Blackbeard was slouching on the sofa when Walden walked into the living room. There was an empty cup of coffee on the table, a decimated pack of McVitie's biscuits and an assortment of crumbs around it.

Evey was reading in her favourite armchair, by the hearth, where a fire was burning, even though no one in the house was bothered by the late February cold. Evey said it made the place more hospitable to their guest. Or guests, apparently.

Alice usually spent her days in the conservatory, studying the magical plants and herbs that grew there and experimenting with them. The "few days" she was supposed to remain at the manor had turned into weeks, but no one really minded. Walden had to admit that he felt safer with her in the house. Better to have two Ancients at hand than one, with Greyback lurking.

Ted, however, didn't exactly live here – he just visited whenever he bloody felt like it, and that was a bit too often for Walden's taste.

"What are you doing here?" Walden demanded.

The Wolf grinned at him. "Hey, Sleeping Beauty. I was just scouting the area for Greyback and his cubs, and your wife kindly invited me in for a cup of coffee."

This, Walden had already guessed. "But why are you still here?" Evening had fallen, darkness settling in quickly. Ted had to know that Walden would be up soon.

Evey abandoned her book on the table after carefully marking her page and threw him a reproachful glare instead of a loving greeting. "Gods, you're impossible."

They hadn't talked about Ted since Walden had discovered that he wasn't gay, as Walden had initially assumed. They hadn't talked about Walden's supposedly unwarranted fit of jealousy. They probably should have but, truth be told, Walden wasn't sure that he could explain it. That meant that he would have to apologise to Evey – and Ted – for his reaction and supposedly rude behaviour of the past few weeks. He wasn't looking forward to it.

The Wolf had (wisely) avoided being in the house when Walden was awake, until tonight. "This is really none of my business," Ted began to say, clearly on the verge of making it his business, "but can you tell me exactly what I'm being accused of here? I never made a pass at your wife, you know. I never will. I may be a pirate at heart, but I have morals. I respect the proper etiquette regarding flirting with other people's wives, which is simple enough: don't do it." He paused, waiting to see if Walden or Evey would like to contribute to his monologue, then went on when they didn't. "I don't see you getting upset about your brother living here, so why does it matter if I visit occasionally?"

Walden frowned in confusion. "What does my brother have to do with any of this?"

"Well, he's…" Ted trailed off, looking at both of them in turn. Evey seemed equally mystified by Tony's sudden appearance in the conversation. The Wolf cleared his throat. "Never mind. But Evey's not jealous of Alice, right? Because she trusts you. Why won't you trust her? I mean, wasn't that part of your wedding vows or something?"

"I do trust her," Walden protested.

"Then why the fuck are you jealous of everyone who talks to me?" Evey exclaimed.

"It's not everyone," Walden grumbled, before realising it was not the right thing to say. "I mean…I trust you, V. I just don't trust him." He guessed it was the reason, anyway. Had to be. Blackbeard had helped rescue Evey, sure, but…well, he was a Wolf, just like Greyback. Walden simply didn't think he could ever fully trust one of them. He wasn't about to try and explain that in front of Ted, however.

Evey's face softened unexpectedly. She stood up and advanced toward Walden. "Look, I know you've had several nasty experiences with some of your previous girlfriends, but I'm not them, alright? I'm not a cheater. I'm not a gold-digger. I love you for who you are, Walden, not for your money or gigantic estate or noble, Pure-blood name and status." She paused, then flashed him a teasing grin. "Though I do appreciate the extra benefits of being married to you."

Walden smiled, somewhat hesitantly. Were they making up? He took a step forward and Evey hugged him tightly. "And I'll have you know that if anyone dares make a pass at me, I will gut them myself. I'm a werewolf, remember?" she murmured, amusement seeping into her voice. Walden leaned down to kiss her.

After some time, Ted loudly faked a cough, and Walden was unpleasantly reminded that the Wolf was still in the room with them. "That's dealt with, then," Ted said with a sly grin. "Now, if you want to know why we were waiting for you to wake up, vampire, it's because we wanted to talk to you about the next full moon, on Saturday."

Walden let go of Evey reluctantly. She stood at his side, clinging to his good arm, instead of returning to her armchair. "What about it?" Walden asked warily.

"It's going to be a blood moon, which means that even Wolves will have to transform." Ted shrugged. "I think it's safe to assume that it will affect Evey, too."

"Um…ok." Walden still wasn't sure where they were going with this. Evey had transformed before; in fact, she did it quite regularly. She seemed to enjoy it a great deal. He glanced at her, and saw that she was chewing on her lip. "What am I missing? Is it about the mandrake leaf? It can wait until March, V."

"Well, it's a bother," Evey concurred. "I could have started last month, and the potion would be almost ready by now." She was seriously determined to become an Animagus, though Walden couldn't figure out why she was so adamant about it. She could already turn into a werewolf, and she had more important things to learn besides.

Tony had been tutoring her in Occlumency, while Walden taught her how to Apparate and how to summon a Patronus. Ted was her werewolf mentor, so to speak, though what that entailed, precisely, Walden didn't know. Alice had mostly focused on training Tony in hand-to-hand combat, Ancient-style, sometimes with Ted's assistance, since he was a Wolf and therefore the perfect adversary. She'd also explained to Evey why she couldn't possibly turn invisible while in werewolf form: despite Evey's Ancient/Wolf duality, the two abilities simply weren't meant to coexist.

As for Occlumency, Evey's lessons were not going very well. Walden thought that Tony was being too hard on her, breaking through her mental shield easily and then showing her memories that sometimes left her sobbing and shaking, but he insisted that it was a necessary evil. If Voldemort – or, gods forbid, Greyback – decided to perform Legilimency on Evey, she had to be prepared for everything, for the very worst. She kept reliving her brother's death, seeing Walden's corpse, facing Greyback as he repeatedly stabbed her – or himself, with the same painful result.

Consequently, conjuring a solid Patronus was difficult. She had plenty of pleasant memories, and many things to be thankful and happy about right now, but the things she saw during her Occlumency sessions kept intruding. So far, she'd managed to produce a faint wisp of silvery smoke, which she found rather depressing.

The only thing Evey was even worse at than Occlumency was Apparition.

In Walden's seventh year at Hogwarts, he'd taken Apparition lessons with some of his classmates, including Tony, and there had been this one kid who'd nearly splinched himself in half. The lessons had been cancelled after that, while the poor kid finished his school year at St Mungo.

The bad news: Evey was almost as bad at Apparition as that kid.

The good news: she regenerated very quickly. Walden hadn't needed to reattach everything she'd lost – nails, eyebrows, hair, teeth, even a finger or two and part of her left ear. Each bit had regrown right away. Walden wondered if the fact that Evey knew she could sustain no permanent damage from splinching was causing her to (subconsciously?) not give it her best shot.

Irrelevantly, he'd also wondered if it meant that she could never get a haircut, since even her hair had grown right back after she'd splinched it.

Given these poor results, Walden had taught Evey how to drive instead. She was not too terrible at it – the car was still intact, anyway.

They also duelled on a daily basis. Evey was slowly improving her skills in that area. She was clearly not a natural, but she could defend herself, and cause some damage, too, at least when attacking Walden, who didn't have Tony's enhanced reflexes and magic-proof skin.

Becoming an Animagus, however, was a long and tortuous process. The first step consisted in holding a mandrake leaf in one's mouth for an entire month, from full moon to full moon, then add it to a potion containing several ingredients that were relatively difficult to obtain. Walden still had some supplies dating from his own days as a wannabe Animagus, but not everything, so they'd had to postpone Evey's "mandrake month" until the next full moon. She was obviously frustrated that she'd have to wait yet another four weeks before she could initiate the Animagus procedure.

"The potion can wait, V," Walden said. "The dew would be difficult to harvest in the glacial cold anyway." Then he frowned. "That's not what you needed to talk to me about, is it?"

Evey shook her head and gestured to Ted. "As I was saying," the Wolf explained, "the blood moon will force the change upon us. In itself, that's not at all a problem, especially given this ideal location," he went on, indicating the back of the house, in the general direction of the woods. Ted loved to run in the woods in wolf form as much as Evey did. "The thing is, this won't be like the usual voluntary transformation. It will be for us like it is for any other werewolf – that is to say, it will hurt like hell."

Walden swallowed past the lump in his throat. "Right. And…is there anything we can do to-"

"No," Ted said before Walden could form a proper question. "There's nothing to be done about it. Just have to suffer through it. Be thankful that it doesn't happen often."

"Wolfsbane?" Walden said hopefully. He didn't have much in store – leftovers from his Warden days of arresting rogue werewolves – but he'd happily sacrifice what was left of it for Evey. They could always brew or purchase more.

"Won't make any difference," the Wolf replied. "Not with the blood moon. All werewolves will have to do this the hard way. I pity the new cubs who'll have to transform for the first time that night."

"I just…thought I should let you know beforehand," Evey said in a low voice, tightening her grip on his arm. "So you don't worry if I…scream, or…" She trailed off miserably. "What with your acute hearing and tendency to worry about nothing."

An icy chill ran own Walden's spine. It was hardly nothing. He was glad that they'd told him, but part of him almost wished they hadn't. Now he would worry for certain, even if he knew why Evey was screaming in agony.

"Wouldn't want you to think it was Greyback attacking or something," Ted added.

"Will you still be able to control yourselves?" Walden asked. Werewolves usually didn't prey on animals, magical or not, and they avoided the undead if they could, but… Well, the wards were designed to keep potential threats out. They wouldn't keep two werewolves in, and there was a Muggle village not too far from here.

"To an extent," Ted said. "We won't be as lucid as usual, but we can still rein in the urge to bite and devour humans, if that's what you're worried about."

The idea of Evey hunting defenceless Muggles and eating them was too weird and disturbing to dwell on. "As long as you're sure about that, I suppose we'll just have to suffer through it, as you said."

Evey fell to the ground, completely drained of energy. She curled up in foetal position, shivering with exhaustion. The cold didn't affect her, even now, even naked as she was, but she still felt like she ought to be freezing.

Unlike any other wound she'd suffered in the past year and a half, the physical pain caused by the forced transformation lingered. She felt like it would never go away.

She prayed to the gods that there would never be another blood moon, not while she lived. How did werewolves do it? How did they survive, suffering the change in all its painful horror every single month of their lives? She'd never felt such pity for Remus before. No wonder he chose to drink Wolfsbane, when he could afford it. It wasn't weakness, as Greyback had implied; it was common sense.

And speaking of Greyback... Did the pain from his transformation impact her, did it make her own pain worse? She was glad to know that he'd suffered as much as she had that night, but if it was adding to her already unbearable torment...

She lost her train of thoughts for a moment, then became dimly aware of the sunlight that was slowly filtering through the trees. She was still in the woods – she didn't think she could make it back to the house, not in her current condition. She would sleep here, in the cold dirt, and-

She heard someone laugh.

For a moment, disoriented by the pain, her brain reacted hysterically, latching onto the object of her last conscious thought: Greyback had found her. Either he'd made it through the wards, or Evey had somehow ran beyond them in her barely-lucid blood moon frenzy.

Her heart was racing in her chest; she couldn't breathe. This was her nightmare come true: she was going to have to make a run for it, through the woods, while Greyback gave chase-

Then Ted's face appeared above her. "Well, you don't look so bad, all things considered. I remember my first-"

Evey broke down in tears in sheer relief.

"Aw, I'm sorry, doll. Did I scare you? I understand, believe me. It's enough to fray anyone's nerves, this curse, eh? Never figured out how the cubs survive it. It's no wonder there's such a high rate of deaths during the first transformation." Ted crouched down and pulled her into his arms. At that moment, in spite of everything, Evey's first reflection was that Walden would try to kill Ted, if he realised that he'd seen her naked, and touched her besides. She didn't have the strength to protest, though. Walden was already asleep, anyway. Hopefully he'd never find out about this. "Let's get you into bed, yeah? Then I'll fall into a near-coma in that fancy sofa of yours, if you don't mind. Bloody blood moon took a toll on me, too." He chuckled softly.

"I'll take her," someone else said. Tony, Evey's brain realised a moment later. Gods, she was tired. She felt her body change hands. They were handling her as though she weighed nothing. Tony wrapped her in a blanket, and his arms tightened around her protectively. "Is she alright?" he asked, voice full of concern. "Why is she crying?"

"Ah, don't worry about it. It's a fairly normal reaction. She'll be fine, she just needs to rest."

Tony began walking and whispering to her soothingly, but Evey barely heard him. She was fast asleep by the time they reached the house.

"Is Evey still asleep?" Alice asked as she walked into the garage, where Tony had once again established his workshop. Fergus, Walden's father, had cleared some space for him here when Tony was a kid.

He was nearly finished with his project, but he quickly hid it from view when Alice approached his desk. He didn't want anyone to see it before it was done. Alice scowled at him, but she made no remark.

"She is. I've never heard anyone snore so loudly in my life," Tony said. "And I slept across from Bellatrix Lestrange's cell for fourteen years."

Alice cocked her head sideways, seemingly listening to something far away. "Wait. That's Evey? I thought it was the Wolf!"

Tony chuckled. "Ted's been up for two hours. Emptied the fridge. Caraid must have been afraid for his life."

"Good gods," Alice murmured. "It's probably a good thing that you turned Walden – only a sleeping vampire could withstand the noise."

"It's not always that bad," Tony said affectionately. "But yeah." He glanced at her. "Is it alright if we skip training today? I'd like to wrap this up tonight." He pointed at the canvas-covered object he'd concealed when Alice had walked in.

"Actually, we won't be training anymore. I'm leaving, Tony."

"Oh." He wasn't going to say 'about time', because despite the fact that she'd extended her stay at the manor, having Alice here had been rather nice. She'd kept Tony company during the day, she was not an invasive guest, as Ted sometimes could be, and she'd greatly helped him improve his fighting skills besides. She'd even taught them some Muggle herbalism. "Is there a particular reason for your sudden departure?"

Alice nodded. "Jeanne came by this morning, while you were…keeping an eye on Evey." Tony had watched her sleep for a few hours. It wasn't creepy. He was just worried about her. She'd looked so frail and vulnerable that morning, in the woods.

"Something's come up?"

"I just…I should spend some time with her, I think. To make sure she's alright. Oh, and she gave me this." She took a small key out of her pocket, and a folded sheet of paper. "The key opens a storage container in Fort William. Apparently, she had most of Evey's belongings moved out of her house before she burnt it down."

Tony stared at her. "Why didn't she say anything before?" Not that it would have made her deed any less crazy, but Evey would certainly have liked to know this weeks ago.

"Because she was angry with you and Evey, I surmise," Alice said with a shrug. "You did rescind her invitation," she reminded him.

"Jeanne's always angry about something," Tony muttered.

"Anyway. The address is on the paper, and there's also a list of blood suppliers and voluntary donors in your area."

"Donating blood is illegal." Ancients couldn't be affected by blood diseases, unlike mere vampires, but…well, it was still illegal. And Tony would much prefer not to feed directly at the source, in any case.

Alice rolled her eyes. "The suppliers usually sell fresh-enough blood, if you truly have a problem with biting people. It's either that, or feeding off Evey," she said sternly. "And I doubt you want that. We can't provide for you forever, Tony."

"I know," he said. "Thank you."

"I'm not the one you should thank."

"Look, I appreciate that Jeanne at least removed Evey's stuff from the house before destroying it for no reason, but come on, Al. It was an insane thing to do. I can't thank her for it. And it's a relief to have a way of procuring blood but, frankly…that's an information you should have given me the moment I woke up as an Ancient." For all their welcoming parties and boring crash courses in history, they hadn't given him what he actually needed to survive – or not go raving mad, anyway. That was just plain bad parenting.

Alice pursed her lips. "She's right, you are an ungrateful brat." Tony was about to voice a protest, but she waved it away. "You're also correct, but still."

He gave her a smug smile, and she returned him a fond one, all the while shaking her head in disapproval. "It's impossible to stay mad at you," she went on. "I don't know how Jeanne does it." She patted his arm lightly. "I will miss you, fledgling, but I'm sure we'll see each other again soon. Pass on my goodbyes to Evey and Walden, will you? And thank them for their hospitality."

"I will. Say hi to…" He hesitated. "Tell Jeanne I'm sorry for the way we handled the situation. But what she did was wrong, and what she said was very, very wrong. She won't be welcome here for a long time, knowing Walden, but…" He shrugged, ruffling his hair. "Just tell her I don't hate her, please? Even if she is overbearing and crazy and dogged and-"

"Why don't you tell her yourself? You have her phone number."

Tony eyed at the phone on the desk. "Yeah, maybe I will."

The prosthesis was done.

It looked fucking badass, if Tony did say so himself. He'd fabricated it out of sycamore, the same wood used to make Walden's favourite wand, and he'd carved all sorts of magical enchantments upon it. The core was a Thestral tail hair – the only thing at Tony's disposal here at the estate, but it was said to work just as well as unicorn hairs or dragon heartstrings.

The prosthesis could be moved like a flesh arm, hand and fingers included. It couldn't catch fire, couldn't be detached unless at its owner's command, and it could be used to cast magic, just like a regular wand. Tony had taken the expression "wand arm" to a whole new level.

He was quite pleased with himself, he had to admit. It wasn't the first time he'd thought of replacing missing body parts with wand wood in the hope that it could be employed like a wand, but this was the first prototype ever made, as far as he knew.

And, as a convicted Death Eater on the run, he could never claim credit for it.

But that was alright. At least Walden would have a proper arm once again. Evey should be happy about it, too.

That was all that mattered.