Chapter Text
Bare feet thundered on the stairs as a young girl checked the worn leather watch strapped to her wrist, blonde hair falling around her face in straggly curls as her wire-rimmed glasses slid down her nose. Her plaid shirt was buttoned unevenly in her distracted haste and she brimmed with excitement as she made for the front door of the modest, gabled farmhouse.
“Kara,” her mother called out, dishes clattering in the kitchen as they washed themselves in the sink, and Kara bit back a sigh, swinging around the end of the staircase and stepping through into the kitchen.
Her mother was sitting at the table, still wearing her scarlet MACUSA robes as she pored over the notes of a case, quill in hand and ink staining her fingertips. She looked up at Kara and raised her eyebrows, dark eyes serious as she set aside a scroll of parchment and dipped the quill into ink.
“Where are you running off to at this time of night?”
Wincing sheepishly, Kara shifted from foot to foot as she twisted the small field notebook in her hands, a quill poking out of her shirt pocket as she gave Alura a pleading look. “It’s a full moon - the Mooncalves will be out tonight. I was going to study them-”
“Exactly, it’s a full moon . It’s not a night for being out chasing after silly creatures.”
Sighing heavily, Kara rolled her eyes and gestured wildly, “it’s not silly. It’s for my Magizoology research.”
“It’s late.”
“It’s summer vacation!” Kara protested.
Lowering his copy of The New York Ghost , Zorel gave his wife a faint smile, “it’s Wisconsin , my love, let her run through wheat fields and have her fun. It won’t do her any harm; she won’t go far and the wards-”
“You know it isn’t saf-”
“Sweetheart,” he gently, yet firmly cut her off, “let’s not.”
His eyes - Kara’s eyes - strayed over to his daughter, who was still looking hopeful and a little confused at the secret conversation her parents were having as she lingered in the doorway to the kitchen. They’d been like that for the past few weeks, since she’d come back from Ilvermorny for summer break. Something had happened while she was away at school, that much was apparent, but no amount of badgering them would reveal what it was exactly.
“Fine,” Alura relented, gesturing dismissively before shaking her head and returning to her work.
Beaming at her father, who gave her a quick wink as he reached for the enamel mug of coffee on the table, she turned on her heel and made for the front door.
“Make sure you put a robe on,” her mother called after her as an afterthought. “And shoes.”
Deigning not to respond with the fact that it was the middle of summer, Kara snagged her school robe from the hook near the door and slipped it on over her head, buttoning up the top three buttons and flattening the collar. The emblem of the Thunderbird house was stitched on the breast pocket. She skipped the shoes, her muddy boots on the rack beside the door, opting to run around barefoot as often as she could get away with. Kara found that as she got older it became more and more inexcusable.
Grabbing her camera, she slipped out into the night, the full moon hanging bright and big overhead, casting a silvery tint to the trees and fields spread out from the farmhouse. A faint mist gave the night a strange quality and she shivered as her face clouded briefly, before her earlier haste took over and she ran out into the thin border of forest separating the land, cold grass between her toes.
The fog coalesced here, obscuring her feet and the shadows of tree trunks that loomed out of the darkness, and Kara breathed in the scent of pine and spruce and oak as she followed the familiar path. Appearing on the other side, her skin prickled with the sensation of being watched and she looked around, finding nothing unwelcome in the night.
Hurrying onwards, she made for the fields spreading out around her in a patchwork blanket. Wheat came up to her shoulder as she dashed into the rippling stalks, her pace slowing as she took caution, not wanting to scare the Mooncalves off.
An hour of fruitless wandering and the young girl was starting to lose hope, circling back around the way she’d come. The trees that nestled the farmhouse from view were dark and shrouded in an even thicker fog than when she’d left, the moon sitting higher in the sky and casting its bleaching light over the night as she carefully wound through the trees, fingertips brushing rough bark as she relied on memory alone to pick her way back, over roots and through the underbrush and bracken.
Disappointment knifed through Kara as she took in the sight of the illuminated house, its white clapboard and brick chimney, quaint wraparound porch beckoning her home. She’d hoped for more, for anything, but hadn’t seen so much as a ghoul or a boggart as she’d wandered around in the moonlight.
Still, it was a beautiful night. Mystery and the thrill of being out so late left Kara reluctant to return home just yet, safely through the trees and within the wards her parents had set up to hide their home from the No-Maj’s in the nearby town. Spreading her arms wide open, she drank in the sight of the gleaming white full moon and the bright stars dotting the velvet sky as they illuminated everything within the clearing the house resided in, to the very tips of the towering trees.
The spectacle made her feel so small, the expanse of sky stretching above her as she breathed in the smell of fields and trees and the nearby dirigible plum bushes. Sinking down to the grass, she lay on her back, staring up at the stars as she ran through the constellations; Astronomy was one of her favourite subjects at school and there was something about the unknowable secrets of the universe that compelled her to try and know .
She found Perseus and Cassiopeia, Eridanus and Hydrus, and the last one she found was Lupus. Still drawing the lines between the stars that made up the wolf, Kara heard a rustling in the trees behind her and bolted up into a sitting position, a smile lighting up her young face at the thought of Mooncalves in the trees.
Scrambling to her feet, camera in hand and her movements quiet as she crept forward in a crouch, Kara stepped into the shadows of the trees. She could see nothing though, no signs of movement, and she wondered for a second if it had been her father’s owl up in the branches when a low growl made the hair on her body stand on end.
Whipping around, Kara’s eyes blindly searched the fog as she swallowed thickly. “Hello?”
From out of the darkness of the trees, she saw a dark, furry shape emerge. The shape looked like a huge, black dog with a grey streak running along its hunched back. It bared its sharp, pearly white teeth that sparkled with saliva in the moonlight, and growled even louder.
Kara was so terrified she couldn’t move. In fact, the only movement that continued anywhere in her body was that of her fiercely pounding heart. Even her lungs were still, panic gripping her so tightly that she couldn’t even bring herself to draw in a breath.
The feral creature reared back its head and howled hauntingly - it was a sound that, for a moment, took Kara’s fear away and replaced it with wonder, yet the fear returned as the beast charged. The most Kara could manage in an attempt at flight from it was a single staggering step backwards, out of the confines of the trees but not quite past the boundary line of the protection wards.
As she stumbled backwards, she tripped over the uneven ground and went down as the hulking monster advanced on her, forcing Kara to shrink down even further. She didn’t make a sound as it loomed over her, massive paws pinning her to the ground, claws digging in through her robe and shirt.
The pressure of it seemed to knock the breath out of Kara as she trembled violently, closing her eyes as her bottom lip wobbled and the werewolf’s rancid breath made her feel sick. Its muzzle pulled back as it softly snarled and Kara let out a small whimper as the brutish animal slowly crushed her chest, leaning in so close that its snout was almost pressed against the young girl’s cheek.
It raised one paw and slashed at her right shoulder. Kara let out a strangled scream with a sharp intake of breath as fresh pain seared where the claws had torn at her flesh. The rip of cloth told her that her shoulder was vulnerably exposed, the strange feeling of warmth soaking into the cloth letting her know that she was bleeding. Even with her closed eyes, Kara’s perception of the world seemed to pitch, unconsciousness furring the edges of her mind as she lay pinned to the earth.
Distantly, she heard a woman scream her name, fraught with terror, and a deeper voice bellowing a curse as footsteps grew louder.
“Kara!”
“Alura, stay back!”
Her father was halfway across the yard, wand raised and a spell already forming as he slung it wordlessly at the monster. “Get away from my daughter!”
But it seemed the hexes weren’t powerful enough, and only worked to irk the beast. Snarling, as Zorel stepped beyond the wards, it hunched lower and sprang at him, claws tearing through his abdomen as the creature went straight for the jugular, teeth clamping down hard as they bit through the flesh and tossed the slumped man aside like a rag doll.
“Zorel!”
“Dad,” Kara hoarsely croaked, her eyes open as she’d watched the whole thing happen through her tilting vision, a sob building in her throat.
She waited for him to climb to his feet and hex the werewolf until it ran away, her hand grasping at grass and mud as her eyes swam with tears.
But he didn’t, and a moment later a soft gasp escaped her limp body as fresh pain tore through her other shoulder. It was a burning pain, pointed teeth renting the flesh and digging into bone with a single, fleeting bite that lasted a mere second - yet the agony was so exquisite that it felt like an eternity, existing in that moment of being bitten for aeons, as time had suspended and left her to suffer.
Even long after the thing had pounded away, retreating into the darkness, it felt like it was still there, in her as her blood soaked its jaw. She was barely holding onto consciousness, camera abandoned near her hand and the sky overhead visible through slitted eyes as footsteps thundered towards her. The last thing Kara saw that night was the full silver moon looming ominously overhead.
“Mom. Dad,” she murmured before darkness enclosed her.
Harsh sunlight fell across her face and woke Kara with a pucker of annoyance between her eyebrows. A soft groan slipped through her lips as she rolled over, exhaustion keeping her mind half asleep, before white-hot pain lanced through her and shocked her to wakefulness.
Vision blurry, Kara reached out with a fumbling hand for her glasses, but they weren’t on the nightstand beside her bed. And as she shifted she realised the narrow, lumpy mattress wasn’t hers and the scratchy striped blankets weren’t either. Panic knifed through her and she found it difficult to swallow, her throat dry and the coppery taste of blood caught at the back of her throat.
“Mom?”
Her voice came out hoarse and weak and there was the sound of quick motion, shoes quietly scuffing the tiles floor before a hand was clapped over Kara’s mouth. She struggled as panic welled up inside her, the blurry shape of someone with dark hair looming over her indistinguishable without her glasses, and Kara only stilled as pain flared up again.
“Sh. I’m trying to listen,” a quiet, familiar voice ordered her.
Kara swallowed as her eyes slid closed and she took a moment to allow everything to settle, the ringing in her ears receding and the sense of vertigo diminishing. Only then was she able to tune into the conversation beyond the small room she was in, voices slightly muffled but barely controlled, as if they were trying not to yell.
“Alura-“
“I can’t. I will not-“
“She’s your daughter.”
“She stopped being my daughter the moment that beast-“
A flash of memory struck Kara like she’d been slapped across the face; bared teeth, her father’s crumpled form, the crushing weight of something. It all felt veiled in fog, much like the night before, hiding something from her sight as she lay in the narrow bed and listened.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, Eliza. Send her back to Ilvermorny.”
“You know they won’t take her-“
Kara’s heart hammered in her chest as she drew in shallow breaths, squeezing her eyes shut as she twisted the sheets in her hands.
“I don’t care,” Alura hissed. “I will not have a daughter who’s a- a werewolf.”
The word was deafening in Kara’s head, blotting out any other thought as her stomach twisted nauseously. With startling clarity, the events of the night before settled into order in her mind, and she reeled as she made sense of what had happened.
“And what are you going to tell her? First Zorel and now-“
“I won’t tell her anything. She can think I died too.”
“Alura,” Eliza exclaimed, aghast.
“You wouldn’t understand. If it was your daughter-“
“If it was my daughter, I would love her all the same.”
“You take her then, if it’s nothing to you.”
With a scathing sound of contempt, Eliza’s voice grew more distant, as if she was following Alura down the hall, pursuing her as she pleaded and cursed her out.
“You care too much for your blood status; it’s not going to save you-“
The rest of the conversation became too muffled for Kara to hear and she lay there for a moment, staring blindly up at the ceiling as her heart pulsed in her throat.
“Alex?” she hesitantly guessed.
“Here.”
Her glasses were slid onto her nose and the room was thrown into focus, a faded blue curtain drawn around the bed and the brick walls emanating coldness. Turning her head to the side, she took in the sight of a teenage girl with shoulder-length russet hair sitting in a rickety wooden chair as she picked at a loose thread in the torn knees of her faded jeans.
“Your mom is here?”
Shrugging, Alex gave her a wary look, canvas shoes squeaking on the edge of the chair as she wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees.
“Your mom sent an owl.”
They were the closest neighbours to the farmhouse, their mother’s old friends, a leftover remnant from their days at Ilvermorny, and Kara had grown up spending the odd holiday with the Danvers family. Alex was two years older than her and in Wampus at school, so they’d never really gotten to know each other all that well, but at Christmas and Thanksgiving she was always patient with Kara, putting up with her enthusiastic tailing along and proudly showing off her wand the year she’d turned eleven and started school.
Swallowing thickly, Kara blinked back tears as she ran her fingers over the sheets. “Do you know what the Healers said?”
“My mom said not to talk about it,” Alex said as her mouth thinned.
She picked up her copy of Quidditch Through The Ages and went back to her reading as Kara was left to stare up at the ceiling, waiting. It was a torturous wait, the minutes stretching out like hours for a twelve-year-old whose world had fallen apart overnight.
“My dad’s dead, isn’t he?” Kara asked after a few minutes.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
Closing her eyes, Kara jerkily nodded as her chin dimpled with the effort it took to hold her sob at bay. Quietly grumbling, Alex climbed to her feet and moved over to the bed, poking Kara’s arm.
“Hey, it’ll be okay. My dad’s dead too.”
Kara choked on a laugh as tears ran down her temples and into her hair. The door squeaked open before she could reply, a Healer tearing back the curtain as a pale looking Eliza peered out from behind the woman. Pity welled up in her blue eyes and it was all the answer Kara needed as she forced herself to swallow. Eliza softly clicked her tongue and moved over to the bed, brushing Kara’s frizzy curls out of her face as she gave her a heartbroken look of dismay. Eyes closing, she couldn’t stop herself from crying then, clapping a hand over her mouth as she shook.
“It’ll be alright,” Eliza comforted her. “Don’t you worry, okay? You just focus on getting better and then we’ll get you back home.”
“It bit me. It bit me; I remember-“
“Hey, sh, it’s okay, sweetheart. The Healers have taken good care of you, you’re going to be fine.”
But Kara knew that there was no cure for Lycanthropy, and even though the Healers had saved her life, had sealed the bite with silver and Dittany, the saliva was in her bloodstream. Yes, she’d live, but as an infected werewolf, transforming with the full moon.
The tenderness and pity in Eliza’s voice made Kara cry harder, confusion and disgust and hurt making her chest hurt as her shoulders burned with white-hot pain. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t catch her breath, and the Healer was silent as she took a needle and filled it with the shimmering silver liquid in a vial, plunging it into Kara’s arm until her body went limp and darkness crept in on her mind.
The next time she woke she was disoriented and clumsy, her tongue thick in her mouth and her body heavy. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t form any words as she made slurred sounds and failed to do more than move her hands an inch. There was that awareness of someone else in the room with her though, but even when she managed to open her heavy eyes a fraction, her poor vision made it too hard for her to make out anything.
In the end, Kara spent four days at the hospital, the bite and scratch wounds healing quickly under the attention of the Healers as they fed her various potions and cleaned out the wounds. By the time she was discharged, stiff and sore and weak, only thin, silvery raised scars remained and her mother hadn’t come to see her.
Eliza was there with some of Alex’s borrowed clothes for Kara to wear, a little too big for her but clean, and as she changed, she ran her fingers over the scars and wanted to cry. Slipping the navy and mustard Fitchburg Finches Quidditch t-shirt on, Kara tucked it into the old jeans and put on the boots, a size too big, and hid the scars from sight. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at them in the mirror.
With her glasses on and her wand in her pocket, Kara stepped out of the room to find Eliza waiting for her, Alex a little further down as she leaned against the wall with her arms folded over her chest as scowled. Confused, Kara looked at Eliza and fiddled anxiously with her fingers.
“So, I- where’s … is she coming? I mean …”
Gently resting a hand on Kara’s shoulder, Eliza swallowed thickly. “You’re going to come and stay with us for a little while, okay?”
“Until school starts?”
“We’ll talk at home.”
It struck Kara as wrong that she would be going home to a different house, not to the farmhouse she’d been raised in. Her room up in the eaves of the gabled roof with its charts of the stars and photos of magical creatures was home to her; she didn’t want to go somewhere else.
“But my mom-“
“She’s at work right now; we’ll send her an owl at home, okay?”
Blinking back the stinging in her eyes, Kara nodded. She let Eliza shepherd her towards the lobby and over to the fire. With a handful of Floo powder, Kara stepped into the emerald flames after Alex and closed her eyes to the whirling grates passing by before she stepped out into the cramped kitchen of the Danvers home.
Eliza was a Herbologist and the small house burst with an array of plants she tended to and sold for potions, greeting her as she dusted herself off and watched as Eliza came through behind her. Kara knew they were from a long line of Pureblood witches and wizards, much like her own family, but looking around at the faded homeliness of the kitchen, it was clear that their blood status hadn’t afforded them the same wealth and privilege that Kara had grown up with on their hidden acres out in the countryside.
“Alright, you should take it easy; sit, sit. Alex, why don’t you go upstairs and clear out your dad’s old office. We’ll have to squeeze a bed in.”
Oblivious to the angry look shot at her by the other young girl, Kara looked at Eliza with anxious blue eyes. “I’m not- I mean … I won’t be here long, will I?”
“I’ll visit your mom tomorrow, okay? You just rest up; that attack must’ve taken it out of you.”
Reaching up, Kara rubbed at the tender bite wound on her shoulder, some phantom pain of teeth lingering on the edges of her mind. Swallowing, she nodded, too afraid to even voice her fears about being bitten, about what came next. Any magical child grew up knowing about werewolves, about how they transformed into beastly creatures with the full moon, how aggressive and vicious they were, targeting people and tearing them apart, drinking their blood. There was a reason they were classified as XXXXX by the Ministry.
Sitting at the kitchen table, watching Eliza move around the cramped space, talking to her plants as they trailed after her, Kara was left alone with her awful thoughts. Even at twelve, there was the sense of knowing her life was over, that everything had fallen apart over the course of one night, and how she should’ve listened to her mother. Of course, Kara hadn’t any reason to heed Alura’s warning, the worry behind her mother’s words seeming trivial.
Even now, she didn’t know that her mother had pissed off a werewolf during a court session at work, that Selena had left with a thirst for revenge after being put on the Werewolf Registry, restricting her freedom and costing her her job. She didn’t know that her mother’s prejudices, as she’d made it mandatory for the werewolf to subject herself to government control, had been the cause for the revenge, promised to her as the woman had been dragged from the courtroom.
Perhaps if she’d known, she might’ve never gone outside on a full moon, but she still didn’t know, and as she sat there in the vaguely familiar kitchen, out of place and terrified, all Kara could think was why? She couldn’t even comprehend her father’s death yet, a numbness as reality refused to sink in, leading her to view it all from some outside perspective, as if her mind shielded her from the obvious truth.
“I’m a werewolf, aren’t I?” Kara hoarsely asked twenty minutes later, her knees hugged to her chest as she stared blankly at the fireplace.
Eliza knocked over the tin of Conjure Cocoa and hesitated before picking it up. With a wave of her wand, she had three mugs filled and sent them drifting over to the table. One was set down before Kara but she didn’t touch it as she gave Eliza a mournful look.
With a resigned sigh, the other woman sank down onto the seat perpendicular to her. “Yes.”
She’d already known, of course, had remembered it and overheard her mother, but it still took her a moment to absorb the truth voiced by someone else. There was another gripping fear though as she leaned her forehead against her knees, shoulders taut with panic.
“Will I be able to go back to school?”
“Not to Ilvermorny.”
The gentle letdown felt earthshattering, on top of the Lycanthropy. There weren’t many jobs a witch could get without some sort of formal education, and being a werewolf would mean she’d be shunned from every opportunity. Kara could still remember the son of her parent’s friends who’d turned out to be a Squib and how bad it had turned out for him ; Lycanthropy was an even worse curse, even still having her magic.
“But … I wrote to other schools. I received a letter from one of them; you’ll be accepted there.”
“There aren’t any other American schools,” Kara said with confusion as her brow creased.
“It’s in Scotland. All of the U.K. witches and wizards go there. I’ve heard it’s quite good.”
“Scotland?” Kara rasped, feeling faint, feeling sick. “My mom won’t let me go there . How-”
Placing a hand on her arm, Eliza swallowed thickly, her eyes bright with tears as she devastated her one last time. “Kara, your mom … isn’t coming back for you.”
“My mom’s … not coming back?” she echoed, her childish face crumpling with confusion as her brows drew together over the rims of her glasses. “I- what- no. She- she has to, she’s … my mom. I want my mom.”
She started crying then, unable to feel embarrassed as she sobbed into the borrowed jeans, shaking with the effort as tears turned her eyes bloodshot and cheeks blotchy. Eliza climbed to her feet and moved over to her chair, wrapping an arm around Kara’s shoulders as she held her, until Kara was grabbing a fistful of her denim shirt in her hand and sobbing into the fabric, leaving a large damp patch.
“It’s alright; it’ll be okay. You won’t be alone - I’ll take care of you. I’ll take you to Hogwarts.”