lomonaaeren

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Chapter Forty-Seven—Deadly

Sirius screams as the Dementor bears down towards him.

His mind is full of thoughts writhing and dancing like worms in a corpse, getting ready to devour him from the inside. There’s the guilt for leaving Harry behind, for not being fast enough to get there before Lily and James died in Godric’s Hollow, for not doing something that would make Harry bond to him as a godson.

And there’s the hatred for Wormtail and the killing of him, but the Dementor pulls all the satisfaction out of the memory and leaves Sirius curled as a fetal ball on the floor when it’s done.

He raises his head, panting, what might be an hour or a week after the Dementor left, and he knows one thing.

I can’t stay here. I have to get out of here.

As far as he can tell, the Dementors ignore him when he’s a dog, and even though lots of people know he’s an Animagus now, they don’t seem to have put any extra spells on the bars that would prevent him from slipping through. Maybe there are some waiting on the ways off the island, or charms that would summon the Aurors if an Animagus stepped outside, but Sirius has no way to know and at this point, no way to care.

He can’t care. He has to escape.

Sirius closes his eyes and draws together the tatters of his mind. His usual instinct would be to run straight to Remus, but Remus didn’t manage to keep him safe from being imprisoned, and Sirius shouldn’t ask his one remaining friend to hide him.

He’ll have to come up with something else. He’ll have to plan.

And he’ll have to make sure there is no way Harry can find out, because Harry would oppose him just of general principle. Which means hatred.

How did I fail so badly with the little boy I loved most in the world?

But even that Sirius had to put out of his mind so he can take deep breaths, and think about the likely places they would search for him, and how long it will take for the Aurors who patrol Azkaban to notice him missing, and the like.

He will escape. He must.

*

Hollis Lestrange is disgusting.

Harry knows that some people might think him a bit rich for saying that, when he’s already killed his first victim and is planning to someday help Blaise sacrifice people to magic suns, but seriously.

Lestrange casts little charms all day, every day, that hurt people. Not in grand ways, or justified ways, or even ones that would be funny. They cut skin and make people think they’ve been bitten by insects. They make people stumble and wrench their ankles or their wrists catching themselves. They make people drop books and the like on their feet and yelp in pain.

It’s just to satisfy his sadism that Theo talked about, Harry knows that. But it’s disgusting anyway.

He should find better ways to do it.

There are ways, as far as Harry knows. Lestrange could have found a mentor like Bathsheda or Steel. He could have dedicated himself to some cause that would train him in defensive magic and let him unleash it at targets. There are branches of the Hit Wizards that do that kind of thing, apparently.

Or he could find himself a sexual relationship. Harry didn’t know about that until Theo mentioned the option, his face as red as a sunset, but it was there.

Instead, Lestrange unleashes random pain and magic everywhere, and from the way he twitches on a daily basis, it’s still not enough.

“Cursing me might actually have satisfied him for a day or so,” Theo says briefly, when Harry asks about it. “But I don’t know if it did since I was in the hospital wing, and then we had no way to watch him.”

As far as Harry is concerned, that’s one more reason to kill Lestrange. No one just gets to use Harry’s friends as tools for their own pleasure.

Blaise leans on the corridor wall behind him as they watch Lestrange disappear through the door of the Slytherin common room. “You really hate him.”

Harry nods shortly. Artemis is hissing soothingly to him from his arm, and he ducks his head down and rests his cheek against her for a second, but it’s still hard to calm down enough to speak.

“Why?”

Harry breathes out. Then he says, as honest as he can be with only Blaise, “Well, because he’s what I might have become, I suppose, if I didn’t have you and Aradia. You tamed my desire to hurt people and set it on a better path. And Aradia showed us how to be subtle about it. Lestrange just does it for—gratification. And it doesn’t last and doesn’t even keep his desires held at bay for long.”

“So you think he should be cursing people in the name of a higher cause?’

“I am.”

Blaise leans near to steal a kiss, but steps back with a shake of his head when Harry tries to follow him for some more enthusiastic snogging. “I understand what you mean, but there really is no connection between you and Lestrange. You don’t delight in hurting people. You delight in defending your friends and keeping us safe.”

“And you delight in killing people for the Suns?”

“Someday, I will.”

Harry nods, perfectly content. Blaise is who he is, and he’s also someone training to become an assassin. It would be weird if he didn’t find a certain delight in shedding blood.

And maybe feeding the Suns isn’t exactly a noble cause, but it does mean that Blaise will do his best to look for suitable victims. And they can be ones like most of the people Aradia kills who would have caused harm to the world otherwise.

“So how are we going to handle Lestrange?”

Blaise tilts his head. “I know exactly how I want to do it, but it will involve looking up a spell.”

“You don’t know one already?”

“Not one that would do I what I want it to.”

“All right,” Harry says, curious beyond measure now, because Blaise knows a lot of spells thanks to Aradia, “then what is it?”

“Something that will turn Lestrange’s sadism against him.”

*

“You are asking me to teach you something not normally taught until the third year of one’s apprenticeship.”

“That’s not the same as a refusal.”

“No. It is not.”

Blaise calmly watches Bathsheda, who stands in front of him with her hands folded in her sleeves and her head cocked as she studies him. He has the feeling that she’s looking for some hesitation in his face, some fear.

He really should have proven already that there aren’t any roads he won’t go down to achieve his ends, but maybe she thought that the way he killed Greengrass was a fluke, or doesn’t count because it didn’t involve the spilling of blood.

“Tell me more about why you want me to teach you this spell.”

“Because the person I would use it on attacked one of my friends, and I want to make sure that he’s punished.”

“That is exactly the same wording that you used when I was talking to you about your first kill. Except that you called that person she then.”

“It’s a different person this time.”

“And how many others will you kill in pursuit of this particular goal, Blaise?”

“As many as are necessary to pay the debt back.”

Bathsheda leans in and studies him closely. Blaise stares back. He’s not entirely sure what she’s looking for, and so he doesn’t know how to do anything but be himself as hard as he can.

Whatever it is, it seems that he’s satisfied her, which he didn’t really expect. Bathsheda steps back with a small, pleased smile lingering at the corners of her mouth. “Then I will teach you a spell to turn your target’s weakness against them, although you will not practice it outside their room until I have given you permission.”

“Why did you change your mind?”

“Three reasons. First, you are determined enough to go ahead and learn the spell anyway, and I don’t want you practicing without my supervision.”

Blaise nods, not irritated, but pleased by how well his mentor knows him.

“Second, because if you keep killing in the same ways, then you will get caught, and I think you might do that if you can’t master the spell.”

This time, Blaise wants to object that he wouldn’t get caught, but he does know that he would if he goes too quickly, the way Mother told him he did last year with punishing Longbottom. So he holds his tongue.

“And third.”

Bathsheda steps forwards and bends down slightly so that they’re eye-to-eye. Blaise straightens up, his attention on her. For the first time, he can see how his mentor could be a threat to him.

“Because I am not going to be left out of the maturation of the most promising young assassin of this decade.”

Bathsheda smiles, and Blaise smiles back.

*

“You seem distant today, Mr. Potter.”

Severus watches as Harry blinks and refocuses on him with an embarrassed little smile. “My apologies, sir,” he murmurs, while his hands fly in circles over the cauldron in front of him, scattering flakes of crushed camellia petals the way that Severus has taught him. “A friend told me some distressing news, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Mr. Longbottom?”

“We’re no longer friends, sir.”

Severus pauses. He knew that, truly, but he has never heard Harry say something so final about Neville, or with such a cold tone in his voice.

Harry looks up, catches Severus’s eye, and shakes his head with a little snort. “I don’t wish him harm, sir. Not really. I’m annoyed at him, and I wish he hadn’t turned his back on me because he was so convinced I was the Heir of Slytherin. I wish he wasn’t determined to spare Ginny Weasley being called that just because she’s in the same House he is. But this isn’t about him. I don’t think about him that much anymore.”

“He thinks rather a lot about you, from what he has said to me.”

“He does?”

Severus sighs and leans back to consider Harry, who is still sprinkling in camellia petals even as he steps back from the cauldron and reaches for a pewter stirring rod, even as he focuses on what Severus is saying. “You were one of his first real friends, Harry, one who saw him for who he is without his fame. Of course he misses you.”

“But he had friends before Hogwarts.”

Severus hides a wince. Of course. He forgot that Harry was in that particularly vulnerable position. “Not ones who saw him for who he truly is, as I believe I mentioned.”

“So everyone was using him for his fame? Even the Weasleys?”

“Say, rather, that they could not separate his fame from the boy they also hosted at their house and fed and played with.”

Harry frowns a little as he stirs. His coursework has improved in leaps and bounds, and Severus doesn’t think it’s only because Harry has embraced the fact that he will never be able to cast powerful spells with a wand and concentrates instead on magic like Potions and Ancient Runes. “Huh. That’s—I didn’t know that.”

“I rather suspected you did not.”

“If you’re advocating for him, sir, saying I should take him back as a friend…”

The eyes Harry raises to him are bright and merciless and cold. Severus shakes his head, feeling frustration welling up in him. He wishes Harry would see that Neville is rather more like him than most of his other friends are.

Or “friends,” if Theodore Nott is playing the long game and trying to use Harry and Zabini. But Severus is starting to suspect that might not be the case.

“No,” Severus says. “But I do think that you are not seeing him accurately.”

Harry stands unnaturally still for a long moment, and then shrugs and melts back into the posture of a child. “Oh, well, sir. If it matters someday, I’m sure I’ll be able to change my mind and see him as he truly is. But for now, I have no reason to do that.”

Severus checks a sigh, and nods as Harry’s potion bubbles and looks as if it might overflow the cauldron. Harry leaps back with a yelp that reminds Severus he is still a child, so much so.

“Tell me what happened to make your potion do that.”

“I added too many camellia petals?”

“Indeed. Your concentration is admirable, Harry, but you must also make sure that you give your full concentration to potions that you are brewing for the first time, instead of trying to carry on other tasks.”

“You were the one who started talking to me!”

By now, Severus knows how to handle these particular flashes of childish temper. He just raises his eyebrows and says with a slight sneer, “I assumed you would be able to handle the task of brewing and talking at the same time, especially about someone you claim does not matter to you anymore. I see I was wrong.”

Harry promptly flushes, of course, and ducks his head. His voice comes out in a mumble that at least is not too defensive. “I—I don’t like thinking that much about Neville, sir. But that doesn’t mean I meant to upset the potion.”

“Of course it does not mean that,” Severus says, relenting. He might wish that Neville Longbottom had never made the mistake that cost him Harry Potter’s friendship, and he might wish that someone other than him could create the mentor relationship Neville needs, but neither fact will change for his wishing. “But tell me what you could have done to carry on an intelligent conversation and yet ensure that the camellia petals went where they needed to?”

Watching Harry’s face come alight with passion for Potions is something that Severus will probably never tire of. He listens, and thinks that the Hat did right to place Harry in Ravenclaw where his intellectual loves could be nurtured.

And if sometimes Severus sees a coldness in him that he thinks Slytherin could have nurtured…

It is only right that some part of Lily’s son remain innocent, Severus thinks. Harry has friends in Slytherin and shares the best of that House’s traits. He doesn’t need to share the worst of them.

*

“I want to learn the spell you’re learning.”

Blaise whips around, annoyed. He did take precautions in putting up charms that would warn him of anyone approaching with hostile intent, but of course he didn’t take into account that someone coming up with friendly intent would be able to bypass them. And Theo stands in front of Blaise now, smiling with his whole mouth in a frankly unnerving way.

“I was only practicing the wand movements,” Blaise snaps, although a second later, he realizes how absurd it is to think that Theo is going to tattle on him to Bathsheda.

“That’s not what I’m worried about.” Theo’s smile grows a little bigger, a little wider, with more teeth. It’s the sort of smile that Blaise only sees on himself and his mother most of the time. Well, and once on Harry’s face. “I want to be the one who takes revenge on Hollis Lestrange.”

Blaise pauses. Then he says slowly, “You were content to let us take revenge on Greengrass and Callahan for you.”

“You were the ones who had the ability and the power. But my magic is fully recovered from the curses they used on me now. I want to do something.”

“The cutting curses they used drained your magic?”

“They made it turn to healing me instead of working on my Defender power. Now I have it back. Now I want to do something.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But I want to.”

There’s a sharp burning in Theo’s eyes, and Blaise rolls his own a bit. Theo seems to think that it won’t be fair if he doesn’t get to kill his own person, and Blaise wishes he could say that neither he nor Harry are thinking like that.

But maybe we would be, if we’d been the ones injured.

“I can try to teach you the spell,” Blaise says slowly, thinking through the things that Bathsheda will probably require of him before she gives him permission to do that. “But I’ll need my mentor’s guidance, and I don’t know for sure if it will work for you. I’m training as an assassin, but you’re a Defender. It might be that your magic is too different.”

“But you’ll ask.”

“Yeah. I’ll ask.”

Theo closes his eyes and stands still for a moment as though listening for some sound that will revoke the permission Blaise just gave him. Then he opens his eyes again and gives the kind of smile that would make someone less powerful than Blaise is himself nervous. “I’m so glad that we’re friends.”

“So am I,” Blaise says, and claps Theo’s shoulder.

*

Albus sits in the middle of a ritual circle that is built into the floor of his office, ringing the bottom of his desk. Most people don’t know it’s there. In fact, he would say that there’s only one person who does who’s not a portrait of a past Headmaster or Headmistress, and that person has their own excellent reasons not to talk about it.

The circle is made of alternating lengths of gold and pewter, and shimmers with violent power as Albus contemplates it. When he looks up again, Fawkes stares back at him from his perch and doesn’t move.

“You know that I have no choice,” Albus whispers. “There have been too many deaths in the school. Tom has something to gain from them, even if they are purebloods dying, and you will not grant me the visions I need.”

From the way Fawkes ruffles all his feathers, he seems to think that’s not his problem.

“I did not wish to use one of your feathers this way, my friend,” Albus whispers, and takes out one of the down feathers that Fawkes gifted him after a burning long ago. He lays it on the floor in front of him and concentrates on it. “But needs must.”

There’s a long moment when Albus doesn’t know if this will work, even with the ritual circle backing up his own power. But then his magic surges throughout the ring, and it breaks down the feather, releasing a fleck of fire from inside it.

Albus grabs hold of that fire with his magic alone.

Sweat pours down his face at once. This is no small endeavor. But he twists the spark, and breaks it, and spreads out the immortality that came with it the way he might put butter on his toast in the morning.

And from inside that moment of expanded immortality, tangled time, the past opens like a gleaming flower.

Albus descends into the fire with his eyes and mind. He has been practicing pyromancy for the past month, seeing the future and the past alike in the flames, although originally he intended to use this feather for something quite different. But needs must.

He flickers back to the moment Alexander Callahan crashed his broom into the stands of the Quidditch pitch. And he sees the moment when a small dragon made of dust slashes a shard of glass across the boy’s face.

Albus jerks. What is that? What kind of powers has Tom developed in the time of his exile from his body? Did he actually manage to tame or talk to a dragon with his Parseltongue? Albus thought it didn’t work on dragons.

The movement disrupts the delicate balance of ritual and magic in the moment of time. It dissolves, and Albus is thrown backwards, although he comes to a stop when his back meets the wall of magic rising from the gold and pewter ring. He pants, his hand fastened over his heart, and then turns and stares at Fawkes.

Fawkes stares back.

“This proves it,” Albus whispers. “There is a connection between the deaths, and Tom benefits from them.”

Fawkes ruffles his feathers and gives a deep, sad croon that Albus doesn’t know how to interpret. Then again, there have always been movements and sounds from his familiar that Albus hasn’t known how to interpret.

Albus takes a moment to rest, and then reaches back and gropes for the edge of his desk that he moved out of the ring, rising to his feet with a slow wobbling motion. Fawkes flies over then and lands on his shoulder to preen his hair.

“May I have another feather, old friend?” Albus whispers.

Fawkes tilts his head back and forth. He seems to consider something. Then he shakes himself all over, and a brilliant golden feather tipped with blue, a color Albus hasn’t seen from him before, falls from his neck.

“Thank you,” Albus murmurs, wondering about the colors of the feather, but not enough to ask. He scoops it up, casts a Preservation Charm on it, and puts it in the drawer of his desk that the first one came from.

Then he turns his mind to how he will combat Tom when he seems to have the ability to create creatures out of dust, something Albus has never heard of before.

And more, the vision did not answer his ultimate question.

How do the deaths of two pureblood Slytherin students and Sirius Black going to prison benefit Tom now?

*

Theo waits in the shadows of a staircase leading up to the second floor for Lestrange to descend.

Apparently it took Blaise an argument with his mysterious mentor and almost a week before receiving permission, but he did teach the spell to Theo that turns the target’s weaknesses on themselves. Theo practiced it and practiced it and practiced it, but of course he couldn’t cast it on a living target without alerting someone. The spell kills.

But that makes it all the more exciting, now, to stand here and know that the first time he casts it, it’s going to be on Lestrange.

His heart thumps, his breathing comes cool and steady, and he hears the sounds of Lestrange’s footsteps coming down.

Apparently sometimes Lestrange needs to really torture someone, and he’ll pay Galleons to a few poorer purebloods in Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff to let him do it to them. He’s coming from such a session now. Theo chose this time on purpose once he learned about Lestrange’s little games because he knows that Lestrange will be more relaxed, less likely to pay attention to the world around him instead of running the activities he just participated in over and over in his mind.

Satiated.

Distracted.

Lestrange comes around the last curve at the bottom of the stairs, and Theo strikes. The spell flows away from him with a whispered hiss of breath.

Somehow, Lestrange hears, and whips towards the sound. But Theo is already ducking and rolling and putting the bulk of the staircase between them.

And a second later, Lestrange raises his own wand with a dream-like expression, and casts a Cutting Curse full at his own face.

The scream that rings through the space around them a moment later brings no response, as Theo knew it wouldn’t, because Lestrange seeks out places as abandoned as possible to play his little games. And Lestrange goes on casting, again and again, as his eyes fall out and his cheeks slither open and bleed and his muscle and bone get stripped from flesh. Theo thought about looking away, but now he watches, heart giving a glad beat each time Lestrange suffers.

Maybe he’s as much a sadist as Lestrange, but at least he seeks acceptable outlets for his love of making others suffer.

It goes on until Lestrange’s body is little more than a smear of blood and flesh. Then Theo casts silently, concentrating, and the blood and flesh rise into the air and begin to whirl around each other.

Blaise had to seek permission from his mentor to teach Theo the spell that would turn a target’s weaknesses back on them, but this kind of spell is the kind that is Theo’s alone. And easy to master, given that it’s designed to keep him safe, which pleases and soothes his Defender magic.

The rotating gobs of what was once a human body slam into each other abruptly, and Theo flinches despite himself at the wet smack they make. Then they sink to the floor and melt through the stone. Theo takes a step closer and casts a spell that will detect the presence of blood.

Nothing. There’s nothing. It’s as if Lestrange never was.

Theo closes his eyes and smiles. He knows that Blaise wondered how he planned to get away with casting this spell. The way that Blaise described it, he would have cast it in a way that would make Lestrange hurt the wrong person and then die of easy blood loss during a hex or duel. But Blaise expressed skepticism that Theo could cast it the way he wanted and pass the death off as an accident.

Theo never intended for Lestrange’s bloody, richly deserved end to seem like an accident, but he never intended for the body to be found, either.

He hears light footsteps coming down the stairs, probably the person Lestrange dallied with. It makes sense that they would wait when they heard screaming, since they would assume Lestrange was torturing someone else.

Theo ghosts into the shadows and disappears in the direction of the library. He doubts very much that Lestrange’s victim will report what they heard, especially given the illicit nature of their arrangement with Lestrange.

But if they do, anyone can search. And anyone can report Lestrange missing, not that Theo thinks that’s likely to happen quickly. Lestrange wasn’t the sort of person who had intimate friends.

Other than perhaps Greengrass and Callahan. And, well.

Theo keeps the smile he really wants to give off his face when he strolls through the entrance of the Slytherin common room a few hours later. He gave it some time to see if anyone would suspect him or report Lestrange missing. But the common room doesn’t seem subdued or upset. People are even cheering on a game of Exploding Snap near the fire, not an everyday occurrence when so many people enjoy quiet to study.

Blaise is sitting on their usual couch. Theo takes a seat beside him and remarks, “My magic seems unusually settled of late.”

“Does it?”

“Of late.”

And Blaise smiles at him and just pushes a piece of parchment towards him so that Theo can make some corrections on his Transfiguration essay. They don’t need to say anything more to each other.