After being forced to admit his identity, Peter seemed to make up his mind about something. He stared with his mung-bean-sized eyes,
and struck his own neck precisely with the edge of his filthy hand, revealing a smile of triumph. But his smile immediately froze.
"Y-you, what did you do to me?"
Peter let out a hoarse, shrill cry. Several hideous blood vessels visibly surfaced in the whites of his eyes, and he repeated the motion several times, striking harder each time. By the end, he was practically slapping his own neck,
but the result clearly remained unchanged.
"Where's my magic? Where's my magic? Give it back!" Peter roared furiously, looking as though he would lunge at Brian at any moment. Yet whenever he tried to take a step forward, his legs involuntarily retreated two steps, taking him farther and farther away from Brian.
He now looked exactly like a mouse that had stepped onto a glue trap while stealing cheese, frantically trying to shake the board off its feet. But his struggles would only trap his tail, fur, and mouth as well. Brian, in the role of the cat, sighed and shook his head.
Thanks to the Veritaserum, he already knew that the wizard before him, Peter Pettigrew, was a murderer with more than a dozen lives on his hands. But until he understood the whole story, he had no intention of using violence against him-though necessary precautions still had to be taken.
When he asked his first question, he had already cast ancient magic nonverbally to seal Peter's magic. Peter's reaction proved that this had been the right choice.
What Peter had just been doing could not have been more obvious. He was trying to make himself temporarily mute to evade the effects of the Veritaserum, the best