Nox Redux

Chapter 5

Remus and Snape had spent a fruitless afternoon asking Muggles about a black dog. This made Snape an even less pleasant companion than he was at the best of times, Remus thought. Now they were sitting in the Fox and Hound in Hexley village and might finally be getting somewhere. The landlord had said that two regulars had mentioned something about a black dog the previous evening.

"Better watch yourselves though, gents," he had told them, "they weren't very happy about it."

"This might still be a complete wild goose chase, Lupin." Snape told him. "This dog could have nothing whatsoever to do with Black."

"Well as you so pointedly reminded me last night, there's no such thing as co-incidence under these circumstances," Remus responded. He took a sip of his beer. It wasn't bad.

Two men came into the pub and the landlord nodded over to the two wizards as he served the men. The men looked over too. They didn't look very friendly.

They paid for their pints and walked over. One of them, a big, burly man looked them up and down, and Remus felt himself assessed and dismissed as the man turned to Snape and asked, "Bill here says you've lost a dog?"

"That is correct. A black one." Snape said.

The man leaned forwards, shoving his face in Snape's and grabbed him by the collar. "What kind of a bloody idiot are you to let a dog roam around the countryside worrying the stock?" he yelled.

Snape blinked at him, bug-eyed with fury. "Take your hands off me!" he snarled.

"I'm sure we can pay whatever compensation is required," Remus said hurriedly, before they made too much of a scene. "What happened to the dog?"

This seemed to placate the man somewhat, and he let Snape's collar go. "Shot it last night just outside Hexley wood."

Remus was aghast. "You killed it?"

"Nah. Bugger got away. Ran into the wood. Enormous thing it was." The man's eyes turned shifty. "Got in amongst the cows, stampeded them. Right mess it was." He glanced at the other man, "Weren't it, Pete?" The other man nodded.

"I'm sure it was," said Snape, sneering. "Well Lupin, if you're ready, we'd better go and see to our stray." He drained his glass and stood up. As he squeezed past the two men Remus saw him reach into his pocket and flick his wand muttering, "Obliviate!"

Once outside, Snape disapparated without another word, leaving Remus to savour the memory of seeing him being manhandled by a Muggle. It was a memory he would treasure.

Snape was waiting for him at Hexley wood.

"We should check the map again," Remus told him, pulling out the road atlas. He sat down cross-legged on the ground and cast the charm, but nothing happened. The crystal hung motionless above the paper. He cast it several times and still nothing happened. Flicking through the pages of the atlas, he found a larger map covering the whole of the south of England and tried that. Still nothing. He raised puzzled eyes to look at Snape. "He's not here, Severus."

"Well where is he?"

"No, you don't understand. He's not anywhere covered by these maps." Remus tried something slightly different and cast the charm again, this time dispensing with the map and holding the crystal out over the ground. "This should at least give a direction," he commented. But again, the crystal hung motionless.

"Does this mean what I think it means?" Snape asked.

"It means that the charm can't find him." Remus sighed. "There are several reasons for that, and I'm sorry to disappoint you, but not all of them mean he's dead."

---

Memory slammed into his mind, hitting him with physical force and adrenaline surged through his bloodstream, screaming run! He tried to stand up, but his legs wouldn't move.

Finn looked up. "Well? When do we leave?" he cocked his head. "Wossmatter, you gone all white, you all right?"

"Er, no. Feel a bit faint, think I need some air."

Rose was looking at him quizzically, but she helped him stand up, and he clambered down out of the bus. On shaky legs, he walked over to the edge of the water and stood there on the shingle, trying to make sense of everything he had suddenly remembered. It wasn't the cool evening air that made him shiver. His first reaction to run, and run now still hadn't left him; although the first hormone induced response had died down. With what was on his tail, he had to leave, fast. Bringing the likes of Voldemort down on these people was no reward for saving his life.

After a bit, his legs felt steadier and he bent down and picked up a stone, feeling the smooth surface with his fingers before he threw it into the water. It made a satisfying splash.

"You know, I always find throwing stones into water to be very therapeutic," Rose said, coming up behind him.

Sirius looked round, trying to smile at her comment.

He must have failed, as she wasn't fooled. "You remembered," she stated and he nodded. "And, this is just a guess, mind you, but it wasn't good."

"It wasn't good," he agreed. "Look, I have to go. It's not safe for you to have me around. And as Finn pointed out, I have to meet someone."

"Hmm. Well, I think I'll be the judge of what is and isn't safe for me." She folded her arms as if that settled the matter. "Just because I never went to the fancy school I think you did, doesn't mean I don't understand the way the world really works."

"What do you mean?" He looked at her in astonishment, all thought of Voldemort gone for the moment.

"Well at first, I thought I might have gone completely senile and used fly agaric in the mushroom soup instead of ordinary mushrooms," she said meditatively, "Because, you know, my patients don't normally change into dogs."

He must have looked ready to bolt as she put a hand on his arm to steady him. "But then, of course when you recognised my 'cook book', I knew it wasn't me at all. It was you, you're one of the magic lot, aren't you?"

Ah. He took a step backwards, his eyes locked on hers, trying to gauge what she was going to do. He didn't bother to try and deny it, as he didn't really think she would believe him. All the same, the less she knew the better so he asked, "If you're a mu - ordinary person, er how do you get the ingredients for your potions?"

If she suspected he was only asking to divert her from talking about him, she didn't let it show. "From one of the shops you people run, of course."

"But how? You shouldn't be able to er, find them."

She shrugged. "Not everybody that can use magic belongs to your world you know."

He gaped at her, then demanded, "You have power?"

"Not much," she conceded, "oh enough to get me invited to that fancy school of yours. But of course, since my parents were good socialists and didn't believe in private education never mind boarding schools, I never went. Still, I've picked up bits and pieces over the years as well as a good line in ward magic, which can be very handy."

"You can set wards without a wand?"

"Well, maybe we're not talking about quite the same thing. Here have a look." She handed him a small leather bag.

He took it and emptied a set of coloured crystal cubes onto the palm of his hand. He looked at them doubtfully. "I don't think I've ever seen anything like these before…"

"Silesian ward cubes. They've been used in protective magic by central European Gypsies since the sixteenth century."

He carefully handed them back. "How do they work?"

Rose grinned and shrugged. "No idea. But what they do is make whatever is protected invisible to magical searches. Wanna set them up?"

"If I was inside the ward, someone using magic wouldn't be able to find me?"

She grinned again. "That's what I said."

"How do you set them up?"

It turned out to be ridiculously simple. There were five cubes in all, each a different colour. Rose took them back and walked round the outside of the bus. The leather bag also contained a blob of blue tack, which she used to fix the cubes to the side of the bus, explaining as she did so, "This stuff's great to hold them in position until the ward's set."

She started with the red cube then the green and then the blue, making a triangle around the bus. As she placed each cube she tapped it with her index finger and said its colour, "Rufo, viridi, caeruleo." Then she added the yellow and the purple, doing the same, "Croceo, et pupureo." The five cubes now formed the angles of a pentagon or the points of a pentagram, and she finished by tapping the bus and saying "Quinque coloribus et stella quinplici, nos protegitor!"

For a second, it seemed as if there were glowing lines of light connecting each of the cubes surrounding the bus and then in a prismatic sparkle the cubes were gone. Rose grinned.

"Interesting, you use your finger as a focus," said Sirius, intrigued. "Is the order you place the cubes important?"

"I'm not sure," she admitted. "This was the way I was shown how to set them and I've never done it any other way."

"How do you release them?"

"This way," she said and snapped her fingers saying, "Privo!" As Rose spoke the shape flashed into existence again, and the cubes appeared. "I don't know if the finger snapping is necessary but I always find it really impresses people."

Sirius laughed.

"You know, you should do that more often," she told him, "Makes quite a difference.

He was suddenly serious again. "Well I've not had much to laugh about over the years." This was getting too personal and he changed the subject back, "What range do they have?"

She didn't push it, but answered his question instead, "Well, everything inside the pentagram obviously, however big you make it, then some distance outside it - there's bound to be some complicated mathematical formula that says it's the ratio of the length of each side or something, but that crap always made my head hurt." He smiled at this and she went on, "but I wouldn't go much further than the distance to the water, OK?"

"OK."

"So," she said, as she prepared to re-set the wards, "feeling better now?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, we've been talking for about ten minutes. You've got a bit of colour back, and you don't look as if you're still expecting Old Nick to step out from behind a tree and claim your soul."

His jaw dropped. And he thought he had been distracting her.

Rose smiled impishly and left him standing there as she walked round the bus, re-setting the wards. When she had finished, she came back to where he was standing and asked, with perhaps a hint of anxiety, "By the way, the dog thing, that's not some form of lycanthropy is it?"

Sirius shook his head. "It's just something I can do," he said. "But I don't have to do it." He sighed. "Things are simpler when I'm a dog." Then he couldn't resist adding, "It's the guy I'm going to see that's the werewolf."

TBC...