A/N: Shoutout to awesome reviewers drwatsonn and ArcticJacs! Feel free as always to send your thoughts my way—I've loved hearing from my readers thus far.

"Transformation takes so much physical energy that all I can do in the moment after is lie flat on the ground and wait for my breath to come back to me. Some nights it never does."

—Subject 39

Around this time I began seeing Leonard in London. In the streets. On the stairs. In the reflections on store windows, standing next to me, that jagged grin my mother found a way to fall in love with splitting his face in two.

January was the month that Remus disappeared and I gained a terrifying shadow. To this day I can't tell you whether the glimpses I had were reality, premonition, or some threatening amalgam of the two. But they brought me back to the claustrophobic fear of that bedroom all the same. Like I was seventeen all over again and he had just closed the door behind me.

The first time I thought I saw Leonard was the day after my confrontation with Remus' landlord. I was late getting to work that morning. Not knowing what to do after leaving Remus' now-vacant flat, I'd apparated to the forest and cried myself to sleep against the trunk of a very supportive birch. Now I was exhausted, my back ached, and it was all I could do as I walked to pick the leaves out of my hair and focus on my path as I progressed through London toward the Ministry.

It was then that I saw him. Leonard, pacing toward me. An evil blue flash of his eyes.

I stopped in my tracks, the usual horde of morning commuters streaming past on either side of me, hardly noticing—I was just another fork in the river, another strange girl in city streets. The man I thought was Leonard passed me in an instant, so quickly that I spun and could no longer find him in the crowd. I continued to search desperately, actually backtracking to see if I could pick him out of the passersby again. Nothing. A cold wind gusted through my thin coat, inciting a full-body shudder.

Needless to say, I was unnerved. I hadn't seen Leonard since the summer he'd attacked me and my mother had denied it, the summer that split me from her in such a painful and permanent way. She hadn't mentioned him directly at Christmas, but I knew they were still together. I vaguely remembered that he came to London on business occasionally… but it couldn't be him. Surely I was seeing things. Surely my visit home had simply forced the past back up.

I said this to myself at the time because it was what I needed to believe in order to move forward. It was January second and my hair was full of leaves and far stranger things had happened to me in the last week. I needed routine, order—even if that meant faking it. So I put this glimpse of Leonard out of my mind and proceeded to the Ministry. By the time an hour had passed I'd spruced up in our dingy bathroom, exchanged my usual snarky morning banter with Margaret, and just about convinced myself it was all in my head. That my emotional and physical exhaustion were simply playing tricks on me.

Little did I know this would not be the last time I saw my mother's lover.

"Aren't you at the halfway point?" Dad was saying.

"Wh-what?" I thought I'd seen Leonard again in the restaurant, moving between tables, ogling one of the young waitresses as she navigated with her heavy tray levitating out in front of her. I looked again and he was another man instead, a young wizard with sharp blue eyes, who met my frightened stare with bemused curiosity.

"Cora," Dad cleared his throat and tapped the table between us, as if calling a meeting to order. "Cora, please."

"Sorry." My gaze dropped. The man had exited the restaurant with a raucous group of young wizards—blokes from the Quidditch department, from the looks of it. Leonard was nowhere to be seen. Of course not. Of course. He was a Muggle. He wouldn't be here.

"I was thinking about your grant," Dad continued, both eyes carefully trained on me. "It's been about six months. Usually one holds some sort of event, as a kind of update for the donors who contributed to your cause. It's a way of thanking them, and also assuring them that you've used their funds to make progress."

I thought fleetingly of Will, his potions robes now permanently stained in splotches of purple and blue, like a bruise. How he stood upstairs in his little laboratory and watched cauldron after cauldron combust. Had we made any progress at all? Or just discovered new ways to make things explode?

"Think of it like this—these events tend to make for good publicity, which can't hurt." Dad pushed a charred piece of meat around the plate with his fork, appetite uncharacteristically absent. "I'll take care of it. We'll hold it at the manor."

I scanned the room again but saw only younger faces, a sea of them, mostly laughing. It was possible that Dad was the oldest person in the room. He looked at me then, with such a serious expression.

"Where is Remus, Cora?" he asked suddenly. As if he knew the last night I'd seen Remus was the last night he'd seen him, too, that he'd disappeared without a word since, humiliated, his flat left vacant and lonely.

"Busy, Dad." I didn't want to admit I didn't know; I wondered if he was already aware of the eviction. Dad had a way of finding things out. Things people didn't always want him to know. Staying informed, he called it. Disguised as constituent concern.

He stared at me across the table for a long moment, lips pursed, and then he finally put his fork down, the final bite still remaining on his plate.

"Is this really the man you want to pin everything on? Your career, your future… your l—"

"What if someone had asked you the same about Mum, Dad?" I interrupted. "Before she left you. What would you have said to them?"

He didn't have any response to that, my father.

Days passed and still Remus did not return to the Ministry. I knew Margaret had noticed but for some reason was choosing not to say anything, blowing her gum bubbles quietly as I went about my research and occasional interviews. We settled back into the routine we'd established before Remus' autumn reappearance with an ease that frightened me. But quickly I attempted to tamp down the fear. Wherever he was—maybe on an Order mission, I told myself—he was a grown man with no obligation to me, just another former student. He could take care of himself. I pushed the kiss he'd given me on New Year's from my mind—it was starting to feel more and more like a goodbye, and I couldn't bear the idea. He'd already left me once. Instead I decided to operate as if nothing had changed at all—I RSVP'd to the grant gala with Remus as my plus-one and went about my work.

One such day I came into the office to be greeted with Margaret's somber pronouncement that Fenrir Greyback had bitten yet another child. Her gaze lingered on my face after she said the words, like she was waiting for something to click into place. And it had. I hurried over to our filing cabinets, still wearing my coat, and began pulling all the information we had on Greyback.

"Do we know how long he's been active?" I asked.

"Decades," Margaret responded slowly, lifting her feet down from their usual spot on top of her desk. "No one really knows how old he is, but he's been biting people since the forties, at least." She watched as I continued to shuffle through our yellowed files, pulling every name, noting every date. "Why?"

Of course. She'd seen the look on my face in advance, but she didn't actually know what I was thinking. My thoughts flashed to the last contact I'd had with my mother, her hurried note. Don't tell anyone what I did. Even now, she was ashamed of what my uncle had become before she'd killed him.

"I want to trace Greyback's attacks," I said truthfully. I want to know if this monster is the reason my mother killed her brother.