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Chapter Thirty—Bringing Them Closer

Tom sat in the middle of the room behind his office, a private sanctum with a hidden door that not even Harry or Nora or Lavinia knew about. He breathed with his head lowered, his will forming the circle around him. It crackled with silent dark fire that only his skin or eyes could perceive the heat or color of.

His hands reached out, and brushed the severed and skinned halves of the snake he had conjured. His breathing quickened, or tried to, but Tom forced it back under control. He had to do this right, or he stood no chance of seeing what he wanted to, and the divination attempt would be wasted.

He ran his hands up the snake’s scales and stripped muscle, pausing now and then. When he reached the ends, he cast his hands out in front of him, scattering the blood on the floor.

If he had done it right, then the blood would form a pattern that should tell him the answer to at least one question he was desperately seeking, whether that was how to get the Elder Wand out from behind Malfoy Manor’s wards or how to lure Andromeda to do as he wanted.

The sensation of dark fire died. Tom took a deep breath and opened his eyes, focusing straight ahead on the pattern of blood.

It was meaningless.

His magic surged back and forth in his body, searing his veins. Tom managed to channel it onto the halves of the conjured serpent, and set them on fire with a thought. He remained still as the small blaze consumed its target, and breathed hoarsely in an effort to control himself once more.

He had to figure this out. Harry was coming along as a war wizard, but he was still only fifteen. And the excesses of Malfoy’s regime had lately grown worse and worse. They’d begun to prey openly on purebloods who stepped out of line. They’d continued their violent experiments with potions to create children. Malfoy had preached so much against Muggles that there were also spontaneous attacks on them, and the Statute of Secrecy was in more danger than Tom thought it had been since it was established.

He did not know what to do.

Tom paused at the thought, and glanced back at the blood for a moment. Yes, the pattern was meaningless. But did that have to mean that the divination and the sacrifice had been wasted? Or was the pattern answering some question he hadn’t thought to ask?

Tom tried to let his mind relax, slip into the kind of crystalline clarity that he used when he was learning something new, or when he had first learned to memorize and manipulate the tenets of Occlumency. He focused on the floor in front of him, breathing so gently and softly that he couldn’t hear it himself, and his eyes unfocused. He didn’t know how long he drifted, trying to convey his openness to an answer, until his eyes focused again and he blinked and cleared his throat, aware that he was as thirsty as a vampire.

The blood gave him an answer.

Tom’s hands clamped on his knees, making sure that he didn’t move and disrupt the pattern. It wasn’t an answer to the question he had asked. But he ought to have remembered that even the pattern of strange Divination that Andromeda had seen in the star chart had more than one moving piece.

The letters slashed into the floor, formed in the empty places between the blood drops, said, Gaunt Shack. Little Hangleton.

Tom stood. He would leave the school through a door from this room. He didn’t want to be stopped by anyone over a petty piece of business or the answer to an “urgent” question right now.

He did wave his hand to let fire consume the blood on the floor as he left. He didn’t know if anyone else would be able to see the message—his research said this form of Divination functioned for Parselmouths alone—but there was no use in tempting fate.

Not when it had been so kind as to give him an answer.

*

Tom Apparated outside Little Hangleton, not far from the shack where the pitiful remnants of his mother’s family had once lived. His lip curled as he looked at it.

He could, of course, have done something more to them, with them, than he had. But he didn’t see the point in taking vengeance on those incapable of feeling it. Morfin Gaunt wouldn’t have. And Tom’s mother had been long dead, and Tom’s grandfather in Azkaban.

No matter what I did, they would only have seen me as a half-blood, not worthy of a real reaction.

Tom shook his head and stepped towards the shack, listening. There wasn’t the hum of wards, but there was something else, something that made him tilt his head. A hiss, a whisper, a crackle, as though he was once again back in the room he had just left and listening to the silent fire his will had summoned.

Of course, he highly doubted that any ward the Gaunt family had cast would have endured this long. And if what he had been thinking about just before his eyes saw the message in the blood was correct, then it wasn’t magic at all.

Not as such.

Tom eased into the shack, wand at the ready, and still nothing attacked and still something sang in front of him. Tom sat down near the door on a conjured chair and waited. He could force the waiting power to show itself, but he had the impression that would go extremely badly, and he didn’t want to force an attack.

The song of magic gradually died. Tom waited. Something was watching him, he was certain, without eyes, but with a cold and composed intent. Any motion of his might turn that coldness into hostility.

Tom kept his wand down at his side.

At last, with a rattle, a shape materialized on the far side of the shack under a window. Tom clenched his muscles to keep from jumping. By all appearances, this was nothing more than a pebble, but he was absolutely sure that it would be bad to judge by appearances.

The pebble lay there and watched him with senses that Tom knew had nothing to do with eyes. He simply waited. The part of a leader might be to take the worst risks, but it didn’t have to involve leaping to take them.

The stone finally stopped shedding the aura that seemed to make the air around them freezing and grey. Tom, still holding his wand, stood and stepped over to it, kneeling down so that he could examine the stone without touching it.

It was smaller than he’d thought at first, and a shiny grey that reminded him of the sludge he’d produced the first time he’d tried to brew a Draught of Peace. And on the top of it was carved the symbol of the Deathly Hallows.

Tom released a long sigh, and carefully picked up the Resurrection Stone.

*

Sirius glanced up in annoyance as someone knocked on the door. Even Remus and Harry knew better than to disturb his time with Sophia. She’d long since got over her distrust of him, but she hated practicing magic with anyone else but him or her siblings, and would clam up the second someone else entered the room.

Sirius tried to ignore it and turned back to Sophia with a smile, but she cast down her eyes and didn’t move. Sirius hissed between his teeth and stood up to stalk across the room to the door, flinging it open.

“What—”

His voice trailed off when he saw Riddle standing there. Sirius tried to clear his throat, and ignored the corpse-like smile that flickered at the edges of Riddle’s mouth. “What is it, Riddle?” Sirius asked, and decided that he didn’t have to bark as hard as he had originally when he’d thought it was someone he loved interrupting them.

“I found this,” Riddle said casually, holding out what looked like a rock he’d picked up from the side of the road. “And I thought of you.”

Sirius shot him a disbelieving look, but Riddle kept holding out the stone, and you did what Riddle told you or you were out of Fortius. (Most of the time). Sirius sighed and reached out, closing his hand around the pebble.

He was prepared for almost anything—from an electric shock like one of James’s pranks would have given him, to the stone to dissolve because it was just an illusion—but the shock of cold that ran up his arm still made him gasp. And the shadowy dark figure that materialized around the stone a second later made him start back, teeth bared, hand closing harder around the pebble in pure shock.

At first he hoped he was mistaken, but the dark figure formed into the one he’d thought it was since he caught a glimpse of a face. He didn’t forget the woman who’d watched over the darkest moments of his childhood.

“Mother,” Sirius hissed.

Walburga Black, or the ghost of her, folded her arms and glared around the room. Sirius half-glanced over his shoulder, glad to see that Sophia had already ducked out of sight. The last thing she needed was the kind of trauma that this dead bitch could have inflicted on her. “So you called me at last. You listened to me only after I was dead. I suppose I should have expected that.”

Sirius stared at her and said nothing. What the hell was she talking about? They’d screamed at each other when she came to “visit” him during his imprisonment, and they’d done the same thing after she’d died and Narcissa had made him a gracious present of Walburga’s portrait. Never did he remember her ever talking about ghosts or calling her.

Then again, he might have broken out of his imprisonment just to get away from her eventually, so he supposed he could have forgotten something like this in the midst of one of her tirades.

“Black,” Riddle said softly. “Ask her what she means.”

Walburga glanced over her shoulder and sneered at the sight of him. “Consorting with Mudbloods, Sirius?” she asked. “You haven’t done everything I told you, then. But why did I expect such an ungrateful bastard of a son to—”

“Why did you want me to call you, Mother?” Sirius interrupted. He had to speak now, before Walburga said something else that got Riddle really upset. He would have liked to scream at her the way he had at her portrait, but more than that, he wanted to know what she had to say and then dismiss her again.

Walburga snarled at him. It was remarkable how expressive her face was, even for a ghost’s, Sirius thought, and then clenched his teeth. He didn’t want to think about how expressive her face was. He didn’t want to stand here talking to her.

But Riddle had brought this stupid stone to him, and Riddle had given him shelter and introduced him to Harry and brought Remus in and given Sirius a purpose in life. So Sirius stood there and endured while Walburga did some more sneering.

“You would already know, if you had paid attention when you were younger.”

“What, to you cursing me? Ordering Kreacher to beat me? Telling—”

“There’s a book in the Grimmauld Place library. Secrets of the Damned.”

Sirius jerked. He remembered seeing that book, but he hadn’t paid any attention. He’d thought it was just some necromancy book or other Dark Arts tome that his ancestors had collected, and so what? Even after ten years nearly alone (except for his mother’s constantly screaming portrait), he hadn’t been desperate enough to read that.

“Black?”

“Just a minute, Riddle,” Sirius muttered, not taking his eyes from the ghost. “What about that book, Mother?”

“It talks about what you might need to do to win a war, should you be so unlucky as to find yourself trapped in one.” Walburga gave him a sly look. “And if you don’t read it yourself, then it’ll chew the eyes out of anyone who tries.”

Sirius shrugged angrily. He didn’t have any idea what value that bloody book had, but Riddle was scribbling down what might be the title, so he supposed the man had accomplished what he wanted when he’d handed the damn stone to Sirius. “Fine. Go away now.”

“How can I do that?” Walburga asked, with a soft, delighted laugh. “I didn’t come because you summoned me. The Resurrection Stone has to be turned over and a particular spirit concentrated on to do that. Instead, I came because I wanted to and have been hovering around you unseen ever since I died. Now that I’m here, why should I go away?”

Sirius stared at her, his mind leaping like a startled Kneazle between horrific things—that Walburga could stay around forever and that this was the Resurrection Stone—and not letting him do much except gibber.

“Enough, madam,” Riddle said softly, his voice coiling around the corners of the room like a cold snake. “I will not have you staying here, terrifying your son. Your welcome is rescinded.”

He seemed to hiss those last words, and a dark whirlwind picked up around the corners of the room where the cold snake had been, dancing closer and closer until Sirius had to close his eyes against the pressure of the air. He heard his mother shrieking something, and when he looked again, he was just in time to see her being sucked through the wall, her face distorting for a long moment before she vanished.

The minute Sirius was sure that she was gone, he flung the Resurrection Stone at Riddle. It bounced off his forehead. Riddle gave him a long look.

“Punish me all you like,” Sirius told him, panting. His Mind-Healers had said acting like that, like a dog, was something he should try to avoid, but he didn’t really care. “I’m not going to subject myself to that woman again.”

Riddle slowly inclined his head. “I only gave you the Stone in the first place because your cousin’s Divination showed that you were somehow associated with it, and I had to see what secrets you would expose.”

“So you gave me one of the Deathly Hallows not knowing what would happen?”

Riddle just raised his eyebrows. “You were never in any danger of being haunted permanently by her. I control the wards of Fortius, and because spirits are a part of their guardians, spirits cannot stay here when I rescind their welcome.”

“But you still didn’t know what would happen when you handed me the Stone. You are such a wanker, Riddle.”

There was a long moment which felt as if Sirius was balanced and tilting on the edge of a precipice, and he had time to reflect that perhaps it wasn’t the best tactic to address an all-powerful wizard who wasn’t a friend that way—

And then Riddle laughed.

Sirius stepped back with a long sigh and shake of his head. Riddle turned and left the room, Summoning the Stone to his hand on the way. Sirius slumped back against the wall and turned his head to check on Sophia.

Sophia was peeking up from around the chairs, an expression of intensity on her face that Sirius didn’t understand until she spoke. “You had the kind of childhood I did? You had that for a mother?”

Sirius hesitated. Then he nodded. “She was awful. And her portrait was worse. And the thought of being haunted by her spirit for the rest of my life was more than I can bear.”

“I’m glad that Father didn’t come back as a ghost,” Sophia whispered, settling into her chair again.

Sirius watched her for a minute, but she seemed to be all right. So he sat down across from her and went back to teaching her.

And tried not to think too much about his upcoming meeting with Fred and George Weasley, who were taking this apprenticeship thing a lot more seriously than he’d thought they would.

*

Fred thought he and his brother were doing pretty well about learning the rules of Fortius, given that they’d never been inclined to obey the rules at Hogwarts at all.

They’d arrived and been shown around the grounds by Mr. Padfoot, and introduced to Mr. Moony—something that they were reeling a little from internally, still, to know that Mr. Moony was the legendary murderous werewolf Remus Lupin—and the Headmaster, Tom Riddle. They’d heard of him before, but mostly in the context of a weak half-blood who did Hogwarts a favor by taking some of the Muggleborns with louder parents. Fred still didn’t know what to make of the man who looked at them across a desk scattered with crystals that seemed to be paperweights and looked more dangerous than Minister Malfoy ever had, the times they’d met him.

But they couldn’t get used to everything, especially since the seventh-year students at Fortius were taking classes so different from the ones at Hogwarts that he and George would essentially have to sit their OWLS all over again. For now, Headmaster Riddle had said they could attend the fifth-year classes.

And he’d taken them into the labs where they’d met Shante Carol.

Carol, as she’d told them to call her, was even more impressive than Mr. Moony and Mr. Padfoot. Yes, they were geniuses with pranks, there was no doubt of that. But Carol was the only person Fred and George had ever met who could reach out and touch a potion and shape it to be something else just because of her will.

Sometimes Fred thought he and George had almost achieved that with some of the simpler pranks they’d put together. But it had never worked out exactly the way they’d envisioned. He supposed that they had to work on it further.

Carol had already achieved it. She explained her method of making potions into diseases, and it sounded like nonsense half the time, but only half the time. And this was an area where, thanks to the rules at Fortius that implied seventh-year students should have embarked on their own private course of study several years ago, they could do what they wanted, as long as Carol was willing to accept them as students.

George had been the one to get down on his knees in the labs a few days ago and bow his head until it touched the floor. “Most marvelous and amazing Potions brewer Carol,” he had intoned, “will you accept a few humble purebloods as your students?”

The woman looked back and forth between them for a moment. She’d been clasping a capped vial that was filled with a potion which made Veritaserum seem heavy and clouded. Fred had wanted to touch it with a longing that surprised him, but Carol had warned them already that they didn’t want to do that.

Well, unless they did want blood to explode out of their eyes and noses and mouths and ears and arses. Then, Carol had said cordially, they could do whatever they wanted.

“I haven’t had good luck with students in the past,” Carol had finally said slowly. “Not direct ones, working under me instead of just attending a Potions lecture I did for a little while. They’re too horrified by what I do.”

“We’re not horrified,” Fred said, knowing that, as always, he was speaking for his twin. “We’re fascinated.”

“What you do is fantastic,” George agreed.

“If you let us help you—”

“And adopt some of your techniques, and adapt them—”

“Then we’ll be happy here.”

Carol obviously thought about it, her fingers tapping on the crystal vial. Fred watched with a curiosity and a nervousness that he couldn’t hide. Of course, he didn’t want to experience the disease that Carol had enchanted into the potion. On the other hand, he wanted to know how she’d done it, how her will and magic interacted with the potion, so badly that he felt hungrier than he ever had for food.

“I haven’t had many older students, either,” Carol murmured, seemingly talking to herse. “They were set in their ways by then, and didn’t want to listen to me. The younger ones sometimes did, but they didn’t have the skills.” She looked directly into Fred’s eyes for a second, and then George’s. “Would you be willing to listen to me? Obey, if I told you to move away from a cauldron or not use a certain set of ingredients?”

“Of course we would,” Fred said at once. George bobbed his head.

Yes, obedience hadn’t been their strong suit at Hogwarts. But there, there was almost nothing challenging, except planning pranks and sneaking into the dungeons around the Slytherin common room. (Fred had to touch his arm then, as a remembered edge of Ron’s curse made its way up the skin).

Fortius was a constant challenge, and Carol’s labs promised more and endless fascinations.

Carol thought about it some more. She was the stillest person Fred had ever met, the exact opposite of Mr. Padfoot with his constant whirlwind of motion and Mr. Moony with his barely contained energy. But it probably meant she was taking them seriously, so it wasn’t like they could really complain.

“Very well,” Carol said at last. “We’ll try it on a provisional basis. If you disobey me during the next three days or act as though you’re too impatient to be good in a Potions lab, then I’ll dismiss you.”

George stood up. “Yes, Professor Carol.”

Fred echoed him. He could feel prickling little thrills of gooseflesh racing down his arms, and he didn’t have to look at his twin to know he would be in the same state. They were going to work with someone who could turn potions to diseases by essentially combining the ingredients in the right way. How cool was that?

*

Hermione closed her eyes and waited for a long moment, the hovering hawk of her mind poised above a precipice. In a few moments, it would dart forwards and try to grab its prey in its talons, but right now, she wasn’t ready to do so.

“Go.”

Hermione sent the hawk flying without opening her eyes. She let the wind from her wings lift and bear her, and then hurtled down towards the crystalline target that was the mind of a Yaxley who had escaped the slaughter Professors Lupin and Black had inflicted on the family a few years ago. This was an advanced stage of training in Legilimency—reaching out to a distant mind where she had never met the person and couldn’t have eye contact—but Professor Elthis had decided that she was ready.

The pressure of what Hermione always saw as a starless night surrounded her. The distance between minds was conceptualized by every Legilimens slightly differently, but skies were apparently a common one. Professor Elthis had admitted that she visualized stars and a moon, though.

Hermione flew through absolute darkness.

Her talons pierced the crystal of Harmonia Yaxley’s mind.

Hermione gasped to herself as she twisted her wings and landed, a narrow, diving angle of attack that shouldn’t alert Yaxley’s conscious mind. Her hawk hunted only a single, specific memory, made easier to find in this case because Riddle had some control over Yaxley and Hermione was striking from a school controlled and warded by Riddle. If Hermione did this right, only that part of Yaxley’s mind would become prey and no other part would ever see or feel the hawk’s shadow.

Hermione flexed the hawk’s talons around the memory and yanked hard, pulling it first to the surface of Yaxley’s mind and then away entirely. Her eyes fluttered open, and she found herself staring at Professor Elthis, who had bent over her.

“You were gone so deeply into your own mind that I couldn’t feel you,” the professor said quietly. “Did you get it?”

“Yes.” Hermione shut her eyes and winced for a second, her hand coming up to touch her temple. The first moments after she integrated someone else’s memories into hers were always difficult. “I felt—I feel what she felt when she was at the slaughter of the Yaxley family in their home.”

“Main emotions?”

Hermione carefully formed a protective mental shell around the memory, sort of like the way she thought oysters must do it around the specks of grit that became pearls, and rolled it back and forth. “Disorientation. Fear. Rage. Terror. So much terror.”

Professor Elthis nodded. “Good. That’s a basic weapon, but it’s a powerful one. Do you think that you could lob it at someone else?”

“Yes.”

“Shielded?”

Hermione let out a slow breath. This was the challenge that she had failed before, but hiding from it would do no good. “Yes, professor. If you want me to try, then I will.”

“Good. Eyes open and on me, Hermione.”

Hermione opened them. Professor Elthis glanced at her and started to turn away, the way that someone might pass her in an ordinary corridor or in the middle of a duel when Hermione didn’t look like that dangerous an opponent.

Hermione struck.

The encrusted ball of terror and Yaxley’s memories tumbled from her mind into Professor Elthis’s, and hit the older woman’s Occlumency shields. Professor Elthis gasped a little, and Hermione pushed it forwards harder, relying on that fleeting moment of eye contact, and smashed into the shields again and again within the space of a heartbeat.

Professor Elthis’s shields broke, and Hermione’s, Yaxley’s, memory rolled in.

Professor Elthis turned even paler than usual. Hermione caught herself watching anxiously, and bit back the scowl. She had to be able to do this, or she wouldn’t be able to defend herself in battle. Catching someone’s eye shouldn’t even be necessary once she fully grew into her Legilimency powers, or so Professor Riddle and Professor Elthis had told her. She could do it just by feeling the dim light of someone else’s mind shining through their skulls.

The professor caught herself with one hand on the back of a chair, and breathed in a measured pattern for a long moment. Then she nodded and stood up. “Yes. That was well-done, and the shield surrounding it made it harder to deal with the emotion and incorporate it into my own mind. Someone who’s not an Occlumens and anticipating an attack like that would have no chance.”

Hermione beamed. She wasn’t the most powerful student at Defense—that was Harry—or the best with words—that was Theo—or the most clever and skilled student at shaping wards—that was Angelina. But she was what she was, and that kind of person could help in battle.

Hermione hoped she would have a chance at Lucius Malfoy’s mind before everything ended.