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Chapter Twenty-Five—Clasped the Hand

"Who's there?" The growling voice comes from behind a tree and seems to echo in every direction.

"Someone who doesn't think your shtick is scary," Harry says plainly. He had to Apparate five times to get to this pine forest, just in case someone from the Ministry is trying to track him. In reality, from having been an Auror, he knows that Apparition-tracking spells almost never work that well, but if he didn't do it, he would never hear the end of it from Hermione.

The growl cuts off, sounding confused. Harry smiles and continues waiting. He's in a clearing created by fire spells. He takes out his wand and trims a few more plants back with flames, just in case.

Someone moves next to the tree nearest the flames. Harry cuts off the spell and waits patiently as the woman steps slowly forwards.

She has long, unbound, uncut hair, like most werewolves, but unlike some of them she isn't dressed in dirty rags to show her disdain for human clothing. She's cut back her nails, too, and her eyes stare straight at him instead off to the side. Harry approves. She did all the cringing and dirtiness before because she had to, to convince people in her pack she wasn't a threat.

But Fenrir Greyback has been dead for a few years now. It would be a waste of her potential if she kept it up.

"Know, human, that my teeth and nails can scar you even when it is not the full moon."

"Good to see you, too, Grace. You should know that I'm a fugitive wanted by the Ministry now, so I take your threats even less seriously than I did."

For a tense second, Harry doesn't think she'll drop the drama, but then, Grace sighs and straightens. Her hair is white because she dyes it, and her eyes are golden because she concentrates all the force of her will on them remaining that color, the way Greyback concentrated all his will on his fingernails becoming claws. "All right, Potter. Tell me what you want."

"That open alliance I told you I could probably never offer your pack? I can offer that now."

"How does your being a fugitive help us?"

Harry shrugs. "It means I don't have to play nice and act like the rules matter to me and hide my correspondence with you anymore. However, I'm not going to be able to get you more rights, either. The Ministry and the rule of law in the wizarding world as we know it is going to be gone in a few months at most. So the question is, do you still want the benefits of an alliance?"

Grace stands there and blinks until Harry wonders if she got hit in the head by a falling house recently, too. Then she says reluctantly, "I suppose you'd better come back to visit. There are a few new young ones since last time, so you might have to use a few spells."

Harry nods, not surprised, and walks beside Grace as she heads away from the clearing into the dark forest. "Nice place you have here."

Grace snarls at him half-heartedly over one shoulder. Harry just grins.

After they step around several pits, drop-traps, and rope nooses, they reach the similar clearing, burned out of the forest, where the pack waits. They all stare straight at Harry when he walks in. There was a time when that would have intimidated me, Harry thinks, as he nods in a friendly fashion to all the green and gold and amber stares and sits down on a log carved into a seat. It's far from the fire, which means far from a position of prestige, but with what Grace said about young werewolves, it isn't going to take long for someone to challenge him anyway.

"What are you doing here, human?"

Harry leans back to study the man confronting him. He wears jeans, which makes Harry think he was probably a Muggle before he was turned. "Relaxing."

The werewolf snarls the way Grace resisted doing. He has orange eyes and nails he hasn't kept cut back. He sharpens them on a tree above Harry's head. Harry leans a little to the side to avoid the falling bark shavings.

"I could infect you."

"No, you couldn't," Harry says calmly, ignoring the way the nails are suddenly resting on his shoulders. "It's not full moon."

The man makes a deep, full-throated, inhuman sound, and starts to press down with his nails. Harry, who has been waiting for an openly aggressive move so the rest of the pack can't claim he started it, casually turns his wrist. The young werewolf goes flying and rolls to a stop near a similar carved log seat on the opposite side of the clearing.

He scrambles up at once, a bellow of rage coming from his throat. Harry just shakes his head at him. "That makes you sound more like a cow than a wolf, you know."

The werewolf charges him again. By now, the others, even the ones who don't know Harry personally, have moved out of the way, which means that the young one hits no one when Harry tosses him back into the log. "Get some sanity," Harry advises him mildly as he watches him stagger slowly back to his feet.

"I am stronger than you!"

"Physically, of course. But why does that matter when I don't intend to let you touch me?"

Incredibly, the jeans-wearing prick charges at him again. Harry sighs and this time, hangs him upside-down, connecting the invisible magical rope to the nearest tree. There are enough snickers that he suspects the man isn't popular and he's pleased the rest of the pack more than angered them.

"If this is the quality of the recruits you're making lately, you ought to think more carefully about who you bite," he tells Grace when she stalks up beside him.

Grace sighs. "Another one of the young ones bit him more in revenge than anything. He's a Muggle who still doesn't really believe in the capabilities of wizards." She pauses, watching, like Harry, to see if the werewolf will go on struggling as Harry drops him to the ground. But he doesn't, even though Harry made sure not to drop him on his head. He gets back to his feet and slinks off without a look at them.

"Everyone." Grace can command attention with just a flash of her teeth. "This is Harry Potter, as some of you know. He has come to discuss the benefits of an open alliance."

The staring, lounging werewolves look fully at him. Harry nods to them. "If any of you read the Daily Prophet, you may know that I'm an outlaw right now. I confronted an enemy who tried to drug me and kidnap me, and I fought back instead of going along with her plans. So fighting for a place for you in recognized wizarding society isn't something I can do."

"What good are you?" That's a naked woman with matted grey hair who looks more than half wolf even now.

"That's what you have to ask for yourself. I can tell you some things I can offer, though."

Grace gestures for him to go ahead. Harry clasps his hands in front of him. "I can warn you of what's going to come in the future after the Ministry's collapse, and the safe places that you can be. I can get you some wands, registered ones that were taken from criminals now in Azkaban; they have no reason to think I'll strike at that room, and no reason to update the wards on it anytime soon. I can offer you my own personal support in building shelters if you want them. I can give you access to Wolfsbane."

"And what do you want in return?" Grace sounds wary, as well she might.

Harry gives her a smile that makes her step backwards. He wonders why. It's not half as threatening as the grins that some of the werewolves keep trying to give him. "For you to create chaos and serve as distractions. Let them guess, rightly, that I'm allied with the Whitemount Pack, if they want. Given how much people fear you, a few raids would go a long way."

"You don't want anyone bitten?"

"I know that you can't really do anything purposeful on the full moon, anyway, unless you're taking Wolfsbane. But no, I'd prefer not. Maybe you could scar a few pure-bloods if you can catch them."

Grace's eyes glitter. "Which ones?"

Harry taps his pocket. "I'll write you a list of the Lords and Ladies I don't care about before I leave."

"I don't understand," says another young werewolf, although he cowers a bit when Harry looks inquiringly at him. "Aren't you a member of the Sun Chamber? Why do you want them hunted down and scarred?"

"Because I'm not really pure-blooded enough for them, and now they've betrayed me," Harry says. "I mean, yes, I was planning to betray them first, but. Semantics. They can die now for all I care."

The young one still looks bewildered, but at least Grace is thinking about it. "That means that you don't plan to leave any pure-bloods alive for the rebuilding effort to rally around?"

"Oh, a few. My allies, the ones I'll put on a different list and would be very upset should any scarring happen to," Harry says softly, and watches with some satisfaction as Grace pales. "But the others need to die."

"Why?"

"They betrayed me." Harry speaks the words slowly this time, in case she's having trouble catching up.

"And for that they deserve to die?"

"Do the wizards who denied you wands and confined you to the woods deserve to die?" Harry asks, and watches as a wave of growling and bristling goes all around the circle. "Unless you want me to start questioning your motives, you would be will-advised not to start questioning mine."

That gets him some lowered heads and eyes. Harry nods. He just wants to make sure that the Whitemount Pack will do what he tells them and not step out of line to go after people he likes, such as the Weasleys or Neville. Whether they feel contempt for him in their heart of hearts or anything like that, he's beyond caring about.

"How are we going to find wands that fit us?" demands the jeans-wearing, formerly Muggle werewolf Harry threw across the clearing a while ago. "What about those of us who can't perform magic?"

At least Grace looks embarrassed. Harry really hopes that she argued against the decision to admit him to the pack. He would hate to think an ally has such terrible taste. "Then you won't be able to cast spells. That doesn't mean you can't fight in other ways."

"What other ways?"

"Whatever ways the pack has trained you in." Harry feels the temperature around him lowering; his magic is getting out of control. He tucks it back inside his body and sighs. "Whatever ways you use when you're fighting another werewolf or a Muggle for control."

"That kind of thing is pretty useless against a wizard," the man mutters. "You just proved that yourself a few minutes ago."

"No, I proved that charging a powerful wizard with nothing but your hands and teeth is foolish." Harry stands restlessly. The Whitemount Pack is better than most of his other allies in that he can make deals with them and be relatively sure they'll keep them, but he's not in the mood to sit around providing their brains for them. "I'll go now, Grace. I need to make sure that room in the Ministry with all the wands stored is open, among other things. I'll send you an owl when I'm ready. Don't eat it."

Grace nods and manages to turn the nod into a half-bow. At least Harry thinks that isn't due to his status as a Lord. "We'll await it, Potter."

Harry nods back and then turns and Apparates right out of the clearing; he knows what Ron and Hermione's house looks like well enough for that. He lands and sighs as he feels his magic tremble inside his body. He probably did use more than he strictly needed to when confronting the Whitemount Pack.

"Mate?"

Harry looks up with a smile when he sees Ron standing in the doorway of the Apparition room. "Hey, Ron. How's it going with your family?"

"Well, Mum and Dad are upset, obviously. Percy and Ginny are both some combination of stressed and 'I told you so.'" Ron hesitates once. "You know how George is…"

"What about Bill?" Harry asks quietly. There's a reason that Ron is pausing like this when he shouldn't have any spectacular news about the Weasleys to give.

Ron seems to brace himself, the way he used to before he started chess with a brand-new opponent in the Gryffindor common room. "Bill is here."

Harry raises his eyebrows. But then again, Bill probably picked up enough from the conversations-slash-rants he's had with Ron in the past to know that Ron and Hermione are irrevocably on Harry's side, and it wouldn't take a genius to figure out that Harry might be here, just someone smarter than most of their enemies.

"All right," he says. "Do you want me to talk with him someplace that isn't your kitchen?"

Ron looks like he wants to slump over. "Please."

Harry pats Ron's shoulder as he walks past him. When he opens the door to the kitchen, Bill spins around and faces the door in a way that puts the scars on his face in sharp relief. Harry honestly isn't sure if that's intentional or not.

They stare at each other for a moment, and then Harry asks, "Well?"

"I was waiting for you to cackle evilly and try to take my blood to boil in a potion," Bill admits. His voice is husky; he seems to have acquired a few more werewolf-like signs in the last few years, and that deepness to his voice is one of them. "But since you don't want to, you don't have to."

Harry smiles. "I would like to talk with you, but not here. Do you want to come to a safehouse I know?" He's already reaching for one of the small coins he carries with him on a regular basis, a permanent Portkey that will take them to a stuffy little house owned by Sirius's more paranoid ancestors.

"Yes."

Bill agrees so confidently that Harry's own confidence increases that this isn't something he'll have to end up regretting. He holds the Knut out, and Bill comes out and grasps it as Harry speaks the relevant phrase. "Voldemort's scaly arse."

When they come out of the whirl of Portkey transportation, Bill is gaping at him. Harry laughs as he puts the Knut away. "No, I didn't fancy him. I just wanted to make sure I had a passphrase I wasn't ever, ever going to say by accident while holding onto that particular coin."

Bill nods and follows Harry through the silent, dark corridors into a tiny kitchen. It's not unlike the one at Grimmauld Place, although this house is all one floor and considerably smaller. Luckily, Harry knows enough general cleaning charms now that he doesn't need to bring Kreacher with him every time he wants to use the place, even if the elf would be thrilled. Harry waves his wand and murmurs under his breath, and Bill yelps a little as the cobwebs are abruptly blasted away from under his chair.

"Yeah, sorry about that." Harry summons the kettle and tea that he keeps here and prepares a pot that he hopes isn't too musty-smelling. Bill stares at his back the entire time. Harry forces himself to ignore that, even if it also feels like someone aiming a dagger there. It's not, not really, and it's time his paranoia respected that.

When he puts a cup in front of Bill, Bill drinks it without reaching for the sugar or milk Harry also put out, and says decisively, "I want to join you. Openly."

"You can't right now. I'm not doing things openly."

"Then let me disappear with you. Use a house or something like this." Bill takes a deep breath. "The goblins warned me that the Wizengamot is on the verge of passing a bill that will make creatures, those with creature blood, or marked by a creature, non-citizens."

Harry stares at him over the steam rising from his own cup of tea. "I didn't hear anything about such a bill, and I thought we had pretty good surveillance on that." Luna would have let him know, if no one else.

"This is a hasty one." Bill tightens his hands into fists until the cup trembles a little. "I think they've rushed it through because they believe that you're going to turn to people who have creature blood to help you."

Harry nods slowly. It will also affect the free house-elves, he realizes, and they are known allies of his. They're more frightened of Harry himself than he thought.

Either that, or someone is putting the pieces together and realizing that Harry more than likely wants to lead a rebellion, although Harry can only hope they don't realize his ultimate goal.

"All right. Then why don't you look around this house and see if it would suit you? I'll see about enchanting some other Portkeys if it does. Are you going to pull Victoire out of Hogwarts?"

Bill's shoulders have relaxed, and don't tense up again even as he grimaces. "We'll have to. She won't like it, but…" He hesitates and looks at Harry. "There isn't going to be a Hogwarts in a few months, is there?"

"It will depend on a lot of things," Harry says quietly. That's not a lie. He doesn't intend to do anything to affect the building of Hogwarts itself, but Hermione's plans will affect the bindings of their house-elves, and the Elder Wand will affect at least some of the people who reside there. "I'm sorry to deny her an education."

"The Ministry would already be doing that. Non-citizens of the British wizarding world can't attend Hogwarts." Bill sighs out. "Thanks. I'll explore the house. Can you show me the spell you used later? We'll probably need to do that on at least a few of the rooms."

Harry waves his hand to give permission, and Bill disappears down the corridor. Harry spends a little time thinking. The bill isn't entirely unexpected in the sense that he thought they would do something like this, just not so soon.

And it means he has one path open that he wasn't considering before, given that he thought of them as solidly part of the establishment.

Harry grins. It's time to see if the goblins can forgive him for breaking into Gringotts.