xXx

The cold cut bone deep, fed by the whip of the wind rattling the open kitchen window, the clatter drowned out by the sleet pouring from the bloated Toronto sky above. Draco Malfoy balanced his elbow on the sill, peering out into the darkness for any sign of life left in the night, pale cheeks blistered a rosy pink from the chill and the rain lashing at his face.

A flicker of movement from outside the window caught his attention, nothing more than a blur of a shadow dipping low in the evening grass by the fence far out back. Insignificant by a naked and crucially human eye, and finally, Draco ducked his head back inside, reached over for the handle, and shut the window to the noise of snapping bone and shredding skin dotted with the huff of an animal in strain. He didn't need to wait long for the back door to swing open with a squeak of its protesting hinges, nor for their third participant to come prowling in from the wind and the rain to join himself and Bill Weasley in the cramped kitchen space.

Harriet Potter, known affectionately as plain ol' Harry to her friends, of which Draco, four years on from the war, wasn't quite sure he was classified as one yet, came stalking into the heart of the room from the night outside. She was drenched from the downpour and snowfall outside, scalded cherry by the wind, monstrously curly hair, as black as the night settling outside, plastered to her pale skin that glistened. The hastily tied bed sheet around her body stuck in patches to her skin, doing very little to hide much of her impressive six-foot frame.

Draco was surprised she had gone for the bedsheet at all before walking in. Modesty, a rather human concept if he did say so himself, was typically substituted for naked-insouciance when you found yourself fury and with a tail once a month.

Or in Harry's case, whenever she bloody well felt like it.

The act of modesty must have been for Bill's benefit, the poor bugger still stuck somewhere between Werewolf and Wizard since his run in with teeth and claw that saw half his face mangled, leaving the redhead with a taste for blood but no fang to bite even on a full moon. Draco wasn't sure if he felt sorry for the older Wizard or if he was jealous he had gotten away with some heightened instincts and nothing else while Draco hadn't.

He would never admit to feeling either, sympathy or jealously, clearly. Werewolf or not, Draco was still a Malfoy, and he had some pride left.

"Any leads?"

Bill asked gruffly as he slid a heaping platter of cut deli meat and cheese across the kitchen island towards the stone-faced girl, their prize from his and Draco's grocery run that morning. Harry, of course, ignored it, pushing it back towards Bill with a huff and a curl of her nose. Instead, she braced herself against the rim of the marble topped counter, shoulders squared and head hunkered down between, eyes still an eerily bright gold from her shift outside.

And didn't that say all that needed to be said?

Draco couldn't remember the last time he had seen Harry's eyes as their iconic green. Not since, perhaps, Sirius and Remus had been home six months ago.

"Nothing until I ran down south-east for a while till I hit the border to New York. Snagged sight of one of his lackeys waiting around. I had him pinned before he crossed the border."

Bill frowned deeply, red hair curtaining the rugged shape of his face, knotted and ruffled from running hands through the locks, as he stubbornly pushed the platter back towards the girl with one foot of the edge of control.

"You have to eat, Harry. You've been running for a fortnight on nothing but the rabbits you've caught outside in the woods."

The four years since the death of Lord Vol-

Tom Riddle, he was called Tom Riddle now, and Draco had to keep reminding himself of that, had been… Not kind, war wasn't kind and it didn't end with the death of one man, but… full of growth for the young Gryffindor. Certainly, even before… Before her turn, where, against the odds, as Potter was prone to do, she had died and came back, shifted into a bloody Werewolf right before their eyes and ripped Tom Riddles throat clean out at sixteen in Hogwarts courtyard, Harriet Potter had always been a little Strange. And yes, the capital letter was warranted. She had forever been a tall thing even when they were first years glaring at each other on the stone steps of the Grand Hall, wiry but strong, faster than most, lethally fast, as their cousin, Bellatrix, could attest.

Poor bint had tried to spell Sirius through the Veil once, and only got a mouth full of Potter knuckle and her teeth clattering across the obsidian floor for her trouble before she could get the spell out.

Nevertheless, Harry was fast, and strong too, with a set of uncanny senses that had seen her dominate the Quidditch field in her Seeker robes, much to Draco's chagrin in his younger teenage years, but she had also been an orphan, malnourished and war torn, and half a step from death most of her childhood.

She'd been stunted.

Now… now, she'd packed on the muscle, deep, stiff muscle that matched the scars littering her flesh, the kind of muscle that you weren't quite sure was there until it was too late, until her fist was swinging for your face and you felt, first hand, the brute force of it, the kind of muscle that made the slant of her eye, keen and fox-like, all the more cutting when she glared your way.

Draco Malfoy kicked back against the kitchen island, jutting his pointed chin in Harry's direction, to the startling crimson splashed across the bottom of her own jaw, splattered across her mouth, dried to a rusty burgundy.

"Looks like she's already had a snack. How did he taste?"

Yes, her glare really could cut, Draco thought, as coldly as the wind outside as she turned it on him from across the kitchen.

"I didn't fuckin' eat him!"

Her gaze swung away, down to the table where she snatched at the platter, plucking up a roll of ham to shove into her mouth to chew.

"He just... Needed a bit of assentive to talk."

Assentive, to Potter, was breaking bone until the bloke squealed.

Bill slunk his own large frame onto the bar stool, curling up as much as he could on the small seat.

"And did he talk?"

Harry snorted through her nose, swallowing down the ham before she answered.

"Not as much as I would have liked but he said enough. Greyback's here, alright. He's in New York-... Or he will be in a day or two. Him and whatever remains of his pack are making a run across the border tomorrow."

The name was as heavy as the sky outside, as bitter as it too as it settled in the room and over the young adults like a blanket of snow, leaving nothing but barren starkness between them.

Mindlessly, Draco's hand twisted into a fist by his hip, the scarred skin pulling taught and white across the bone, the bite-mark of Greyback a blunt reminder of his own current state of Lycanthrope, a gift given on the orders of Tom Riddle when his father had failed to reclaim the prophecy from the Department of Mysteries. From the corner of his eye, Draco saw Bill's own scarred face twist in its corners, knotted under his own scars and his own curse.

Greyback.

The reason they were all here right now.

Evidently, Harry had no scars from Greyback to feel burn at the souvenir of his existence, at their presence here, in Canada of all places, hunting the ex-Death Eater down. Whatever kind of wolf she was, she wasn't their kind of wolf. No mindless brutality, no full moon needed, no half shift to something not quiet beast and not quiet man.

She was something born.

Or, at least, that was what Remus Lupin had supposed before he and Sirius Black had gone missing six months ago trying to answer that very question.

What exactly is Harriet Potter?

Whatever she was, she was pack. As was Remus and Sirius, Bill and Malfoy, their own little pack of misfits and oddities and outcasts, and this… By the lilac bruises under her golden eyes that wouldn't fully shift back to green under the brunt of her whirling emotions inside, the hollowing of her waist that had taken years to fill between the ribs with healthy fat, the disappearance of her two guardians, their family, was taking its toll.

It was on all of them.

"Are we sure this is on Greyback?"

Harry viciously bit into a chunk of cheese, shrugging at Draco's hesitant question.

Bill and Harry… They were Gryffindors, through and frustratingly through. They saw a target, and they gunned for it. Draco, however, luckily for all of them, had a bit more brains, and those brains, currently, were telling him something was up, something was missing, that they didn't have the full picture as they suddenly didn't have a full pack.

It doesn't sit right with him. None of this does. It prickles at the back of his neck, and churns in the bottom of his stomach, and worst of all… It makes him think.

"You remember as much as me. Remus said he was going to try and find Greyback so they could track down this… JD fellow before he disappeared. Two weeks later, Sirius goes to do the same, and now neither are answering the mirror, Floo calls, or Patronus's… Who else could it be?"

The truth was, before Remus and Sirius had gone on their grand Houdini disappearing act, they had been… Suspiciously cagey. Draco caught it sometimes, on the edges of their days, moments where conversations were walked in on and suddenly cut off, sharing long, lingering looks when Harry did something, yet again, unsuspected, said something that made the shadow of memory trickle over their eyes, and… Since Harry's turning, they had closed in, set up Grimmauld Place for her, for all of them, Draco too when his father and mother kicked him out for what he was now, for what they had made him by their choices, who Remus and Sirius had taken in after the war to help acclimatize to his new wolfish-way of life, and they had shut the door.

Shut and locked it.

Harry, after her first turning, couldn't hold back the shift, changing at least three times a day at even the slightest provocation, and with her suddenly tumultuous emotions, which had always been a little volatile, she could have posed a danger to the non-wolf-folk.

Only they hadn't let up on the quarantine.

Draco had originally put it down to the man they were hunting. Greyback had always shown an… Interest in the Gryffindor since he had first caught scent of her in a side street in the back of Knockturn alley. Every chance he got, he bolted for the girl-who-lived-to-annoy-Draco, even to the detriment of the missions he was sent on by the Dark Lord.

He was like a dog with a bone, if you excuse the pun.

When news broke that Greyback wasn't amongst the dead at the Battle of Hogwarts, it had made sense to Draco that Remus and Sirius had been cautious in letting Harry out and about should the beast be hiding in the shadows readying to pounce. And then a year passed, and Harry got a grip on her emotions and shifting, as much as she could given her hot-headed nature, and they still kept her separated at Grimmauld Place with only Bill and Draco allowed close. Then another year passed, and there wasn't a single hair or fur ball of Greyback lurking around, and still, Remus hesitated in letting her go to see Hermione and Ron at the Weasley Burrow. Three years on, and even Harry began to question why she was being so heavily guarded, more so now than even when Tom Riddle had been after her head on a stick, and Draco had walked in on many an argument between the older wolf Remus and the younger pup, as Sirius affectionately called Harry, often ending in a slammed door and a haggard Remus, still tight lipped, slumping in a chair.

Four years on, after Harry had snuck out with only Draco for company to a local Quidditch match, only to be dragged back to Grimmauld Place with their tails between their legs by a furious Remus, had the once professor finally cracked.

Draco had heard it all though the hallway door he had been eavesdropping from after being sent out the room.

"It's unsafe, pup. I know this is hard-"

"It's hard because you're not telling me jack shit! You know, Dumbledore did the same, and it cost me my life. Please... Please, Remus, don't put me in the same spot again."

Silence, long and lingering.

"I just… I don't get why I can't go out. You let Draco and Bill go wherever they want."

"Draco and Bill are different."

"Better, you mean. They don't tear their clothes apart on the daily or rip up the couch when they get antsy."

"You know I didn't mean it that way, Harry-"

The soft sound of steps thudding on carpet, and Draco imaged a hand placed on a tightly hunched shoulder.

"I swear, I'm just trying to protect you. Our world… Werewolves are dangerous. For you more than anyone. If word got out about-"

There might have been a draft of wind, or perhaps a suffering sigh that tickled Draco's ear.

"Maybe I've gone about this the wrong way. I don't know how to-… James would have known what to do and-… Look… Give me some time, alright? A month. I need to… There's someone I need to find. There's someone you should meet if they're still alive. I thought I could do it, but obviously-… Maybe it's time."

"Time for what? A flea treatment? You're not taking me to the vet to be neutered are you?"

A tired chuckle.

"If you keep eating all the chocolate in the pantry, I might."

More footsteps, and Draco began pulling away from the door.

"One more month of quarantine and then…"

Remus said no more, but Harry echoed his words.

"One more month, or I'm pissing in all your slippers."

Three weeks later, Remus had gone to find Greyback and this elusive JD. He never came back. Two weeks after that, Sirius, pale faced and edgy and silent on where Remus had gone, had followed with a promise to be back within the weeks end. He never came back either, and now here they were, a Weasley who liked his steak raw, a Malfoy with a moonlight problem, and a Werewolf-but-something-else Potter were crowded around a kitchen island with ham and cheese for dinner in a broken into abandoned house after spending six months tracking train ticket sales, hotel slips, gossip about grey coloured wolves, and a forgotten suitcase in Vancouver.

"Have you heard anything about this JD guy in your runs? He's our only other lead."

Harry picked at the platter, refusing to meet Bill's eye and see her own failure reflected back.

Gryffindor's, Draco thought with a hearty scoff. They were irritatingly hard on themselves. It was all the morals they carried around with them, he supposed.

Worthless baggage, really.

"Not so much as a peep. No one seems to know who the fuck he is."

Bill slapped the counter with a flat palm and stood.

"Then we find Greyback. We know he's in New York now or will be soon. We'll cut him off. Come on, let's head to bed. We have an early start tomorrow."

xXx


A.N: This fic is loosely inspired by another one I read a while ago called Kin by Sparks94, but it hasn't been updated in a very long time, and I wanted to try my hand at writing my own twisty version of it, and of course, Bitten the TV show and the books. As you can likely tell, if you've read that other fic, this one is very, very different to that one. Nevertheless, I hope you all like it anyway!

The pairings in this fic are as follows: Clay/Fem!Harry, Draco/Elena, Bill/Fleur, Jeremy/Lily, Sirius/Remus, Nick/Hermione.

You won't need to have watched or read Bitten as, if I've wrote this fic correctly lol, there shouldn't be any need as most of that lore is explained here.

I hope you all had some fun reading this, and if you could, and you have time, don't forget to drop a review!