Brandy. Cyrus had been told, once, that it was often prescribed by muggle "doctors" to heal what ailed their patients. From a scientific perspective, the wizard was skeptical at best, but from an emotional perspective, Cyrus thought as he sipped at a glass of the stuff, it did not hurt. With each swallow coursing down his throat, the werewolf felt the shakiness, the pain of the previous night's transformation begin to ebb—how he yearned for the month previous, when the all-encompassing darkness had stayed his transformation! But now, in this moment, a calm of sorts was returning to him: he had survived another month, and it would be a full cycle before the wolf returned.

Absently, Cyrus reached for the copy of the Prophet that lay upon the tabletop. It was a day old, but that was hardly a surprise in an establishment such as this. His eyes, though, gravitated almost immediately to the headline like a moth to a flame:

WEREWOLF ATTACK IN LONDON
His own incident had been phrased similarly, half a decade before. Cyrus did not need to imagine the chaos, the carnage that could result from such a vicious attack: he had lived it. Still, as though watching a train wreck, his eyes kept reading, taking in the little details that others might overlook. A boy had been turned. Six were dead. Two were muggles. The Ministry would be cleaning up from this for weeks. And the boy, well, that was his life over—over before it had even begun.

The shakiness began to come back again.

He had been secured, barricaded, at the local constabulary (the best the Ministry could do, given that the Hogsmeade access point was down for the count) for all three nights of the moon, and so there could be no question of his innocence in this matter. Nonetheless, a wave of guilt washed over him, as though he were somehow responsible for all of his kind. He was not even responsible for any of them, for the sole comfort of his public outing was the fact that Cyrus had never been in a position to do harm to anyone in his lupine state. In society's mind, however, and even a bit in his own, he was complicit in this tragedy, though it had not been his claws or his jaws that had torn at flesh.

Things, he suspected, would be getting worse before they got better.