Chapter 4: Demanding Answers

By the time Mimi came to deliver supper, Hermione had worked herself into a right state. This was the first time in years that she'd felt so powerless, and without paper and pen for her to write with, the hours had dragged on with her fuming in silence.

"Mimi, I know you're young, but you need to tell me the truth," Hermione said, trying not to growl. "I get the feeling that you're not telling me everything."

"I don't know what you're-" Mimi started.

Hermione glared at the girl. "Mimi, please. I saw the claw marks when you opened the door. I need to know- what, exactly, tried to get into my room."

"It's...it's only because you're….you're…" Mimi stammered, looking afraid as she backed away from Hermione's stormy expression.

"Why, it's a veritable miracle. Our honored guest is up and about." A familiar voice came from the entryway to the room and the professor stepped through. "I didn't realize you had a habit of scaring little girls, Miss Granger."

The man nodded to Mimi, who looked gratefully at him and left quickly.

"How did you-?" Hermione couldn't help but feel that she'd heard her surname spoken in a similar way in the past, but the man's gruff voice and the two-day-old beard on his face wasn't familiar at all.

"Mimi tells me everything, you know. It's part of her job," the man said.

"Well," Hermione replied huffily, "I would prefer to know whom to thank for my involuntary imprisonment, along with the expert medical care, of course. The decor might leave a bit to be desired, though." She gestured at the long, deep claw marks in the open door. "Don't tell me, your clawfoot tub came to life and fancied my door a scratching post?"

The man stepped back and slammed the door behind him so that she could no longer see the marks. "I will not be spoken to in that way," he said, sneering in a frighteningly familiar way as he approached where Hermione sat at the foot of the bed.

"I know you, don't I Professor?" Hermione asked, her eyes widening with realization. "Your voice...your hair...that horrible suit...you look different enough but...I know who you are…"

"Do you, then?" the man stepped back, his anger replaced by a careful neutrality, but Hermione could see that her words made him uncomfortable.

"Yes, Professor Snape," Hermione replied, looking triumphant, "and let me be the first to tell you that you're looking rather well for a dead man."

"I am no longer a professor!" the man...Snape...said fiercely, his eyes flashing. "He. Is. Dead. And I am not much better off with my...illness…"

This got Hermione's attention. "What illness?"

"It's none of your business." Snape scowled, staring at her strangely for a moment, and Hermione could have sworn that his eyes went golden and slitted for a fraction of a moment before he shook his head and screwed his eyebrows into a frown. "Now, kindly finish healing so that you can finally leave!"

He slammed a couple of vials on the table and turned, his brown suit doing his form no favors. It was hardly as intimidating as his voluminous black robes. For some reason, it seemed far too tight on him, even more so than before. He growled and stumbled, slamming the door behind him, but not before Hermione saw the hand that pulled the door shut.

It had grown hairy and clawed...almost like the beginning of a paw.

Hermione ran to the door and pressed her ear against the wood as she heard the telltale sounds of a ward being raised on the door and a hasty scrabbling sound as a key was turned in the lock. Hasty steps echoed down the hall away from her door, but Hermione could almost hear them growing heavier and heavier as they got further away.

Then...silence.

Hermione looked out the window to see that the sun had just slipped over the horizon and, in the dim light of the rising moon, she could almost make out a massive shape moving across the snow before it disappeared into the forest.

She'd found the creature. Hermione knew in her heart of hearts that it was true.

But, cruel as he'd been, she couldn't help but feel sympathy for her former professor. After all, he hadn't asked to become a monster.

'And I didn't ask to lose the love of my life to one,' she thought to herself.

Hermione was annoyed a few days later when she started to bleed. She normally cast a charm to stop her monthly cycle from coming, but without her wand, she couldn't do that, and she felt incredibly uncomfortable asking Snape to cast the charm. Ever since the night where she'd figured out his identity for certain, he'd stayed for briefer and briefer periods of time, sending in a young woman who avoided eye contact and refused to speak to her. Hermione supposed that she was Charlotte, and from the way the girl carried herself and started rocking back and forth at the slightest rise of Hermione's voice, Hermione suspected that she was autistic to some degree.

She got the odd feeling that Snape was trying to protect Mimi from her, and after she'd unsuccessfully tried to get information from Charlotte the third time, Snape stormed in with her evening meal, slammed it on the table, and then stuck his wand in her face.

"Exactly what is wrong with you?" he demanded, "You're harassing my staff and acting a right pain in the arse! I think, given the circumstances, you ought to stop acting like an ungrateful wretch. The lock on your door is for your own protection, you insufferable Gryffindor!"

"Oh, look at you, so bravely sticking your wand in an unarmed opponent's face," Hermione sneered back angrily. "What was it you said? That you'd have left me there if you had wanted me dead? How can I be sure that you didn't just want to nurse me back to health so you could feed me to the beast that keeps trying to break down my door?"

"That was...it….it won't happen again," Snape said pulling his wand away and looking somewhat uncomfortable.

Hermione glanced at the window momentarily. By her calculations, which had been somewhat difficult to make due to the fact that there wasn't a single clock in her room, it was close to the time that she'd seen his hand grow furry and clawed before. She'd drawn the shades purposefully, just to see if her plan would work. The heavy falling snow outside helped as well.

"Oh really?" she said, her voice tinged with a taunt, "Then why don't I have my wand just in case?"

He glanced away from her for a moment and sighed. "I'm sorry, Miss Granger, but your wand...met a similar fate when it landed."

He pulled Hermione's broken wand from his inner pocket. "I'd thought to try and go to town to get the wandmaker there to fix it, but there's been a blizzard for the past two days and no one can go out into the town when it gets like this on the mountain. Even though you've healed up, and even if you do get a new wand, Apparating out will be difficult in this extreme weather."

"And how long will that take?" Hermione asked, the hysteria in her voice rising sharply. If nothing could go out in the blizzard, then neither could the creature that Snape would turn into.

"Sometimes a few weeks. Sometimes a month. Once, it went on for two." Snape looked resigned, his expression tired.

"Can you tell me more about the creature?" Hermione asked, gently, though she was pretty sure she knew most of the details already.

"Can you tell me why you thought it a good idea to climb up a frozen tree in the middle of winter on this godforsaken mountain?" Snape replied, answering her question with a question of his own.

"I was hired to do a job," Hermione replied shortly, crossing her arms.

"Yeah, and what job was that? Falling to your death?" Snape retorted with a sniff.

"Ugh! You're utterly insufferable, do you know that?" Hermione fumed.

"I may have been told as much by multiple people over the years, but what of it?" Snape replied, looking irritated, "After all, it's not my fault that you were stumbling about by yourself on my property like an idiot in the dead of winter."

"What?" Hermione was taken aback. "What do you mean by your property? Mr. Snignibbon said-"

"Oh, well, if Mr. Snignibbon said so, then it must be true," Snape replied sarcastically. "I bought this land fair and square more than ten years ago. The fact that the goblin village down the mountain believes that my purchase of the property was only a rental agreement until they could find a more lucrative use for it, as all goblins seem to do, mustn't have anything to do with it!"

"What? But...I….two people have been snatched by the monster...and..." Hermione sputtered, feeling like she'd lost control of the whole conversation.

"Why not use that brilliant encyclopedia of knowledge that you absorbed back at good old Hogwarts to remember how goblins are notorious for going back on their word as long as they can find a loophole!" Snape was nearly snarling, and Hermione could see that his teeth were sharper than a normal human's, his face elongating slightly as though growing more animalistic in nature. "All I ever wanted was to be left alone, but somehow, they figured it out...my...illness, and...Granger...you have to believe me….they were tied up...in the snow...they'd have died if I left them…."

He was huffing heavily, his body hunched over as he tried to steady himself, staggering back towards the door before his muscles tightened unnaturally under his skin and he let out a moan of pain.

"No...Y...you...did this...on purpose…." he struggled to speak, his hair falling loose over his face, growing longer and bushier as she watched, frozen by the change that was coming over him, "I...c..an't…"

Hermione staggered back as he suddenly shot up in height, falling to all fours onto the carpet and snarling like a demon from the pits of hell itself. Jagged horns broke through the skin of his temples and grew up towards the ceiling, ending in sharpened points. His hair grew longer, covering his face, and Hermione could see a muzzle breaking free, black hair sprouting all over the places where his body could be seen. The cloth of his ill-fitting suit bulged and tore until it burst like a balloon, shredding material everywhere. With an unearthly thrumming roar, Hermione watched arms and hands rearrange into furry legs and massive paws. The back paws, however, sported cloven hooves, and a sibilant hiss rose from behind the beast as a massive snake that gave Hermione dejavu rose to stare at her threateningly.

The full horror of the situation began to wash over Hermione even as she found the word on her lips.

"Manticore."

When Snape looked up, his eyes had gone from black to gold, the slitted pupils blowing wide as he sniffed the air, his eyes zeroing in on Hermione's location. Hermione had futilely tried to hide behind the bed, hoping he wouldn't see her, but as she rolled under the bed cursing her aching back, she could hear the sound of the weight of the manticore's front paws on the mattress above her as he leapt up to explore. Hermione could see the snake tail waving back and forth on the side of the bed closest to the open door, and she knew that she was trapped unless she was willing to take a chance and run for it.

All species of manticores, she knew, were poisonous. From their saliva to their tail venom, they were absolutely deadly from the moment they were born. Some even said that their claws were tipped with poison, though Hermione was fairly certain that it was more due to the manticore's grooming habits than venom-secreting claws.

Snape had turned into a very rare sort of manticore, though. The snake tail was generally a trait of a chimera, but there were no other heads attached to the body of the beast, and Hermione could tell that the snake was no ordinary viper, but eerily similar to the monster that had torn out his throat and burned his blood with venom.

Still, she had to try.

The creature above her let out a strange thrumming purr and she could see a large paw touch down on the floor where she'd crouched only moments before. She rolled as hard as she could out from under the bed, her eye on the door. She could feel the snake hissing in her ears and the sound of it striking as she rolled and tried to pull herself up towards the door. Just before she hit the wall, she rolled on top of something very hard and uncomfortable. Snape's wand. She grabbed it, her hand shaking as she saw that those haunting golden eyes were watching her with predatory interest from the bed. Though her body screamed at her to stop and her feet were bare, Hermione picked herself up and tore through the door, slamming it behind her just as the beast pounced and slammed against the door.

Hermione pointed the wand at the door and tried to cast a fortifying ward onto the wood, which had begun to vibrate with the repeated impact of the manticore's body. It sputtered to life and cooperated after two or three tries, but Hermione was not happy with it.

'My wand would have done it better…' she thought back to the pieces of wood Snape had shown her and shook her head. She needed to be strong and preferably find a safer place to hole up until the storm passed. Hermione lit the tip of Snape's wand and began to walk down the hallway. Most of the rooms she looked into were heavily neglected and full of dust. It was creepy to walk through the dark with so many doors on either side of her, but the majority of the wing outside of her room was devoid of human or magical life. Even the portraits had been removed; Hermione could see discolored rectangular spaces on the walls where something had once hung. Hermione wondered if they'd been magical talking portraits, and nearly wished she had Phineas Nigellus' portrait to talk to. It would have made the whole thing much less lonely, even if a painted person wasn't really real.

Hermione paused at this thought- it had been awhile since she'd been able to admit to herself that it would be nice to have companionship. Though she'd always worked alone in the years after Ron's death, it had never bothered her. Now, though...she looked down at her nightgown and bare feet and cursed her vulnerability. Even Snape's wand wasn't much help. It kept fighting her whenever she tried to use it, but she wondered if part of that fight wasn't her own reticence to use it.

"After all, this wand was used to kill," Hermione said softly to herself, wincing when the last word echoed down the hallway.

She'd killed too, though. And though Luna had always told her that all magical creatures had as much a right to live as a human being, Hermione had never really thought of it much. Her anger and the danger they posed was enough for her to take a job and finish it. Even the werewolves she'd hunted and shot through the heart with silver arrowheads had been killing sheep and endangering children's lives, and she'd had no thought to their humanity while their teeth were snapping at her heels.

Hermione heard a crash as as heavy wood splintered down the hall, and she quickened her pace, her determination to find an exit renewed by the thick chuffing of the beast that had become of Severus Snape.

Hermione was running down a long set of stairs when she saw Mimi dusting the bannister and singing a cheerful tune.

"Mimi!" Hermione hissed. "We have to get out of here! He's...he...transformed…he's coming for us…"

Mimi looked frightened for just a moment at the sight of Hermione and immediately dropped her duster, running down the stairs. It took Hermione a moment to realize that the girl wasn't running with her, but away from her, and Hermione once again berated herself for being so harsh on Mimi when the girl had only been trying to help.

It was then that she remembered Snape's words before the transformation had taken hold. Had he saved them from the snow? Mimi...then...and...Charlotte...too….she shook her head as a crash at the top of the stairs turned her eye backward. The manticore's glowing eyes were fixed on her form, and Hermione choked back a sob as she continued towards the swinging double doors that MImi had run through. Hermione pushed through the doors and into a darkened kitchen. With its tall, high windows and the sheer size of it, Hermione felt a stab of deja vu. Though it wasn't nearly as huge as the kitchens at Hogwarts, the setup was very similar. It was obvious that it had been made for beings the size of house elves.

Hermione turned as another door slammed on the far left side of the room, and she nearly tripped over a cart that had been set in the middle of the floor in the gloom. Snape's wand, which had been her only light, slipped from her grasp and she grabbed out for anything to steady herself, grabbing the corner of what seemed to be a table as she watched the glowing tip of his wand fading as it spun across the floor. Getting down on her hands and knees, Hermione groped around in the darkness, doing her best to feel for the wand. She finally grasped the tip of it; it was still hot from having been lit. She shook her hand back and forth and hoped that it hadn't left a burn before grasping the proper end and lighting the tip once more. She'd made it halfway through the room when the doors burst open and the manticore stormed in with its nose twitching with her scent. It began knocking over plates and pans in a terrible cacophony as it tried to reach her in a space that had obviously not been designed for manticores. Hermione had to cover her ears at the terrible noise, but she continued onward, using wand-light to get to the next door, which was made of some sort of dark metal with rivets and a rather formidable-looking knob

There was a moment of panic as she tried to open the door and realized it had been locked. Then, she remembered that she had a wand.

"Alohomora!" she shouted, trying to keep her voice from shaking as the noise of the manticore's progress grew louder behind her.

The door did not budge.

"Mimi!" she screamed, banging on the door. "Please! Let me in! He's going to kill me!"

"Go away." It was not Mimi's voice.

"Charlotte! Please!" Hermione's voice was tinged with hysteria as she realized that the silent girl had finally spoken.

"He saved us from them. We were just fine before you had to show up," Charlotte said bitterly.

"This is not just fine!" Hermione screamed back, feeling the musky heat of the beast's breath curling the hairs on her head. "He's turned into a monster and-!"

She turned around, her back flat against the door just in time to see the manticore staring down at her, his golden eyes fixated upon her as the snake tail swished from side to side behind him, hissing but out of reach.

Hermione tried to cast a stunner on the creature, but Snape's wand sputtered and let out a few pathetic sparks, seemingly unable to betray its master, even while he was in such an inhuman form. Rather than appearing angry, the manticore let out a strange thrumming purr and advanced upon Hermione. The pungent odor of its breath was overwhelming and full of the acidic tinge of poison.

Hermione only had a moment to realize how ironic it was to die the same way that Ron had. The thought made her feel oddly calm. She stared at the beast, her gaze steady even though her legs shook. He stood only inches away from her, thick puffs of his breath pouring over her in waves. She could feel herself losing consciousness almost immediately and sank down to the floor gasping and sputtering horribly. She felt the gentle impression of teeth on her shoulder as the creature picked her up and began to drag her away.

Before she blacked out, her very last thought was a memory of a man choking on his blood and dying on the floor of the Shrieking Shack with no one to mourn him or even search for his body in the ash that had been left of the building after fire had consumed it.

No, they'd be happy that she was dead, she reasoned. It would be a relief to everyone, even, perhaps, herself.