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Chapter Thirty-Nine—The Chase

Theo lifts his head. He couldn’t sleep, which is nothing new, and he thought he would spend time reading in the common room, in front of the fire. But a scent has disturbed him.

He finds that happens often now, with the heightening of his senses that his Animagus form has brought him. He can barely stand to eat some spicy foods, and he was able to smell a Dungbomb that one of the fourth-years tried to sneak into their dormitory before it went off.

This smell, though, he knows he’s scented before, but it takes him a long moment to place it. Theo puts that down to it being so unexpected at Hogwarts, because when the familiarity slams into him, he transforms without a second thought.

A rat. A familiar rat.

Theo crouches down on the other side of the chair from the common room door. The room is filled with flickering shades of grey now, fire shifting back and forth and shadows doing the same thing, but it also glows more brightly to Theo’s feline eyes than it did to his human ones. He flares his nostrils, and his mouth opens in spite of himself.

The rat is creeping along the wall near the door, aiming for the dormitory where Harry sleeps.

Theo slinks on padded paws, his belly nearly touching the floor. It seems impossible that Pettigrew could hear him or sense him.

But he does. The rat stops in place, whiskers twitching. Theo freezes, but the damage is done. The rat whirls around and runs for the common room door in a pattering of claws and a faint squeal that Theo doubts anyone but him would hear.

Theo springs. But the rat is moving faster than he thought, and able to duck into smaller corners than Theo’s leopard body can, and he gets out from under the common room door.

Theo nearly lets out a cough of frustration, but manages to turn back to human long enough to rasp the password. Then he runs straight down the corridor, blurring from human to leopard in mid-stride.

Pettigrew isn’t going to get away this time.

*

“Hello again, Harry.”

Voldemort is speaking in Parseltongue, but Harry sees no need to respond the same way, especially when they’re not even in the same solid dreamscape that Voldemort gave him last time, but in some dark red place that pulses like a beating heart. Maybe it’s meant to be one. Harry doesn’t think he will ever understand Voldemort’s choices. He folds his arms. “Did you have something to say to me?”

There’s a pause, and one of the dark red shafts of light sways aside in a way that reminds Harry of some of the semi-doors that he saw in the Speakers’ world. Voldemort steps out. He’s barefoot, and his body gleams like marble. He’s turning his yew wand over and over in his fingers, and a great snake is coiled on the ground next to him, tongue darting out.

Harry looks at the snake and swallows. He can feel an odd buzz coming from her, one that seems as though it’s replicated in his own heartbeat. He’s pretty sure that he’s looking at another living Horcrux.

“Do you know why I can access your dreams?”

“You’re a wanker,” Harry says. It’s odd how strong the temptation is to tell him about the piece of his soul that he’s buried in Harry’s scar. But Harry is going to be intelligent and not tell him about that.

No matter how wonderful the expression on his face would be if Harry did.

Voldemort hisses, a long, low sound that seems to twine around his bones. Harry doesn’t get the same pain in his scar that he did before, though. He folds his arms and does his best to lounge against the red-stained air and look thoroughly unimpressed.

“Your protector is no longer here.”

“Professor Snape has never been able to follow me into my dreams.”

“Dear Severus will get what is coming to him in due time,” Voldemort says, but his fingers flex around the wand in a way that tells Harry how much less calm he is than he seems. “But no, I was referring to young Theodore.”

Absurd as it is, Harry almost snaps for Voldemort to call him Theo, about how much he hates Theodore, and then he catches himself back with a gasp. “What did you say?”

“I know you heard me.”

Voldemort’s eyes are gleaming with sick satisfaction, but Harry ignores him. He reaches out and gropes for his—he supposes he can still call it a bond with Theo, the one that Professor Snape established between their minds. He can’t find it, and that makes his heart start speeding so hard that he’s gasping before he thinks it through.

“You know I am telling the truth.”

The fact is, Harry has never tried to reach for the connection between his mind and Theo’s before, except when he was in the process of being yanked out of a nightmare, so he doesn’t even know if this blankness is how it’s supposed to feel or not. But he’s also pretty sure that Voldemort is telling the truth, if only because he would be delighted to hurt Theo.

To hurt someone so important to Harry.

“The Speakers hate you,” Harry says, reaching for the only weapon he has, words, while he tries desperately to figure out some way to slide himself out of this dream.

“They are beasts.”

“They could have reached out to you when you were making a name for yourself in the first war, or even when you were a schoolboy. They deal with me, so they wouldn’t have cared that you were young. But they never did. Do you know why?”

Voldemort’s tongue darts out, forked. The snake has gone still at his feet, unblinking golden eyes fastened on Harry. “You will tell me.”

“They consider you corrupt. An insult to Parseltongue. They didn’t want to associate with someone who could taint them and their magic.”

“I am the strongest Parselmouth in the world!”

“And one who would—” Again Harry has to choke back the immediate temptation, because he cannot tell Voldemort that they know he split his soul. He shakes his head. “One who would corrupt them by association. They would need an assurance that you would be a faithful ally, and we all know that you’re too obsessed with torturing your allies to be that to them.”

Voldemort hisses, so sharply that it sounds like he’s trying to carve the words on air. Harry moves away from the lash of a spell and smiles at Voldemort, shaking his head back and forth a little.

“One has to pity you. The only thing that you have to be proud of is your descent from Slytherin’s line, and the people who should be your natural allies reject you.”

“You will bring them to me.”

There’s a heavy, still pressure on Harry’s mind. He thinks it’s Voldemort using the connection between them to try and manipulate his actions the way he might with the Imperius Curse.

But Harry is resistant to it the way he was to the Curse. He lets his smile widen across his face. “You’re going to die in the end. Did you know that? Snakes like the Speakers can shed their skins and move on into new forms, but you decided to stay in your own, old form. Even the one that you got from the resurrection is really more like a discarded skin than anything else. They told me that you—”

Voldemort snarls at him and attacks.

Harry finds himself dodging faster than he knew he could. The red curtains dance around him. The snake near Voldemort’s feet is gathering herself to lunge at him, and Harry keeps an eye on her, but he’s also thinking about something the faster movement has revealed to him.

Voldemort isn’t the only one who has the power to alter the dreamworld. Harry can do the same thing.

He finds it a lot harder than Voldemort probably does, as hard as accepting the idea that he’s a Horcrux. But he shapes the truth like a blade in his mind, and abruptly he Apparates across the distance between them and holds the blade to Voldemort’s throat.

Voldemort snaps a hand up to grip Harry’s wrist. Harry leans forwards in the corner of time before he’s flung away and slits.

There’s a horrible scream. The blood is pouring from Voldemort, a long waterfall of it, far heavier and darker than it should be with such a simple cut. And Voldemort is reeling with his hands clasped to his throat, as if he could hold the wound shut by sheer faith.

Harry laughs.

The snake strikes towards him, but the world is already dimmer around them, less controlled by Voldemort’s will, and Harry manages to slip to the side and away. He can feel the supposedly solid darkness at his back parting like Voldemort’s flesh. He tumbles and spins, and lands in his bed.

When he looks at his hands, he is holding a blade, and there’s blood on it.

The curtains come tearing open. Harry rolls over, ready to defend himself, but it’s Blaise on the other side, his face nearly grey.

“Harry, what—”

“Theo is in danger,” Harry says with a calmness that he doesn’t feel, rolling to his feet and making sure that he has his wand in its holster. Lion comes awake with a sleepy little flutter and flies to his shoulder amid complaints. Harry tells the snake to hold onto his neck and faces Blaise. “Voldemort tricked him somehow. We have to find him.”

“He can reach into the school?”

Harry glances at Draco. He doesn’t have time for whinging, but it doesn’t seem as though Draco intends to do it. He’s shaking, though, one hand pressed to his mouth as he leans against the side of the bed.

“Just through my dreams,” Harry says. “Well, that was true until now. I don’t know how he reached Theo.”

And he doesn’t have time for debate, either. He turns around and runs out of the bedroom. He can hear pounding footsteps behind him that are probably Blaise. By the time he reaches the floor of the common room, Blaise has started knocking on other doors and calling names.

Sensible, Harry acknowledges to himself. Probably they’re going to need help to stop whatever trap Voldemort has sprung on Theo.

Harry, himself, doesn’t stop. Blaise already hit him with a Tracking Charm, so he’ll be able to follow no matter where Harry goes. Harry hisses the common room door open and starts pounding down the corridor, Lion hanging on hard enough with his tail to nearly choke Harry.

It’s only when Harry casts the first Tracking Charm and begins to follow its thin thread of silver light that he realizes he’s still clutching the blade that somehow came with him from his dreams. He keeps it. It feels right in his hand.

*

Theo follows Pettigrew, running crouched low to the floor. The rat darts away from him, squealing. It seems that every time Theo is sure that he’s going to catch the bastard, Pettigrew finds some new corner to hide in.

Pettigrew finally darts into the shade of a classroom door. Theo flattens himself and blends into a shadow. Perhaps he can catch the rat if Pettigrew thinks he’s gone and makes a run for it. The walls of this corridor are heavy, pristine stone without the cracks and holes that he’s used so far.

Pettigrew pokes his nose out, and Theo’s tail swishes. But Pettigrew abruptly comes rolling free, transforms back into a wizard with his wand in his hand before he can even think, and aims his wand at Theo with a hiss of, “Confringo animam.”

Theo doesn’t know what the spell means. He leaps straight upwards, though, and it passes beneath him, making a stone crack and the floor rupture. Theo touches down lightly on his paws and springs at Pettigrew.

Pettigrew casts again. The spell hits Theo.

There’s a distant rushing in his head and a feeling like ice striking down his spine, but Theo doesn’t care. Not when he has Pettigrew’s throat in his teeth, and not when it’s so easy—easy—to wrench his head to the side. Blood splatters into his mouth while Pettigrew shrieks and Theo’s hind legs rise and rake for the disembowel.

The smell of spilled intestines as well as spilled blood is strong all around him. Theo barely restrains himself from starting to eat. The leopard part of him wants to, but the human part of him understands that Pettigrew is dead.

A second later, he feels something else.

Theo screams in pain as the curse seems to turn around and redouble around the inside of him, bouncing and carving off bits of bone. Or what feels like bone. He rolls on his side, twitching and twisting. His tail is going into mad spasms. He screams again, but this time it’s a small and pathetic sound.

He still can’t tell what the curse did. He cudgels his brain, forcing his way past the instinctive fear and pain and hatred and focusing on the Latin words that the feline part of him doesn’t speak. But he’s human, not feline.

Confringo animam.

I destroy the soul.

Theo cries out again, but this time, it’s not from the pain, which has already subsided. It’s from the despair, because he does know that spell, one that his father saw fit to instruct him in although he never let Theo perform it.

That spell rips apart the soul of a magical person in much the same way that murder can—or, Theo now thinks, sick and blinking from the rush of knowledge, the way a Horcrux can. It’s supposed to kill. Theo thinks that it probably only didn’t because he’s not human right now, and technically, his soul isn’t human, either, in this shape.

But when he transforms back, he may die. Or, more likely given that it’s Voldemort who wanted Pettigrew to perform that spell, he may be left with a tattered, unstable soul, and subject to the same fits of violence and temper that Voldemort is.

Theo shudders, and curls up, and continues to shudder.

*

“Theo?”

In the end, it’s Theo’s cries that drew Harry here, not the Tracking Charm. He slows when he sees the great spotted cat curled around himself in the corridor, amid enough splatters of blood that Harry knows whoever Theo hunted is dead before he walks over there.

He has to admit he didn’t expect it to be Pettigrew, though.

Harry blinks, and blinks again, and ignores Lion’s agitated hissing as he steps forwards to crouch beside Theo. The footsteps behind him slow to a halt, and Pansy gasps loudly, “Potter, get away from that, it’s a killer!”

Harry shakes his head. He knows that Theo will never harm him, knows it the way he knows what words in Parseltongue mean. He reaches out and gently touches Theo’s shoulder, leaving his hand there the way he would if Theo were human.

He loses track of what he murmurs again and again, but knows it’s mostly Theo’s name, before the leopard shudders and his fur shrinks. Theo, luckily clothed, rolls over and stares up at Harry with distant icy eyes.

“He cursed me,” Theo whispers.

“What did he curse you with?”

“The Soul-Breaker.”

Blaise chokes behind Harry. Harry knows the name sounds bad, but he also needs to know what it does, and he doesn’t want to ask Theo. He pivots on one knee, keeping a hand on Theo’s shoulder while tilting his head sideways to rest a cheek on Lion’s scales and hopefully soothe him, too. “What does it do, Blaise?”

“It fragments the soul,” Blaise whispers. His face is sickly. Pansy is crowding behind him, and Draco, and Daphne. Further back are a few Slytherins Harry doesn’t know as well. “It—it could kill someone, but that’s honestly a rare side-effect. It’s more likely to make them violent and unstable.”

Like Voldemort.

Harry bares his teeth. “What’s the countercurse?”

“It’s a potion,” Blaise says. His voice is very gentle, and Harry hates that more than the words Blaise is speaking—at least until he goes on, and then Harry hates those words more than he’s hated anything in his life. “And it has to be brewed by the person who cast the curse.”

Harry closes his eyes.

Theo’s shoulder bobs up and down underneath his hand with the force of his gasp.

“We’re going to find another way,” Harry says. He almost doesn’t recognize his voice. It sounds flat to his own ears, calm, although he knows that’s only because the rage is burning so far beneath the surface it isn’t breaking out right now. “Severus is a Potions expert. I know—more than a lot of people about Dark curses.” He won’t say the word Horcrux in a public corridor. “And I know magic related to Parseltongue, which can do amazing things. We’ll figure something out.”

“Unspeakables have researched this for centuries,” Blaise whispers. “There’s not a lot known about it. It’s one of the reasons that so many people think the curse brings death. It doesn’t, but—I only know that because of my mother. But I know how hard other people have tried to find a counter, and it’s not there, Harry. I’m sorry.”

Harry just shakes his head. “I’ll make there be a counter.”

“There isn’t. I’m sorry.”

Harry stands up. He can feel more people gathering around them, probably more Slytherins drawn by their exit from the common room and prefects from other Houses, and he doesn’t want to expose his friends’ weaknesses in front of them anymore. Blaise shouldn’t have to apologize in public. Theo shouldn’t have to cry. “I’m going to find it.”

Blaise is at least wise enough to say nothing further. Harry slashes his wand down and hisses, creating a wavering bubble that is the latest thing Lyassa has been tutoring him in. It forms the coils of a writhing, illusory constrictor around Theo and hides him as Harry casts a Lightening Charm on him and picks him up.

He does have to tuck away the blade that he formed in his dreams first, but the sight of the thing only makes him more determined.

I Apparated across the dreamscape and made Voldemort bleed somehow. I can do miraculous things. I’m going to use that to heal Theo.

Theo is quiet in his arms, and motionless except for some shuddering. Harry holds his friend closer, the friend Voldemort is trying to take away from him, and braids hatred and fear and determination together.

I am not going to let him die.