Evelyn

It was the scream from the clearing, high and thin and terrible, as if no time at all had passed for her between the wet grass and this bed. She came up off the pillow with her arms flailing at something only she could see. She kicked the blankets away. The cup on her bedside table went over and smashed on the floor.

I was out of the chair before I knew I had moved. I caught her wrists. She fought me, small and wild and astonishingly strong, and I let her fight, and did not let go.

“Nan. Nan. It’s Evie. You’re in the hospital wing. You’re safe. It’s gone.”

She did not hear me. Her eyes were wide open and looking at the dark between the trees.

So I did what I had watched Madam Blainey do with the homesick first years in the first week of term, when nothing else would reach them. I sat down on the bed and pulled her in against me, arms and all, and held on. I put my cheek against her hair where the plait had come loose. I said her name, and said it again, low and even, over and over, as you might gentle a frightened horse.

Slowly the screaming broke into sobbing. The sobbing broke into hiccups. Her fists stopped beating at me and knotted themselves in the wool of my skirt instead.

“It was there,” she whispered. “It was there, Evie.”

“I know. It’s gone now. It ran away. Nobody is going to let it near you.”

She lifted her head and looked past me, at the next bed and the boy in it. Her eyes filled all over again.

“Is he dead?”

“No,” I said. “He’s asleep. He’s going to be well.”

I said it as though it were true. Behind me Leander slept on under the Dreamless Sleep, slow and even. Even her screaming had not reached him.

She put her face back into my shoulder. I held her. A few hours ago I had sat three feet from this bed and let someone reach into her head and take things out of it, and now she was clinging to me because there was nobody else in the room to cling to. I did not deserve it. I held on anyway.

“My head hurts,” she said, muffled.

“I know.” I smoothed her hair. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She did not know what I was apologising for. That was the worst of it.

Madam Blainey had come running out of her office at the first scream with her wand up and her cap askew. She stopped when she saw us. Then she straightened her cap and took over. She felt Nan’s pulse and looked into her eyes and asked her to count backwards from twenty, which Nan did, sniffing, getting stuck at eleven. Then Blainey gave her something for her head and a cup of warm milk and sent a house-elf for Professor Weasley. I went back to the hard chair by Leander’s bed and sat down in it, because my legs would not hold me any longer.

Weasley came at eight. She looked as though she had not slept at all. She drew a chair up to Nan’s bed and sat in it and took the child’s hand. She asked her, gently, to tell her everything she remembered.

I held my breath.

Nan told it slowly, the cup of milk going cold in her lap. Poppy in the Entrance Hall. The mooncalves that danced. The library book. Sneaking out after supper while the others were in the common room, down to the paddock and over the fence. The path by the stream. The clearing.

“They were dancing,” she said. Her face changed when she said it, went soft and wondering. “Just like Poppy said. In a ring. I saw them, Professor. I really did.”

“I believe you,” said Weasley.

Then the mooncalves went away, Nan said. And the wolf came.

Her voice went thin. She told the rest in pieces, with long silences between. Weasley did not hurry her. Evie came. Evie put her behind her and said not to let go, so she didn’t. Leander came out of the trees. They fought it with their wands, both of them, all different spells, red ones and blue ones. It went at Leander. It got him with its claws, there and there, and he went down on one knee and got up again. It got him again on the arm when he put his arm up.

“With its claws?” said Weasley.

“Yes.” Nan nodded. She frowned a little, as if the word did not sit right with her. She rubbed her temple. “Its claws. Then Evie made it go away. It ran off. And then I don’t remember.”

I looked at Leander.

He was awake. I did not know for how long. He lay with his face turned towards Nan’s bed and his eyes open, listening. When she said its claws something went across his face that I had seen once before, in the clearing, when I put my forehead against his. A letting go. Relief, so sharp it was almost pain.

Then he looked at me.

I held his eyes. I did not let anything at all show in my face.

Weasley thanked Nan and patted her hand and told her that she was a brave girl and also in a great deal of trouble. They would talk about the second thing when her head was better. Then she came across to Leander’s bed. She saw he was awake and sat down on the edge of the chair I gave up to her.

“Mr Prewett. How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been chewed,” said Leander. Then he heard himself and went a shade paler. “Sore, Professor.”

“I don’t doubt it. Can you tell me what happened?”

He told her. It was shorter than Nan’s and plainer. He did not look at me once while he told it. When he came to the arm he said, “I put it up to cover my face, and it clawed me,” and his voice did not change at all.

Weasley nodded slowly. “Your parents have been informed,” she said. “The Headmaster wrote to them himself last night. I expect your mother will write to you today.” She hesitated. “I expect she will want to come.”

“She can’t,” said Leander. “Harvest.” He swallowed. “I’ll write to her.”

Penhallow came at nine.

He came in quietly, dressed this time, with a satchel over his shoulder. He stood at the end of Nan’s bed while Blainey told him about the sleeping charm. He looked at Nan for a long moment. He looked at the child’s eyes and the colour in her face and asked her what day it was, which she knew, and what she had had for supper on Thursday, which she did not.

“It will come back,” said Penhallow. “Or it will not. A heavy charm can leave a hole at the edges.” He did not look at me when he said it.

It was then, with both of them standing there, that I asked.

“Madam Blainey.” I said it to her, because the ward was hers. I said it loud enough for him. “May I ask something?”

She turned. “Of course.”

“I’d like to take Leander as my patient.” I had rehearsed it in the grey hour before dawn, and it came out as smooth as a sheet folded on her ward. “Under your supervision. Every dressing, every draught. I’ll keep the notes myself.”

“That’s a great deal of work on top of your lessons.”

“I was there,” I said. “I saw every wound made. I dressed every one of them first, in the dark, before anyone else saw them. If something changes, I’ll know it.” That was the truest thing I said all morning. It was also the reason for everything else. “And he’s my fellow Head. It’s my duty to see him through.”

I did not look at Penhallow. I could feel him not looking at me either, as you feel a draught on the back of your neck from a door you know is open.

Blainey looked surprised, then pleased, then tired.

“Merlin knows I could use the hands,” she said. “And you’ve earned it. Yes. Professor?”

Penhallow had taken off his spectacles. He polished them on his handkerchief, slowly, as he had in his office on the first day. He looked at me across the end of Leander’s bed.

“Miss White will report to me on Thursday as usual,” he said. “With notes.”

That was all. He put the spectacles back on, nodded to Blainey, and left.

Blainey went into her office to write up the night. Weasley had gone with Nan’s statement. The ward went quiet.

Leander had drifted off again before Penhallow reached the door; whatever was left of the Dreamless Sleep still had hold of him. I sat down in the hard chair by his bed and took his wrist to count his pulse, because it was a quarter past and that was what I was for.

Sixty-two. Sixty-two. I lost count somewhere after that and began again. His skin was warm under my fingers now, warm and dry. Alive. The window behind his bed was full of thin October sun. I had been awake for more than a day.

I only meant to rest my eyes. I leaned forward and put my head down on the edge of the mattress beside him, just for a moment, with his wrist still in my hand.

I woke to whispering.

For a moment I did not know where I was. There was linen under my cheek and sun on the back of my neck, and something was moving in my hair, slow and light, over and over, as you might stroke a cat asleep in your lap. Then I knew what it was.

It was his hand. My fingers were still curled round his wrist, and he had turned the hand at the end of it and laid it on my head. He was drawing his fingers through the loose hair at my temple, where the pins had come out.

I lay still and did not open my eyes.

“—told you she’d be here,” Garreth was whispering. “Didn’t I say? Pay up.”

“I never bet you anything,” Marigold whispered back.

“You bet me with your face.”

I opened my eyes. Garreth and Marigold were standing at the foot of the bed, Garreth with a parcel under his arm and an expression of perfect innocence, Marigold with her hand over her mouth.

Leander’s fingers went still in my hair. Then they went away.

I sat up. Every pin I had left was somewhere it should not have been. My face was hot from forehead to collar.

“We brought provisions,” said Garreth, as if nothing whatever had happened. He held up a striped paper bag from Honeydukes. “Strictly forbidden on the ward. Contraband of the highest order. Blainey’s at her lunch, so we came in by the back door.”

“Treacle toffee,” said Marigold. She sat on the end of Leander’s bed with her knees drawn up and looked at the bandages with her mouth set. “Your favourite. I’ve been saving it since Hogsmeade.”

It was the kind of toffee that has to be broken with a hammer. Garreth broke it with the heel of his shoe on the flagstones. Marigold fed Leander a piece, because he could not manage the bag one-handed, and his jaw stuck shut on it at once. He tried to say something through it and could not. Garreth laughed so hard he had to sit down on the next bed. Then Leander laughed too, for the first time since the clearing, a short, cracked, astonished sound through a mouthful of toffee, and stopped because it hurt.

“The whole tower’s talking about it,” said Garreth. “The Head Boy and the Head Girl and a werewolf. Someone’s already making it into a song. It doesn’t scan. I’ve told them it doesn’t scan.”

“Tell them to stop,” said Leander.

“They won’t. Sir Lucas Rumbelow from the fifth floor portraits wants to paint you.” Garreth looked at me. “Both of you. Heroically. In oils.”

“Out,” said Blainey, coming in at the far door with her lunch still in her hand. “Now. And take that toffee with you before somebody chokes on my ward.”

They went. Marigold squeezed Leander’s good hand as she passed. Garreth stopped by my chair. For a moment the clowning went out of his face.

“Thank you,” he said, low. “For bringing him back.”

I could not answer that. I nodded.

When they had gone the ward was quiet, and I could not look at him. I took his pulse instead, because it was half past and that was what I was for. He let me. He watched my face while I counted.

“You fell asleep,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Did you sit up with me all night?”

“Most of it.” That was true. I did not tell him what I had done with the rest.

“Then you needed it.” A pause. “You snore.”

“I do not.”

“A little. Very politely.”

I wrote the figure in his notes in my neat ward hand. My ears were burning. “Your hand,” I said, to the notes.

“Yes,” he said. He did not apologise. I did not ask him to.

After lunch Blainey took Nan down to see Professor Weasley, who wanted to speak to her about the second thing now that her head was better. The ward was empty but for two second years asleep at the far end with Pepper-Up steam drifting from their ears. Blainey stopped at the door.

“His dressings are due,” she said. “Arm and shoulder. You know where everything is.”

I knew where everything was. I fetched it. Then I drew the curtains round his bed, all round. The world closed down to a small white room of linen with the two of us inside it.

He watched me do it. He did not say anything until I sat down on the edge of the bed and began to undo the binding that held his arm against his chest.

“You didn’t ask me,” he said.

I kept my hands moving. I unwound the binding. I eased the splint aside and began on the bandage underneath.

“In the clearing,” he said. “You didn’t ask me. You told me. It clawed you. Say it.” His voice was low. “And I said it. And then I said it to Blainey, and to Weasley, and this morning I lay here and let a child say it for me, and in an hour I’m going to write to my mother and say it to her. I’ve lied to more people since midnight than in the whole of my life before, Evie, and I never once decided to.”

The last turn of the bandage came away. I looked at the arm.

In daylight it was worse and better at once. Better because the dittany had done its slow work overnight and the wound had drawn closed along most of its length, a long puckered seam of new pink skin edged with grey where the silver had been. Worse because now that it had closed I could see the shape of it. Not furrows. Not rakes. Two curved rows of puncture marks, crescent-shaped, one above and one below, sunk deep into the flesh and only half healed over.

Anyone who looked at it closely now would see teeth.

I picked up the fresh lint and laid it over the arm before he could look down.

“There wasn’t time to ask,” I said. “You were bleeding out. Weasley was coming. If I had stopped to ask you what you wanted, she would have found us. You would have told her the truth, because you always do. And by this morning they would have been deciding what to do with you.” I wound the bandage round, over and under. “I decided. I’m sorry I didn’t ask. I’m not sorry I decided.”

“You don’t get to decide that for me.”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

“Because I couldn’t bear it,” I said. My hands stopped. “Because I could not bear to watch them take you away from everything you were going to be. That’s why. It isn’t a good reason. It’s the only one I have.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Some of the anger went out of his face. What was underneath it was worse.

“What if it takes?” he said. His voice cracked. “Evie, what if it takes? There’s a full moon in four weeks. What if I— if I’m in the castle, if I’m in the dormitory, if Garreth’s in the next bed—” He stopped. He could not finish it. His good hand had closed into a fist on the blanket. “I’d rather they locked me up. I’d rather anything than hurt someone because we were too frightened to tell.”

I put my hand over his fist. I held it until it began, slowly, to open.

“Not every bite takes,” I said.

He looked at me.

“It’s true.” I made my voice steady and kind, my ward voice, the one Blainey used on frightened first years. “Not everyone who’s bitten turns. We don’t know yet. Nobody can know until the moon. So we don’t decide anything until then. Not you, not me. We wait, and we watch, and if it comes to it—” I took a breath. “If it comes to it, there will be somewhere ready. Somewhere safe, where you can’t hurt anyone and nobody can find you. I’ll make sure of it. I promise you that.”

Every word of it was true. That was what made it a lie.

I watched the hope come into his face. I watched him take it from me and hold on to it, as I had known he would. Something in my chest closed like a fist.

“All right,” he said at last. “All right. We wait.”

I finished the arm. I bound it back against his chest, carefully. Then I did the shoulder, where the three long claw marks had knitted cleanly under the dittany into three red lines. Real claws. Honest wounds. I was almost grateful to them.

“Nan didn’t see,” he said, while I worked. He sounded wondering. “I was sure she must have. She was right there when I said it.”

My hands did not stop.

“She was behind me,” I said. “It was dark. She saw it go for you, and then she saw you on the ground. Then she was screaming. I don’t think she saw anything after that but blood.”

There it was. The last one. I had promised myself in the clearing that whatever else I did, I would not lie to him. Now I had, without a pause, with my hands on his shoulder. It had been the easiest of all.

He let out a long breath. “Thank God,” he said.

I tied off the bandage. I put the old dressings in the basin. Then there was nothing left for my hands to do. I sat on the edge of the bed with them in my lap and did not know where to put them.

“Evie,” he said.

I looked up.

He was looking at me as he had on the duelling platform, hair in his eyes, before the third point. Not like that, either. There was something in it now that had not been there then.

“About the wall,” he said.

I had known it was coming. I had known since the clearing.

“I shouldn’t have,” he said. “I knew. You told me in September, the first night on rounds. Your father had found you a husband. I knew there was a man in London with a ring and a date, and I backed you into that wall anyway, and I didn’t step back.” He swallowed. “I’ve been lying here thinking that I ought to be ashamed of that. I keep trying to be.”

“And?”

“And I can’t.” It came out of him low and rough, as though it hurt worse than the arm. “I wanted to so badly I couldn’t think. I’ve wanted to since sixth year. Since you spent every round we ever walked as prefects telling me I was wrong about everything. I’d been watching you a year before that, since you knocked me flat at Crossed Wands. That’s the truth, and it isn’t fair to you, and I’m sorry for it. But I’m not sorry I did it. I’m only sorry it was me.”

I sat still.

“I don’t care what my father wants,” I said.

He stopped.

“I don’t,” I said. “I haven’t cared for a long time. I only didn’t say it, because saying it would mean I had to do something about it.” My voice was shaking. I let it. “I didn’t kiss you because you backed me into a wall, Lee. I could have walked away. You gave me all the time in the world to walk away. I kissed you because I wanted to. I’ve wanted to since sixth year too. Why do you think I argued with you on every round? It was the only way I could think of to keep you talking. And I don’t care what my father wants for me. I am far more interested in what you want.”

The curtains moved a little in some draught. Somewhere at the far end of the ward one of the second years coughed in his sleep.

“What I want,” said Leander slowly. He looked down at his bound arm, at the place under the bandage where the teeth had gone in. Then he looked back up at me. “You. That’s what I want. That’s all I’ve wanted for a year.” He took a breath. “But not like this. Not until I know what I am. I won’t ask you to want something that might be a monster in four weeks’ time. You don’t get to decide that one for me either.”

I wanted to argue. I opened my mouth to do it.

He reached out with his good hand and took mine. He turned it over on the blanket, palm up. He looked at it a moment. Then he lifted it and bent his head and pressed his mouth to the inside of my wrist, to the place where on his birthday I had laid my thumb against his pulse.

He held it there. I felt my own pulse jump against his lips and did not try to stop it.

“Four weeks,” he said against my skin. “Ask me again in four weeks.”

I could not speak. I nodded.

He let my hand go. I sat on the edge of his bed in the white linen room with my wrist burning. There was hope in his face that I had put there myself, and the shape of teeth under the bandage between us. For a long time neither of us said anything at all.