For a long minute, Lily could only sit on the floor, in shock. They were gone. No one was there.
When she finally got her voice back, she screamed, "Cassie! Bess! Jill! Please, Merlin, where are you?"
She jumped up and made her way around the rooms. No one was in the kitchen. Nobody in any of the rooms. Nobody in the bathrooms. Had they gone after James and Sirius once they had left? This was the only thing she could think of, but maybe they had just gone to the buffet for breakfast. Of course, that was it.
Lily threw on some pants and a sweater, grabbed her coat, and ran downstairs. She couldn't be bothered to wait for the elevator. Waiting made her nervous. Instead, she took the stairs. Once she hit the main floor, she took off down the hallway and sprinted into the main dining hall. A few people stared at her when she came in, panting. She probably looked like a complete mess. Quickly, Lily looked around the giant room for some trace of her friends. They weren't there.
Come on, Lily, pull yourself together, she thought to herself. They're probably just at the pool. Or maybe the hot tub.
A few minutes later, though, after she ran to the pool, she finally realized that her friends were gone. Brutal images of Cassie, Bess, and Jill, all torn apart by a savage wolf, flew across her mind. Lily's nightmares were coming true.
She thought of what could have happened as she rushed back up the stairs. The girls probably saw that the guys were gone, or maybe they saw them leave. Whatever it was, they followed them. If they were stupid enough, they followed James and Sirius outside. But how could her friends follow James and Sirius without being noticed? Surly, one of the boys would have heard them sneaking up behind them. This was insane.
Lily quickly unlocked the door and went straight to her room. She needed her wand.
She had made up her mind that she would go after them, even if they were on top of the tallest mountain. She found the slender piece of wood in her suitcase and shoved it in her pocket. Lily took one last fleeting look around the rooms before she took the stairs down to the lobby.
Now a nervous wreck, Lily made her way to the front door and was about to leave when the doorman stopped her.
"Hello, miss, where are you going today?" he asked. Lily thought this was odd- where else could she be going, but out to the mountains? "You know the lifts still aren't working?"
Lily moaned. Of course, the snowstorm from before. Why hadn't the resort fixed the lifts yet?
"I'm not going to ski, I'm off to the supermarket," she lied. The man gave her a friendly smile, told her to button up for the chilly weather, and wished her good luck with the shopping. He was awfully nice.
As soon as she walked through the doors, she knew that she had underdressed. The wind whipped around her face and danced briskly in her ears. She had forgotten to wear a hat. The violent cold was even rushing up her sleeves and through her loosely knitted scarf. She had completely forgotten gloves. When she sighed, she saw her own breath floating in front of her, along with the snow that had just started falling. This was brutal.
Lily hurried off towards the mountains. Her friends must have climbed, but she couldn't think of how they had managed it in the dark. She was having so much trouble, just in the daylight. She was hardly even on the mountain when she heard her name called from behind her.
"Lily? Is zat you?"
Poor, freezing, friendless Lily turned around to see Jim, standing a few meters from her, looking cocky. "What is it you are doing on ze hill?" he asked while she tried her hardest to ignore him. "Lily?"
"It's none of your business," Lily told him sharply. She kept climbing, hoping that he would leave her alone.
"But you know the runs are closed?" said Jim.
"Thanks, but I'm perfectly aware." She really didn't have any patience for this boy. She needed to find her friend and she wanted to find them alive.
"Where are ze others?"
Filled with rage, Lily spun around to face Jim. "Look," she spat, "I don't have time for this. I'm not interested in you and I'm never going to be. Please leave me alone and go back to the other French... people." She instantly felt guilty for yelling at Jim, who was only trying to ask a question, but today just wasn't her day.
Jim stood silently for a moment and then said, "All right, then." Lily watched as he took off his gloves and through them at her. "If you are hiking, you don't want the cold fingers."
Why did he have to do this? She was mad at him, she yelled at him, and what does he do? He offers her his gloves. Lily tried to throw them back, she didn't want him to give her gifts of any sort, but he wouldn't accept them. Then he walked away. Standing, now alone, on the side of the mountain, Lily decided to wear them. It was getting cold.
Now, with warm hands, Lily continued her trek up the hill. She didn't know how far the Marauders, sans Peter, would go. For all she knew, they could be anywhere. She needed a faster way to travel.
Luckily, she found a low-level forrest run, which was pretty flat and easy to walk on. Well, it would have been easy for most people. It was quite difficult for Lily, seeing as she had just about as much coordination as a troll doing ballet.
The cold was really getting to her, even with Jim's gloves on. Her face felt numb, probably because she was walking straight into the frigid wind. She tugged her jacket up to her nose and hoped that she would find her friends soon.
Or maybe she didn't want to find them. She had no idea what their conditions were. Was it possible that one of them died the night before? Anything could happen with a werewolf. She tried to push the negative thoughts from her mind, but with little else to distract her, she couldn't help but wonder if there had been any mishaps.
She trudged on. It was really hard, hiking up the mountain. The ice caught her feet at unexpected times, sending her to the ground, but she knew that she had to keep going. She had already climbed through the forrest run and up about half the mountain when she tripped over a large branch. Lily thought this was very strange, because the forrest seemed pretty far away from where she was. How had the branch gotten there? When she went to examine it, she saw that it had been cracked and then stuck back together. She could see the line splitting down the middle. When she tried to pull it apart, she couldn't. It was solid.
Something told Lily that this was different. That it was magic. She realized that she was probably jumping to conclusions, but she just knew that there was something very off with the crack. She took one of her gloves off and touched the wood. Right where the sliver was, Lily could feel warmth. She was right. Someone had used a spell to mend the branch. That meant that she must be getting close.
Lily didn't know what she expected to find, but she started to sift through the snow anyway. Maybe there would be another mended stick or some kind of form of magic. Anything.
She tossed aside another stick before she gasped and quickly retrieved it. Upon further examination, she noticed the smoothness of the wood and the subtle design carved on the thicker of the two sides. Instantly, she knew exactly what this was. It was Sirius' wand.
Quickly, Lily pulled out her own wand. Once she had it, though, she wasn't sure what to do. She could reveal the last spell that Sirius had cast, but what would that do? She did the spell anyway and saw that he had, in fact, done a sticking spell on the branch. But why? Was he fighting off Remus? Could he still do spells in his animagi form? Maybe this, at least, meant that they were close by. She pocketed Sirius' wand and continued up the mountain, more determined than ever.
By the time Lily spotted the little warming hut, more than halfway up the mountain, her face was numb and she could no longer feel her toes. It was bitter cold so high up, so Lily hoped that the doors would be open.
She tried the doorknob, but it was locked. Her hopes fell, but she decided to knock in case someone else was there.
"Hello?" Lily asked through the door. She was surprised at how small her own voice sounded.
Suddenly, Lily froze when she heard movement from inside the hut. Hoping that she hadn't just imagined the sound, she knocked again, slowly. "Cassie? James? Sirius?" she asked through the door. She could hear more rustling from beyond the wall, but Lily started to wonder if maybe it wasn't her friends in the warming hut. It could easily be Death Eaters.
With her wand held high, Lily finally decided to knock again. It seemed like this was the only shelter in a reasonable distance, so Lily's numb toes were begging her to take her chances. "Is anyone in there?" Lily said loudly as she pounded on the wood. She wanted to make sure she was heard.
"Wait," said a voice from the other side, "James, I think it's Lily!"
"It is!" said Lily, more excited now than she could ever remember. "James? Sirius, Cassie, Bess, Jill it's me, Lily! Oh, Merlin are you all right?
The door swung open and everything was not all right. The first thing Lily saw was blood. It seemed like it was stained everywhere. Lily rushed past Sirius, who had opened the door, and straight to the pile of blankets that Remus Lupin was buried under.
"No," whispered Lily. Remus was beaten up. It seemed like the others had tried their best at patching up his open wounds, but Lily could tell it had been a rough night. Still holding her wand, she tried a few healing spells she had read from a charms textbook, but they didn't help much. One of the charms did seem to stop one particularly nasty cut from bleeding too horribly, though.
Once she was sure that there was nothing else she could do for the boy in front of her, Lily turned to the others. To her instant relief, they were all there. They had looked better though. And not all of them were conscious. James was sitting up in a chair, his arm wrapped in a bandage, while Sirius was pacing by the door. Both of them still looked shocked from Lily's sudden arrival. Cassie was sitting at a table, looking worried, and Jill was sitting next to Bess. Bess wasn't awake.
Lily rushed to Bess, who was on a bed. It wasn't until then that she realized that this wasn't a warming hut, but instead a one room cabin. That wasn't important, though. Lily held her wand up again, ready to preform any spell to wake Bess up, but became suddenly aware of what she was doing. Magic. In front of Muggles. They had seen her charm Remus. This was very bad.
Everything was happening so fast that Lily had to crash. She sat down, right on the floor, and stayed there until James came by her side and helped her up.
"What happened?" she asked as James hugged her. "What happened last night?"
James let her go and sat her down on the armchair that he had been in. "Things got... a little out of control," said James, nervously.
"You think?" said Lily sarcastically, looking around at her injured friends. "Is Bess...."
"Bess is going to be fine," said Sirius, walking over to the others. "She had a bit of a fall."
So far, the girls had remained silent. They were probably shocked.
"But she's okay?" asked Lily.
"Yeah," said James.
"But how do you know she will be okay? Give us some answers," begged Jill from the bed. She had bags under her eyes. It must have been an awful night.
"Could someone just start from the top, please?" said Lily. She was dying to know why her friends felt compelled to follow James and Sirius up a mountain in the dead of night.
"Well, we left," started James, "and everything was going as planned. We walked to a little hut to meet Remus and then we were going to transform there."
"But they," said Sirius, pointing to the Muggles, "followed us."
"We thought you were just going out to have some fun," said Cassie, trying to defending herself. "We had no idea that... that thing was there." She nodded at Remus.
"They saw him?" asked Lily. She had expected as much, but she had hoped more than anything that she was wrong.
"They more than saw him," said Sirius darkly.
"We were chased by it... well, by him," said Jill. She shuddered.
Lily could just imagine how terrifying being chased by a werewolf would be. She couldn't believe that it happened to her friends. This was exactly was she was afraid of. She should have known that something would have gone wrong.
"James and I had to transform and carry them away," said Sirius. "Bess fell off my back. That's why she's unconscious."
"Oh, Merlin," said Lily. She hoped, more than anything, that Bess would recover.
"We got them to this cabin, but we had to go and take care of Remus," continued James.
"Then we came back once Remus was back to normal," finished Sirius.
Lily took a deep breath, letting everything sink in. Then she remembered Sirius' wand in her pocket. "I found this," she said as she handed him the slim piece of wood.
"You're a life saver, Evans," said Sirius, obviously relieved to have his wand back. "I could kiss you."
Lily saw James shift uncomfortably, which, for some reason, amused her. He really was the jealous type.
"Well, let's save the snogging for after we get these two sorted out," said Lily, motioning towards Remus and Bess.
Snowflakes by The_Dream_Team
Chapter Notes: Hey guys, here is chapter sixteen! It's a bit late, but I hope you all like it :)
Chapter Endnotes: Thanks so much for reading! Any guesses about what happens next? :]