Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Addie McConnell is standing in the cool light from the perfect summer sky outside, the sort of sky that makes Mary feel patriotic about being English, and some of the sunlight catches in the edge of her wine glass.

It's the texture of the curtains that catches on Mary's eyes, and the odd little knickknacks that she has forgotten entirely having lined up on the windowsill, though she must have done so, in another life, in the life when Jackie lived here, or visited often enough, overnight especially, that all of the neighbors assumed that she lived here. And she is calmly conversing with a woman who is kin to Jackie's murderer—if so, there was a murder she cannot remember, for the spell is still in place that makes it impossible for her to remember that night. All that wakes in memory is the glowing skull and snake in the sky over the square where Jackie lived.

Where she lived. Where she died, as well, the same night as her aunt. Killed by a kinsman of the woman who stands before her, ordinary brown hair and eyes green-brown, like the light in a stream deep in a forest.

At least she can remember that Jackie is dead.

Mary watches as Addie lifts the glass to her lips, and takes a sip, and inexplicably a phrase comes to her, the wine-dark sea, and she thinks how deep that sea must be, to absorb all light, and to throw back a color like blood.

For they are all bound by blood, this coterie of strangers who live nestled in their enclaves, or disguised in the open—the Granger girl lives in suburban London, in a house on an ordinary street, that has a real address—and their feuds go back centuries. From time to time, she understands now, someone is born as one of them, but into an ordinary family: someone with a name as commonplace as Granger or Finnegan or Thomas or Goldstein.

The late war seems to have settled that question, whether those foreign-born folk are their own or not, in the affirmative.

Jackie was one of them but not; never in all the time had she seen anything untoward happen in her presence, though out of the corner of her eye, at Aunt Amelia's, odd things happened all the time. It was a dreamlike place, that apartment, a sort of museum of Victorian Orientalism, and what's more… very much larger inside than she would have expected from the outside. At the time, she'd admired that as a clever stage-effect.

At length Addie says, "I don't blame you if you take it hard… I needn't…"

"No," Mary says. "Stay." She nods at the glass of wine. "Enjoy." She asks, "Did you hesitate because he was your relative?"

Addie gives her a speaking look, and then apparently decides that something can be explained about the assumptions she's just violated. "I knew of him, of course. But no, we hadn't grown up together under the care of the same house-elf. At best, I knew him by reputation. And the last…" She looks down. "He was faster than I was. At least she didn't suffer."

That was the thing Mary had wanted to know and hadn't dared ask, and the expression on McConnell's face would indicate that she's not lying…but who knows with professionals. That face is open and shuttered at the same time, and Mary now finds it more than a little sinister that she cannot remember that face when she thinks about it after.

Mary says, "The way you say that… it wasn't the case for others, was it?"

McConnell shakes her head. "Not my mother, certainly." She takes a deep breath. "And Greyback got my sister and brother. Nine and ten years old." She closes her eyes, fingers still grasping the wineglass, and Mary sees the tension in the fine muscles of her forearm. Mary waits; that face, eyes closed and brows pulled together and mouth compressed, is what a tragic mask would look like if it were British; it's the tense surface behind which nightmare is playing out.

At length, McConnell opens her eyes, and says, in a matter-of-fact way, "Of course you don't know the details." She places the wine glass on the table, and fishes in the pocket of her loose black trousers to produce a folded piece of something like paper.

It's a newspaper clipping, but a very peculiar one: the photographs move, just like that one Mary had seen before, of the pink-haired girl and her amber-eyed husband. Only these are in black-and-white, and the faces… almost all of the faces are terrifying, with a handful of exceptions, with eyes that open onto darkness in a way that Mary has seen only a very few times in her life.

McConnell silently indicates the two she means.

There's a man who's scarcely a man, but nearly half wolf; it's not the shape of the features so much as the expression… no, it is the shape of the features, and when the lips lift in a snarling sneer, the teeth that show are pointed. Mary tears her eyes away from the eyes that find hers with predatory intent, and reads the caption, "Fenrir Greyback, werewolf. Confirmed dead in the Battle of Hogwarts. Read interviews with his victims, page 5 (inside)."

The other is the very obverse, icy and something colder than human; where the wolf-man is all hot blood and slavering hunger, seemingly poised to leap through the picture, this figure recedes, as if to draw away from the lesser beings looking at him from the other side of the picture plane. He's all planes and angles, long pale hair and pale eyes and sharp cheekbones, as if a cubist sculptor had been given the assignment of crafting a human being out of arctic ice. The resemblance to the boy in the waiting room is unmistakable, and the surname confirms it. "Lucius Malfoy, second-in-command to the late Dark Lord. The indictment in full, page 3."

His picture is flanked by that of his wife, the woman Mary knows as the Black Widow, and his son, who looks back at the viewer with terrified and bewildered eyes; the background is unclear but Mary has the sense that he's backed against a wall and can retreat no further. The captions indicate that they, too, are accused of war crimes, for the details of which the reader is also referred to page three.

At length McConnell says, "Lucius Malfoy is the most thorough bastard ever to walk the earth. He oversaw my mother's torture."

Mary says, "And you cannot forgive his son the resemblance." McConnell shakes her head. "I can't say that wouldn't be a normal reaction. It's a very strong resemblance. Only the boy seems to be mostly harmless." More than this she cannot say; she knows the details in the medical record, but those are between Dr. Burgess and the boy himself.

McConnell says, "And Greyback was Malfoy's tool, before the worm turned…" She adds that the Malfoy family apparently fell from favor with their Lord, and spent the last year of the war as hostages in their own home, but the father in the pride of his power was inhumanly cruel, almost a match for his sister-in-law, their Lord's torturer-in-chief…

Mary says, "I think that you ought to take up Granger on her offer." She adds, "I don't know what military discipline is on your side of the border, but it sounds as if you're already in trouble with Kingsley as it is…" She frowns. "He's your commanding officer, is he?"

McConnell says, "Not exactly. He's… the Minister." She adds, "Like your Prime Minister. Only we don't have a Queen."

Mary blinks in surprise, as she realizes what that means. Kingsley had spoken of his veterans, and what he had meant was the full roster of front-line forces in this mysterious war, on both sides, as many of them were willing to come forward and ask for help. "Your world is very small," she says.

McConnell sits down, looking shaken and human for the first time. "Yes, it is. I suppose it is." And then, quite unexpectedly, she puts her hands over her face and weeps silently, like an abandoned child who is afraid of making a fuss. At length she says in a low voice, "There's no one left." Anticipating the question, she says, "My father was killed in the First War. I joined Dimly to avenge him, really. Although my family's always been in Dimly, so it wasn't hard."

Mary puts a comforting hand on her shoulder. "I think you should take up that offer."

McConnell—Addie—looks up at her. "Then I won't see you any more."

Mary says, "Not on duty, certainly." She adds, "But it sounds as if you've been on duty rather too long."

For generations, in fact, but that doesn't need saying. Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart. That had been another civil war entirely and from the other end of the century, but that was Addie McConnell to the life.

ooo

Author's note: "the wine-dark sea" from Homer's Iliad; "too long a sacrifice" from W. B. Yeats, "Easter 1916."