"Pst! Clarence!"
Clarence, who had admittedly not been paying as much attention as he probably should to the discussion of the pack's finances and plans to move further south for the winter, startled at the sound of a child's voice behind him.
Bram looked over at him as he quietly slipped out of his place in the circle, but it wasn't entirely unusual for Clarence, who had been Fenrir's second-in-command for nearly two decades, now, to excuse himself from these meetings to take care of some matter or other back at the camp.
He led the boy far enough away that they wouldn't distract from the debate in progress — whether they ought to send a few more adults out looking for work in the real world, and if so, who — before asking, "What is it, Wil? Is everyone okay?"
Wil was the oldest of the youngsters, now — fourteen, according to Anika and her magic. He, like many of the children in the pack, had been fending for himself — on the streets of Frankfurt, in Wil's case — before Fenrir and Lena had found him. He was supposed to be keeping an eye on the other six kids (and two wilderfolk wolf-pups) back at the camp. Which was admittedly a pretty boring job — none of them really required much looking after, and the younger ones knew better than to run off by themselves.
"No, no, everyone's fine, it's just— There's a woman. She just walked into the camp, I thought she was wilderfolk at first, but she smells human."
"Did you capture her?" Strangers very rarely just stumbled upon the pack — they did have spells to hide themselves, make humans avoid them. Whenever someone managed to get past the spells, they had to be detained until he and Fenrir could question them about how they'd found the camp.
"I didn't have to — she said she wanted to talk to Fenrir, she'd watch the kids while I went to find him." The look on Clarence's face must have communicated his disapproval, because the boy quickly added, "I sent Kiki to find Claudia and Erich and told them to keep an eye on things."
Claudia and Erich were only eleven and twelve respectively, but Erich had some talent for magic, and Claudia was...uncommonly good at predicting the immediate future, even if she didn't actually seem to be able to do the same kind of magic as the other mages in the group. They often hunted in the woods around the camp, rather than play with the younger children. Clarence sighed, but reluctantly admitted to himself that they would at least be able to raise the alarm if their...visitor tried anything.
"Okay, fine. This woman, did she say who she is?"
"No, she just said to tell Fenrir that his favorite tiny human bitch is back."
The bottom dropped out of Clarence's stomach. There was only one person in the world Fenrir called tiny human bitch, but he'd...thought she'd gone to prison when the War ended. Of course, there was also a rumor going around that she had died a couple months ago, attempting to escape, so it wasn't out of the question... "About this tall?" he asked, holding a hand about level with his own collar bones. "Godawful pale, black hair and eyes? Smells human, moves like wilderfolk, and gives orders like disobeying is inconceivable?"
"Er, yeah. Who is she?"
Fucking trouble, that's who. "Bellatrix."
"Who?"
The Blackheart, Thom de Mort's mad dog. She made Loki — their old pack leader, the one who'd once beaten a new-turned ten-year-old to death over his refusal to join them — look like a kindly old man. And she was alone, at the camp, with the kids... "FENRIR!"
"What? Who is she?" Wil repeated, trailing behind him. "Why are you so— She seemed fine. Weird, but not dangerous, or anything..."
Yeah, that's what they'd thought at first, too. And to be fair, she might not have any ill intentions toward them at all. But she had threatened to kill them all if she ever saw them again the last time they'd spoken, and he somehow doubted the past thirteen years had done her sanity any favors. If she was here...
Fenrir broke off whatever he was saying as they broke into the circle. "Clarence?"
"We need to go, Fen— We need to get back to the camp, right now."
"Why? What's going on?"
"Bellatrix is here."
"But—"
Clarence cut the alpha off with a quick shake of the head. "Your favorite tiny human bitch, was it?"
Will nodded. "Er, yeah, but—"
"Everybody back to camp! Be ready to fight, but don't provoke her!" Fenrir ordered. "Did she say why she's here, kid?"
"Uh, no, just that she wants to talk to you."
"What do you think?" he asked Clarence.
"Fuck if I know. We didn't part on good terms, but if she wanted to kill them, why would she have sent Wil for us? We would have gone back and found them eventually..."
"Let's go," Fenrir snapped, leading the way back toward camp at a quick jog.
When they reached the clearing the children tended to use as their play yard, Clarence was treated to what might have been the oddest scene he'd ever seen — at least, oddest for Bellatrix. If it had been Lena or Anika sitting cross-legged on the ground, scratching Harmonie's ears and...apparently giving Claudia advice on fighting the larger, heavier Erich (who currently had her pinned to the ground), it would have been perfectly ordinary, but...
He knew Bella had raised her little sisters and cousins, but he'd never really seen her interact with them outside of training and formal dinners.
She raised an eyebrow as the pack broke the tree line, Fenrir and himself approaching slowly.
"Really, Mickey? The whole pack, just for little old me?" She bent her head to address the wolf-pup lying half across her lap in a language Clarence didn't recognize — they'd picked up the pups somewhere in Russia, but they didn't seem to understand Russian. The younger wolf pup trotted off to go sit with her sister at the edge of the trees. Typical. She'd been here all of fifteen minutes, and she'd already gotten further with those little furballs than he and Lena had in eight months. He tried not to be too put out about it. There would be plenty of time for jealousy later, assuming she didn't kill him. She stood, stretching her back.
"Why are you here, Bellatrix?"
"Well, I was in the neighborhood, and I figured you'd be able to fill me in on the latest news. The veela I was staying with don't really keep up with the Resistance."
There was so much in just that handful of words that made so little sense. Veela? Why had she been staying with veela? She wanted information about the anti-statutarians? And in the neighborhood? There weren't any veela colonies for hundreds of miles in any direction...
"No, why are you here, and not in your wizards' prison?"
"Or dead," Clarence chimed in.
She grinned. "I'm not dead because, well, I'm me. Did you really think the Magical British government could stop me if I wanted to leave? I think I might be insulted."
"Last we heard, you'd gone to Azkaban with the dementors."
Voluntarily. Because Bella had completely lost her mind when de Mort had died, or so they'd heard. The pack had left Britain the year before that. The spring of 1980 had been a bad one. If it had just been the losses the pack had suffered, they might have stayed, they'd re-built before. But it had been becoming undeniably obvious that de Mort was losing it himself. There had been no chance, at that point, for the Revolution to succeed. Bella had not appreciated it when Fenrir had told her that. She'd appreciated it even less when he'd asked her if she'd considered just cutting down old snake-face and stepping into his place.
"Yes, well, I've recently had an opportunity to...examine my life's choices, you might say. I've decided to move on. Obviously I've been out of the loop for a while, though, so..."
"So if I were to say that de Mort was a stupid son of a whore and he was nothing more than dead weight after that red-headed bitch cursed him..." Fenrir said, one hand hovering warily over the hilt of his knife.
Bellatrix sighed. "Are you really going to make me say it?" She pouted. When Fenrir failed to react, she sighed again. "Fine, Mickey! You were right. I should have killed him when it became clear we were not going to be able to recruit Evans and convince her to fix him, and pressed forward without him. The man I followed was dead long before he was defeated."
Fenrir relaxed. "Stand down, everyone."
"So glad I passed your little test," the woman said, rolling her eyes and smirking at them.
So...apparently they were friends again? Well, Clarence wasn't about to complain — that was certainly preferable to being her enemy.
"Lots of new faces, here. Are you going to introduce me?"
He grinned. "Allow me to do the honors." Both Fenrir and Bella nodded and gestured for him to continue, causing Fenrir to glare at her and her to smirk back, exactly as though the past fifteen years had never happened. "Everyone, this is Bellatrix. We used to work with her in Britain. She's insane. Bella, this is everyone. Please don't kill them, we like them."
The woman scoffed at that. "I don't kill people just because I can, Clarence."
"Since when?" Hati called from somewhere off to his left.
"Eighty-One, Ass-Hat," she retorted, sauntering across the clearing to offer Fenrir and himself proper greetings.
It had always amused Clarence that she insisted on observing werewolf conventions, when she was never half so respectful of even the most powerful humans (barring de Mort, of course). Even in the beginning, when she'd disdained everything about them, she had made a point of it. Honestly, Clarence suspected she just preferred their way of doing things. A thousand years of breeding, born to power and money and magic, to a life of ease and luxury, and she was more comfortable slumming with the likes of them than acting the part she was born to play. He bent down to bury his nose in her hair, allowing her to do the same. She still smelled like blood and lightning — dark magic and death — still grinned at him like she knew exactly what her scent did to him. (The Wolf liked dark magic and death, despite Clarence's better judgment.) "Missed you, Hela."
She giggled, grinning up at him. "Hmm, yes, I can't even imagine how dull your lives must have been all these years without me. So, fill me in, boys — what have I missed?"
The hours until dinner passed surprisingly smoothly — thirteen years of political developments (and developments within the pack) provided plenty of relatively neutral conversation topics, most of which were of little interest to the vast majority of the pack. At dinner, however, as the others joined them to eat around the fire, the atmosphere quickly grew tense.
Lena, Fenrir's wife, was generally a kind, patient soul. Clarence had never imagined she might have a jealous bone in her body. But Bellatrix had usurped her place at Fenrir's right hand and Lena was very clearly growing annoyed at her monopolizing his attention.
On top of that, Bella had a habit of stealing food off Fenrir's plate — a one-time dominance play which had become almost an inside joke between them by the end, an ironic reminder of the stupid children they'd been when they first met. Her constant use of his given name and his favorite epithet for her — tiny human bitch — were the same. The few members of the pack who had been with Fenrir in Britain — who had fought alongside her — were accustomed to their constant mutual disrespect, well aware that it was all in show.
It hadn't always been, of course. When they'd first met, Bella had had nothing but scorn for them — subhuman trash, she'd called them — and they'd thought her a spoilt, arrogant little human girl with more money than sense who — fighting abilities notwithstanding — had most likely gotten where she was in the Death Eaters by sucking the Dark Lord's dick. (She had been fucking him, of course, but that had nothing to do with her position in the organization.)
It had taken months for her to truly earn their respect, even with having (narrowly) beaten Fenrir in a dominance challenge when they'd first met. They'd told themselves she'd cheated, using magic, even if it wasn't casting spells — she was still just a pushy little human bitch who wanted to play with the big boys. Even after watching her lead a raid, carrying it out with ruthless efficiency, they'd had no respect for her personally. She'd commanded her men well, sure, but no degree of leadership competency would make up for the fact that she was only human. That she had only overcome by demonstrating that, human or not, she was a much bigger monster than any of them. It had taken nearly five years for a real sense of camaraderie to grow between them, and she had not been happy when Fenrir decided to cut his losses after the slaughter at Hogsmeade.
Most of the pack, however, had not been with them in Britain. Of the original dozen of them who had joined de Mort, only Fenrir, Hati, and Clarence himself remained. Anika, Jason, and Ellie had become pack before they'd left Britain, and so also knew Bella. Everyone else was watching her be her usual pushy self with various degrees of discomfort. Most because her behavior suggested that Fenrir was subordinate to her, and though he wasn't acting particularly subordinate, he also wasn't contesting her claim the same way he would if any of them had dared touch his food or called him Mickey — most of them hadn't even known his human name before today. Hati had never heard anyone other than Bella use it, and Loki had turned him and his brother only eighteen months after Fenrir.
Lena, however, was definitely growing jealous. Understandable, really. Bella's physical behavior — sitting so close to him that their knees were touching, for example — could be read as particularly forward flirting, especially since Fenrir didn't act as though it was a challenge. Clarence was absolutely certain Bella realised this, but she delighted in causing trouble, even for people she liked.
He was so caught up in watching Lena, thinking of ways to diffuse the situation that would inevitably erupt between them before she unthinkingly challenged Bella and Bella took her apart, that he missed Petrov and Bram muttering together on the other side of the fire until Petrov called over the conversation, "Some alpha he is, letting this human join our circle, letting her eat our food and treat him like a fucking lap-dog!"
A growl trickled out of Fenrir's throat. Clarence sighed. This had been coming for a while — Petrov was one of the newer members of the pack, a violent radical who'd heard about their mission to carve out a place for themselves outside of the reservations so very charitably allotted to them by certain magical states, and been disappointed to discover that they spent more time working to feed the children than slaughtering human villages.
(Ironically enough, Bellatrix had also been rather disappointed to discover this. It had taken all of five minutes discussing the direction the pack had taken in the past few years for her to offer them a fucking vinyard, because she never had had any concept of money.)
Petrov was particularly disappointed in Fenrir, who was a very different man now than he had been thirty years ago, or even fifteen, and being an angry young idiot — much like Fenrir had been when he'd overthrown Loki and led them to join de Mort's forces — had been making noises lately about how things should be run. How they would be run, if he were their leader. It was only a matter of time until he moved to make an actual challenge.
Before Fenrir could say anything in response, however, Bella beat him to it. "Hey, Mickey, it's been a while, so correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't challenges supposed to take place around the full moon?"
Fenrir snapped around to focus on Bella, smirking at him like it was still 1979. They exchanged a very brief, silent conversation which Clarence interpreted as I want to hurt someone, and he just volunteered and you're clearly still insane, tiny human bitch — but if you must...
Petrov lunged to his feet, ignoring Bram's attempts to reason with him. "Who does this stupid little cunt think she is, involving herself in pack matters?! If you won't stand up to her, Fenrir, I will!"
"I think I'm Bellatrix Black," she said, still lounging nonchalantly beside Fenrir, taking another swallow from the bottle they'd been passing around. "You know," she added, in response to his obvious lack of recognition at the name, "it's been a very long time since I've met anyone who hasn't already heard of me. I suppose I could give you a demonstration as to why. It's been like...twenty-seven hours since I've killed anyone."
Fenrir snorted. "I can't have you just going around killing my people, Bella."
"Ha! As if she could! I'd like to see her try!"
Bella grinned. "Would you really?"
"Sit down, Rocks-For-Brains," Ellie warned Petrov. "She could kill us all if she wanted to. And she has a right to comment on your asinine criticisms because unlike some people, she actually earned her place in this pack."
Well, if one could consider leading them through a fucking war to be earning her place. She had been the lieutenant Fenrir reported to, their main source of contact with the Death Eaters and de Mort's other forces, and they had come to appreciate her willingness to interact with them — she might have openly disdained them for years, but most of the wizards refused to have anything to do with them, as though they could be turned simply by talking to a werewolf. They appreciated her honesty about it. The real source of their esteem for her, however, was her willingness to go into battle alongside them, rather than issuing commands to their division from the safety of the back lines like...pretty much any of the Dark Lord's other lieutenants.
Well, that and they had eventually discovered that she wasn't really human, even if she had been born one. In the spring of '72, even before she'd come around to admitting that she preferred their company to her own people's, she'd taken it into her head to run with them on the full moon. As a human. Even de Mort had thought that was mad, and he never casually called her insane like everyone else. But she could disappear into the shadows if they ever got too close to biting her, so he'd allowed it. And... It was hard to explain, exactly how the Change worked, but the collection of curse-borne instincts that overwhelmed them on the Moon— The Wolf...didn't quite recognize her as human. There was too much magic in her, like a veela or a vampire — they knew instinctively that the Curse wouldn't take if they bit her. If she ran, of course, they'd chase, but not with the same single-minded determination to proliferate the Curse that they would feel toward any actual human.
"Plus, there was the whole eyeball thing..." Hati said, with a shit-eating grin to match Bella's own.
"If I'd known all it would take for you idiots to take me seriously was a little cannibalism, I would have done it months before you came up with that stupid challenge game," she grumbled.
Clarence snorted. It also didn't hurt that she very clearly didn't consider herself human, either. Not in any way that suggested the vast majority of them — magical or not — were anything more than animals to be used and discarded at her slightest whim. Like when Fenrir had challenged her to eat a human eyeball, and she promptly went and killed someone because there weren't any spare eyeballs in camp. (In Fenrir's defense, he'd been trying to get her to fuck off, no one had thought she'd actually do it. They really hadn't known her yet.)
"Who did you kill yesterday?" Hati asked, in an obvious bid to change the subject. Ellie and Bram, on the other side of the fire, were clearly making similar efforts with Petrov, though too quietly for Clarence to overhear.
"Eh, a couple of Hunters out of Rome. Followed them until I was close enough to actually trace your anti-tracking charms, but they'd served their purpose, so."
"Were you going to mention that at some point?" Fenrir asked her. Clarence agreed — it was kind of important to know that the Vatican was sending Hunters after them. Not to mention, their anti-tracking charms could be tracked?
"Yes. Just now." Hati passed her the vodka again. She knocked back another swallow before handing it to Fenrir.
"Care to elaborate on the incident?"
"I thought you found my penchant for gratuitous violence off-putting, Clarence, but if you want details, I—"
"Hey!" Petrov shouted, still standing, fists clenched. He took a single step in their direction, a clear demand for Fenrir to take his challenge — which the alpha had still not even addressed, beyond giving Bella silent permission to deal with it — seriously. "Just because this little human freak kicked your ass, Mickey—"
"Oh, hang on a second," Bella said, rolling her eyes. She stood and, faster than blinking, vanished, reappearing behind Petrov with a knife in her hand, sinking it between his ribs four times before he managed to turn around. Clarence didn't even think she'd used magic for that — the moving through shadows thing, yes, but she hadn't made herself faster — the little blue runes on her arms hadn't lit up. She ducked under his wild, unbalanced swing, came up with the blade poised to be driven through the underside of his jaw and into his brain. He froze as well as he could, coughing blood in her face, even as everyone nearby scrambled away. "Are you sure you don't want me to kill him, Mikael? He's stupid enough he's bound to make a nuisance of himself eventually."
Fenrir sighed. "No, Bella, I don't want you to kill him. If and when he challenges me, I'll do it myself."
"Ugh, fine." She pouted, but instead of striking a killing blow, she carved a quick 'X' over his heart, deep enough Clarence was sure she'd nicked a rib or two. "Do yourself a favor and remember, when you finally work up the balls to challenge Fenrir, that you owe your life to his mercy. And I'm the only one who gets to call him Mickey."
And then he was on the ground and she was sitting in Fenrir's shadow again, Anika rushing to Petrov's side. "Was that really necessary, Bellatrix?" she asked in her most grandmotherly tone of disapproval, kneeling to inspect his wounds.
"Uh...yes? You know how much I hate it when people talk about me like I'm not right there. And it's not like I used silver, he'll heal. If you're going to speed the process for him, let the cross leave a scar. Just to help him remember not to underestimate tiny human bitches."
"As you should remember you don't give orders, here," Fenrir murmured, quietly enough that those beyond Bella and Clarence wouldn't overhear. Not that many of them seemed interested in sticking around, or in most cases, returning after fleeing Bella's demonstration of the dangers of overconfidence. Even Ellie seemed shaken, helping Anika get Petrov back to his tent. Since leaving Britain, they'd taken the pack in a much less violent direction — the war had taken its toll on all of the survivors. Most of the new members had never seen real bloodshed outside of full moons.
"Anika knows she doesn't have to follow my orders. Actually, I don't think she's ever followed my orders?" She hadn't. Bella had taught Anika some of the spells they used to hide themselves, but the older woman had been turned in her fifties and was no kind of warrior. She had been one of the few pack members who hadn't had anything to do with the Death Eaters. "Anyway, pretty sure that makes it more of a suggestion."
"Uh-huh. You have blood on your face," he noted, wiping a drop off the tip of her nose and licking it from his finger.
She twisted her face into an expression of false disgust, then grinned at him. "So, all is right with the world, then."
"Not everything," Lena snapped, stalking around the fire to glare down at the two of them. Clearly Fenrir apparently reciprocating Bella's "flirting" was a step too far — enough of an insult that she had to say something, even directly in the wake of Bella demonstrating that she was, in fact, as insane as Clarence had warned them all.
It was almost funny, really, the expression on Fenrir's face as he looked up at his glowering wife. "What?"
"You can't tell me you haven't noticed this slut practically hanging all over you!"
The alpha looked down at Bellatrix, completely flummoxed. She sniggered, but it was Clarence who answered. "Easy, Lena. There's nothing between them. Never has been."
"Yeah, chill," Hati agreed. "There's a reason we call her Hela."
Fenrir nodded, shoving Clarence to move further down the log they were using as a bench, making room for Lena between them. She immediately tucked herself under his other arm, glaring across his torso at Bella, who twiddled her (bloody) fingers mockingly in return. "She is like my sister. My tiny, annoying sister who thinks she is in charge of everything, all the time."
"Not everything, just you, and training, and the Time Turner project, and... Oh! Assassinations, I was in charge of assassinations," she said absently, cleaning her knife on her tunic and scrubbing the blood off her hand with a bit of dirt. "Special Operations, whatever."
Fenrir chuckled. "My tiny, annoying, drunk sister," he corrected himself.
"Oh, go fuck yourself, Mikael, it's been thirteen years since I got drunk, I think I'm due."
Hati sniggered. "I was going to go with her being Death's bitch, actually." Which was also a fair point. She'd been in de Mort's bed well before the pack had joined him. Clarence was pretty sure she'd never even fucked her husband. "Her Dark Lord," he explained, for Lena's benefit. "She went to prison waiting for him to come back from the dead."
"He's not dead, I'd know if he died," she said, turning her arm to reveal what had been a detailed tattoo of a skull and a snake, but which now resembled a faded, grey burn scar. "The color would fade entirely if he were entirely gone."
"So, why are you here, then, if you still think he's going to come back?" Hati asked.
"I told you, I decided to move on."
"Yeah, but...why?"
Bella groaned theatrically. "Okay, remember back forever ago when I told you about my goddess?"
"Yes..." Hati said, shooting a quick glance at Fenrir. The subject of Bella's goddess was one they had never agreed on. Hati didn't believe she existed. He didn't believe in any gods at all. Bella explaining that gods and magic were really the same thing and he'd seen her using magic, hadn't really helped. Fenrir, on the other hand, had been a Christian before he'd been turned, and had a very hard time understanding Bella's conception of many Gods and Powers, despite his belief that at least one god did exist (and hated him, but that was a separate issue). Clarence hadn't entirely thought Bella was being serious when she had told them that she served a goddess of chaos, thus it was her sacred duty to fuck up as many people's lives as possible.
"Well, apparently she took exception to how thoroughly Tom managed to domesticate me—"
"You. Domesticated?" Fenrir repeated, obviously as much at a loss as Clarence to think of any less domesticated person he'd ever met.
"Yes. I know you lot think I'm a fucking savage, but in case you forgot, I did spend the last decade and change in fucking Azkaban waiting on him like a good little puppy. Anyway, Eris dragged another version of me to this dimension, and the two of them colluded to force me to re-examine my entire life. Which incidentally incapacitated me for almost a month and brought me to the attention of the Department of Mysteries. And you know how I feel about the Department of Mysteries. So I left, sailed to France, spent a few weeks with a veela colony recovering from being in a bloody coma and pushing myself...probably more than I should have to get out of Britain, then decided since I didn't have anything else to do, I'd look you up and figure out the best way to cause the most chaos for everyone over the next couple of years."
"You're not going to try to revive the Revolution in Britain?"
"Eh, I figured the other me could do that. Start with something more familiar, you know? She is only a kid, and not nearly as familiar with the political situation as I was at her age, being from another universe and all."
"Uh...huh," Lena said, very skeptically. "How much of that is true?"
Bella leaned around Fenrir to look her in the eye. "Does it matter?"
It didn't, but Clarence suspected that somehow, no matter how fantastic it sounded, the answer was all of it.
