Author's Note: This section is pretty grisly. Be warned. Greyback's death is not a pretty one.

The three research partners went back down the stairs, through the wooden door, down the corridor, and faced the iron door once more.

“Let me go in first again,” Lupin said. “Just in case something went wrong with the monitoring spell.” He eased the door open and slipped through, clanging it shut behind him hard enough to make the bar drop back into place.

“What the—?” they heard him say, yelping in fright.

“Remus!” Snape shouted, reaching for the bar on the door.

“Remus, are you okay?” Hermione called, drawing her wand. She met Snape’s eyes and he nodded once, lifting the bar.

Lupin heard him lift it. “No!” he yelled. “Stay out there! I’m okay—just wait a minute!”

They heard him cast “Stupefy!” followed by “Incarcerous! INCARCEROUS!” and it seemed like a long time before he finally banged on the door for them to open it. He was panting and his robe was torn.

“What happened?” Hermione asked, grabbing his shoulders. “Are you okay?” She inspected the tear and glanced around for blood. “I thought Greyback was dead!”

“He is,” Snape spoke grimly, peering over Lupin’s shoulder at the interior of the dungeon. “Most gruesomely.”

“Yes,” Lupin said. “Unfortunately, his inner wolf seems to have gained a life of its own.” He stepped aside so they could both see.

A huge, grey wolf lay on the stone floor, barely breathing and bound with so many ropes that it would never be able to move.

“At least now we know how Greyback died,” Snape said. “A rather ironical ending, I must say.”

Greyback was in pieces.

Hermione gagged and leaned against the wall of the cell. “Uh. Wow. That’s… wow, that’s disgusting!”

Lupin agreed. “He always was, you know.” He grimaced, looking around. “Just not in so many pieces.”

“How secure is the wolf?” Snape asked, eyeing the massive grey lupine twitching on the stones. A low growling eminated from

“Yes, and is there anything magical about him? Animagus or anything?” Hermione wanted to know.

Lupin shook his head. “He’s just a wolf, nothing more. A killer wolf, but nothing magical. I imagine he's good for a bit, Severus. And you can always Stupefy him again.”

“Good.” Snape cast Stupefy, and the wolf stopped twitching. Snape stepped over it calmly and went to examine one of the several pieces of Greyback that littered the floor. “I’ll need to collect some blood and tissue samples, to see whether the potion worked or not.”

“I think it must have,” Hermione said. “It’s designed to split apart what doesn’t belong, from what does belong. I think it split Greyback the wolf apart from Greyback the man…”

“Whereupon Greyback the wolf had himself a little snack,” Lupin finished. “You can hardly blame him, though. We did leave the victim immobilized for his convenience.”

“Ew, Remus!” Hermione wrinkled her nose.

He laughed. “Sorry, Hermione. Sometimes my sense of humor gets a little dark.”

“As does your intellect,” Snape said. “But that’s no surprise, really, is it?” He stood up again with a container full of disgusting brown liquid. “I’ve got my samples, Remus. You can clean this mess up, if you please. Miss Granger and I have got work to do.”

“What shall you do with the wolf, then?” Hermione asked, skirting the shaggy creature nervously as she preceded Snape out into the hall.

“Get rid of it,” Lupin said sharply. He answered Hermione's questioning look with a decisive nod. “It’s a man-eater, Hermione. We can’t let it live.”

“Kill it and burn them both,” Snape suggested. “And be quick about it.” He followed Hermione out, and both of them paused and waited right outside the door for him.

Lupin nodded. He cast the slicing spell, to neatly decapitate the wolf, and then cast “Incendio!” on the carcass of the wolf, its head, and all of the remaining Greyback-bits. For good measure, he cast “Bombasto Maximus!” Then he ducked out and slammed the door behind him.

In a few minutes, the fire had died down and he opened the door again. The walls were scorched where the manacles hung, and there was a pile of ash on the floor where the wolf had lain.

“Evanesco!” Lupin cast, and the room was clean again.

“Good,” Snape grunted. “Let’s go.”

In his examinations of Greyback’s blood and tissue, he found that the man had indeed been cured of lycanthropy. Apparently every part of the wolfish nature of the man had become embodied in an actual wolf, leaving the man completely normal in body… bare minutes before he had been attacked and mostly devoured by the wolf in question.

Which left the ticklish question, what would happen to Lupin if they tried it on him?

None of them ventured to bring it up for the next week. Snape researched several anti-lycanthropy variations of the Horcrux potion; Lupin prepared their reports to submit to the Ministry; and Hermione spent all her spare time reading ahead in her classes again.

She had discovered that while she’d been working so hard on the Horcrux project, her teachers had finally caught their classes up with her level. The only thing to be done was to spend some extra time getting ahead again, so that she would have time to spare when and if Lupin decided to try their cure.

It was Lupin himself who finally brought it up. He had finished copying Snape’s and Hermione’s notes in his clear, copperplate hand, and pushed the stack of notes aside. Snape was doing his marking, and Hermione was working on her class work. She had taken to studying down in Snape’s office with her two partners, rather than in the library; there were fewer distractions, and she found it very convenient to have two adult mentors to question while she worked.

“All right, let’s talk about the next experiment,” he said.

Snape exchanged a glance with Hermione, and both of them put down their quills. “What about it?” Snape asked warily.

“I’ll do it. Next full moon.”