March 1988

The walls in Juliet's living room and kitchen were covered with photographs, articles from The Daily Prophet, and handwritten notes. Some of the parchment was worn and the ink was faded. She'd have to cast another anti-aging charm or re-write them herself. The oldest notes were transcripts from April 19, 1985, the day she had excavated the minds of Albus Dumbledore, Bartemius Crouch, and Cornelius Fudge. Four days after the murder of the four muggle-borns inside the Wizengamot dungeon, she had placed her hands on the temples of each man and found similar memories. Bodies hanging in the air. Mutilated foreheads. Screaming.

On April 19, 1985, Juliet had been an Auror for all of five months. She had completed three years of training, passed her final tests, and immediately been given the mind-numbing task of reviewing and sorting vials of memories stored in a dust-covered cabinet inside a storage room at The Ministry. She had spent weeks in that fucking room, pouring strands of memories into a pensieve, making notes, and re-shelving them in some kind of order. The majority of the memories were worthless, in Juliet's opinion. One vial contained the memory of a witch making some type of stew. Another was from a wizard who had crashed his broom into a high-rise. And those were the exciting ones. Vial after vial were filled with memories of witches and wizards grocery shopping, cleaning kitchens, and casting levitation charms on household objects. Burke told her the memories were significant, and that sorting them was important work. It had all been a load of shite. Juliet was just the youngest, least experienced Auror and, before the murders started, Burke hadn't known what else to do with her.

All of that changed on April 15, 1985. Here was something, fucking finally. A quadruple homicide. A real, honest to Merlin crime, committed right beneath the Auror office, despite the presence of heavy wards that should have prevented anyone from being able to get inside the dungeon. This would be it; the case that defined who she was as an Auror. She was going to solve this mother fucker alright.

I was so goddamn young. And so fucking naivete.

Three years later, Juliet's face had aged ten years and she wasn't sleeping. The list of victims she had affixed to the center of her largest living room wall was still there, with the word victims underlined three times. She had made that list with so much excitement and vigor, making broad strokes with her quill. It had started with four names. Then it had become nine. Then nineteen. Now, after Nicholas Conner, there were thirty-one names. Thirty-one muggle-borns killed in three years, with crime scenes from London to Liverpool, from Oxford to Glasgow. Three years, thirty-one bodies, and the most she had was her own fucking memories from the night Cass and her had almost caught the man and the woman at the flat in London where Albert Daven was killed.

Until now.

Juliet turned on the lights and made space on her desk. She took a cauldron out of her kitchen cabinet and set it on the desk, next to two of the vials from yesterday's crime scene. She stood on a chair and yanked the smoke detector off the ceiling, then she opened a window and started a fire beneath the cauldron.

The fucking killer had gotten sloppy, or the killer had interrupted Nicholas as he was getting head in the stairwell. Either way, she would have another face to go with the crime scene and someone to find and question.

Juliet took a handful of Angel's Trumpet and dropped it in the cauldron. She cracked an Ashwinder egg in next, careful to include all the fragments of the shell. She stirred for four minutes and added dragon's blood. She reached into her satchel and pulled out a jar of fireflies she had spent the last two hours collecting. She unscrewed the lid, grabbed a handful of insects, and crushed them in her fist. She scraped the neon liquid, broken wings, and tiny legs off her palm and into the cauldron. Juliet stirred until the mixture turned from dragon blood red and orange to purple and dark blue; a sunset that faded into twilight. The twilight glimmered into a starry night sky. That would be the fireflies.

Juliet pulled on gloves and opened the first vial. She pulled out the strand of curled, brown hair crusted with dried blood and dropped it in the cauldron. She waited. It didn't take long for steam to rise from the liquid night sky. The steam thickened and collected above the cauldron, dancing in the air.

Come on, come on.

The steam coalesced, forming into the shape of a woman's body.

Yes, I fucking knew that much. Come on, show me more.

The woman's features settled and colors appeared. Long brown hair, light skin, and blue eyes. Juliet held up a piece of parchment and raised her wand.

"Captis."

The ghost of the woman collected itself on the parchment and turned to colored lines of charcoal, producing what the muggles called a facial composite; a police sketch. Juliet stared at it. She had never seen the woman before. Had this woman killed Conner? Or had they both been in the wrong place at the wrong time? If so, where was her body?

Juliet dumped the ingredients in the cauldron and started over for the next sample, not wanting to contaminate her next batch of evidence. When the potion was completed, she added the vaguely clear substance she had pulled of Nicholas Conner's flaccid penis.

The steam again formed into the shape of a woman. Juliet watched the same hair, eyes, and facial structure appear in the air.

But then, the shape twisted. It curled in on itself until there was another face. A man's face.

Holy shite. Were they both giving this fucker head? Is this the same man and woman I chased across the roof? What kind of sick fucks are killing these people?

Something was wrong. The steam didn't settle. It didn't break off into multiple figures like it typically did when a cluster of collected DNA belonged to more than one person. The steam danced in a constant state of flexion, so much that it took Juliet a few tries to capture the man's face onto its own sheet of parchment. The steam morphed from the woman to the man and back to the woman, with some hybrid face in-between that was neither.

Oh fuck.

Juliet dropped her wand. This wasn't going to solve the fucking crime; it was going to make everything more complicated. Because, whoever had sucked Nicholas Conner's dick, was a metamorphmagus.