Chapter 282 - 282
I hate werewolves. Absolutely, thoroughly.
My phoenix-self shifted from Australia straight into the night sky above us, cloaking itself with magic against every form of detection, and began scanning below, making use of that absurdly keen, sensitive eyesight, the phoenix's own nature as a half-material creature letting it perceive and feel everything perfectly well.
Like a drone in the sky, my phoenix-self took in the truly tiny settlement — every house one or two storeys, matching plots and the rest. A small river caught the moonlight in little sparks; copses dotted the land around the town here and there, and to the east lay large, level ploughed fields rolling gently with the terrain's faint unevenness. A forest in the distance.
Some ten or so houses had been damaged, smoke curling from two of them, but the worst-off was a small manor house on a hill, and judging by the traces of powerful magic there, that had clearly been the target — either the Aurors' target, or the Death Eaters'. A group of wizards was working there now, though none of them looked like combatants.
Here and there across the town I could see people. The dementor-energy within the phoenix let me sense them, and whether they were alive or dead. Very few of the latter, as it happened, and those who had died were clearly wizards.
Bright lime-green robes bustled about at various points across the town, helping anyone and everyone, each covered by at least one DMLE or Auror officer. There's an unspoken rule, of course, that Healers aren't to be touched, but who cares about rules like that in the middle of a clash like this. And werewolves certainly don't care about rules at all.
I spotted the latter approaching the outskirts of the town. Five groups, five to six individuals each. Large, distorted bodies, part wolf, part man, tearing towards the town at speed from a single general direction, though their points of entry would clearly differ. At least two groups were plainly heading straight for us, like sharks that had caught the scent of blood — and there'd been plenty of that spilled right here.
"Twenty-six of them, five groups," I began, speaking to everyone present. "Moving fast from the north-west. Two groups will come in from our side, one near the petrol station, one near the brewery — or distillery — and one from the direction of the school."
The Auror standing nearby, to his credit, didn't stop to ask how I knew any of that — he simply glanced quickly at me, staring off into nothing, evidently saw something in my expression, and just relayed my words on, pressing a hand to his collar. Something hidden there, probably — impossible to make out, thanks to some enchanted thread woven into the fabric.
"Time to contact…" I calculated it down to the second, "eighty-six seconds."
"Damn it," the Auror outside snarled, "no one of ours out there, the Muggles'll be slaughtered like calves. Or bitten. We can only make a stand here and by the petrol station."
"Reinforcements?" I asked, checking on the possibility of help.
"Reinforcements, my arse," the Auror outside spat.
One of the wizards I'd only just finished healing, his clothes badly torn up, struggled to his feet from the floor and looked over at us.
"I'm ready to fight…" he said, his voice hoarse.
"Lie down and recover," our escort cut him off flatly.
"Don't worry, boss… kh… I'm living on borrowed time as it is."
Breathing out, unnoticed by anyone, I activated my bracelet of little triangles. Those little triangles slipped out of the house unseen and shot off at tremendous speed towards their targets. Combining the information from them and from my phoenix-self in my mind, I guided them, as if by aerial reconnaissance, towards the targets the Aurors and the DMLE couldn't handle themselves. Concentration, an effort of will, images flickering through my mind as though I were watching a bullet in flight. Target — werewolves — enormous, furry beasts, entered the field of view, and the image snapped instantly closer.
I could almost feel it as the little triangles, at maximum acceleration, drove point-first into their skulls, and then, already inside those skulls, unfolded flat along the direction of motion, turning those heads into an explosion of blood, bone and brain matter.
My phoenix-self watched from above as the werewolves, still moving at speed, went down headless, ploughing furrows into the ground or slamming into the walls of houses on the corners, drenching everything in metre-long fountains of blood from their torn-open necks. Whole trails of blood spun through the air behind the tumbling, already-dead bodies as they rolled across the ground. A ghastly sight. Ghastly, and in its own way, oddly mesmerising.
"There's one group left, still heading our way," I reported the fact.
"You do realise," Smethwyck looked at me, "that it isn't exactly proper for a Healer to strike first?"
"I'm not a Healer yet," I smiled, glancing at my mentor. "I'm only learning."
"The Auror Office will have a fair number of questions for you," our escort said, looking at me.
"Any questions for my apprentice will have to go through me first," Smethwyck said at once, with a smirk.
"Never mind that, boss," another wizard nodded. "Lad's saving lives. Best hold your wand steady… kh… I can feel those dogs myself."
The wizards braced themselves, and within a mere ten seconds, five werewolves came bursting out of the nearby copse — the same copse I'd appeared in with the group of Healers, and one with an excellent line of sight from here — and charged straight at us.
The Aurors let loose a rapid series of spells, but the beams still flew slower than a bullet, and the werewolves managed to leap aside half a step in time — just enough to dodge.
"Ready!" one of the Aurors guarding the house suddenly shouted.
"Do it!" the boss, our escort, shouted back.
An instant later, orange spikes burst up out of the patch of ground the werewolves were crossing. There were a great many of them, like the spines on a hedgehog. Four werewolves were skewered clean through, lifted slightly off the ground, thrashing, struggling to do something, their flesh hissing and smoking wherever it touched the orange spikes.
One werewolf, running out ahead of the rest, managed to leap forward and clear the range of that rather ingenious trap, and, howling with fury as it ran, charged straight at us. On that werewolf's muzzle I could see total animal madness mixed with an equally total human madness, entrenched and long-standing, and it drowned out even those faint seeds of doubt I might have dug up in my own mind, had I really, truly tried.
But as it happened, I didn't need to do anything. One of the Aurors murmured a spell and struck the maddened werewolf with something Dark that quite literally turned the animal inside out. Like a glove, pulled inside out. The bloody mess flopped down onto the ground and rolled on from momentum, kicking up dust in the light of the moon and the chain of Lumos lights someone had sent floating into the sky. That heap, that mess, lay there, twitching, bleeding.
"Disgusting," the boss Auror grimaced.
I felt him channel something very powerful through his wand, murmuring "Bombarda." The resulting burst was barely visible, as always with that spell, but slow. It struck the mess and scattered the werewolf's remains quite literally across the surrounding area.
"Doesn't look much better, boss," the one stationed under our window smirked.
"Clear," I said, watching the situation from above.
Naturally, my words weren't enough on their own to make the Aurors relax — the senior one sent out requests over his line, clearly received answers the rest of us couldn't hear, and only then did he relax, if only slightly. Very slightly.
That was the last significant event of the night. For roughly two more hours we carried on treating everyone in turn, joining the rest of the Healers. Ordinary people too, calmed with charms — their injuries were the mundane sort, so magic could be used without having to deal with panic or awkward questions on top of everything else.
It was only after those two hours that I finally spotted the first Obliviators and repair crews, each getting on with their own work. The aftermath really was being cleared up efficiently.
"Good thing this scuffle was small-scale," one of the Aurors assigned to guard Smethwyck and me said — the boss had stayed behind in that house.
"Oh?"
"Yeah," he nodded, though he didn't look particularly pleased. "A bit more, just a slightly bigger scale, and the repair crews might not have managed. And faking something, dressing it up as a natural disaster, a hurricane — it's a nightmare of a job. On top of having to do the wrecking yourselves, too. And that, Healers, I'll tell you, is a genuinely rotten feeling — smashing up someone's house yourself."
Before long the whole situation was fully under control, the town's residents asleep in their houses, whole again, with no idea whatsoever of the memories they'd just lost. And we, the group of Healers, for our part, helped organise the transport of the nearly-healed but utterly worn-out, thoroughly drained law-enforcement staff back to the hospital for observation.
---------------
Give me Powerstones if you like the story.
If you want to read 60+ advance chapters, you can do so on my Patreon.
Patreon(.)com/TheRedSpell