Work settled into a routine the next week--strengthening security charms, interviewing witnesses and survivors, searching an ever widening perimeter for hostile spells or hiding places. Tonks's strength returned physically, but the sort of glassy separation between herself and the world around her persisted. She tried to ignore the odd sensation, but it was distracting and sometimes overwhelming. It was difficult to enjoy much, even when she wasn't especially sad. She'd found notes from Sanjiv on four occasions, but it was always late when she discovered them, and the following days seemed to be over before she remembered to respond.

Her colleagues refrained from ridiculing her for a parental visit, but remained no more than cordial, and she wasn't surprised to learn that the three of them had a regular card game to which she hadn't been invited on Wednesdays and Fridays. Wednesday night, she'd stayed in her room and written (and erased) another letter to Remus; Friday, she opted to go down to the pub and have dinner with other boarders, maybe pass a word or two with Aberforth.

The other boarders were involved in an argument and Aberforth turned out to be quite harried with the rest of the Friday evening crowd, so she curled up in a booth toward the back of the pub with a battered old Enchanted Encounters paperback, this one about a plucky young witch who followed her lover to the Americas, where he ignored her to seek his fortune and she quite unfortunately ran afoul of Muggle witch-hunters in a sleepy village in Massachusetts Bay. Choosing--for reasons that only made sense in a Fifi LaFolle novel--to not simply Apparate out, she was to stand trial in a Muggle court, where her lover was to defend her. It was quite convoluted, and by chapter four it had become apparent that a mermaid colony was to be somehow key to the thing, but it was a pleasant way to spend an evening. Tonks had been a bit hesitant about it, as she and Remus had spent a good deal of time reading a romance to one another last year and she thought it might be like picking at a scab, but she was glad to find that something that had always been a guilty pleasure of hers was, in point of fact, still a pleasure.

"I knew it."

The book tipped down, and Tonks looked over it to see Sanjiv, who was shaking his head at her.

"See, I just knew that if I saw some buxom witch standing on a rocky seashore, it had to be you behind it." He picked up the book, read the cover copy, and winced. "Don't they ever live inland?"

Tonks took the book back. "I read one set out in the Australian desert a couple of years ago. And another up in the Alps. Though there was a lake in that one, and she spent quite a lot of time wandering around the banks."

"Don't they ever live in the city?"

"I think that's against the rules. It's not an attractive place to pine."

"So that's why you came to Hogsmeade. More picturesque pining spots."

Tonks grinned. "I was thinking about trying the top of the rise on the far side of town. It just has a couple of scraggly trees, and I'd make quite the figure there at sunset."

"Yes, very dramatic. You know these things are very bad for you, don't you? You'll just get your brain twisted up."

"Thank you for the advice."

"You're coming to the city."

"What?"

"I've been leaving you notes all week. You haven't answered them."

"I keep getting back late. I didn't think you'd appreciate the interruptions."

Sanjiv rolled his eyes. "You overestimate my social appeal. I mainly meant to inform you that I was going to abduct you tonight."

"Abduct me?"

"If you won't make time for your friends, we'll just have to turn to a life of crime to get you back into the swing of things." He sat down across from her and took her mulled mead, downing what was left in a gulp. "Maddie and Daffy were going to come, but Maddie's mum is getting some kind of volunteering award tonight, so they left it to me to fill in for all of us. Come on, stand up."

"Can I finish my supper?"

"No. We'll eat more in Edinburgh. Stand up."

Rolling her eyes, Tonks stood.

Sanjiv wrinkled his nose. "No, that won't do. D'you have something more Muggle-ish? For the city?"

"Sanj..."

"No arguments. Hup."

She pulled herself out of the booth and started to trudge upstairs. "Where are we going?"

"I don't know yet. Somewhere where they play the music very loud and people dress in colorful clothes and no one bloody well Knows Who. I'll break my variety of hearts, you break your variety of hearts, and we'll laugh about it in my parents' kitchen later."

"I'm not really in a heartbreaking mood."

"Good, so I know you won't break mine by trying to beg off."

There wasn't any point to arguing with him, so she dove into her wardrobes without much enthusiasm. Sanjiv ended up choosing her outfit--something she'd bought for a London club last year, with a short skirt and a checkered silk top--and waited impatiently while she tangled her fingers in her hair trying to force it into shapes that would have come a lot more easily if she could just morph the way the follicles went.

They Apparated to a sheltered part of the back garden of his Muggle parents' home in Edinburgh just after sunset, went inside long enough for him to raid his box of Muggle money, and then headed out to a bustling, cobbled street lined with an eclectic collection of buildings that had been converted to clubs and pubs. Young people in clothes that made Tonks's outfit look quite conservative roamed from one to another, draped over each other and laughing. A great deal of laugher was coming from a club fronted with a series of narrow arches, and Tonks was tempted, but Sanjiv pulled her past it, insisting that she should be moving around, not sitting in an audience while someone else told jokes. He finally chose a madly crowded place that played cheerful, brainless music, and dragged her out onto the dance floor, where people were hopping around to a choreographed sort of dance that required throwing their arms in all directions, then jumping a quarter turn and doing the whole thing over again.

"Front, front," Sanjiv said, pushing Tonks's arms out to the beat. "Side, side... hip, hip... arse, arse... Shake it and jump...." He jumped behind her, twisting her around a half step.

She landed on his foot, and tripped forward, losing track of the beat entirely, but laughing. "Sanjiv, dancing and I don't..."

"Front, front... side, side..."

He didn't allow her to stop dancing, or complain at any point when she stepped on his foot, punched him in the hip with an errant arm, or knocked him into one of the little tables surrounding the dance floor. She had almost gotten it by the time the song finished playing. Her face felt red and hot, but she was laughing and it felt good.

A woman with bright purple hair caught Sanjiv after the dance, and her girlfriend, a bubbly thing with blond hair teased into a high spike, dragged Tonks into a fast dance to something that sounded very electronic and not particularly deep. After the girls, Tonks found herself dancing with a strange, funny man with a nasal accent she couldn't identify off the top of her head--he said he was from Brooklyn--and then with a ridiculous man of Remus's age who was trying to behave like the university students around him. Sanjiv caught her again for another dance. He finally allowed her to step off the dance floor long enough to go to the bar and get a drink.

He looked ostentatiously at his watch, leading her into a secluded little booth. "Look at that. Only an hour, and you're laughing."

"Yes, thank you."

He waved his wand surreptitiously and drew a Shade Charm, obscuring the booth from view. "Try your hair."

"I don't know..."

"Come on. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I like the brown all right."

"Sanjiv, really..."

"I promised Maddie I'd make you try if I could get you laughing."

"What are you lot talking about when I'm not there?"

"Mostly about how to bring you back up." He handed her a mirror.

She took it skeptically and looked into it. Her hair was starting to flag against the pins she'd put in it, and it could use something to pick it up. "All right," she said, and concentrated. Color rushed up from the roots, and, to her delight, it stood on end and filled up the clips and decorations she'd put on it. "Oh, look! It's me!"

"I'm a miracle worker. Back to the dance floor."

"No, no, no..."

But arguing was pointless.

They stayed at the club for most of the evening, dancing with nearly anything that moved, finally running out into the fog when a drunken university student tried to pick a fight with Sanjiv. Tonks sat down on a bench near a bus stop and opened her arms to the chilly night, welcoming the chance to cool down.

Sanjiv sat beside her, looking very self-satisfied. "You know," he said, "it's a damned shame that I don't find you remotely attractive."

"Not really. Then I'd have to bring up that you're abysmally ugly, and everything would get awkward."

He grinned. "Come on. Let's go steal my parents' food."

Her hair had faded to brown by the time they reached his parents' home (his father started to say something about the lack of color, but out of the corner of her eye, Tonks caught a sharp hand movement cutting him off). The four of them watched television, which was quite enjoyable until after the highlights of a football championship, when a gossip show offered post-mortem on a royal divorce. Tonks hadn't been keeping up with the Muggle news, and it had come as a bit of a shock, as she remembered watching the wedding with her parents and pretending that she had the pretty carriage and beautiful white dress.

Sanjiv switched the television off in a rush. His parents said their goodnights, casting worried glances in Tonks's direction, and disappeared into their room.

Tonks put her hand on her head, and realized that the curls and body had disappeared entirely. She winced. "Well, it was nice while it lasted."

Sanjiv took a deep breath and sat down on the sofa across from her. "Tonks... look, joking and kidnapping aside, I'm worried about you. Maddie's worried, Daffy's worried, your parents are worried, and now my parents are worried."

"Sorry."

"What's happening?"

"I can't tell you. I would if I could."

"You don't need to give me details."

"Someone I love is pushing me away."

"Any reason?"

"He thinks so."

"And you don't?"

"I can take care of myself. Why doesn't he know I can take care of myself?"

Sanjiv started to say something, then seemed to change his mind and wrapped her up in a knitted blanket. "Get some sleep."

She dreamed of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

She was on Sanjiv's parents' sofa and dressed in her dance club clothes, but she was now in the parlor of the Black family home, which was in a state of great disarray. The dark green velvet curtains had all been torn down and were lying in a dispirited pile on the floor, and books and curios were piled haphazardly into wooden crates. A tattered black curtain hung from a window that looked out into the garden, and Sirius sat in front of it, going through a pile of family rubbish. He didn't acknowledge Tonks's presence.

Beyond him, she could see the courtyard, where several of the children had pulled up Auntie's flowerbeds and were plowing the earth into straight furrows. The family gravestones were leaning up against the house, and when Ginny Weasley's plow turned up a hand that Tonks somehow knew belonged to Sirius's brother Regulus, Ginny just tucked it back under the dirt and kept going. Upstairs, she could hear several different kinds of construction charms going, and a fine mist of sawdust hovered in the parlor door.

"Where is Remus?" Sirius asked without looking at her.

"I... I don't know. He's with the werewolves."

"He's always with the werewolves," Sirius said irritably.

"No. No, sometimes he's with me."

"He's always with the werewolves." Sirius picked up a shattered vase and examined the pieces in the bright sunlight. "Do you think anyone would notice that this is a bit cracked?"

"Probably."

He frowned and tossed it away, letting the ceramic pieces break against the bricks in the hearth.

"Why are you doing that?"

"It doesn't matter." He looked over his shoulder and pointed at the ghastly black curtain. "It's all going to be new soon. I've got these for the whole House. Moony was supposed to hang them in the kitchen. Do you know if he's finished?"

"No... I wouldn't let him. They're just awful."

Sirius rolled his eyes and shook his head. "Oh, come on, Coz. You know how it's meant to be. We're almost gone now. You can't stop the inevitable!" He poked his hand in a box and came up with a small portrait of Phineas Nigellus, which looked quite annoyed at the intrusion. "Would you like this thing? It's a bit annoying, but--"

"We have one already," Tonks said.

He tossed it aside and pulled out a silver hand. "Do you think Moony would like this?"

"No! Sirius, what's wrong with you?"

He looked straight at her for the first time. "What do you mean?" His gaze shifted upward, and he smiled. "Oh, there you are!" he said. "What kept you?"

"Dora kept putting things in my way," Remus said, coming in with an armful of black curtains.

Sirius stood and took them from him, and went to the empty windows. The curtain on the last one fluttered toward him.

Tonks got up and ran across the room to him. "Sirius, please!"

"Oh, Dora." He hugged her. "It's nothing to worry about. It's just the way things are."

He pushed her away.

His hands had become bones, his face a mossy remnant hanging on an exposed skull. He was smiling. "Nothing to worry about," he said again, and turned her back toward Remus, whose mossy hand was reaching toward her to catch her as she fell...

and fell...

She awakened, gasping and bracing herself against the McPhersons' coffee table to keep from falling to the floor with a crash. The room was dark, though an early, dirty gray dawn cast it into barely distinguishable shadows. Early Saturday traffic was going by outside.

"I was wondering if you were going to wake yourself up," Sanjiv said. He was standing in the door to the dining room, wearing bright-colored pajamas. "You've been muttering for awhile. If you hadn't woken up, I'd have probably started shaking you." He came to the couch, and sat down on the floor beside it. "This isn't about breaking up with Lupin, is it?"

"Sanj, I can't..."

"And it's not about your job or the bloody Order of the Phoenix, is it?"

"Yes... no. Yes. No."

He fought against smiling--Tonks could see it in the corners of his mouth--and finally gave up. "No wonder you do so well on tests. You just give all the answers. One of them has to be right."

"Right."

He pulled himself up onto the couch and sat across from her, cross-legged. "What were you dreaming?"

Tonks made a mental list of all the elements of her dream that Sanjiv wasn't cleared to know a thing about, then shook her head. "I can't tell you. Really, I can't."

"All right." He started to get up, and Tonks felt a vast well of loneliness swelling inside of her, ready to drown her.

"Did I ever tell you about my cousin Sirius?" she asked.

He sat back down. "Sirius Black?"

"Yes. He... " She looked away. "I was dreaming about Sirius. You know, he would have done what you did last night. I mean, if he'd seen me being such a damned goose lately. And if the entire Ministry hadn't been out hunting for him." She smiled. "Well, he might have tried it anyway, but I expect Remus would have stopped him."

"Hmm. So you have superlative taste in friends. I already knew that."

"I didn't really know him when he first came back. I remembered him from when I was small, but... I was supposed to hate him all that time. And I did. I hated him so I stopped thinking about him. And then he came back, and I loved him again, and now he's gone." She sniffed. "That's all. I'm just not good about losing people. Everything's falling apart again, and I don't know how to make it stop."

"You can't." Sanjiv shrugged and took her hands. "It's not falling apart because of you, and you can't make it stop. But you've got me, and Daffy and Maddie, and your parents. And I'll tell you something as a man, Tonks--you've got Lupin."

"Not really."

"Really. I've seen him with you. The man is quite definitively got."

Tonks shook her head. "I just... I didn't even have a vote on the subject," she said. "He's treating me like a child. Ever since Sirius died, even before..." She stopped. "And now he's shutting me away and trying to take care of me. And I..." She blinked rapidly. "I'm an Auror, Sanj. I know how to take care of myself. But all the sudden, I'm a little girl to him again, and I thought we'd got past that. I thought he was finally seeing me as... Oh, hell." She wiped her hand over her eyes, and it came away wet. "I'm sorry. I'm horrible company."

Sanjiv shrugged. "I'll just have to sack you as a best friend."

"Right."

Sanjiv looked down and frowned slightly. "Tonks, I think..."

"What?"

"Nothing. Nothing important." He let go of her hands and moved to the armchair across from her. "Do you want to go back to sleep, or hunt up breakfast somewhere?"

"I'm not hungry. I should get back. Work."

"Do you ever not work?"

"I'm always an Auror."

"Is Hogsmeade really all that beset by the forces of evil?" He smiled, inviting her to step off of the unpleasant train of thought.

"You tell me," she said, gratefully taking the bait. "You're the one who lives above Madam Puddifoot's."

"Well, the forces of tackiness are firmly entrenched at any rate."

"It's an advance guard. I'm sure of it. Any place with that many frilly doilies has to be practicing Dark Arts. There's just no other explanation."

"You know," Sanjiv said, "I'm now having visions of Death Eaters tatting lace, cackling madly and declaring victory one tea shop at a time."

"It's insidious, really."

"A dastardly plan indeed."

His mother awakened a few minutes later and started cooking a prodigious breakfast ("I'm well aware that you two children don't eat properly on your own"), involving bacon, fruit, and crêpes. His father joined them before they left, giving Tonks one mildly worried look before Sanjiv cut him off when he thought Tonks couldn't see and then switching to a discussion of his job, which involved designing advertisements to convince people to holiday in Scotland. He suggested that the bureau should change its slogan to, "Come to Scotland. The fog is clearing... really!"

The fog had, in fact, nearly lifted by ten o'clock, when they finally went into the back garden, slipped into the Apparition shelter, and returned to Hogsmeade.

"Is there some reason you drew your wand?" Sanjiv asked, looking quizzically at her raised arm.

Tonks scanned the street in front of Madam Puddifoot's, then lowered her guard. "As a friend at work calls it, constant vigilance."

"Mmm."

"Thank you," Tonks said. "I needed a break."

"Glad to oblige you." He bit his lip again.

"Dammit, Sanjiv, if there's something you want to say, say it."

He shook his head. "I'll let you get back to work," he said, and went inside.

Tonks looked up as she walked down the street and saw the drapery in his window move to one side.

She continued on to the Hog's Head.

The next Wednesday--two weeks after the Dementor attack--Tonks was in the city again. Not Edinburgh this time, and St. Mungo's was hardly a cheerful distraction, but apparently Sanjiv's mother had been sufficiently disturbed by Tonks's abrupt un-morphing to contact Mum about it, and Mum had informed Tonks that she would appear in her office first thing Wednesday morning. Tonks considered refusing, but Robards had been there when the owl arrived, on his monthly walk-through, and he'd decided to enforce the order, preferring certainty that his Division was in full health.

So she arrived at the drab storefront at foggy dawn, barely needing to be stealthy among the bleary-eyed Muggles trudging to early jobs. The mannequin let her through, and she went quietly to Mum's second floor office.

Mum hugged her, then ushered her brusquely inside, steering her onto a high bed for an examination. "How are you feeling?" she asked, casting several diagnostic spells, then pulling Tonks's face forward and studying her eyes carefully. "Has there been any change in the morphing?"

"No. I can't believe Mrs. McPherson spoke to you about it."

"It was entirely accidental," Mum said. "She needed help getting into Diagon Alley to buy a birthday present for Sanjiv, so she called me on that telephone in the cellar, and we got talking, and she mentioned what happened. It worried her. It worries me. I know you've had a few slow times, but this is the longest I've ever seen you have trouble morphing."

"It has nothing to do with the Dementor attack. It started before that."

Mum nodded, nonplused, and went on with the examination. "You're tense, Nymphadora."

"A bit."

"Quite a bit."

Tonks slid down off the bed and headed for the door. "Mum, I have work to do. Remember? I can't just run off to London to talk because you're worried about my hair. I have a job."

"Dora..."

"Why does everyone forget that? I'm an Auror. I passed my bloody exams. It's not a game. Sanjiv tried to follow me on the job yesterday, like it was some school lark. And Remus--" She stopped and waved off the thought. "If you just want to talk, could we do it on Saturday? I have time off on Saturday." She reached for the door.

"Colloportus."

The door slipped away from her and sealed itself. She turned around.

Mum pointed her wand at a chair and swung it against the wall. Her lips were tightly pursed. "Sit down, Nymphadora."

Tonks sat. "I'm sorry, Mum."

"We don't have a lot of experience with Dementor attacks," Mum said. "Not even here. The victims are usually too far gone to learn much from. But we're going to see more of them, and we need to know what happens. So you will sit still for diagnostics. I know that your troubles morphing started before it, but I think it may be an aggravating factor, and I don't want to rule anything out until I've examined you."

Tonks remained silent, feeling small and chastened.

Mum went back to the exam, casting spells here and there and examining Tonks's hair and the spot on her face where the Dementor had touched her. The light from diagnostic spells pooled in a few places--Tonks's wand arm, her chin, a spot on her shoulder where she'd been touched--but mainly spread out in a thin, dingy aura around her.

When it had finished, Mum stood back, looking troubled. She pulled a chair from behind her desk and Summoned a new record scroll. "I know you have a lot of things in your life that aren't particularly conducive to feeling pink," she said. "Have you been able to morph at all?"

"Once, while I was out dancing with Sanjiv."

Mum nodded. "Will you try now, while I can trace any changes? I have the readings I've taken when you're feeling more yourself."

Tonks closed her eyes, concentrating all of her energy, everything she had, into the thought of herself in a different form. Nothing drastic, nothing unnatural. I have black hair, she thought. Black hair like Daddy and Granny Tonks and Sirius and Auntie and...

"Good," Mum said. "Very good. Hold it."

Tonks squeezed her eyes shut tighter, thinking only of her hair, of keeping it black, hoping that it was in fact black. She heard Mum muttering spells.

After a moment, Mum sighed. "You can let go if you need to," she said.

Tonks took a deep breath and let go of the thought, opening her eyes. Her hair hung limply beside her face. She could see that it was black, but it was already beginning to lighten.

"It's the same as it ever was," Mum said, scanning the record. "I don't think your problem is magical in origin. Or aggravated by the Dementor attack, but don't say you knew that, because neither of us could have been certain."

"Just feeling a bit blue. Or, well, brown." Tonks sniffed. "Apparently I'm just going mad."

"No. I watched my older sister go mad. And I think you probably remember that I've... er... had some less than stellar responses to stressful events from time to time."

Tonks looked away awkwardly. When Sirius had first been arrested, Mum had rampaged through the flat they'd been staying in, burning photographs and weeping for what seemed like days. And Sirius himself... She closed her eyes again, remembering a day last year when she and Remus had found him crouched in the kitchen, reaching for both of them for warmth, nearly unable to talk. They'd held him between them then, and Tonks had spoken to him gently, and he'd come out of it and she missed him.

"You're not mad," Mum said. "I think you may just be outgrowing the pink hair."

"I miss the pink hair."

Mum shrugged. "I miss drawing flowers on the edges of my papers."

"So draw them."

"Right." Mum made a few notes, then looked up. "There are lingering effects from the attack. Do you find yourself getting tired easily?"

"Sometimes."

"And any strange sounds?"

"The voices in my head... the Dementor voices, I mean?"

"Yes."

"Not really. I think I dream about it sometimes."

"That's understandable. I want you to monitor this, watch for any changes. Do you know how to do a simple Query charm?"

"The pregnancy test? Mum...!"

Mum rolled her eyes. "That's one use for it. It's not the only one. What it does is keep track of any major changes in your body, physical or magical. I'll cast the initial spell now, and you do the charm every day. The incantation is Exquiro corpus. Let me know right away if it picks anything up. I don't trust anything Dementors leave behind."

Tonks nodded and let Mum do the initial spellwork. "That bit of a temper you flew into earlier..." Mum began.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Are you angry at Remus?"

"Isn't everyone saying I ought to be?"

Mum didn't answer.

Tonks went back to Hogsmeade, and put in a day's work. She sat in her room at the Hog's Head later, her quill poised over an empty bit of parchment, ultimately writing nothing. Her head was pounding.

The next day at lunchtime, while she was investigating the disappearance of two sisters who lived alone near the cave where Sirius had once hidden, Sanjiv appeared with a picnic lunch. She was irritated with him, but tried to hide it. He asked if he could help. She told him he couldn't.

A series of Dementor attacks in the countryside--one of them again on the road near the Forest--took up the weekend, and on Monday, Tonks steered a meeting with her colleagues to the subject of the Hogwarts Express, which would be arriving in less than a week, to the cheerful welcome of local Dementors if they didn't do something about it soon.

"We're trying," Proudfoot said. "Do you think you'll do better on your own? Or do you just have a far superior plan based on your extensive friendship with The Boy Who Lived?"

"I want to know why they keep coming back here. What do they want?"

"And how is that going to help us protect the train?" Savage asked.

Dawlish cut it off. "It can't hurt," he said, to Tonks's surprise. "Let's track the attacks. Tonks, find out what you can about the Forest. Didn't Minerva McGonagall share any information with you?"

"Some."

"All right. I suppose it's nothing you feel a need to share?"

"I think they're after something inside the Forest, but we didn't find anything useful about where they're coming from."

"So you didn't get anything out of it?" Savage sneered.

Tonks briefly considered telling them that she could get in and out of the Forest, but decided not to--at the moment, it had no bearing on their ongoing cases, and it wouldn't be a useful entrance point to the school, as they'd have to find their way through the trees before they could even reach the school. The Shrieking Shack was a better bet, if worse came to worse.

Her stomach twisted painfully, and she put it out of her mind.

Sanjiv chased her down for lunch again, and she was less irritated this time, though she couldn't tell him much of what he wanted to know. She sent him firmly home when he asked if he could help in the afternoon--"Those bloody damned Dementors; I'd like a piece of them."

Her shift ended late in the afternoon, when the sunlight was falling in golden streaks that seemed to have weight and solidity of their own. She finished up a quick interview with a Zonko's cousin who had come back into town to retrieve things from the flat above the store--he assured her that they would re-open soon--then started to head back to the Hog's Head. The gates of Hogwarts caught her eye, and she stopped in the street, staring at them.

So you didn't get anything out of it?

She frowned, then steeled herself and headed up the road beside the Forbidden Forest. Ten minutes later, she reached the pine with its four hanging cones, touched the wall, and opened the arch. Inside, the Forest was already dark, the sun no longer at an angle to reach through the heavy canopy. She drew her wand. "Lumos."

It didn't shed much light. She used it to sketch a quick light symbol on a tree, and went further in. The shadows grew denser. The brook she and McGonagall had followed seemed to lead in an entirely different direction today, and she followed it carefully, keeping alert for abrupt changes in its path, marking trees along the way.

I am competent, she told herself. I will get something from this.

But as she followed the stream into the shadows, nothing came, and nothing coalesced in her mind. Something skittered in the treetops above her, and when she turned her head involuntarily to see it, a flash of light to one side caught her eye. When she looked in its direction, it was gone.

She pointed her wand in the direction it had come from, but nothing moved.

Frustrated, she followed her signs back to the wall, touched it, and let herself back out into the evening.

"Wotcher, Tonks."

She wheeled around, furious. "Sanjiv! What the bloody hell are you doing? There've been two attacks on this road!"

"Which is why I didn't think you ought to be on it alone."

"I AM AN AUROR!" Tonks thundered, pushing past him. "And you are going home. What's the matter with you?"

Sanjiv hadn't moved, and when she looked back, his face was calm and serious. "Don't you think I can take care of myself?"

"It's not about that."

"It's not?"

"Do you think I want to see you get hurt? Do you think I want to be worrying about you? Do you think--?" She stopped and nodded. "Fine. All right. Please tell me you were trying to make a point and not just being an idiot."

"I was trying to make a point."

"Then why not just say it?"

"I didn't need to say it. You did." He shrugged and pointed over his shoulder. "For what it's worth, Daffy has my back."

Daffy Apcarne came out from behind a rock. "Are you all right?"

Tonks was shaking with anger at both of them, and turned on her heel. "Fine. All right. I get the point of your little lesson: Remus isn't thinking about me at all. He's just thinking that he doesn't want me in danger. And I shouldn't take offense or think he's treating me badly. And what happened to the pair of you wanting to rip him limb from limb?"

"Oh, we're still up for it," Sanjiv assured her, catching up and walking beside her. "Anyone who hurts you stands a chance of answering to us, if he makes it past your dad alive. But this business of you being angry with him and deciding that it's because he doesn't trust you or whatnot... it's not good for you."

"And it's not fair to him," Daffy said, gaining her other side. "We're angry at him for breaking your heart. You're starting to blame him for the part that any of us--especially you--would do. And you know it."

"I--"

"You got caught by four Dementors." Daffy paused and looked ahead of him. "No one is saying you're a bad Auror for not beating all of them off single-handedly while they had hold of you."

"It's true. I think even your idiot colleagues are smart enough to know better," Sanjiv said. "I've eavesdropped on them. They haven't said a thing when I was around, and they don't know me at all, so they weren't being careful."

"It's not your fault that sometimes the other fellow is stronger, and no one thinks less of you for it. Just because you're beating yourself up about it doesn't meant that Lupin has decided you can't be trusted. Or that anyone else has."

Tonks didn't look at them. In her mind, she saw not the Dementors on this road, but her mad aunt, laughing, raising her wand. And somewhere in the distance she could hear the dream-like sound of Sirius's laughter, heard for the last time as she lay on the inner edge of unconsciousness, silenced forever seconds later.

What had Remus said? You're not actually imagining it's your fault?... Bellatrix is an expert duelist. You lasted as long as Sirius did and longer than Kingsley. She's very powerful...

"I just lost," she whispered, to whole-hearted approval from the boys.

I lost, then Sirius died, then Remus left me. And of course he doesn't trust me because I was the one who let Bellatrix through, I was the one who...

Except that it had no more occurred to Remus than it would have occurred to Tonks to think that Sanjiv wasn't trustworthy because he'd once got lost on the grounds, or that Daffy wasn't because he'd been a wretched Chaser. It wasn't about them; it was about not worrying about them.

They walked her the rest of the way home.

She sat down, wrote a long letter to Remus, and sent it by owl to the Burrow.