Chapter Text
April 2006
It was just a little terracotta pot, with painted thumbprints making flowers around the bottom and a butterfly on the side. Just a little flowerpot. Was that really worth her dad getting so angry about, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her so hard that wisps of her hair fell out of her braid? Even with the spray of daisies growing out of the pot in full bloom, was it really that bad?
An adult’s shadow fell over her, and Mrs. Clark, her neighbor, asked, “Daisy, why are you sitting out on the steps?”
“The door’s locked.”
“That’s odd. Usually your mum calls me if she gets held up at work. Well, I’ll get the spare key so you can change out of your school things, and you can wait for her round at my house.”
As Mrs. Clark briskly click-clacked away in her pumps to get the key, Daisy ran her finger around the rim of the little flower pot. Mrs. Clark returned a minute later, opened the front door for her, and froze. “What on earth?”
Daisy peeked around her into a bare living room. Everything was gone, even the furniture, leaving only crushed places in the carpet and a smattering of dirt in the corners of the room. Two steps inside showed the same in the kitchen: everything gone except the stove and refrigerator.
“Were your parents getting ready to move?” Mrs. Clark asked, looking around. Daisy shook her head. Mrs. Clark searched the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, then looked up the staircase for several long seconds before coming back to Daisy and taking her hand. “I think you’d better come to my house.”
“She’s just in the living room.” Daisy stared at the coloring book on the floor in front of her as the foster mom came to the living room door. “Daisy, you have visitors.”
The only visitors Daisy wanted were her parents, but these were strangers, a woman and two men. All wore suits, but the younger man’s was oddly old-fashioned, like it had come out of one of the black-and-white movies her mother liked to watch. The woman looked all over the living room as if she were memorizing it. Her eyes fell on Daisy, and Daisy shrank in her seat. People’s eyes weren’t supposed to be bright yellow like that, were they?
The older man asked in a raspy, growly voice, “Give us a few minutes alone, would you?”
“Of course,” the foster mom said, stepping away.
“Roma, look around outside. Word is this case was leaked to Granger; she might try something.”
Roma nodded and went back outside. He directed the younger man to look around the house, then sat down on the floor beside Daisy with an ease most grown-ups didn’t have, especially not ones with gray hair. “Hello. My name is Fenrir. What’s yours?”
“Daisy Dursley,” she said softly. He would probably ask her the same things all the other strange grown-ups had.
He smiled, and she shrank in her seat even more. His teeth were sharply pointed, like a dog’s. “That’s a very nice name, Daisy. Do you like flowers? Or do you get tired of people asking you that?”
“I like them,” she said, looking away. His eyes were a normal brown, not like the woman’s, but his hair had a stripe running back from his temple that looked too white to be real, like it was sucking all color out of the world around it.
“How old are you?”
“Five.”
“Oh, five’s a nice age. I bet you’re learning all sorts of things about the world.” She shrugged. “You must be tired of strangers asking you questions. Maybe you’d like to ask me one instead.” Daisy bit her lip and shook her head. “Oh, I think you would. You’ve got that look about you. Don’t worry; I won’t be cross. Ask me anything you like.”
She knew it was rude, but he looked at her so expectantly that it seemed the fastest way to make him stop. “Why are your teeth pointy like that?”
“Ah, so you do see them. I thought you might. Not everyone can, you know. Can you keep a secret?” She nodded; he leaned towards her conspiratorially and whispered, “It’s because I’m a werewolf.”
“Werewolves aren’t real,” she whispered back. “They’re just pretend.”
He chuckled. She expected him to admit he was joking and tell her the real reason, like most adults did. Instead he said, “A lot of things you were told are just pretend are actually real. Like magic.”
She was supposed to say that was silly. That she was a big girl who knew magic wasn’t real and didn’t need to be lied to. Instead, she looked down at her hands and twisted her fingers together. “Is that why strange things happen around me sometimes?”
“Yes, that’s exactly why. I’m here to take you somewhere you can learn to do it proper.”
“I don’t want it,” she whispered. “Give it to someone else.”
“That’s not how it works. You were born with magic. You have it whether you want it or not, just like you have that pretty red hair.”
Daisy’s eyes stung. She blinked hard, trying to stop the tears that welled up. “I want my mummy and daddy.”
He reached over, and his huge hand engulfed hers as he patted them. “I know, poppet.” He didn’t have to say the rest. But they don’t want me.
Outside, Roma shouted, “Stupify!” Fenrir’s hand clamped around Daisy’s as his head whipped around to the window. A second later, a sound ripped through the air like a saw blade cutting through a nail. Daisy tried to pull away to cover her ears, but she couldn’t pull out of Fenrir’s grip.
The younger man ran past, but as he opened the front door, Fenrir shouted, “Farmore, get your arse back in here!” Farmore paused, and Fenrir made a sound that Daisy could swear was a dog’s growl.
Farmore closed the door again. “But Darcy—”
“Darcy’s got it sorted. What are you going to do, get in the way of that poacher catcher? I need you in here in case that was a distraction.”
“What’s going on?” Daisy’s foster mom asked, coming to the doorway.
Daisy tried again to pull out of Fenrir’s grip, but he didn’t seem to notice. With his free hand, he drew a stick from his sleeve and gestured towards the foster mom with it, and her face went blank. “Keep an eye on her,” he said with a jerk of his head towards Farmore.
“Nothing happened, ma’am,” Farmore said, taking her shoulders and leading her back into the hallway. “A car outside just had to stop in a hurry. Screeched the tyres a bit, is all.”
Daisy’s breath came in gasps as Fenrir turned back to her. “It’s all right, Daisy. I’m sorry I frightened you.”
“Let go!”
“I can’t do that right now,” he said in a calm, measured voice. “There are some bad people who might try to take you. I need to keep a grip on you to be sure they can’t.”
Daisy stopped struggling. “Would they hurt me?”
“I don’t know what they would do, and I’d rather not find out.”
Daisy nodded silently. Fenrir shifted his grip and let her pull one hand out, but kept a grasp on her other wrist. A few minutes later, the front door opened and shut hard, and Roma leaned into the room. “Weasley,” she said before Fenrir could ask. “He got away. I didn’t see anyone or anything that could be Granger, but I can’t imagine she’d let him out alone.”
“Way to the car clear?” Fenrir asked. Roma nodded, and he called for Farmore. When the man came to the room, he said with a gesture to Daisy, “We’re taking her to safety. Have that foster lady pack up Daisy’s things, and you watch her every second while she does it. Don’t let her eat or drink anything for at least an hour, either. If she’s clean, bring Daisy’s things to headquarters and we’ll check them there. If not, you know what to do.”
Farmore nodded and went back to the hallway as Fenrir rose to his feet. He let Daisy’s wrist turn in his hand while she stood too, but didn’t let go. Roma opened the front door and went first, looking around like she expected someone to jump out and shout ‘boo’, then she and Fenrir took Daisy to a 1950s-style car parked in front of the house. Fenrir lifted Daisy into the back without letting go of her as Roma slid into the driver’s seat. They were on the road and out of the neighborhood before he released Daisy’s wrist and helped her put on her seatbelt.
“What happened back there?” Fenrir asked.
“I smelled something that wasn’t right. Not quite human; not quite animal,” Roma said as she turned a corner and accelerated onto the highway. “I cast a Stunner to flush it out, and this weasel bolted, so I threw a poacher catcher after it. And it went off.”
“An animagus,” Fenrir said. She nodded. “How’d the catcher miss?”
“It didn’t. He must have known what it was, because he popped into a human right before it hit, then back to a weasel when the ropes locked. That gave him a chance to wiggle out and dart off before they tightened again. I went after him, but I didn’t think it’d be a brilliant move to shift up here in suburbia. He got far enough out, I was afraid he was a distraction to lure me away.”
“Good thinking about the distraction, but next time you need to shift up, just do it. We’ll clean up the mess after.”
Roma nodded once.
“He turned into a weasel?” Daisy asked.
Fenrir chuckled. “Strangely appropriate, eh?” He ran his hand over her hair. “It’s all right, Daisy. You’re safe now, and we’ll keep you safe until it’s too late for them to do anything to you.”
The sports car transformed into a middle-class sedan as Draco turned off the motorway and into a subdivision of near-identical houses. He pulled up to the address and parked beside the old-fashioned Ministry car, then willed himself to let go of the steering wheel. Looking like a Muggle house doesn’t mean anything. It might be an Order safe house, it might be a facade…
After a few more “might be”s, he took his cane out of the passenger seat footwell and walked to the front door. Taking a deep breath, he put his hand on the doorknob. Damn it. No enchantments, no protection charms, no detection or repelling spells. It was a Muggle house.
The door unlocked effortlessly as he turned the knob and went inside. The smell of a young family greeted his nose: baby powder, milk, and lavender. Roma Darcy and another hit-wizard were in the kitchen, visible from the front door through the living room, and turned towards him.
“About time you showed up,” Greyback said, descending the stairs.
Draco muttered something about traffic as Roma and the other hit-wizard came into the bare living room. “Roma,” he acknowledged.
She nodded and gestured to the other man. “Draco Corbin-Malfoy, Alex Farmore.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Farmore said, shaking Draco’s hand.
Roma added, “Farmore’s giving it a go with us hit-wizards because he washed out of Auror training.”
“I see why,” Draco said, looking pointedly at Farmore’s suit. Had he nicked that from an old Muggle gangster movie? “You need a fashion consultant.”
“You volunteering?” Greyback asked.
“You paying?”
Greyback laughed and jostled Draco’s arm. “You tight bastard. Get to work.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Anything useful.”
“That depends on the context, doesn’t it?”
“It’s a Muggle house,” Greyback said. “You know the context.”
With a sigh, Draco took a pair of glasses out of the Thief’s Pouch in his pocket and put them on. Everything hidden glowed in the lenses. Pipes and wiring are supposed to be hidden, he thought, adjusting the glasses on his nose. Those faded to just a hint of light behind the drywall, but a portion of the wall beside the kitchen doorway remained bright. He walked over, stretched his bad leg in front of him and squatted on his good leg, then wiped his hand over the wall as though wiping frost off a window. The top layer of paint vanished, revealing a child’s scribbles in marker below.
Farmore chuckled and shook his head. “Kids, bless ’em.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” Greyback said. “You ought to see my walls. I don’t bother vanishing it anymore until the cubs need more room.”
Draco pushed himself up with the help of his cane and continued into the kitchen. Roma and Farmore had been going through the cabinets when he arrived, and canned goods sat in neat rows inside. Something glowed on the top shelf of the awkward cabinet above where two counters met in a corner. Draco waved his hand and muttered an incantation; the cabinet door opened and a tin canister marked ‘flour’ flew to his hand. He pried off the lid, then held it out so the others could look inside. “It’s Muggle money.”
“Coins and small notes,” Roma observed. “Looks like someone isn’t very nice to his wife.”
“I don’t follow,” Farmore said.
“She’s hiding money a bit at a time to get away from him. Couldn’t grab it when they left, or he would have found out.”
“That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?”
“Bet you a Galleon Malfoy finds more stashed about.”
“I’ll take that bet.”
Draco put the tin on the counter and looked around again. Something else glowed in the cabinet below a wall-mounted telephone. He opened the door, but the cabinet was completely empty. The glow came from underneath it. A closer examination found that the contractor hadn’t installed the counter correctly. They’d left a tiny gap between the backsplash and the wall, just enough for a sheet of paper to slip through.
Draco took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and squatted on his good leg again, then drew a rectangle on the side of the cabinet from the wall and to the floor. He added a circle by the long edge, then knocked twice on the rectangle, stuck his fingers through the circle and pulled it open like a door. There was an empty space under the bottom shelf. He reached in and pulled out several sheets of paper that had slipped between the wall and cabinet over the years: old phone messages, some yellowed with age, and a still-white list of numbers. He handed the sheets up to Greyback and pushed himself up again.
“Brilliant,” Greyback said, looking over them. “‘Daddy’s work. Mummy’s work. Daddy’s mobile, Mummy’s mobile, grandma’s house.’ Our mole in Scotland Yard might be able to do something useful with the mobile numbers, but in the meantime, I bet Mummy and Daddy wanted their last pay packets.”
“I’ll give the offices a ring,” Roma said, taking the list.
“Don’t shout down the receiver,” Greyback said with a sideways glance at Farmore.
She rolled her eyes as Greyback and Farmore followed Draco out of the room. Behind them, he heard Roma say in a blandly professional telephone voice, “Hello, yes, I’m looking for a Mr. Dursley. Yes, that’s right, Dudley.”
In the downstairs bathroom, Draco found a box of tampons with more Muggle money hidden at the bottom. Farmore tossed a gold coin to Roma as they passed by the kitchen on their way to the staircase, and she caught it easily, smirking at him as she continued her telephone conversation.
“How’s your mate?” Greyback asked as Draco hobbled up the stairs to the second level.
“Having way too much fun mucking things up at MI6,” Draco answered.
Greyback shook his head and laughed. “They’re actually buying Chris as an Eton boy, then? I really thought we’d have to send you on that job.”
“He spends the day imitating my father. Winds Severus right up when he doesn’t drop it at home.”
“How is Lucius, anyway?”
“Splendid,” Draco said. Lucius had never quite recovered from his stint in Azkaban or the war that followed. Sometimes Draco saw hints of the proud, ambitious man he remembered from his childhood, but these days they were largely lost in a cloud of firewhiskey fumes, and it had only gotten worse since the wedding.
Draco reached the top of the steps and started on the upstairs rooms. In the main bedroom, he found an NHS card for “Maryanne Dursley” that had fallen into the heating register. The next room was completely empty; a guest room, maybe. He went to the third and stopped short when he opened the door to a little girl’s bedroom with everything perfectly in place. “What on earth?”
“Tell me about it,” Greyback said.
“Why did they leave the girl’s things behind?”
“Probably because they left the girl behind, too.”
Draco turned to him. “She’s the one with magic?”
He nodded. “Some. We’ll find out if it’s enough during the next full moon.”
A little shudder went through Draco, and he looked around the room to distract himself. “Have you already searched the bookcase?” he asked, pointing to the empty set of shelves.
Greyback turned to Farmore with narrowing eyes, and Farmore put his hands up and stepped back. “We didn’t touch a thing, Mr. Greyback. You told us to leave it alone until the specialist got here.”
“So they took the books, but nothing else?”
Draco and Greyback both considered, and a moment before the reason came to Draco, Greyback said, “Inscriptions. They didn’t want them to lead us to more of the family.”
“They knew you were coming,” Draco said. “A leak?”
Greyback shook his head. “Nothing to leak. A neighbor called Muggle authorities about a little girl who had been abandoned by her family and oh, by-the-by, they also might have seen one of those ‘mass hallucinations’ people are told to watch out for.”
“The parents knew she was a witch, then?” Draco asked.
“Must have had another one in the family at some point,” Greyback said with a nod. “That’s why we prune three generations off the family tree these days.”
Draco withheld the shudder this time, but just barely. Keeping Muggleborns out of Hogwarts was one thing; this was something else entirely. Families ‘pruned’ just because some kid had a little accidental magic. If we just left them alone, it’d never grow to more than just weird coincidences. Even feral werewolves’ wild magic came mostly from knowing what it was and egging each other on. Why do we have to do this?
He turned his attention back to the bedroom. There wasn’t much, but something glowed in the jewelry box on the dresser. Draco opened it, and Brahm’s Lullaby greeted him in a series of tinny tings as a plastic ballerina inside pirouetted. He reached to lift out the top tray and jerked his hand back with a curse.
“Find something?” Greyback asked sarcastically.
Ignoring him, Draco took a pair of impossibly thin gloves from his pocket and put them on, then pulled out a sterling silver locket. Inside it were pictures of two older people: a massively overweight man with a white walrus mustache on the left and on the right, a nearly skeletal woman with a face of sharp angles and an overly long neck.
“Grandparents, maybe,” Draco said, holding it out. “Mind yourself; it’s silver.”
Greyback gestured for Farmore to take it, and he pried the pictures out to see if anything was on the back. Draco returned his attention to the music box. Something was still glowing inside. He lifted out the top tier, scooped out a handful of beaded necklaces and cheap child’s bracelets, and found the ribbon loop of a not-terribly-hidden false bottom. Pulling that out, he found a birthday card and a folded paper that unfolded into a crude drawing of two adults, a child with long red hair, and a smaller figure with short brown hair.
“Second kid,” Greyback said with a purr that Draco didn’t like at all. He clapped Draco on the back. “Good find, Malfoy.”