A few days passed with no sign of Esme, the Morthahg, or the wolfpack. The Hogwarts staff took advantage of the lull to resume classes and start to prepare for the holidays. Decorations were beginning to show up all through the castle. There was a forced air of normalcy everywhere. Underneath it though, there was a tension. Hogwarts seemed in the eye of a hurricane, quiet for now, but the second half of the storm couldn’t be far away.
There were two infirmaries now. An extra room had been added to keep Tanner away from the other patients. Only a few people had been told that he was a werewolf, but after Professor Lupin, no one wanted to take any chances. Hagrid had argued that it wasn’t healthy for a pack animal to be isolated. Pomfrey had insisted though. Tanner wasn’t well enough to socialize, she’d claimed. When he had recovered to her satisfaction, Hagrid could keep him in his house and keep him company, but until then, Tanner stayed put.
She had begun to wonder though, if Hagrid might’ve been right. Most of Tanner’s injuries were healing nicely. He was weak and disoriented, but the part that worried her was that he seemed to be in a world of his own. He would half-answer a question and then his words would trail off as his attention settled on something else. Or, he would ignore the question completely.
He would also shapechange randomly, without any logic that she could find. She had brought him a book to read and he had become a wolf to paw at the pages until she turned them for him. Then she brought him a soupbone and he had become human again to play with it. Poppy Pomfrey hadn’t been a nurse at a school of magic for so long without having nerves of steel though. She had seen worse things than a loony shapeshifter, and wasn’t able to feel any fear of the creature. It wasn’t until he began to talk to himself that she became worried.
“It wasn’t me,” Tanner whispered. “I didn’t! Didn’t ever.”
“What is it he’s talking about?” Madame Pomfrey whispered to Lorelei. The infirmary witch had called her to the werewolf’s bedside again. Lorelei wasn’t happy to be there. Her last headache had been the worst yet. Her eyes were throbbing in their sockets. If she moved her head too quickly, her vision would blur and her stomach would lurch. Pomfrey’s question stabbed into her ear like a rusty corkscrew.
“Why do you keep asking me?” she snapped. “I had nothing to do with the creature. He was my sister’s little friend, not mine.”
“So you have no idea what he could be so afraid of?” Lorelei sneered at the question and turned her eyes to where Tanner cowered. Still not strong enough to stand, he had dragged his blankets to one end of the bed and crouched there.
“Has anyone been hurt or killed by werewolves recently?” she asked after a moment. “Anyone missing? Maybe he’s got a guilty conscience.”
“Not that I know of,” sighed Pomfrey. She looked from Lorelei to Tanner and back again. “Is he really capable of it, do you think? You know him better than I do, but he seems more silly than dangerous.”
Lorelei was silent for a long moment. Then, she sighed and shook her head. The movement made her flinch.
“Tanner was never the problem,” she said a little reluctantly. “It was the other one that you couldn’t turn your back on. Black Rosie was the real reason people kept their doors locked. Wolves will follow the strongest and so Tanner followed her.”
“Black Rosie,” Pomfrey repeated. “It sounds like a pirate. If she was that dangerous why was she allowed to run free?”
“Because she was under the protection of a powerful magical family,” Lorelei said after a moment of hesitation. “When she was actually accused of killing humans, there was someone to step forward and take responsibility for it.”
“Good gracious,” Madame Pomfrey sounded impressed. “But she never hurt your sister, did she?”
“Not that I know of,” Lorelei looked at Tanner again. He was chewing on his own arm. Pomfrey ran to stop him before he could draw blood. He cowered as if he thought she would hit him, but she only magicked up some bandages to wrap his arms with.
“That should slow him down a bit,” she said. She patted Tanner on the head and he smiled at her. Smiling back in spite of herself, Pomfrey made her way back to Lorelei. The pale woman had retreated into a cloud of gloom again.
“If you don’t mind such a personal question,” Pomfrey began. “I can’t help but wonder what your sister’s connection to the werewolves was...Are they really so common where you’re from.”
“My family lived in the mountains,” Lorelei said. “There are all kinds of animals there. There is a large population of werewolves because there used to be a colony of them. A group of Muggles back in the pioneer days were hunted one by one by a werewolf. So many were bitten that they formed a whole pack of shapeshifters. Those bred among themselves and it turned out that if both parents are cursed than the children are born that way. They keep to themselves for the most part, but there are always troublemakers.
“...My sister always wanted a familiar, but our mother wouldn’t let her just pick one. Mother held that a true familiar would come to you on its own. Esme didn’t seem to have much luck with animals. She would roam around the woods when we were children, just in case her familiar was out there, waiting for her somewhere. That’s how she met the werewolves. I suppose they were better than nothing, from her point of view.”
“She’s a brave girl to treat a werewolf like a familiar,” Pomfrey said. Lorelei looked at her coldly.
“You were the one patting him on the head,” she said, nodding towards Tanner. “What if he were to snap at you? Bite you? You’d lose everything if you were to become cursed.” Taken aback, Pomfrey looked at Tanner in alarm.
“Not me,” he said for the hundredth time. He dug around in the blankets until he found the bone she had given him and bit into it with an unsettling crunch.
“Then again,” Lorelei added sweetly. “Maybe all you would lose is a finger.”