Chapter 2: The Pack Gathers
The echo of Rabastan’s claim hung in the damp air, thick and unresolved. Hel didn’t move, every muscle wire-tight. His body was a shield between her and the new shadows, but she felt more cornered than protected. A shield could become a cage.
Rodolphus Lestrange stepped fully into the crimson light. He looked like a sharper, harder version of his brother, all angles and cold assessment. His black eyes scraped over her, lingering on the dried blood on her knuckles, the wildness in her curls. “Little witch,” he said, voice a low gravel. “You look like you’ve been busy.”
“So do you,” Hel shot back, her own voice steady despite the leopard’s panic beating against her ribs. Rodolphus’s coat was torn, one sleeve dark with something that wasn’t water. Behind him, Mulciber seemed to materialize from a patch of deeper shadow, his unsettling smile like a crack in glass.
“We’ve been hunting the local wildlife,” Mulciber said, conversational. “Vermin. Large, fanged vermin. Different from the sort we’re used to.” His gaze was a tactile thing, slithering over her skin. “You seem to have found the only other sensible predator in this dump.”
Yaxley said nothing. He simply stood near a rotten crate, blond hair almost white in the dimness, watching. He was so still he seemed to fade into the wall, which was somehow worse.
Rabastan hadn’t moved an inch. “She’s with me,” he repeated, the words dropping like stones.
“Is she?” Rodolphus’s eyebrow lifted a fraction. “And does she know she’s with you, brother? She looks ready to bolt. Or burn.” He nodded slightly at Hel’s hands, where a faint, heat-haze shimmer warped the air above her palms. She hadn’t even consciously called it.
“I’m not with anyone,” Hel said, the words bitten off. “Last I checked, you all wanted me dead. That tend to change just because the scenery’s different?”
“Practicalities change,” Mulciber purred, taking a slow half-step sideways, forcing her attention to split. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Potter. No Ministry. No Order. No dear old Dumbledore to throw you at a problem. Just this… gray, noisy, stinking world. And things in it that don’t like us.” He gestured vaguely to the blood on Rodolphus’s sleeve. “Strength in numbers is a cliché for a reason.”
“He’s not wrong,” Rabastan said, still not looking at her, his eyes locked on his brother. “But the numbers here are five. Not a tribe. And she stays by me.”
A flicker of something—annoyance, amusement—passed over Rodolphus’s face. “Territorial already, Bastan? Interesting.” His focus returned to Hel. “What do you know about this place?”
She weighed the silence. Information was currency, but so was defiance. A thin line to walk. “It’s a city. Sounds like London, smells worse. The tech looks late nineties. The police have guns, not wands. I haven’t seen a trace of magical government. It’s just… muggle.”
The word landed with a dull thud. Mulciber’s smile widened. “No government. No rules. Just delightful.”
“It means we’re exposed,” Yaxley said quietly, speaking for the first time. His voice was soft, yet it cut through the space. “If there are other things here, as we’ve found, and they sense us… a structured response would be predictable. Anarchy is not.”
“We need a base,” Rodolphus stated. “Not this leaking tomb. Resources. Intel.” His eyes pinned Hel again. “You know the muggle world. How it works. How to move in it without drawing the wrong eyes.”
It wasn’t a question. It was an allocation of utility. She was a tool. The familiarity of it was a cold bath. They might not want her dead at this second, but they hadn’t seen a person, just a set of skills. Some part of her, the tired, shattered part, screamed to just give them what they wanted, trade labor for temporary safety.
The leopard inside her snarled, a soundless vibration in her bones. Never again.
“I know enough,” she said flatly. “But I’m not your guide. You want to work together? Fine. It’s a partnership. Not a command.”
Rabastan’s head turned slightly, just enough for her to see the faint, approving curve at the corner of his mouth. It was gone in a heartbeat.
Rodolphus considered her, then gave a single, slow nod. “Acceptable. For now.”
The tension in the room shifted, not dissipating, but reshaping itself into a precarious, shared axis. They were all orbiting the same problem: survival in a world that had no space for them.
Mulciber drifted closer, his air affinity making the dust swirl in little eddies around his boots. “The feeding, though,” he mused, as if discussing the weather. “That’s new. And quite specific. Are you operational, Potter, or are you running on empty?”
The question was so invasive, so casually probing, that heat flared up her neck. Rabastan growled, an actual rumble that seemed to come from his chest, not his throat. “Back off, Mulciber.”
“I’m merely assessing our collective resources. If her unique physiology requires… sustenance… it’s a vulnerability. Or an opportunity.” His dark eyes glittered. “We should understand the mechanics.”
Hel’s fists clenched. “The mechanics are none of your damn business.”
“Everything that affects the group is my business,” Rodolphus overruled, his tone leaving no room for argument. He looked at Rabastan. “Can you control her?”
The words were a spark to tinder.
Hel didn’t think. Fire erupted from her palms, not a targeted stream but a wave of concussive heat that shot past Rabastan’s shoulder and slammed into the crate beside Rodolphus. It didn’t so much catch fire as disintegrate into splinters and ash.
In the same heartbeat, Rabastan moved, but not toward her. He turned on his brother, a blur of motion, his hand shooting out to grip Rodolphus’s forearm before he could even raise his own. Earth magic met fire, a dull thump of displaced pressure hitting the air.
“You will not,” Rabastan whispered, the words lethal and quiet, “speak of her as if she’s a cursed object. Look at what she just did. Look at what we all are. Control is an illusion. The sooner you understand that, the longer we all live.”
Silence, broken only by the crackle of dying embers and the frantic drip of water.
Rodolphus looked from his brother’s gripping hand to Hel’s defiant, flame-lit stance. He didn’t look angry. He looked… recalculating.
“Point taken,” he said, and Rabastan slowly released him.
Yaxley, from his corner, finally pushed off the wall. “The authorities will have noted the earlier energy signatures. Perhaps ours now. This location is compromised. We need to move before the sun is fully up.”
The mundane urgency of it grounded them. They were fugitives in a foreign world, squabbling over power while the real threat might be a blue siren rounding the corner.
Hel let the fire die, the phantom warmth retreating into her skin. She felt Rabastan’s gaze on her, heavy and considering. “You know where to go?” he asked her, not his brother.
She took a shaky breath, the adrenaline making her hands tremble. She shoved them in the pockets of her ruined jeans. “Maybe. I need to see a street sign, get my bearings. It’ll be the muggle way. No apparition. No floo. We walk, or we steal a car.”
“Then we walk first,” Rabastan decided, the de facto leader for the moment. He glanced at the others. “Stay close. Stay quiet. We find shelter, then we talk.”
As they moved toward the shattered loading bay door, a ragged line of predators forced into a pack, Hel felt Mulciber fall into step just behind her left shoulder. His voice, a breath so soft only she could hear, carried a smile she didn’t need to see.
“A partnership, then. How novel. I do look forward to seeing the terms, Hel.”
She didn’t reply. Outside, the city was waking up, its gray light harsh and revealing. They stepped out of the warehouse’s heartbeat and into the unknown pulse of the streets, each of them carrying their own private fire, their own coiled hunger, into the dawn.
The dawn air was cold and tasted of diesel fumes and salt. It wasn’t the damp, green smell of British rain. It was sharper, heavier. The buildings were wrong, too—stucco walls in faded yellows and pinks, terracotta roof tiles, wrought-iron balconies tangled with dead flowers. A plastic bag skittered down the cracked pavement, caught on a gust that carried the distant, tinny rhythm of music she didn’t recognize.
“This isn’t England,” Hel said, the realization a cold stone in her gut.
“Astute,” Mulciber muttered, his eyes scanning the empty, decaying street. It was too quiet for a city waking up. There were no black cabs, no red buses. Just graffitied shutters and the skeletal remains of old cars on cinder blocks.
They moved as a loose, wary group, sticking to the shadows of the narrow sidewalk. Rabastan was a solid, silent presence at her left, his stride shortened to match hers. Rodolphus took point, his earth-grounded senses seemingly reading the street itself. Yaxley faded behind them, a ghost in the periphery.
A flickering neon sign in a barred window up ahead finally confirmed it. The script was looping, unfamiliar. Cervecería, it declared in bold red. Below, smaller letters: Tapas y Bebidas.
“Latin-derived script,” Rodolphus noted, slowing. “Not Cyrillic. Not Greek.”
“It’s Spanish,” Hel said, the word falling like a verdict. She stared at a weathered poster plastered to a wall, advertising a bullfight. The date, the location, the florid script—all of it was utterly, incomprehensibly foreign. “We’re in Spain. Or maybe Mexico. Somewhere that speaks Spanish.”
A beat of silent dismay passed through them. Purebloods, even a half-blood raised magical, their world had been insular. Languages were for spells, not for street signs.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” Yaxley stated, his calm voice undercut by the implication. Their greatest advantage—Hel’s muggle world familiarity—was just gutted.
“None of us do,” Hel shot back, frustration fraying her edges. She’d navigated the Dursleys, she’d navigated a war, but she couldn’t read a damn bus timetable here.
Rabastan and Rodolphus exchanged a look. “French,” Rabastan said, almost to himself. He was studying the poster, his brow slightly furrowed. “The roots are similar. Corrida. Toros. That’s… close. I can catch words. Not sentences.”
Rodolphus gave a tight, humorless smirk. “Cerrado. Closed. Peligroso. Dangerous. It’s not a conversation, but it’s more than nothing.” His gray eyes cut to the others. “It seems the family’s useless classical education has a function after all.”
The petty victory in his tone was a spark in dry tinder. Mulciber’s smile was a thin, cut line. “Wonderful. So the two of you can vaguely comprehend a menu while the rest of us starve. A monumental advantage.”
“We need a plan that doesn’t involve talking,” Hel interrupted, cutting off the brewing conflict. Her eyes were on the far end of the street where it opened into a wider, slightly more active avenue. A truck rumbled past. “We need clothes that don’t look like we’ve crawled through a battlefield. We need food, water, a place to lie low that isn’t exposed.”
“Priorities,” Rodolphus agreed, his managerial tone back. “Shelter first. Then we determine what passes for currency here.”
They reached the corner, pressing against the grimy stucco wall to observe. The wider street held a few more signs of life. A woman in a bright dress was hosing down a patch of sidewalk outside a shuttered shop. An old man shuffled along, leading a skinny dog. The air was warming, carrying the smell of baking bread and something richer, like fried potatoes and paprika.
Hel’s stomach clenched. The hunger was a hollow, echoing thing now, layered over the deeper, stranger ache she refused to name.
“There,” Yaxley murmured, his chin indicating a narrow alley across the street. At its mouth, wedged between overflowing dumpsters, was a faded charity clothing bin, its chute half-rusted open.
It was undignified. It was perfect.
Rabastan looked at Hel. “Can you and Mulciber handle that? Quick, quiet. Smallest targets. Yaxley and I will watch the street. Rodolphus, the alley’s other end.”
It was the first time he’d given her a direct task within his impromptu command structure. A test, perhaps. Or an offer of trust. She nodded once, sharply.
“Come on, little predator,” Mulciber breathed, already flowing across the broken asphalt with unnerving lightness. She followed, her own steps silent, the leopard’s grace in her bones.
The bin reeked of mildew and despair. Mulciber wrenched the metal chute wider with a muffled screech. Inside was a tangled mound of fabric. He started pulling items out, discarding most with a sneer. “Fashion here is a tragedy.”
Hel ignored him, digging. She found a faded sundress that looked roughly her size. For Rabastan, she grabbed a worn leather jacket and a plain grey t-shirt that might stretch over his shoulders. It was scavenging. It was survival.
She tossed the bundle to the ground just as a new sound cut the air—the easy cadence of youthful Spanish. Two boys, maybe sixteen, turned into the alley, laughing and shoving each other. They froze at the sight of them.
One said something fast, his eyes wide. The other grinned, showing crooked teeth, and took a step forward. His gaze slid over Hel, small and disheveled, and then to Mulciber, who looked like a scarecrow carved from shadow. The boy’s expression turned predatory, a familiar, ugly look of seeing easy targets.
He said a word that needed no translation. He reached for Hel’s wrist.
Time compressed. She didn’t think. Her hand came up, not with fire, but with a predator’s instinct. Her nails elongated into short, sharp black claws, and she raked them across the back of his reaching hand.
He yelped, snatching his arm back. Four parallel lines welled up deep and red.
His friend shouted. The injured boy’s face twisted from surprise to rage. He pulled something from his pocket—a small, flip-open knife. The blade caught the dirty morning light.
Mulciber sighed, a sound of profound boredom. “Muggles with cutlery. It’s always so tedious.”
He didn’t move his hands. He just exhaled, a directed, focused breath. The air in front of the two boys solidified into a wall of compressed force. It hit them like a silent freight train, throwing them backwards off their feet. They landed in a heap of limbs against the dumpster, the knife clattering away, the fight knocked clean out of them along with their breath.
Hel stared, her claws still out, her heart hammering against her ribs. It had been so fast, so effortless.
“Are you waiting for a written invitation?” Mulciber asked, already scooping up the bundle of clothes. His tone was casual, as if he’d just swatted a fly. “Grab the rest. We’ve overstayed.”
She snatched up the remaining garments just as Rabastan appeared at the alley’s mouth, his gaze taking in the dazed boys, the discarded knife, her exposed claws. His gray eyes flashed, not with anger, but with something hotter. “Move. Now.”
They melted back across the street, into the relative cover of their original sidewalk. Rodolphus fell in beside them, having seen everything from his post. He didn’t comment. He just looked at Hel’s hands, where the claws were slowly retracting, leaving behind perfectly normal, blood-tipped fingernails.
“That will do,” he said, his voice low. “That will do for now.”
They kept walking, turning corners at random, putting distance between themselves and the incident. The city unfolded around them, a puzzle box in a language they couldn’t read, full of threats they couldn’t yet name. But they had clothes, and they had a clearer, sharper understanding of the new rules: here, even the smallest predators carried hidden teeth, and no one was leaving this place without getting a little blood on their hands.
The blood on Hel’s fingertips had dried to a flaky brown. It itched. She stared at it as they walked, the unfamiliar streets unfolding in a haze of wrong colors and sharp smells. The bundled clothes under her arm felt like a pathetic prize.
“We can’t walk into any establishment looking like this,” Yaxley stated from behind her, his voice cutting through the rhythmic scuff of their shoes on pavement. “We’re conspicuous. Dirt and blood are a narrative, and it’s one the local authorities will want to read.”
Rabastan glanced down at his own torn knuckles, then at the dried smear across Hel’s cheekbone she didn’t even know was there. “We need water. And a door that locks.”
“Hotels require money and identification,” Rodolphus said, his tone that of a man ticking off insurmountable obstacles. “Squatting in another ruin leaves us exposed.”
Hel stopped walking. The sheer mundane reality of the problem pressed in, almost laughable after everything. They could command elements, shift shape, but they were stymied by the basic human need for a bathroom. A short, brittle laugh escaped her. Four pairs of eyes locked onto her.
“Something amusing, Potter?” Mulciber asked, tilting his head.
“Yeah, actually,” she said, rubbing her gritty eyes. “We’re standing here like we’re planning a siege. We just need a toilet and a sink.” She gestured vaguely ahead, where the street signs were still a mystery. “A petrol station. Or a bus terminal, a train station. They have public restrooms. Usually unlocked. Nobody pays to use a toilet.”
The men looked at her, then at each other. The concept was so ordinary it seemed to short-circuit their grand, strategic thinking.
Rabastan recovered first. “You’re certain?”
“It’s not a wizarding secret, Lestrange. It’s just how the world works. Or how my world worked.” She adjusted the bundle in her arms. “Bigger stations might have attendants, but terminals? People are coming and going all day. You just walk in. We clean up, we change, we walk out. We look… normal. Or closer to it.”
Rodolphus processed this, his sharp features softening from calculation to acknowledgment. “Efficient. Low risk. Lead the way.”
“I don’t know where one is,” Hel admitted, frustration returning. “We need to find a main road. Bigger traffic.”
They walked for twenty more minutes, the sun climbing and heating the pavement. The neighborhood shifted from residential decay to a slightly more commercial stretch. The smell of frying oil grew stronger. Then, the blessed roar of consistent traffic echoed from a parallel street.
They turned a corner and saw it: a wide, four-lane road clogged with cars and buzzing motor scooters. And across the street, nestled between a mechanic’s garage and a shabby cafe, was a Repsol petrol station. Its bright orange logo was a beacon of mundane utility.
“There,” Hel said, a thread of relief in her voice.
Navigating the traffic was its own quiet ordeal. The cars moved with a chaotic, aggressive rhythm that made Yaxley stiffen and Rodolphus scowl. They crossed in a tight group, Hel feeling bizarrely like a schoolteacher shepherding dangerous, oversized children.
The station was small, two pumps attended by a bored-looking man in a blue uniform smoking inside a kiosk. Around the side, past a stack of tyres, was a white door marked with a stick-figure man and woman.
“Separate,” Rabastan ordered quietly. “We go in pairs. Less noticeable. Yaxley, Mulciber, you first. Get the lay. We’ll follow.”
Mulciber’s smile was wry. “Scouting the lavatory. How far the mighty have fallen.” He and Yaxley moved with casual indifference, pushing the door open and disappearing inside.
Hel leaned against the warm stucco wall, the bundled clothes pressing into her. The smell of petrol was overwhelming. Rabastan stood close, his shoulder nearly brushing hers, watching the street. His silence was a physical weight.
“You handled the alley,” he said finally, not looking at her.
“He grabbed me.”
“I saw.” Rabastan’s jaw tightened. “Your claws are… efficient.”
“They’re not a party trick,” she muttered, defensive.
“I didn’t say they were.” He finally glanced down, his gray eyes capturing hers. “I said they were efficient. In this place, that’s a compliment.”
The door swung open. Yaxley stepped out, giving a curt nod. “Two stalls. One sink. It’s clean enough. Empty.”
Mulciber followed, flicking invisible dust from his new, ill-fitting jumper. “A symphony in porcelain. It’s all yours.”
Rabastan nudged Hel’s arm. “You’re with me.”
The inside was bleakly functional: fluorescent lights, cracked tiles, the sharp tang of industrial cleaner overlying less pleasant smells. The sound of a dripping tap was amplified in the small space. Rabastan locked the main door behind them.
“You first,” he said, his back against the door, a sentry.
Hel didn’t argue. She ducked into the larger stall, shutting the flimsy door. For a moment, she just stood in the stale, enclosed space, breathing. The aftermath of the morning—the fight, the flight, the peeling poster, the boys in the alley—threatened to crash down. She shoved it aside.
The sundress was simple, navy blue with tiny white flowers. It was soft from many washes. She stripped out of her ruined jeans and t-shirt, the fabric sticking to places where blood and sweat had dried. The small mirror over the sink was clouded, but the reflection it showed was stranger than any she’d seen in the Mirror of Erised. A wild-haired girl with too-green eyes and golden skin, smudged with the dirt of two worlds.
She wet paper towels, the water startlingly cold, and scrubbed at her face, her neck, her hands. The brown flakes of the boy’s blood swirled in the basin and disappeared. She changed quickly, the dress hanging loose on her frame. She looked smaller somehow, younger. Vulnerable.
When she emerged, Rabastan was exactly where she’d left him. His gaze swept over her, a quick, intense assessment. He said nothing, just pushed off the door and traded places with her.
Hel took her post by the sink, listening to the rustle of fabric from the stall. The water dripped. A truck horn blared outside. She studied her hands again, now clean. Normal.
Rabastan came out transformed. The simple grey t-shirt strained across his shoulders and chest, defining a musculature his robes had always concealed. The leather jacket, worn at the elbows, made him look less like a wizard and more like someone from a gritty film. The aristocratic sharpness of his features remained, but the context had shifted. He looked dangerous in a completely new way, a danger that belonged to this city’s streets.
He caught her stare in the clouded mirror. One corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Absurd,” he muttered, adjusting the jacket cuff.
“It works,” she said, and found she meant it.
He moved to the sink, splashing water on his face and raking his wet hands through his dark hair, pushing it back. The water darkened the leather on his shoulders where it dripped. He scrubbed at the blood on his knuckles until the skin was pink and raw.
They stood there for a heartbeat, two people pretending to be normal in a petrol station bathroom, surrounded by the evidence of their monstrous morning. The illusion was thin, but it was all they had.
“Right,” Hel said, her voice too loud in the small room. “Your brother’s probably pacing.”
Rabastan nodded, his eyes meeting hers in the mirror one last time. In that reflection, she didn’t see a Death Eater or a Lestrange. She saw a man as lost and recalibrated as she was, armed with fire and teeth and a stolen leather jacket. It was almost worse.
He turned, unlocked the door, and let the noisy, petrol-scented world back in.