Dumbledore appeared in the corner of the Great Hall without warning. His discreet tap on the shoulder scared McGonagall so badly that she whirled around with her wand drawn.
"I would rather we not create a commotion, Minerva," Dumbledore said, his voice low and urgent. "Please put that away."
"Professor Dumbledore! How did you …" She gestured to the corner where he was standing; he could not have approached without her seeing.
"I apparated here."
"Apparated? But the defenses …"
"Are not as intact as they once were, it seems," he confirmed with a short nod. "It has been a rather bad night, though, fortunately, you would not know it from standing in this room." He glanced at the dance floor, where the Halloween Ball continued unabated. Only Faith, Xander, and Lorne remained from the visitor's ranks, their faces twisted with anxiety as they watched the children enjoy themselves in grand fashion. Hagrid stood next to them, idly munching on a mutton chop the size of Xander's head while making stilted conversation.
Dropping his voice to a whisper, Dumbledore detailed the evening's events. When he reached the part about Grindelwald, the Transfiguration professor turned white.
"My word," she said when he had finished. Then her pale features hardened. "We must send someone to fetch Medi-Witches, and the aurors – we must summon the aurors."
"Already done, Professor McGonagall. They'll be here shortly."
She nodded, her pinched lips betraying her rapid thoughts. "How are the children?"
Dumbledore's blue eyes dropped to his shoes. "Harry and Ron are quite alright. Shaken, nothing more. Well, that and angry, of course," he amended. "Miss Weasley and Miss Granger, however, are another matter."
"I must see them right away."
Dumbledore nodded, and without another word the two professors vanished.
"What the bloody hell is this?"
Spike's right arm held Tara upright from the waist. His other arm bound Jess, still unconscious, to his shoulder; the cuts on her shoulders and back were bleeding, and the smell was driving him crazy. The girl's blood reeked of power, and he knew it would taste heavenly. The strain of not sampling it had begun to tell by the time he forced the infirmary door open with his foot. Once he made it inside, the crowd in the infirmary drove all thoughts of eating from his mind. He had expected to find no one home. Instead, he seemed to have walked in on the fairy tale version of the first episode of MASH.
Madame Pomfrey was on her knees by a bed at the back of the room, and entirely engaged in her ministrations. She spoke to Spike without looking up. "Are they dying?"
"Don't think so. Just worn out an' in shock is all, plus a couple knicks and cuts."
"Then put them in a free bed and I'll be with them in a bit." Without another word, she turned her focus back to her current patient, whom Spike couldn't see and whose smell he didn't recognize.
Spike laid Jess on her back in the closest bed to the door and helped Tara plop down in the next one. He saw the Angel Investigations crew, minus Lorne, huddled around the next bed down. Harry and Ron were perched between the next two beds, where Spike could see Hermione and Ginny. Both girls lay face-up with a glassy thousand-yard stare. The angry looks on the boys' faces told the story there.
"What went on here, Angelus?" Spike growled angrily. The elder vampire glared but rose from his spot on the bed to explain. When he did, Spike saw the occupant.
"Dawn!" His game face appeared unbidden. "What did you do, you stupid berk?"
"Petrificus Totalus," Pomfrey said calmly. The spell flashed and Spike froze in the middle of the room. "I want it quiet in here. I have no time for pointless prattle." Her wand disappeared; she had never even looked directly at Spike.
"Can he hear me?" Angel asked Harry. Harry nodded. Angel grabbed a handful of Spike's duster and pulled him close. The jacket felt like it had been heavily starched. "Good. Listen up, Spike: she's not hurt badly. Just a minor concussion. Other people aren't so lucky, and if you can't control yourself, I will personally toss you out of this room and kick your pasty ass down several flights of those moving stairs. We don't have time for any of your crap. Now, Harry's gonna unfreeze you, but if you start anything …" He let it hang menacingly.
Then he turned to Harry. "You can unfreeze him, right?"
"Uh huh."
"Do it. Please," Angel added a second later.
"Finite Incantatem."
Spike rolled his shoulders. "Damn, that's a creepy thing."
"Why don't you skip the bullshit and tell us what happened in Sunnydale? Is Buffy …"
"She's fine, Peaches. Wouldn'ta left if she wasn't. Unlike some people," he added pointedly. "Witches took a beatin', but we kept him away from Buffy. Got the twins an' their girls watchin' over her now, along with Demon-girl."
"Was it …"
"Yeah, it was him. Poncy git. Put a sword through his chest - pissed off his beanie baby pretty good, but didn't do a lot to His Heavenliness. How 'bout you tell me what happened here?"
"Same thing that always happens," Harry said. His voice was flat and his eyes never left Ginny. "A dark wizard with a bug up his arse tried ta kill us an' I let my friends get hurt."
"We let our friends get hurt," Ron corrected. Harry didn't offer any disagreement.
Spike glanced at Angel with raised eyebrows.
"I don't know about the commentary, but it was definitely an evil wizard."
"He got Little Red an' Granger, Dawn, an' somebody else before Dumbledore put 'im down?"
"He got away," Harry said.
"Dawn got hurt by some … conjured minions of his," Angel said. "We took care of them. The somebody else wasn't him. She was with him."
"Dumbledore put the hurt on her, then?"
"No." Angel shook his head. His eyes moved grimly over the still form in the back of the room. "Willow did that."
"Red?" Spike sniffed the air, then carefully examined the three injured girls near him. "S'an awful lot o' blood in this room, an' it didn't come from the Nibblet or the two lions. What'd she do?"
"Tore an arm clean off. Then she beat her with it." Angel grimaced, picturing sweet little Willow working Amy over.
Spike's eyes went wide. "Damn. Haven't seen anyone do that since you did it to that buggy driver in 1890."
He was about to ask where Willow was when Dumbledore appeared in the center of the room with McGonagall at his side. The sudden entrance gave everyone a jolt except for Pomfrey, whose wand continued to bob and weave with unwavering focus.
"How is she, Poppy?"
"I've done almost everything I can for her, Professor. The arm is mangled beyond repair. Her wound is closed and the bleeding stopped. She'll need a lengthy spell on her back – there's no helping that." Madame Pomfrey finally looked up, her face empty of blood and her hair matted with sweat. Even her nurse's hat had fallen askew. "Professor, is it true? Willow did this?"
Dumbledore nodded gravely. McGonagall moved silently to check on Hermione and Ginny. She sat down next to Ron and lightly stroked Hermione's hair. It was the most openly affectionate gesture Harry and Ron had ever seen her make.
"Oh dear."
"Not to take the focus away from the wounded for too long," Angel said, "but do we have any idea where Willow is now?"
"Unfortunately not. We have several people attempting to track her at the moment, a task which you, Harry, could aid greatly."
Harry looked up from Ginny. "Me?"
"Yes. We need your map of the grounds."
"The Marauder's Map," Ron said, nodding. "That'll tell you where she is if she's still here. You think she stayed on campus, Professor?"
"Grey believes so. Apparently after she injured the young woman over there she came to her senses and took off running. He was too dazed to follow, but she was most definitely on foot."
"It's in my trunk," Harry said dismissively. He turned back to his girlfriend and took her hand in his.
"Would you be so kind as to retrieve it for us?" Dumbledore asked.
"No. I don't much care where Willow is, Professor," Harry added. Everyone in the room could feel the anger creep into his voice. "I need to be here. With Ginny."
Dumbledore nodded sagely, ignoring Harry's anger and rudeness as if it hadn't existed. "Very well." He vanished with a pop.
Grey thrust the weathered parchment into Sirius' hand.
"Make it work."
With a tap of his wand, the map came to life. He suppressed a smile as the familiar introduction danced across the page. Beside him, Remus stood tight-lipped and anxious.
"Is she there?" Giles asked.
"Yes. Here," Sirius said, pointing to the tiny dot labeled W. Rosenberg. The dot was in the center of the Dark Forest.
"We go now," Grey said, his hand unconsciously brushing over the cool sapphire grooves of his lightsaber as he turned to leave the courtyard.
Giles stopped him with a hand on his arm, drawing a fierce look from the former auror. "She's deeply entrenched," he said, though whether he meant in the forest or the magic, Grey didn't know. "It's quite dangerous, and I daresay a modicum of caution is in order. "
"Fuck caution." Grey shook him off and headed for the forest. Giles and the two wizards traded anxious looks, then hurried to follow him into the darkness. Sirius shifted into his dog form, darting back and forth across their path in hopes of picking up Willow's scent.
After a few hundred yards of forest, all he could smell was evil.
"She must have come a different way," Remus said, picking his way between branches as he spoke. "We should take care; this is a deadly environment, and if her control is already slipping …"
"Yes, quite," Giles agreed.
Grey said nothing, his face revealing none of his emotions. He kept replaying a scene from Dumbledore's office in his head as they walked. I'll be the one to face you, he had promised her almost a year before. It had seemed so obvious at the time, such a natural thing to do for a friend. She loved me then, he realized now. That too seemed obvious in retrospect, and he was glad he had validated her feelings for him.
Now that he had to actually steel himself for the task, though, fear and doubt draped themselves over him like a second skin. He barely heard Giles and Remus talking behind him and noticed the forest itself not at all. All he could see was Willow, her black hair and eyes framing her pale, vein-riddled skin as the magic crackled around her and Amy. The spell he had reflected back at Amy had knocked the evil witch senseless. When Willow moved in for the kill, Amy had never had a chance. Only his failed attempt to tackle Willow had stopped her from killing Amy; the sight of him sprawled on the floor, bleeding from her magical push, had shocked Willow out of her insanity. She had bolted from the hallway without a word.
And now she was here. In the center of a massive glut of dark magic. Whether he could pull her out remained to be seen.
They had nearly reached her when Sirius loped to the front of the group. He reverted to wizard form and laid a hand on Grey's chest.
"Something's here. I can smell it," he whispered.
The other three halted. Remus sniffed the air and nodded his agreement; they drew their wands, while Giles unsheathed his rapier and Grey gripped his lightsaber.
In the silence, they could hear the quiet shuffling of the leaves. The darkness covered up all but their immediate surroundings, and they had agreed not to use a light. Illumination worked both ways when it could only come from one source.
The attack came without warning. Grey felt the creature an instant before it leapt, but the magical hunch was still a fraction of a second late to save him completely. Fully five hundred pounds of animal slammed into his chest with a roar, gouging red furrows under the gashes in his sweatshirt and sending his lightsaber flying into the bushes. Grey went over backwards. Their combined weight and the beast's momentum dashed any hope of maintaining his balance. Rocks and twigs dug into his flesh as they tumbled across the forest floor, and Grey could feel its hot breath on his forehead. Teeth the size of fingers opened wide to slam down and shred the flesh of his face. He tried to push the beast away, but its claws latched onto him and refused to give way.
From his vantage point off to the side, Giles could see that the beast was a massive, purplish war hound. The point of his rapier came up and he moved to wade sword-first into the fight. Sirius' shout stopped him short.
"You'll stick Grey with that thing. Let us handle it." Giles nodded. Sirius looked at Lupin. "James teach you the spell before he died? The one for the night of the full moon?"
Lupin nodded. Sirius gestured to his torso, then changed into a dog. The beast atop Grey dwarfed him.
"Gravitas," Lupin cast, waving his wand in an s-pattern in front of him.
Physically, nothing visible happened to Sirius. When he lunged at the larger hound and caught it squarely in the midsection, though, the monstrosity flew off of Grey with a thump and sprawled onto its side at the base of a massive oak tree. Sirius landed next to Grey, barking and snapping his jaws at the hound. Grey rolled up on his side, the painful cuts squeezing a low moan from his throat.
Giles and Lupin rushed forward and dragged him back to relative safety. "What now?" the Watcher asked. Sirius and the hound traded a series of hungry snarls and nasty swipes.
"That spell won't last long. James only used to use it when I was … acting up, and they needed to restrain my wolf forcibly."
"Do the opposite," Giles said, the answer coming to him in a sudden burst of insight. "Put it to sleep."
Lupin didn't need to be told twice. "MORPHEO!"
The white ball of light sped out of his wand and took the hound in the chest; it slumped to the ground, breathing deeply. Sirius changed back to wizard form.
"Not bad, my friend," he said with a grim smile. Lupin nodded. "How's the auror?"
"Fabulous," Grey mumbled. His whole torso was soaked in blood. "We need to find Willow." He spat, a mixture of spittle and blood. His insides felt like they were leaking out of him. "Also, someone needs to figure why I keep getting cuts on my chest. Every damn time," he muttered.
"And if she finds you first? You're not much with the in-shape-to-stop-her-ness, are ya?"
Willow, her hair still black and her skin pale as chalk, floated out of the darkness and landed in front of them.
