"Alberta?" Harry called out, trying another door in the examination room that lead to an office. Maybe she'd heard the gunshot and ran off. "Alberta?" Harry tried again, grabbing the Health Drink that was sitting on a desk and going through another door that led to behind the reception desk. There was a box of handgun ammunition, as well as a map of the hospital and an old newspaper from years ago, but no sign of Alberta, either behind the desk or beyond it. It was possible that she was elsewhere in the hospital; the map showed that the building had three floors and a basement, so she could conceivably be anywhere. He was about to start the search when the headline on the newspaper caught his eye. It was under a picture of a smiling woman in her late twenties whose hair was tied up in a ponytail and draped over her shoulder, holding up a child of about six who was waving at the camera.

Giraffe Animagus Causes Outcry!

Charlotte Garnier builds new care center for werewolves

by Lewis Griswold

Controversy has sparked in the town of Ashfield over the creation of a new care center whose sole function is to take care of people living with lycanthropy in the area. For a very small fee of about three sickles a month, victims of this disease can have access to Wolfsbane Potion and a safe place in which to transform. It is funded by a charity driven-organization that was founded by a young woman named Charlotte Garnier, age 28. Garnier, who hails from Judith Gap, Montana, tells a tragic story of how her best friend was taken from her by a werewolf.

"We were living together, and she had to go gather some fluxweed to make a potion for a friend of ours, and…well, I heard screaming. I ran out and saw this…this huge wolf attacking Andrea [Chapman], who…who'd stopped screaming by then. I know I'd lost her, and I knew I was next.

"I ran back inside the house and barricaded every entrance and just fell to the floor and cried for the rest of the night. I heard it trying to get in but the spells held. When the moon set, I was still a mess and I only had one thing on my mind: Revenge. I undid all the spells on my door and went to confront the monster who'd killed Andrea.

"Instead I saw a naked teenage boy who was staring at the blood coating him and was crying just as hard as I was. He looked up at me, looked back down at his hands, and threw up." (ctd. Page 2, column 5)

Harry hurriedly flipped to the corresponding page and read the column beside the picture of a large giraffe surrounded by people.

In an amazing twist of fate, Garnier ended up tending to the boy and providing Wolfsbane Potion for him. The boy, Samuel Pearce, appeared to be utterly distraught by what he had done and had attempted to kill himself many times. While most would approve of this course of action, Garnier prevented each attempt and sought counseling for the boy.

"Unfortunately no wizarding therapist would see a lycanthropic child, especially one who had killed, and of course going to a Muggle one was out of the question, so I ended up counseling him myself. I did the best I could."

When asked if she blamed Pearce for Chapman's death, Garnier vehemently shook her head.

"It was an accident," she insists. "It's as if someone is under the Imperius Curse; they have no control over their actions and should not be blamed for them." When it was pointed out that the likes of Isabel Romasanta, John Bailey, and Fenrir Greyback among others deliberately set themselves up near potential victims, she claims that "they took those actions when they were human. Most werewolves try to hide themselves away or lock themselves up so that they won't hurt anyone. Your examples are only a very loud few and they wouldn't be as such if werewolves as a whole were treated better."

With the recent revelation that werewolves enjoy the company of animals and in particular Animagi, as pointed out by wizarding world savior Harry Potter, Garnier took a surprising direction in her life: She devoted herself to becoming an Animagus, managing to complete her transformation within eighteen months.

"I was very surprised to know what my form was," she admits laughingly. "Like everyone else you want something cool, but are usually stuck with a dog or a cat or something. I never dreamed I'd be a giraffe! I mean, I'm only 5'1"! How does that work?!"

Unfortunately, the one she did all this for didn't live long enough to see it for himself.

"I couldn't watch Sammy all the time," she says regretfully. "No one can keep an eye on someone every second of the day. I thought he was getting better, but…It had been exactly two years since Andrea, and I guess Sammy just couldn't take the guilt anymore. And after he died…I just needed to get away, so I came here."

Pearce died of a self-administered aconite overdose. The Samuel Pearce Care Center for Lycanthropes is named in his honor. It has inspired many to try something similar.

"What Garnier is doing for these people is amazing," commented Healer Jeffrey Palmer from the neighboring town of Silent Hill. He and his colleague Beverly Hazle have recently started setting up their own wing of Alchemilla hospital in the hopes of doing something similar. "It's about time these poor people were treated with the human rights they deserve."

While not everyone in Ashfield agrees with this sentiment just yet, Garnier is clearly in this for the long run.

"I was brought up to believe that every human life is sacred," she explains calmly when a heckler shouted at her for building a place for monsters. "Even those who don't look like humans all the time. I'm not about to abandon any of these people, many of them children, and frankly, I believe those who do are the real monsters."

Harry smiled as he put the paper down. He was glad that he did something to help werewolves in America, even if it was just giving out information. Even if it led to a hospital in as poor condition as this one. He did wish they wouldn't call him a savior, though.

Heading back to the examination room, Harry noticed another door on his left that apparently led to a potion room. He tried the handle, and it jiggled but didn't open. He hoped he could find a key someplace. Going back out into the hallway, he tried to see if Alberta might be in the women's restroom, uncaring of who might catch him, but the room was empty apart from some shotgun shells hidden under a filthy sink. The door leading to the rest of the first floor remained impossible to open.

Steeling himself, Harry realized that he had no choice but to go back to the second floor. He made sure that his handgun was loaded and cautiously made his way up the stairs.

There wasn't anyone else on the second floor, but the body of the…Healer he had shot was still lying there. He…It…The body wasn't moving. Cautiously, Harry bent down. The Healer looked like it had been an Inferius or something similar; there was no way someone with such severe injuries could have still been walking without help. Was the whole hospital like this? Were Palmer and Hazle the only employees who weren't already dead? It would certainly make affording potion ingredients and the like easier to afford if they didn't actually have to pay those who worked for them…But wouldn't that terrify the patients? Especially when obviously decomposing bodies were impossible to keep sanitized for very long…

Harry stepped cautiously over the body and tried the handle to room 201. Thankfully it opened, but all that was inside was a small, child-sized metal bed frame next to an empty wooden crib. Harry peaked inside. Apart from an ampoule hidden in the corner, which Harry cautiously grabbed, there weren't even any blankets or pillows in it. Regardless of how the Freeman's Owl portrayed it, Alchemilla hospital didn't look like the sort of place you'd want to stay at and recover from anything.

The doors to rooms 202 and 203 were both jammed, which worried Harry, but room 204 opened easily. There was just a regular hospital bed inside, this one with a mattress and a bedside table with a piece of paper on it. Harry stepped forward in order to get a look at it when a body suddenly crawled out from under the bed. The radio static suddenly spiked and Harry yelled, falling over as another figure in Healer robes reached out and grabbed his leg. He fumbled for his handgun and shot the Healer in the arm, making it let go of him. Scrambling away frantically, he shot it three times in the head before it went down and the radio fell silent again.

Harry panted heavily as he stood up again, stepping over the body and picking up the piece of paper at last. All it said was, "Come back to me." Harry put the piece of paper back down, assuming that it had sentimental value to someone and he didn't want to interfere.

Back in the hallway, the door to the mediwizard's center was jammed, as was the door to the men's room. The women's room was open, with three boxes of handgun bullets in the corner and two Health Drinks perched on a toilet seat. One of the stalls was locked from the inside, and there were wooden boards nailed to the floor and ceiling preventing Harry from trying to see what was beyond it. When he knocked regardless, no one answered. He was about to leave when he heard someone sniffing. He whipped around quickly.

"Hello?" he called out softly. "Is someone there?"

There was no response.

"Alberta?" Nothing. "…Teddy?" Still nothing. Harry sighed and left.

Unlike downstairs, the door leading to the rest of the second floor was able to be opened. There were two more Healers in there, one clearly possessing the figure of a woman and the other holding a scalpel in its hands. Both started creeping toward them, but they were in such a similar state to the first two that Harry didn't hesitate killing them both before they could hurt him, or anyone else. The hospital so far had been empty apart from Alberta but he couldn't chance that the place was completely empty, especially once she had planted the hope within him that Teddy might be here as well.

Reloading his handgun, Harry tried the other door to the mediwizard's center, which was also jammed. The door to the operating room looked like it was just locked, though, and Harry briefly wondered why they needed an operating room in a wizarding hospital, even if it had Muggles come in, before remembering that not every would could be healed with magic. He looked at his gun, his hand brushing over the pocket where his wand would usually be held. Sometimes things just had to be done with your hands, no matter how messy it got.

The door to the intensive care unit was jammed, but room 205 opened onto another room with two more female Healers in it, both as decayed and rotting as the rest. Harry would've just left them alone but he spotted a box of shotgun ammunition on the table behind them, and knew he needed them if he was to survive this place. He shot each Healer once, grabbed the ammunition, and left before they could get up again. The radio fell silent as soon as he shut the door, and he hoped that their hands were so corroded that they wouldn't be able to grip the door handle once they got up again, since it wasn't as though he possessed the ability to cast colloportus anymore.

He exited room 205 and went to open the door to the room beside it when that door started hammering and banging, as if someone was trapped inside and desperate to get out.

"Is anyone there?" Harry called out; the pounding got louder in response but there was no other reaction. "Hang on, back away, I'm going to open the door!" Gun at the ready just in case, Harry crept toward the door to room 206; whoever was behind it did not head his warning as they kept slamming against it. Harry opened the door regardless—thankfully the door actually opened, and jumped in front of the doorway, gun pointing into the room.

There was nothing inside apart from two other beds; no items, no Healers, no actual Healers, and no patients.

No Alberta.

No Teddy.

Harry slumped against the doorway. He'd been hoping, praying, that he would go into one of the rooms and see Teddy curled up on one of the beds, making himself as small as he possibly could like he always did when he was really scared, maybe sniffing and trying to hide it because big boys didn't cry…Each time Harry opened a door, or went anywhere in this town, and didn't see any sign of his little boy, a little of what hope he still had started to fade away more and more.

It was a while before he was able to drag himself out of the doorway again. He tried the door that would apparently lead to the lift, but it was jammed as well. Sighing heavily, Harry headed back down the hallway and up the stairs again, opening the door where the stairs ended on the third floor and nearly walking right into a gurney in the middle of the hallway.

Shutting the door behind him and ignoring the radio static for the moment, Harry looked up and down the dimly lit hallway and turned on his torch to get a better look around. There were gurneys scattered all over the hallway, some of them pushed up against the wall but others smack in the middle or even outright turned over. Each one had a body on it covered with a sheet, and each had a dark red spot that was slowly spreading from the chest.

Harry could smell it. The blood was fresh.

There were also three Healers that were already dead but still moving, and Harry took them out without much trouble and reloaded his gun again. These new monsters were disturbingly easy compared to previous ones, or possibly he'd just gotten better at shooting them. He wanted to conserve bullets but the pipe was nearly broken by this point and the sledgehammer was just so heavy and slowed him down too much. He thought about wrenching the scalpel away from one of the dead Healers but he didn't like the thought of getting that close to the monsters in order to kill them; he wanted a stronger weapon than that, at least.

After they'd all been taken care of, Harry threw caution to the wind and lifted the sheet on one of the gurneys. The body was of a young man in maybe his thirties with close-shaven brown hair and the makings of what could've eventually been a nice mustache. He was shirtless and Harry could see the hole in the left side of his chest. It almost looked as though…as though someone had plunged their fist into his chest and took out his heart. The look on his face was of one contorted in fright. Putting the sheet back over him, Harry checked the next gurney and saw a black man in his forties that had been killed the same way. The one after that made Harry let out a sob; the young boy couldn't have been older than twelve.

Each and every body Harry checked was the same; a man with an incredibly fresh chest wound, a terrified expression, and no sign of their heart anywhere to be found. The only connection Harry could make between them was that they were all male and at least older than ten. As horrible as it made him feel, Harry couldn't help but be relieved that they were at least that old, because it meant that Teddy wasn't one of the victims. He checked every single body just in case, thanking whoever might've been listening each time that it wasn't his godson's body that he was staring at.