lomonaaeren

“This is…Dark.”

Hermione was shivering, staring around the cave and the lake filled with Inferi, her eyes wide. Harry nodded grimly. He knew that he would probably never have found this place if not for the notes that Dumbledore had left, and he could only be grateful for them, while at the same time resenting the necessity.

If he hadn’t kept so many secrets…

But Harry pushed the idea away. Dumbledore was dead, he had paid the ultimate price for keeping those secrets, and Harry really couldn’t just stand around resenting him all his life. He had things to do.

“Here.”

Adrian was walking ahead of them. He had Apparated Harry in, since it would still be four weeks until Harry could legally do that himself. Harry broke into a trot to catch up, and found Adrian stepping back from a boat that was just shimmering into visibility.

“You knew that was there?”

Ron’s voice was suspicious. Harry sighed. “You saw Dumbledore’s notes, too, Ron.”

“Doesn’t mean I trust a Slytherin.”

Harry turned away without answering. Once again, his highest priority was to avoid an argument.

Although he was starting to wonder if it really should be.

“Those notes about the island and the boat and the potion made it sound like we’d have to torture someone to death to get to whatever it is on the island,” Hermione said in a tiny voice. She was wringing her hands, eyes darting around. “You said that the potion can only be drunk out of this basin, not drained or scooped out?”

“Yeah.”

“That sounds dangerous. Terrible.”

Harry shrugged a little. They already had a plan to deal with that.

Adrian raised his wand, concentrating. A flicker of blue blossomed at the end of his wand, and then more blue and white and still more blue and still more white, forming into a bridge of ice that arched from the edge of the lake over to the island. Adrian grunted with the effort of holding it, and Harry cast him an anxious glance.

“Fucking go,” Adrian muttered under his breath.

Harry knew why. Adrian could only perform this spell here because it was technically Dark Ars since it could breach wards. The longer he held it, though, the harder it became, given the pressure of Voldemort’s magic in the cave that was meant to make it impossible to bypass the lake with anything but the boat.

Harry ran up the bridge, and he heard Adrian growling at Ron and Hermione to follow. Ron sounded as if he wanted to stay and argue, but at least Hermione pulled him after.

The ice bridge was beginning to crack by the time Harry reached the island and turned around. He swallowed, anxious, as he watched Ron and Hermione reach the shore and Adrian pound up it with the kind of speed that he usually achieved only on a broom.

Adrian was still a meter or so out from the island when the ice flaked and vanished. He simply leaped, though, staggering a little as he came down next to Harry, but landing with a flash of a smile.

“Worried about me?”

“Of course,” Harry whispered, winding his hand into Adrian’s robes.

They might have started kissing, but Ron said something that Harry couldn’t quite make out in a complaining mumble, and Adrian moved back with a flash of emotion that closed his face. Harry sighed and turned to face the plinth on which the basin stood.

The potion, the poison, was tangible from here. But—Harry paused—there was something else he had expected to sense and didn’t. The Dark aura of a Horcrux was absent.

Harry glanced over his shoulder at Adrian, wondering if he was imagining things. After all, the only Horcruxes Harry had been close to were the shard from his own scar, which was rather different, and the diary, which was years ago. He could be misremembering, or this one was just different.

But Adrian was frowning, too. He waved his wand back and forth, mumbling a quick detection charm. The basin didn’t light up the way Harry knew it would have if they had found a Horcrux.

Adrian cursed, soft and low.

“What is it?” Hermione stared around at the cave walls, shivering, her arms wrapped around herself. “Is it—not the right anchor point?”

Harry started. He’d almost forgotten the stone that crackled with malevolent-looking illusion magic, which he’d put in his robe pocket. He bent over as if to examine the base of the plinth, and managed to pull it out and drop the stone.

“It might not be one as important as we thought,” he said, and moved out of the way. Ron and Hermione promptly started towards him. “But there’s a stone here, see?”

Ron and Hermione started discussing how they were going to break the “curse” on the stone. But in the meantime, Adrian had looked into the basin, and he was shaking his head a little as he looked at Harry.

Harry grimaced. There was a golden locket in the basin, under the potion, and it did resemble the one that he had seen in some of the Pensieve memories Dumbledore had shown him. But this wasn’t the right one.

A decoy? A trap?

Not a trap from Voldemort, Harry thought, a second later. He didn’t think this setup, as elaborate as it was, would have been to protect a fake. Well, maybe it would have been if Voldemort was smarter, but that would have required him to be smart enough not to make Horcruxes in the first place.

So.

A fake, from someone else.

Harry stepped back and nodded to Adrian. Adrian raised his wand and closed his eyes. Sweat broke out on his face after a second, but Harry just waited. He trusted Adrian, and besides, Adrian was good with fire spells.

A spark grew at the tip of his wand the way it had when he was conjuring the ice bridge. This time, it was red and hot and furious. It gathered at the base of the plinth and surrounded the stone in swirling, red-hot flame.

Ron and Hermione jumped back from it, swearing. They’d destroyed the stone that Harry had left, he saw, and now they all watched they flames rising, turning more blue and white as they did so. Harry saw one of the tongues of fire trying to grow a lion’s head, and felt the force of will that Adrian exerted to make the Fiendfyre tame and looking like the product of an overpowered Incendio.

Then it was gone. The plinth was destroyed, and the basin, and the potion. The locket slumped in a puddle of molten gold.

And it didn’t bleed black blood. It did nothing but look pitiful.

Harry grimaced and shook his head when Adrian glanced at him. Even if it hadn’t been certain before, it was now. The locket definitely wasn’t a Horcrux.

“What was that?”

“The plinth and the basin were part of the anchor,” Harry said quietly. “Adrian was destroying all of it so we could make sure that we didn’t miss any of it.”

“You almost got us!” Ron snapped, turning to Adrian. “You were trying to kill us!”

Adrian gave him a cool look. “If that had been the case, I wouldn’t have missed.”

Ron started to snap something else, and Harry’s anger and disappointment over this whole elaborate trap being a waste of time surged up and he shouted, “Enough!” before he even thought about it.

Ron turned to him, red-faced. Adrian remained as remote and cool as he had been, but Harry knew Adrian trusted him, wouldn’t think Harry was abandoning his boyfriend for his friends.

“I trust Adrian, and I trust the two of you, and I won’t have your arguing getting in the way and disrupting us,” Harry said. He swept his eyes back and forth across everyone’s faces, although Adrian just looked faintly amused. He would know as well as Harry that Harry wasn’t really talking to him. “Stop saying that he’s going to try to kill you. He would never try to kill one of my friends.”

“So he would try to kill other people?”

“If it were necessary to protect Harry,” Adrian said, putting a hand on Harry’s shoulder, “of course. Wouldn’t the two of you?”

Ron and Hermione exchanged sick glances.

Harry sighed. He knew he wasn’t going to get them past all their morality objections at once, and it didn’t matter, not when they had Horcruxes to find and a deception to keep up with Ron and Hermione thinking that they were destroying some kind of net of anchors instead. “Stop accusing Adrian.”

“Will he stop trying to kill us?”

“He’s not trying to kill you.”

“We can’t trust him.”

“If you can’t, then you should stop coming along on these expeditions, Ron, because Adrian is the only one who can cast spells like the one that got us across the lake.”

Ron glared mutinously, but Hermione tugged him towards her and whispered into his ear. Ron finally relaxed and sighed. “Yeah. Sorry, mate,” he said, pointedly only looking at Harry and not including Adrian.

At this point, Harry wasn’t sure he cared. “Come on. Let’s just get out of here.”

*

“You look upset, Harry.”

Harry sighed and flung himself into the chair across from Sirius. “Yeah. I just—this task that Dumbledore left us is complicated.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

Harry did, with a little more detail and truth than he’d used for Ron and Hermione, but sticking with the idea of anchors and a net of them that was meant to preserve Voldemort’s immortality. Sirius whistled under his breath as he listened, and then leaned back in his chair with his own Firewhisky.

“And you think that the anchor you destroyed was a fake one?”

“Yeah. I was close to one once in Dumbledore’s office, and it didn’t feel like that. We destroyed it anyway, just in case, but I don’t I think it was real.”

“What was it?”

“A stone that was spitting red sparks, and a golden locket.”

Sirius sat up, his eyes wide. “What did the locket look like?”

Harry blinked at him. “Golden, with an S made of emeralds on the front.” He thought Sirius might recognize the description, and volunteer that it was Slytherin’s locket, but Harry wasn’t going to.

Sirius swallowed. “There was a locket like that in one of the cabinets that Molly was having us clear out last summer. No, wait, the summer before this last one.”

“What?”

“You—right, you wouldn’t have known.”

“No, I was very carefully kept out of the loop,” Harry said cheerfully. “So what did this locket look like? Like I described to you? And where is it now?”

“Mundungus Fletcher—petty thief, member of the Order, you wouldn’t know him—was trying to steal treasures from the cabinets to sell, or what he thought were treasures. But Kreacher was rescuing them, and, well, I didn’t say anything. I don’t want them, but there’s no particular reason that Fletcher should profit, either.” Sirius took a deep breath. “Kreacher would know. Kreacher!”

There was a pop next to Harry’s chair, and he started and turned around. He hadn’t spent much time with Kreacher in the few days scattered here and there that he’d spent at Grimmauld Place. The elf had stared at him, muttered, and avoided him. Harry had thought he should let alone someone that determined to avoid him.

Now, Kreacher bowed and said in a surly voice, “Kreacher is answering the summons of stupid, no-good, filthy—”

“Enough of that,” Sirius cut him off. “We want to know where that golden locket that Mundungus Fletcher was trying to steal went.”

Kreacher dew himself up, his ears lifting with such offended pride that Harry stared, and wondered if a Horcrux could possess a house-elf. Or maybe if Voldemort would lower himself to possessing one.

“You are not taking Master Regulus’s locket,” Kreacher snapped.

“I—what? That belonged to my brother?”

Harry glanced at Sirius. He had heard Regulus mentioned a time or two, thought he remembered someone whispering about Sirius’s little brother being a Death Eater one of the times he’d walked into the Grimmauld Place kitchen, but the people who’d been talking about it had stopped the instant they saw him. Harry had assumed that was one of the secrets everyone had decided to keep from him.

“Master Regulus be dying for that locket.” Kreacher’s ears were quivering now. “Filthy Master Sirius is not touching it!”

“Why did Regulus give it to you?” Harry asked. It seemed odd that a possession that had killed a member of the Black family—because it was cursed? A Horcrux?—would have been so precious that the family’s only remaining house-elf.

Astonishingly, and terribly, Kreacher burst into tears.

*

“That’s four gone.”

Harry watched, nodding in silence as the locket bubbled and boiled, becoming no more than a mass of molten gold, on the floor of the cellar in Grimmauld Place where Sirius had led them when they’d told Kreacher they would destroy it. This one had definitely been a Horcrux. It had not only the miasma, but also the black blood and the hoarse voice screaming as it vanished from the world.

“I’m worried about finding the others.”

“I know. We got lucky with this one, but we won’t be able to rely on luck forever.”

Adrian’s hand rested hard and heavy on his shoulder in a way that meant Harry knew he had something important to say. He turned and looked up into his boyfriend’s face, tucking a stray curl of dark hair back from Adrian’s cheek.

Adrian swallowed. “We don’t know where the others are, but we know where one was.”

“The cave.”

“Yes. If we go back there…there’s a ritual that we might be able to perform to locate them…”

“Worse than the one we did to transfer the one in me to Dumbledore?”

Adrian blinked at him, opened his mouth slightly, and then closed it. “No,” he said, sounding hoarse. “Definitely not worse than that.”

Harry nodded. He was keeping his hope and his wonder firmly tamped down. “Then let’s do it.”