Thank you to all of you who are reading this story. I especially appreciate those of you who have taken the time to review. It is always nice to know what people think about what I've written.

Chapter 21

Something hurt. Something really, really….her head was going to explode. If she could only wake up and open her eyes perhaps she could stop the pain. After some effort she managed to open one eye very slightly, but the pain only multiplied.

A man's voice said urgently, "Drink this. It will help, my love."

Drinking something would help? Well then give it to ….she coughed and spat out the horrible tasting potion.

The man's voice seemed very insistent as he said, "It tastes nasty, but it is worth it. Try again, Winnie. Come on, love."

"Are you sure?" Her own voice sounded strange, too.

"Yes, my darling. The pain will go away. I promise. Drink this all down and you will feel better."

She took a deep breath and tried to swallow the bitter, thick liquid as quickly as she could.

Lovely, lovely man, it had worked. She opened up her eyes to thank whoever had been helping her and saw the sickly white, frightened face of Remus Lupin.

He reached out his hand and placed it on her forearm saying softly, "Winnie?"

All the memories of what he had said flooded back into her head and Edwina tried to pull herself away from him. There was such a desolate look in his eyes; the test must have come out against her.

"How do you feel? Is the pain any better?"

"What did it say?"

She watched his body sag with grief as he spoke in a hoarse, rough voice, "God Winnie, I am so sorry. I was so wrong, utterly wrong. I don't know how to explain it, but you were right."

"The baby is yours?"

"Yes, absolutely mine. No question at all. I was so wrong, darling." Remus picked up her hand and pressed his lips to her palm before placing it against his cheek. "The healer must have made a mistake. I ought to have known that and not assumed you had betrayed me. I should never have believed it."

The test had gone in her favour. He was the father. "Do healers make mistakes about those things?"

"They must have done, Winnie. I did not make one with the test."

Edwina looked up at the man standing beside the bed. She had never seen anyone look so absolutely shattered before. She didn't have the energy to think out what she really wanted to say. All that she wanted to do was sleep.

"I…I don't have words for how sorry I am, Winnie love. It is my fault that things came to this. And I should never have put you at risk by performing the paternity spell, either. That sort of magic is dangerous to anyone, but with the Breochaid…"

"I told you to do it, Remus. I had to know."

As he spoke Edwina heard an angry edge to his voice, "If I hadn't been such a fool then you wouldn't have asked me to do the spell, Winnie. In any case, I should have refused to do something so risky to your health."

Edwina was so tired, so very tired of all the emotional upheaval. Surely everything didn't have to be always scary and painful. An instinctive feeling inside her gut told her that now was the time. This was when she decided whether they had a future together or not. She had been sure for two days now what she wanted, so she had to tell him. She just wanted things to be nice. She didn't want an unhappy, miserable life like her mother, but maybe with him there was the possibility for real love.

"Do you think that you are any more foolish than I was? I actually believed the healer when he told me that you are a horrible, dangerous dark creature, who will almost certainly turn me into one of your kind eventually and raise our child in some dirty, hidden werewolf subculture."

This admission startled him. "He thought that I would pass the curse onto you? Why would I ever do that?"

"I don't know, Remus. But he told me that werewolves have some sordid lifestyle that I should protect my child from at all costs."

Remus stared with a puzzled expression at Edwina as she lay back against the cushions of the bed. "There are werewolf communities, as I have told you, but I do not live that life. I am not sure what he thought I was going to do to you, but I can assure you that I am not going to make you into a werewolf or do anything else so disgusting."

"But I believed it."

Remus moved closer and picked up both of her hands and lifted them to his chest. "Yes, you did."

"I don't want to be angry anymore."

Edwina saw a flash of hope in his eyes, which was too quickly replaced by a horrible, empty look.

"Neither do I, Winnie."

"Can we forgive each other and make things right?"

"I hope so, Winnie."

"I want to."

"Do you, darling? Tell me what you mean by that. Please."

"I mean, well, I want to stay. I don't want to waste any more time being silly."

As she finished speaking, Edwina was not surprised that she was being gently, but fervently embraced by her husband. What did surprise her were her own feelings and her reaction to being held so closely by him. She loved this man. It didn't matter that her feelings didn't make much sense to her or that only a short time before he had thought she was pregnant by another man. She was tired of being unhappy. She loved him and it was terrifyingly real and quite overwhelming. Somehow there didn't seem to be any point in waiting anymore.

Edwina wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned forward so she could kiss him. His response was predictably passionate and completely wonderful. If this was a taste of how things could be then she wanted more. Right now, in fact.

If he could wake up with her hair tickling his nose every morning then he didn't think he could ever really complain about anything again. Nothing had gone as he expected yesterday. He had almost accepted that she was not going to contact him, since it had been almost 3 weeks since she had left and she had not yet written. Remus told himself that it would be best not to think about what his plans for today had been before he got her letter. Everything he had intended to do in these last two days before the full moon would have been quite illegal and could easily have landed him in Azkaban.

He had been unable to think of any candidates for her lover, so he hadn't had any idea where to start looking. But there was no rival. Instead, now he had to find out how a healer of St. Mungo's could have made such a large error in such a simple, regular test. Twice. He hadn't told Edwina or even Sirius that he had requested the test to be redone.

Was there a third possibility? The simplest explanation was usually the right one. How likely was a healer to make the same mistake twice on a standard charm? Even the likelihood of Edwina being unfaithful had seemed greater, but he had been wonderfully, blessedly wrong about that. Was there something else that could explain everything?

In fact that was just it. There were entirely too many mysteries surrounding Edwina and him. If he thought about things impartially it was all quite unlikely. Perhaps there was only one mystery. The pregnancy that he could not explain, the odd reactions of her family to her attack, the identity and motive of her attacker…Remus listed the unexplained occurrences to himself and then suddenly pushed himself up in the bed. There was another mystery as well: the disappearance of her father and the sudden suicide of her mother.

"Oh, is it time to get up?"

The sleepy voice of his wife effectively derailed his brain from any further logical thought. "No, you may lie in as long as you like, Winnie."

He watched her open her eyes when he spoke and saw a deep red flush of embarrassment spread over her face. He ought to have expected that. Remus turned to get out of the bed and find some proper clothing.

He pulled on some trousers and a robe that he must have discarded over two weeks ago, which he found in the corner by the bed. He rarely bothered with a bath the day before full moon, but it had been almost three days since he had washed so he knew he must reek of sweat. It hadn't mattered as much when it was just him and Sirius, who had told Remus when Remus had pointedly reminded Sirius about the invention of soap that he really couldn't be arsed either.

He saw Edwina look down at her nightdress and pull up the sheet to her chin. "I want to get dressed."

Remus turned to get some clean clothing for himself, which he could put on after the bath, and heard her jump up from the bed. Tucking his own clothing under his arm, he took her dark red dressing gown down from the hook inside the wardrobe and turned around. Edwina snatched the dressing gown from his hand and quickly put it on without looking at him. Remus pulled out a pair of ratty looking slippers and slid his feet into them.

"What is that thing on your back?"

Remus responded with a puzzled query, "What do you mean?"

"I could see it through your shirt just now when I woke. You have a big tattoo thing on your back."

"Oh, yes. It is just that, a tattoo."

"Right, but what does it mean?"

"It has to do with a specific branch of wizardry. It isn't important."

"If it isn't important then why do you have it?"

Remus could see that she was feeling embarrassed and awkward, so she was focusing on asking about his stigmat. However, he didn't want to delve into a discussion of his marking nor the time of his life when he had gotten it.

"It is part of my past."

"Why don't you want me to know about it?"

Remus leaned back against the wardrobe and considered his wife for a moment. What should he tell her now, anyway? A year ago he had thought that part of him was well buried. But twice in as many weeks he had felt the taină rising.

"There isn't a simple answer. That marking essentially means that I am a werewolf."

"You mean it is something all werewolves have? Like the registration number?"

"You know about that?" Edwina nodded in response. "No actually, that is there for identification by the Ministry. They are supposed to be able to track all werewolves that have been tagged."

"Can they?"

Remus laughed shortly, "No. That was easy to overcome. But I cannot remove the number marking, however."

"It's horrible that they do that."

"I think so."

"But the other thing, it isn't from the Ministry?"

"No. I got it when I was collecting research for my specialist in magical subcultures. In fact the magic behind this marking and the study I was doing is the reason that I wanted to take the degree in the first place. There is a type of magic that is used by some half-humans, not just werewolves but also part-veela or part-giants amongst others, which is used to control the various portions of one's being."

Edwina squeaked, "What does that mean?"

"It means that some half-humans want to summon their non-human abilities or to hone them for some particular purpose. Others, a definite minority to which I belong, want to use this type of magic to keep the non-human portion of themselves hidden."

"Oh. You can make yourself a werewolf when there isn't a full moon?"

Remus' expression was firm as he replied with a harsh voice, "Yes, I could, but I would never want to do that."

"So, so the healer was right? There is a werewolf culture and you aren't just dangerous at the full moon?"

Edwina stared at him with wide eyes waiting for him to respond. Remus purposefully relaxed his clenched fists and leaned back into the wardrobe as he answered, "No, he was not right, Winnie. A werewolf is dangerous at the full moon without the potion that helps him keep his mind, because he has no control. A werewolf with only a werewolf's mind is extremely dangerous. But a werewolf who takes the potion and who can control the beast is much safer."

"But if you take the potion why do you need to control yourself?"

"I must control myself during the rest of the month, Winnie. When a werewolf feels any deep, primal emotion then his werewolf's instincts can become very strong. The more I can control the taină, the better." Remus saw her mouth open to ask a question and answered, "Taină means the secret self or the mystery. That is what those who study Vrăjitorie Noastră call the portion of us that is non-human."

Edwina noticed the superlatively calm voice of the man in front of her as he described what seemed to her to be a dark and frightening part of himself. She tried to remember what Professor Quirrell had taught them about werewolves in third year. "How do you control it?"

"That is an extremely complex type of magic, Winnie. Very few wizards or witches are strong enough to master it. More often the student loses themselves to the beast instead of the other way round. More than half of us went mad or worse."

Edwina wasn't sure how she felt about the implication that he must be an abnormally powerful wizard to have succeeded at this weird magic. "Then why would anyone want to study it? Do all werewolves study that?"

Remus shook his head. He could see nervousness and uncertainty evident in Edwina's body language, but if he were going to explain Vrăjitorie Noastră at all then a full disclosure was best. "No, no. Very few wizards and witches have ever heard of it so most werewolves don't even know it exists. It is only taught in either Romania or Slovakia and always with extreme secrecy. I studied it because I do not like what the werewolf is. It almost caused me to harm someone many years ago, so I determined to do what I could to restrict the wolf."

Edwina shivered as she asked, "It is dark magic, isn't it?"

"No, not precisely, although it can be. Unrestrained natural magic is very complex, Edwina. That is why becoming an animagus is so heavily regulated. The majority of the applications of unrestrained natural magic do border on the dark arts, but not all of them."

"How do you do it?"

"Do what, control the taină?" Remus glanced at the moon clock by his shoulder and said, "That is something we are not going to discuss right now, Edwina. When I sent your family an owl last night to let them know that you would be staying here, I promised that you would contact them early this morning. You know that if you don't then there will be trouble. So I think I should set about organising breakfast while you write your great-aunt."

"Oh! I never thought about letting them know where I was." Edwina looked at the moon clock, as well, trying to remember how one read the writhing outer bands. The inner band seemed to say it was at least 7 in the morning.

"I think that is understandable considering everything. However I didn't want your uncle trying to break down the wards around the house."

"Oh, oh yes. Uncle Wilfred is not going to be impressed when he knows that I'm coming back here."

Remus thought that was a rather enormous understatement, but said nothing further. Edwina's easy assumption that she was coming back to Hatishall Cottage to live was a little surprising.

Remus wasn't going to argue with her, although he wondered if they were ready to live together again. However he didn't think that they really had the luxury of reacquainting themselves with each other slowly, so he would take this opportunity and run with it.

As he smiled at Edwina and gestured for her to precede him through the door, he thought that it was lucky that the sitting room had at least been decently presentable the night before. Fortunately she hadn't yet seen the state of the kitchen and she had not seemed to notice the bedroom the night before. He'd had a chance to do a hasty clean of the bedroom the night before, once he had written to her family and spoken to Sirius, but he knew she wouldn't be amused by the plates that were currently moulding in the sink. Edwina hated disorder.