Furry Magic

Title: Furry Magic, chapter 12

Disclaimer: The HP characters belong to JKR. The others to me.


Professor Trelawny found herself in a quandary. Draco had brought in blood, just as he\'d agreed to. But it had been soaked in a towel. Ghod, she\'d nearly screamed at him in frustration at the idiocy. Essentially unusable in the state it was delivered to her. Yet, there was no alternative but to make the specimen usable somehow.

She was reduced to using spring water to wash the blood out of the fabric, collecting it in a large cauldron. Then she did a drying and concentrating spell, slow and painstaking work. She couldn\'t risk boiling the cauldron, the blood might be adulterated if she did. So she had to wait. Watch the precious minutes ticking by.

That stupid boy! She could hardly credit that he\'d brought her a blood soaked towel. He should have known she needed a better sample. But if she waited for a new one the time-line would be off. And Andromeda Malfoy might not be so willing to help her next time. Andromeda had her own agenda and time-line to keep. Sybil was on her own unless she could make this work, and soon.

What she should do, she thought, as she labored over the cauldron, was find some rat blood, and mix that up in the potion she was preparing for Draco. Make the brat pay for this. Transfigure him into a rodent. Permanently, if possible. See how the great were-cat Malfoy liked having a rat for a son. Maybe he\'d eat him before he figured it out. She actually smiled at that.

Finally Trelawny had an ounce of blood distilled and filtered. She felt a surge of triumph over her success. Carefully she decanted the blood into a vial and set about cleaning the cauldron she was going to use for the blood-polyjuice potion. That completed, she set out all of her supplies, then went to purify herself.

Back to her private lab in less than half an hour, Trelawny began the potion. Her door was secured, the lights shielded, the room sound proofed. No one would disturb her, not even Draco. She had told him the potion was complex, and that she needed time to get it just right. He was waiting for her to contact him. To meet him at the prearranged place at the prearranged time.

The ingredients went in at precisely the right intervals despite her need to hurry. She stirred the brew with infinite patience learned from a long life of divination, learning to wait for the visions that would tell all, and not to rush them, or force them. She took the same care with this.

If she\'d had the inclination, she could have been as good as the other Hogwarts\' victim of the churlish and ungrateful students, Professor Snape. But Potions had never caught her interest the same way that reading the future had.

Divining what was to come, reading people\'s fate. She\'d had the necessary sympathy to do the task. She\'d cared deeply, advising the sometimes difficult clients and offering solutions they rarely took. Their loss. It was not her problem that they, by their failure to listen and act, failed to grasp their promised fates. One had to work to make things happen. Destiny required effort.

The potion was just as thick, just as viscous, just as smelly. She steeled herself to drink it, gulping it quickly, wanting to have what it gave her. Power. Respect. Fear.

There had been true fear on the faces of the students she\'d confronted and killed. Mind-numbing fear, fear that froze them in their tracks, fear so great that she felt a rush of satisfaction, of delight course through her at the simple memory of it. She\'d held their fates in her hands, uh, paws, and she\'d made their futures for them. She had seen death for them. Her predictions had, naturally, some true. She was, after all, a visionary.

She drank the potion when it was ready, hot, steaming, bubbling in the beaker. Then she waited.

The rush was stronger this time. Her skin crawled, morphed, itched more intensely. She shuddered. The blood impurities had to be the reason. But she waited. It wold work, she sensed it. She knew it would work. She would take care of the problem for Andromeda this night. She would take care of Draco, son of Lucius. She would break the spirit of the were-leopard king, by slaughtering his son, leaving only a bloody heap of flesh to be found. Then she would take his place as king of his animal-people. She bared her teeth in satisfaction.


Draco walked from his dormitory and out onto the darkening grounds. Professor Trelawny had told him to wait here for a quarter of an hour just after sunset. Draco had looked sunset up in his grimoire, and timed his arrival to the minute. He waited, out of sight, not wanting un-needed and undesired questions.

A dragging sound caught his attention. A crackling in the brush, he pushed up off the wall he rested against. The sounds grew louder, and another joined them, a horrible moaning sound, low but unbelievably chilling, like an animal or person in such pain as to be driven beyond human sounds. His hair raised and he inched further onto the path, back towards the buildings of Hogwarts\' main hall, permitting himself unfettered access to escape.

Draco had grown up around shape-shifters all his life. There were many varieties. Feline, his personal favorite for obvious reasons, canine, rodent, and rarer forms, like seals, dolphins, that sort of thing. But he\'d never seen anything resembling the horror that shambled with desperate and ungainly haste toward him now.

Blond haired, pale as ice in the dark, corpse pale, waxy skin, half human and half lycanthrope face, half male, half female. Fangs protruding, obscene in the humanoid mouth. Bristling with devouring menace, eyes crazed, and clawed hands reaching out to grasp at his shirt, lurching closer. Drool ran down the pointed chin, the familiar eyes...he couldn\'t quite make sense of them, couldn\'t place them, not in conjunction with the awful thing they were combined with. It dragged itself towards him far too fast. Instant adrenaline pumped through him. Fight or flight, his body asked. Flight won, hands down.

Draco screamed and ran, the scrabbling claws not finding sufficient purchase to stop him in his agitated flight.

ne\'ichan
faestion1@yahoo.com