason he was so quick to find fault with the two Quileute youth was because he knew that being tied to them meant that Luna and Hermione would be staying here rather than returning to England.

Before he could ruminate any further, or sink deeper into the melancholy that had risen up suddenly at the thought of the two girls leaving him behind, Carlisle spoke up. "Luna, would you like for me to examine you now? We can go upstairs, and if Hermione likes, she can come with us."

Both Luna and Hermione agreed, and in response to Severus's questioning frown, Hermione said, "Carlisle has agreed to examine Luna so that we know exactly how she's doing, like he did with Bella when she was pregnant with Renesmee, before being turned."

"Unfortunately, my equipment won't be able to see much of the baby as the placenta has formed a sort of hardened, opaque shell, but at the very least I can get a few readings as to the health of Luna's body, to see how well she's holding up with the pregnancy. Hopefully, the blood will mean that we'll find her to be healthier in later stages than Bella was, since we didn't know about the blood until much later in Bella's pregnancy," Carlisle stated.

Severus nodded, his brows knit together in deep thought. At last he looked up, and looked at Carlisle. "I assume your equipment would be the standard equipment found in hospital rooms where women give birth?"

"It's state of the art, not exactly standard, but yes," the vampire patriarch replied.

Severus nodded. "Well, you may not be able to get much of a reading on the baby, but I know someone who can." He turned to Hermione. "I'm going to fetch Poppy."

She nodded. "Good idea."

As he twisted in place and vanished with a pop, she turned to the Cullens and the three wolves and said, "He's gone to fetch the nurse from our old school. She's an accomplished Healer and we all trust her with our lives." She smiled a little ruefully and added, "She certainly saw a lot of me, and even more of my best friend Harry, in our school days."

She jumped a little in surprise when she felt a pair of arms slide around her and pull her back to clutch her tightly to an overly warm chest, where a growl rumbled deep and silent. She looked up to find an extremely unhappy Sam frowning down at her.

Confused, she opened her mouth, about to ask him what was wrong, but as she met his gaze with hers she saw a shadow of pain and fear in his black eyes, and she realized he'd been upset by the idea of her being injured so many times. Silently, she cast a wandless privacy charm around them – the first of only a handful of wandless spells she'd mastered so far – so as to avoid the curious observances of the Cullens, who always saw and knew too much. Then she turned to face him.

"It was a school full of magical children, Sam. Accidents happened. My two best friends seemed to have a special talent for getting into trouble, and to keep them alive I had to get into trouble sometimes, too." She reached up with both hands to touch his face, laying her palms flat against both sides of his head. "I'm not afraid to fight if I have to. And if ever there is a threat to the people I love, whether it's Harry, Luna, Severus, or you, I will fight. I won't allow you to hide me away, so the best you can do is stand beside me so that we can defend each other. Isn't that what a pack does, after all?"

And that was how Hermione Granger won an argument before it had even started. She played the pack card, alluding to the fact that though she wasn't Quileute and hadn't been handed the form by genetics but by fate and by magic, she was just as much a wolf as he was, and wolves in a pack worked together to defend the entire pack.

Conflicted, knowing she was right but hating the idea of her fighting, he scooped her up and crushed her to him, burying his face in her hair and breathing deeply her scent. Her arms came around him, one hand coming up to the back of his head while the other arm clutched his shoulders, alternating between stroking his head and patting his back as she murmured in his ear.

"It's alright, Sam. There's no threat to me right now. All the monsters with magic are far away and don't know I'm here, so how can they get to me? And all the monsters who drink blood will have to go through the entire pack before they can get to you and me, and we have Severus, too. He wants to protect me almost as badly as you do, and he's one of the most powerful wizards alive now. I've told you how witches and wizards can destroy vampires without even touching them. We'll be fine."

Eventually, he was calm enough to put her down. "Sorry," he said ruefully, embarrassed by the breakdown he'd had. "Some Alpha I make, can't even keep a handle on my emotions. God am I glad the pack isn't here. They'd never let me live it down. It's bad enough Paul saw."

She shook her head with a smile. "He didn't. None of them did. When I saw how upset you were when I mentioned how the nurse at school saw a lot of me, I cast a privacy charm so that no one else could see or hear us. All they saw was us standing there talking. They couldn't hear us, and they didn't see you pick me up and hold me. For all they know, I was just explaining who Poppy Pomfrey was." Once again she took his head in her hands, pulling gently until he got the message and bent toward her. She pressed her lips softly to his and kissed him, before adding, "So don't worry."

She canceled the privacy charm just as Severus popped back into the room, this time with Poppy Pomfrey on his arm, having Side-Along Apparated with her since this place was entirely new to her.

The Mediwitch looked around the room, taking in all the vampires without a word before turning to see who might be beyond her field of vision, and that was when her eyes lit on first Hermione with Sam and then Luna with Paul. It took her a fraction of a second to come to more or less the right conclusion, and her eyebrows popped up for but a moment. Then, in an instant, she donned her normal no-nonsense manner like a suit of armor as she turned to the vampires, unerringly pinpointing Carlisle as the leader of the coven, and they had to wonder what, if anything, Severus had already told her.

The first words out of her mouth answered the question. "I assume you are Carlisle?" she asked the blonde vampire.

He nodded in affirmation. "I am."

"Do you have a room where we might be able to examine Miss Lovegood in private?"

He nodded again and led the way upstairs. Poppy bade Luna follow her but stopped when she realized that Paul was tagging along. "Please wait down here. I don't know what is going on between you and Miss Lovegood, but I will not have a crowd of spectators sitting in on my examination."

A visible tremor ran along Paul's large frame and a low warning growl emerged from his chest. "She's not going anywhere without me," he rumbled.

Poppy regarded him with narrowed eyes and pursed lips. "Miss Granger. Please come with us," she commanded without taking her eyes from Paul.

Now it was Sam's turn to growl, though his was more a growl of protest than of real anger. Hermione placed a hand on his cheek and said, "It will be fine. She just wants me to be there to reassure Paul." She paused and added with a glimmer of amusement in her eyes, "And to keep him from doing anything rash."

"I heard that," Paul muttered. Luna shook her head with a serene smile, seeing the pout on the big bad wolf's face.

"You were meant to," Hermione replied, looking at him. "We won't stop you from staying close to Luna during the examination, but I promise that if you so much as twitch the wrong way I will bind you to a chair."

Any urge Paul had to protest was quelled by three things. First was the forbidding look his Alpha was giving him. Second was the forbidding look Snape was giving him. Third was the double timbre he could hear in Hermione's voice. That really weirded him out. It was something he was used to hearing only from Sam. To hear it coming from a tiny little woman was bizarre, but he figured it must be because she was Sam's imprint and a wolf-shifter herself.

So he made no further protest, and with a nod of satisfaction, Poppy Pomfrey turned back to Carlisle to lead the way again.

Once they reached the bedroom that had been set up for the examination, Madam Pomfrey waved her wand about Luna, whose clothing melted seamlessly into a formless robe that appeared to be a sturdier, cloth version of a hospital gown, one that wasn't open in the back. It seemed to both Paul and Carlisle that witches and wizards took patients' dignity into greater consideration than regular hospitals did.

Then Luna was instructed to sit back on an exam table that Paul thought probably belonged in the office of an ob-gyn; he prepared himself to look away respectfully as Luna adjusted herself so that her feet rested in the stirrups. To his surprise, however, the witch-nurse waved her wand again and the thing rearranged itself – giving him bizarre flashbacks to the days when he was a kid playing with Transformers – so that Luna sat back at an incline rather than laying down and her feet rested more comfortably toward the base of the chair. Paul didn't know much about the kind of exam that normally took place with pregnant women, but this didn't seem right.

Curiosity gave way to a sense of impressed disbelief when the entire exam took place magically – to his immense surprise and relief, there was no use of any gadgets that needed to be inserted anywhere in Luna's body.

"Now, I'm not at all familiar with the development of half-vampire babies," Madam Pomfrey said as she started casting a variety of spells, "but we'll muddle along the best we can. At the very least the spells we have will enable us to see your baby, and we'll be able to make as educated a guess as possible about how much progress your baby has made in his or her development when we compare to Carlisle's notes about the development of Bella's pregnancy and the rate of her daughter's growth since birth."

A moment later, a fine mist materialized in the air in front of Luna and began to thicken and swirl about, changing shape, and Paul soon realized that he was watching the formation of the magical equivalent to an ultrasound image. A moment after that, they heard a rhythmic thumping which Paul recognized as the sound of Luna's baby's heartbeat, which was much more rapid than that of a human baby.

He looked down at Luna and was transfixed by the look of enchantment on her face. Her lips were slightly parted, the beginnings of a smile evident by the faint upward curve at the corners of her mouth, and her pale, silvery eyes sparkled. "It's beautiful," she whispered, and came out of her trance to smile at Paul. She reached out a hand and he took it in his without a thought.

Paul was immensely glad none of his pack were present to witness his instant transformation from bad-ass into total sap. That smile of hers was like a blessing from God. And that was the moment he knew what the purpose of the imprint must be. Fate must have given the wolves their perfect mate as a way of making up for fucking up their lives in every other way. And he couldn't think of anyone whose life had been more fucked up than Sam's, for example – no dad, dead mother, first to transform into a giant furball with fleas and a tail, and a mission from fate to kill every sparkly, stone cold frozen, walking, talking marble statue that just looked at their people the wrong way. So that must be it. The imprint must be the one person who could make everything else better, or at least not so bad, if only by providing the wolf with someone to care for. And he couldn't think of any two people who needed caring for more than these two witches.

Paul was brought back to reality when he heard a gasp. He looked at the nurse, who was staring at the mist in shock, and watched as she began to wave her wand around more urgently.

"Madam Pomfrey?" Hermione queried, worried. "What is it? What's the matter?"

"It can't be…As if you don't have enough to worry about…Oh, my dear Miss Lovegood," the nurse said, disbelief coloring her voice. "It looks as if we'll have to keep a very close eye on you for the duration of your pregnancy. I may have to see about finding a place to stay here for a while..." Her voice trailed off as she concentrated on what she was doing with her wand. Paul shuddered, the worry in the nurse's tone causing the wolf within him to go on instant high alert. Something was threatening his mate.

"But why?" Hermione insisted. Even as she pressed the mediwitch for answers, she did her best to keep her tone even. She put a hand to Paul's shoulder in warning, willing him to keep calm. "What is it? What do you see?"

"Twins," the nurse said bluntly, turning to look the witch in the eye. "She's going to have twins."