章 2250: 7
"Avada Kedavra!" the wizard barked, the syllables coming off his tongue with staccato urgency.
Taylor was already moving, well away from where the green curse cut through the air. Her enemies numbered two. A roughly-robed wizard with grimy blond hair and a possible concussion, and a spindly little elf with no weapon beyond inherent magic. One was wielding lethal curses, and the other could teleport, vanish her insects with a snap of its fingers, and who knew what else.
She gathered her insects, pulling them in from all around to infest the battleground. It was dark out, with clouds covering the stars. The grounds of their fight were littered wizarding tents, arranged in untidy rows. In the distance, fires raged and fights between Aurors and masked thugs continued, neither side appearing particularly competent compared to the wizard who stood before her. She couldn't count on help coming from them, not quickly enough to stop this fight before it began.
He set a tent on fire, then slashed another down with cutting curses, clearing a flat open area in front of him. The heat of the fire did not stop her from slowly accumulating individual bugs on him, hidden in his robes. Not enough to do damage, but she valued her awareness of his location and the positions of his limbs more than a swarm of stinging pains that would just be vanished again while she wasn't in the position to stop it. That swarm would be prepared, but she would use it tactically.
He wanted her wand. His elf obeyed him. He wouldn't mind if she died in the process of acquiring it. Perhaps her death was the next step in his plans, in any case. He did not, however, know where she was at this exact moment. Whatever method he had used to find her, it was not specific enough to tell him which tents she was creeping behind. Perhaps it was the elf's doing; she was missing from the battlefield, liable to pop back in at the moment she could do the most damage, or simply whenever she was next needed by her master.
"You can't hide!" the wizard yelled.
She couldn't. Not if he was going to keep burning, exploding, or slicing through the tents between them. She had no idea what was happening inside the tents with expanded interiors, but that lack of knowledge thoroughly ruled out trying to hide inside one. Thankfully, this part of the campsite had been evacuated, but she couldn't run like the owners of these tents had. Waiting for help wouldn't get her out of the fight in the meantime.
All that was left was to fight until she won or the Aurors finally took note… Assuming they joined the battle on her side.
"Winky!" the wizard snapped, leveling another tent with a horizontal cutting curse. It popped like a balloon. "Find her!"
Taylor supposed that was one question answered. She darted between two rows of tents, only momentarily out in the open, and brought in bugs to cover her body. The only strike on her that would come as a surprise would be the one to appear right on top of her–
"There, master!" the elf called out, popping into existence next to the wizard and pointing directly at her.
Shit. She could vaguely keep track of the wizard as he formed three separate stone spears from the ground itself, levitated them, and aimed them. "Come out!" he yelled. "Or die!"
She would be doing neither. She moved enough that he was aiming the wrong way, two tents to the left, and set about pulling tent stakes from the ground with whispered summoning charms. There had to be a reason the wizard was using physical projectiles in addition to spells, and she didn't need to know his reason to copy the technique.
He fired, blindly sending the stone spears shooting out into the tents. They blasted through where she had been mere moments ago, one driving itself into the ground not far from her. All of the tents between her and the wizard would be gone in under a minute, at this rate.
She took her stakes – wooden, three hands long and sharp at one end to better drive into the ground – and dropped them in a pile. One good arm meant no carrying them.
"There!" the elf called out, pointing right at her despite there being no clear line of sight between them. That was her cue.
"Wingardium Leviosa, Depulso!" she hissed, whipping her wand at the first of five levitating stakes. "Depulso! Depulso, Depulso! Depulso!"
Her stakes were small, but they were by no means weak with the force of a banishing hex behind each one, and the levitation charm allowing them to ignore gravity. The first ripped through two tents, aimed at the wizard's heart, which he stopped dead with a shield. The second shattered against his shield but would have missed his body if his shield wasn't there. His shield faltered as she set a small number of bugs on him for a second time that night, the third incoming stake was vanished in quick succession with her bugs by the elf–
The fourth stake, shot much more quickly on the heels of the third, drove into the elf, sending its frail body flying into the open flap of one of the still-standing tents behind it. The fifth buried itself in the dirt where the elf had been standing.
She was moving again before the wizard could properly acknowledge that his elf had just been removed from the battle and probably seriously injured. "You want to play hardball, let's play hardball," she growled, bringing in the insects she had gathered out of sight but close to the wizard. They formed a visible cloud in the air, her largest swarm yet on this particular night.
The wizard recast his shield, this time putting up a variant akin to a bubble, closing himself in with a translucent barrier that flashed white whenever her insects touched it. It was glass in surface smoothness and cold to the touch.
She put enough bugs on the barrier to completely block his sight in all directions, the majority of the bugs she had within easy reach of him, and sent a few cursory blasting hexes his way as she moved, forcing him to keep the shield up. A couple more strikes and it would break, and then he was going to have no defense against her swarm. He couldn't maintain his shield and use other forms of magic at the same time, or so it seemed.
The elf popped into existence directly above her, and only the warning crack of teleportation spared her from being clubbed in the head by the blunt end of her own tent stake. She got her arm up in time to take the blow on her forearm, and subsequently the not-inconsequential weight of a shrieking, grappling house elf.
"You killing master!" the elf screamed, biting at her hand, apparently in good condition despite taking a tent stake to the chest. There wasn't even a bloody hole in its tattered makeshift garments.
"Master trying to kill me!" she gritted out, slinging her arm down and dislodging the elf. A firm kick sent it rebounding against the side of a tent, which provided it a springboard to leap right back at her. Spells were too slow, so she instead set her entire robe's worth of wasps and other insects on the elf, grabbing it by one flailing limb as it tried to tackle her, wand momentarily pinned uselessly against a bony little forearm. "Tell him to fuck off and he won't be in danger!" she screamed in its face, her bugs swarming the gnarled little creature, biting and stinging.
"Winky already lost one master tonight!" the elf shrieked. She brought her fingers together to snap, and Taylor did the sensible thing. She dropped to her knees and whipped the elf by the arm against the ground.
The elf's arm broke with a surprisingly brittle snapping sound, but her body rebounded like a rubber ball and she got her snap off. All the bugs within five feet of Taylor disappeared. The wizard, who continued to hold his shield against the bugs a few tents away, flinched as he heard the elf's shrill scream.
Taylor still had the elf by the arm, so she slung it around, smacking it repeatedly against the ground in a bid to keep it disoriented and in too much pain to fight until the repeated impacts overwhelmed its frankly ridiculous constitution. Halfway through her third swing she was blown back by an unseen force, right into one of the tents. She kept her grip on the elf, but her back smacked into something hard as they tumbled into what appeared to be a rustic log cabin.
Wizarding tents were ridiculous. She saw a rhino head mounted on the wall, and a full kitchen, and she was laying on a thick bearskin rug with her back against the side of a massively overwrought wooden throne, for no lesser word could adequately describe the ugly spruce chair. All held within what on the outside looked like a ratty two-person canvas tent.
The elf screamed in her face, attempting to claw at her eyes with three free limbs, and she reflexively threw it into the kitchen, barely managing with the tips of her fingers to snag her wand instead of throwing it too.
For a fleeting moment, they both slumped against expensive furniture. Taylor clutched her wand, rearranging her grip for casting. The elf sniffed, huge eyes glaring balefully.
The moment passed. The elf, one arm dangling limply with a sickening number of unnatural bends, leaped up onto the edge of the sink. A wave of the undamaged arm, and five knives levitated from the chopping block on the counter. "Master wants your wand!"
"Master can get his own," Taylor retorted in kind. She could feel the bugs outside the tent; the wizard was dropping his shield.
In the next handful of seconds, the battle was fought on two different fronts, simultaneously. Outside, the wizard's shield disappeared, and she drove her bugs in from every possible direction. Inside, the elf sent knives shooting at her, keeping one for itself. She blocked the knives with a hasty "Protego!" while simultaneously moving her bugs out of the way of a horribly hot plume of flames bursting from the wizard's wand. The elf was upon her with its personal knife just as she reached the wizard's skin with more than half of her bugs. Her shield faltered; he screamed in agony as she did her best to turn him into a pincushion.
"Winky!" he yelled, and the elf popped away mid-jab, reappearing by his side.
"Fuck!" Taylor yelled. The elf dropped the knife and snapped her bugs away again, rendering her blind in that area save for relatively distant visual perspectives.
She didn't need perfect awareness of their movements to know what would surely be coming next. She ran for the tent flap, on the inside disguised as a hard wooden door. The wizard, somehow still functional despite all of the surface damage she had inflicted, leveled his wand at her tent. His face was contorted into a rictus, and the elf clung to his leg.
He cast; she threw the door open and leaped out, falling to the ground with her hand over the back of her head.
His spell blasted the tent to smithereens, and crucially, the tent was full of wood. Splintering, shrapnel-producing wood. It was a guess–
But it was proven a very good guess, because the tent exploded like a landmine, the blast directed up and out. On the ground, she was spared from all but a pressure shockwave.
A widely dispersed spray of wooden fragments rained down on the area around the exploded tent. Her bugs moved in to close the gap in her awareness once more, their numbers greatly diminished. She saw, as she placed strategic gnats, that the wizard was hobbling toward the exploded tent. The elf was literally clinging to his leg, sobbing her little heart out. They were arguing, or more accurately, the elf was pleading with him. She could hear them with her own ears.
"Master, please master, the witch–"
"She's dead, Winky! I'm not leaving without that damn wand. Went to all this sodding trouble–"
"Master is hurt!" the elf screeched.
"Got the better of her, didn't I?" the wizard retorted.
Taylor quietly cursed herself into a snake and slithered out of sight, into the wreckage of the popped log cabin tent. Her snake body could easily work its way into the wreckage, through openings much too small for any human or elf. The pile itself was mostly composed of arm-sized splinters, with nowhere for an injured person to hide. They did nothing to her scales as she moved over and through them.
The wizard crouched down at the edge of the pile. "Winky, help me find the wand before the Aurors finish with the traitors," he snarled.
"Master can have any wand," Winky wailed. "This one is not worth it!"
The wizard could indeed have any wand… except hers. Taylor's wouldn't work for him, not that he had any way of knowing that. If she didn't like her wand, she might have left it in the rubble for him to find.
She slithered through the wreck, closer and closer. Within striking distance, a single moving shadow in the mess.
The Aurors were finally subduing the masked thugs. Some were coming this way, far too late to be helpful. As it was?
She lanced out of the wooden mess, striking at the elf as it vanished sections of wooden debris to search. Her fangs sunk into the back of its neck, to either side of the spine, and she felt an awkward sensation in the roof of her mouth as her venom was injected. At this size, an abnormally large black adder against a small elf, her teeth were like daggers on their own; the venom was unnecessary.
The elf fell, weakly pawing at its back. The wizard yelled. Taylor pulled her teeth out and countercursed herself, coming up crouched with her wand already in her hand and moving. A stunning curse and another, smaller wave of insects converging on the wizard before he could react.
He fell to the curse.
As it was, she didn't need their help anymore.
She cursed herself back into a snake and slithered away, leaving the man and his elf for the aurors to find. She would rather not answer for what had happened here, either the results or the methods used, and that meant making her escape. There wasn't anything to mark them as obvious criminals, beyond being found in all of this destruction, but–
She stopped. That was… actually a real problem. The wizard didn't have a Death Eater mask, she didn't know the necessary magic to conjure one up in the next thirty seconds to plant on him, and nobody had seen him or his elf up in the VIP box. There was nothing linking them to any crimes. If she left them alone, they might even be able to pretend they were victims of her, and they had seen her face, as well as her distinctive wand.
She wasn't a criminal in this world. She would very much like to keep it that way.
When the Aurors arrived, she was waiting for them as a human. "Took you long enough," she said angrily. Some of her anger was at them. The rest was at the tedious, obnoxious process she was certain she was about to endure.
One danger was dealt with. Now she had to face another.
"What are you doing here?" Sirius demanded. It was far too late at night to deal with the most paranoid Auror in Britain, but here he was, sitting in a waiting room in the Ministry at two in the morning. They were the only ones there.
"What are you doing here, Black?" Moody retorted. He looked worse for wear; he'd already been grizzled and in multiple pieces back when the war was on, but Sirius was prepared to say that Moody had aged far worse than him in the intervening years. And he had been in Azkaban!
"My," quick, think up an excuse for why he cared about Taylor, should have done that earlier, "date for the Quidditch World Cup. She didn't make it back when the fighting started. I think she's here." That would do. Taylor wouldn't be mad at him claiming she was his date if he got her out of here before someone cottoned on that she was Taylor Hebert. If she was here at all; he didn't know for sure.
"Your eye candy wouldn't be here," Moody scoffed. "They only brought in the people who actually fought the Death Eater scum, and the Death Eaters. Guess which identities they're keeping hush-hush?"
"All of them?" he said optimistically. He knew they only took in the ones who fought as witnesses; that was why he thought he might find her here. She definitely would have fought. He only didn't because the Weasleys needed another apparition-capable adult to protect the kids while they ran for the edge of the anti-apparition wards, and to apparate them to safety once they were there.
"Azkaban didn't beat cynicism into you?" Moody asked. "Hell, nothing will then."
An Auror entered the room, fresh and bushy-tailed. "Who are you two here for?" he asked. "Or are you here to give additional accounts of the incident?"
"Call it what it was, lad," Moody growled. "A Death Eater attack!"
"Taylor," Sirius said. "Black hair, one arm–"
"Eh?" Moody stared at him weirdly. More weirdly than usual, that was. "I know her. That one… Yeah, I could see her fighting." He looked over at the Auror. "Me too. Her."
"Who are you?" the Auror asked.
Sirius snorted. "Kid, don't they have alumni pictures at the Auror academy?" he asked. "Or old ghost stories? You've really never heard of Mad-Eye Moody?" He was happy to use Moody's reputation as a bludgeon instead of his own, if only because he knew it would annoy the old fart.
"Uh… let me get someone to help you." The Auror left the room with remarkable speed.
"I will not return, no matter how far into the crapper they get without me," Moody said grimly, "but only because I know I'd not be allowed to properly whip them into shape. Shameful. Now, go at it from the source…"
"Source?" Sirius had a mad vision of Moody yelling at infants in their cradles. Or worse yet, putting pregnant mothers through training programs.
"Nothin'," Moody huffed. "Just an offer I'm thinkin' about. Let's get the girl out of here before they convince her she imagined the whole thing. I want to ask someone a few questions, and she'll do nicely."
"She'll curse you if she hears you calling her a girl," Sirius warned. "She's my age, you old tosser."
"Do you think women graduate into men once they get old enough, Black?" Moody asked, with such a straight face that Sirius couldn't tell if he was taking the piss or not. "She could be eighty and she'd still be a girl."
"Shut up, you know what I meant. She's a woman, don't talk about her like she's a child."
The same young Auror returned, with Taylor in tow. He had her wand – Sirius would recognize that creepy hole-filled stick anywhere – and she had a collection of small scratches and bruises on her face, but other than that all was well.
"You need to come back tomorrow morning to give a proper statement," the young Auror told her as he handed her wand back.
"You got what I'm willing to give," she snapped irritably. "Sirius, Moody," she added, much less angrily. "Thanks for coming. Your presence gave them the kick in the arse they needed to remember I'm not obligated to give them my life story just because their Aurors are so shit I had to defend myself."
Moody cackled loudly, and the young Auror glared daggers at Taylor's back. Sirius didn't consider himself a peacemaker, but it was late and he didn't think antagonizing the government was a great idea given Taylor's circumstances, so he stepped between them. "We'll be going now."
"Best get out before someone with a spine shows up to arrest you for contempt of the law," Moody added in an undertone as they left the waiting room. "I'd have slung you in a cell to wait out the night for that cheek, girl."
"They're short-staffed," Taylor relayed in the same low tone, her anger gone like it had never existed. "Something's shaking them up. Crouch Senior, whoever that is, was found dead this evening. Relatives of the Death Eater wannabes are showing up. One of the Death Eaters is a dead man who was supposed to be in Azkaban."
"They told you that?" Moody whispered as they crossed the Ministry Atrium. Sirius took the lead, heading for the Floo exits.
"I overheard," Taylor answered. "No idea what they're going to do about any of it. Everyone is going crazy. Why are you here, again?"
"Grimmauld Place," Sirius intoned, tossing a handful of Floo powder into the fire. "Moody, you going to badger me and her if you don't get what you want right this bloody instant?" he asked.
"Probably," Moody said, without an ounce of shame. "It'll only take a few minutes."
"Consider yourself invited to tag along." If he knew one thing about the paranoid Auror, he was damn annoying when he was pushing for something. Popped up in the oddest of places, all the time, pressing and badgering… Sirius had been this close to joining the Aurors just to shut the old man up. One more week might have done it. Then Pettigrew had to go and betray everyone.
The flashy intermission of Floo travel did nothing to stop his increasingly dark thoughts. He waited until Taylor and Moody were safely through, then put the Floo grate down. No more treachery or whatnot tonight.
Moody stood in the center of the room, his eye whirling madly for a good minute. Sirius took that time to casually look Taylor over, assessing whether he was going to need to fend off unwelcome questions at Saint Mungo's tonight. She looked… relatively unharmed. Scratched, bruised, but all her limbs were intact and she wasn't bleeding heavily or missing any new pieces of herself. There were some slivers of wood in her hair and the creases of her robes, nothing a thorough shaking-out wouldn't fix.
"Cursed place you got here, Black," Moody remarked, turning to face them. "How long it take to clean it out enough to live in?"
"Long enough," Sirius replied. "Still not sure I want to bother fixing it the rest of the way, now that I'm a free man."
"Do it," Moody advised. "Wards like these aren't easy to come by. Anyway… Taylor. Got any names for a retired Auror?"
"Names of Death Eaters?" Taylor asked. "Expecting the need for vigilante justice?"
"Expecting them to pop up again, if they get off," Moody said grimly. "I'm also expecting the official story to be full of hippogriff-sized holes. Eyewitness testimony, that's what I'm after. Damn unlucky I wasn't there myself."
"Eyewitness testimony. Sure." Taylor straightened up and looked Moody in the good eye. "At least ten idiots in masks akin to Death Eater masks started causing trouble in a coordinated attack, striking close to simultaneously. Assaulting people, setting fires, destroying tents, causing chaos. Those initial ten went down quickly, aside from the firestarter. There were more elsewhere in the campground, and they got into pitched battles with the Aurors. Meanwhile, an elf approached me and said its master wanted my wand, specifically."
Sirius frowned thoughtfully. An elf, seeking a wand… That was weird.
"The elf and her master attacked me when I refused to give it up," Taylor said neutrally, sounding like she couldn't care less. "The wizard called her Winky. She never used his name, and she spoke of having lost one master already tonight. We fought. He was aiming to kill, with killing curses and other lethal attacks. His elf tried to bash my skull in, stab me with a knife, and–"
"Hold on!" Sirius interjected. "The elf was fighting too?"
"Yes?" Taylor answered, frowning at him and Moody. "Why does that matter?"
"Elves don't usually make effective fighters," Moody said. "Takes a lot to rile them, more to keep them riled when facing a witch or wizard. Orders alone won't do it, they only really get dangerous when they have their own reasons for attacking, too."
"It happened, regardless of the cause," Taylor said. "We fought, I won. The elf might live, she might not. I only stunned the wizard."
Sirius could hear the massive gaps in her explanation, such as how she got from 'elf trying to stab me, wizard throwing killing curses' to 'elf in critical condition, wizard stunned'. Hopefully he would get the details later, once Moody was gone.
"I see why they weren't letting you leave, if you stuck them with that sorry excuse for a story," Moody complained. "What did the wizard look like?"
"Sandy blond hair, rumpled robes, recent injury to his forehead," Taylor reported. "The older Aurors all said he was a spitting image of Barty Crouch Junior. Close enough that there were rumblings of checking Azkaban's graveyard right before you arrived."
"Crouch dead, Crouch Jr. mysteriously alive…" Moody shook his head. "Not buying it. Not without some more digging. You get any names or faces of the other Death Eaters?"
"Not really, no," Taylor said apologetically. "A lot of their faces were too swollen to get a good look at, anyway."
Sirius remembered bugs swarming his face. He had a feeling he knew why that might be.
"And you were at the Cup why?" Moody asked.
"My date," Sirius supplied.
Taylor, to her credit, acted like that was absolutely what she had expected him to say, despite this being the first she was hearing of it. "I've been on better dates," she said dryly.
"Have you? Here I thought a chance to sharpen your fighting skills would be cherished," Sirius retorted.
"Yes, that's why you were nowhere to be found," Taylor shot back. "So I could handle it all myself."
"Hey, I was doing the heroic thing and protecting helpless children!"
"That's all I wanted to know," Moody announced, cutting off their tired banter. "I'll see myself out, Black… And I'll get in touch with you if I have any more questions for Taylor, shall I?"
"He's not my secretary," Taylor objected.
"Wasn't thinking of secretaries," Moody muttered. "I'm not buying your date story, either. Keep to fighting Death Eaters and we won't have a problem."
"Same for you," Taylor said.
Moody lifted the grate in front of the Floo, took Floo powder from a pocket in his robe, and whispered his destination into the flames.
Once he was gone, Sirius put the grate down again. "If he's not buying that you were my date, then what does he think you are?" he asked.
"My best guess?" Taylor shrugged. "Mercenary. Does the magical world have those?"
"Yeah, mostly foreigners…" He put a hand to his chin. "You know, I can see it." It would make sense. "Dangerous, foreign, unclear allegiances, no obvious reason to be hanging around me."
"He knows I was the one to help you catch Pettigrew, too," she said. "If you meet him again, try not to disprove that theory. He might not dig any further if he thinks he knows what I am. I didn't give the Aurors my last name this time, but there's enough out there that he could find too much if he really looked."
"Maybe." This was Moody… The Death Eaters might take priority, but the old man obviously didn't know how to sit around and enjoy his retirement. If he ever got bored chasing after resurgent Death Eaters, Taylor's identity might be in danger.
"How's Harry?" Taylor asked.
"Him? Fine." He rubbed at the back of his neck, holding in a yawn. None of the kids had come anywhere near the fighting. "I told him I'd look for 'Hissy', so I can take you back whenever… He'll be asleep by now."
"No, he won't," she objected. "Take me back now, so he knows I'm safe." She shifted into her snake form, clearly brooking no argument.
One more Floo trip, and then he could sleep.
A week after the World Cup, Taylor stared down at a list she had written, in all of its unencouraging lengthy glory. Around her, the more benign books of the Black family library were open to different pages, showing glimpses of hundreds of years of knowledge in dozens of magical disciplines.
If her power had a visual representation, it would be that of a woman rubbing her hands together and licking her lips as she gazed at a buffet table. Taylor herself would be the cholesterol in the imaginary woman's veins, in that metaphor. Or perhaps the stress-induced heart attack.
The long, sprawling parchment was divided into two columns. On one side, she had written down every spell she and her power had mastered together. On the other side, she had the various magical disciplines they had yet to touch, specific spells that she had seen used, and vague power descriptions that she had yet to find a spell for, but knew she would be able to put to very good use if she could replicate them. Also on that side were a few practical things she intended to set in motion, such as ordering a backup wand from Ollivander, and looking into the process for commissioning a blood-magic prosthetic from Bulgarian vampires.
The 'known' side of her spell list was a pathetic stub. Fifty-six spells. A grand total of one serious curse and one countercurse, the set she used to turn into Hissy and on one occasion a Moose, but which was theoretically capable of turning her into any animal. Also in places of pride on the list were Accio, Stupefy, Incendio, Aguamenti, Depulso, Protego, and other basic, bread and butter charms, hexes, and jinxes.
Based on Harry's past schoolbooks, she was skipping all over the Charms and Defense Against Dark Arts curriculums, but she knew about one third of the practical side of what they taught in Hogwarts. She couldn't confidently say anything about the theory, but theory was a luxury she couldn't afford while there were actual spells to learn in the other column.
Also based on Harry's schoolbooks, she was the equivalent of a first-year or worse in every other magical subject. Transfiguration, Runes, Potions, Arithmancy, Herbology, Creatures, Astronomy, Divination… And that was only what they taught in the equivalent of middle and high school! After Hogwarts students were expected to either go into jobs where specific knowledge wasn't needed, or to get apprenticeships for other subjects that built on the Hogwarts educational base. Spellcrafting, Enchanting, Wandcrafting, Warding and Cursebreaking, Healing…
There were thousands of spells to learn, hundreds of techniques that didn't use a wand at all, and dozens of entire sub-disciplines that each offered a unique, powerful new way to manipulate, shape, understand, or predict reality.
Her power might be the one eyeing the buffet table, but she was the one who would suffer for each and every item she put on their plate. It wasn't even the pain that she was dreading, so much as the sheer amount of knowledge required to be even basically competent in the magical world. There wasn't enough time in the day, and time magic was highly restricted, just like ritual, blood, and sacrificial magic. More subjects she could study here, in the Black library, once she learned enough enchanting and cursebreaking to safely read them.
Then there were the spells, techniques, and abilities she knew of but didn't think she could learn due to her unique way of using magic. Just like her separation from her power had allowed her to curse and countercurse herself, but barring her from the intended uses of spells instead of allowing unintended uses. The Patronus charm, to take one example she had already researched and attempted to learn, required powerful feelings of happiness to cast. As it turned out, this was not a placebo or method of aiding concentration. The spell actually needed the caster to feel true, uncomplicated joy.
Her power, for all that it communicated with her by sending emotions, was not an emotional person. Or a person at all. It didn't have directly translatable feelings. The spell probably couldn't even find a person to pull the feelings from when her power attempted to cast it. She felt joy, but she did not have magic. Her power had magic, but it did not feel. The connection didn't go the right way for it to work for them.
On Taylor's end, this just meant that after some truly intense headaches, her attempts to cast the Patronus charm didn't hurt at all because her power had either given up or deemed it currently unfeasible. Emotion-based spells were out. No Dementor repellant, none of the Unforgivables, and quite a few of the nastier curses Sirius had told her about were all off the table.
Then there were the magical techniques and charms that required some form of mental input, not necessarily emotion, making them iffy at best. Obliviation was a prime example; Taylor had no doubt that her power could precisely envision the chains of thoughts to be targeted when casting an obliviation. The question was whether her power's inhuman perspective would translate correctly to the spell, and if it did, whether the results would be what Taylor had originally asked for.
Apparition was another good example. It needed the caster to focus on their destination, to keep their body firmly in mind, and to will themselves to the other point. She could do those things, but the magic didn't look to her, it looked to her power. Could her power do those things for her body? The existence of side-along apparition implied it was possible for one individual to apparate another, but then there was the danger of practicing…
Which led neatly into the third category of spells she couldn't learn, the ones that would be unacceptably dangerous to practice by trial and error. This was the category she had assumed Floo travel fell under until recently. Apparition was a true example of a dangerous spell, because severe splinching could be instantly fatal in unlucky instances, and there was no warning or precautionary measure to avoid it. Fiendfyre was another such spell, dangerous for normal witches to attempt to learn, and liable to turn on its caster even after a successful casting. Any form of self-altering mental magic was also out, because as much as she approved of the current semi-alliance between herself and her power, the last thing she wanted was to give it permission to further modify her mind.
All of those spells and more with the same faults were barred to her, from what she knew and theorized. If not forever, then at least until she had a solid grounding in magical theory at a high enough level to effectively speculate instead of guessing in the dark. Which would take her years of study to get. But even putting those aside there were thousands more she could theoretically learn, at the price of a dozen hours and headaches for each one.
In the year and change that she had been practicing magic, she had only now learned enough to see the mountain of accumulated knowledge laid out before her and understand it for what it was.
She was daunted. And she did not daunt easily. But that mountain had to be scaled, it had to be explored. The only truly safe place to be was on the top, or at least high up enough to defend herself from those with most of a century's head start.
Sirius came in through the Floo, the flash of flame visible to the handful of bugs she had placed specifically to observe the fire. He tiptoed down the hallway, quietly sneaking past the irritating portrait of his mother, and entered the library, whereupon he paused to stare at her messy table.
"It looks like you're trying to compile a list of every spell known in Britain," he remarked, coming to look over her shoulder.
"Pretty much." And the mountain just kept getting higher. He was right, she hadn't even begun to look outside of Britain, even with Harry's example of a powerful spell having originated in Japan, his 'Possessionem Skurge' if she remembered correctly. There would be more like it, strong but unknown in Britain. "I have to catch up."
"Don't sweat it," he advised. "Keep in mind that the average wizard is an idiot who barely made it out of Hogwarts."
"I'm not worried about the average." Dumbledore, maybe Moody, whoever had instigated the attack at the Cup, the pureblood elite who continued to press an agenda that directly impacted her… She had enemies, and they weren't going to be average witches and wizards.
"You make up for your limited knowledge with ruthless cunning," Sirius retorted. "Plus, a lot of this stuff overlaps or isn't worth bothering with." He reached over to point at her 'to learn' list. "Divination has no practical application, and you have to have the knack for it to begin with."
Precognition, this world's equivalent to predictive Thinkers, was worthless? She was going to triple-check that particular valuation.
"What's it good for, then?" she asked.
"Feeling in control." Sirius circled around the table to pick up her discarded teacup. "I've got the knack for reading tea leaves, did you know? I could look in here and get something arguably true about you."
Taylor casually sent a cluster of flies into the cup even as he set it down, and made a mental note to never leave her teacups unattended.
"But I never bother with it," Sirius continued, "because the things the tea leaves reveal are too vague to mean anything except in retrospect. Divination is the art of feeling like you have a clue when you really don't, even when you're doing it right. The only useful thing I've ever seen anyone do with Divination that wasn't scamming others is diagnostics."
"Diagnostics?" She put her pen down and gave him her full attention. "What do you mean?"
"Throw a bunch of divination at someone," Sirius elaborated. "Focus on their secrets. You'll get a load of garbage. Then, send someone who didn't do any Divination to find out their secrets the normal way. When they report back, see if their conclusions retroactively explain the garbage. No bias in their conclusions that way, and if what they've found doesn't give you that sinking feeling that the Divination garbage all made perfect sense if only you'd been smarter about it, then you know they got it wrong."
That did sound theoretically useful, but… "Is that really the best way to use it?" she asked.
"It's the best way I know," Sirius said, "and I only know it because a much smarter wizard than myself took my bet that nobody could make that shit useful. All you really need to know is what the different branches are, how to preemptively poison the well so anyone stupid enough to target you is led even further astray than they would be anyway, and where it borders on other, more useful disciplines."
"Right." She stuck an asterisk next to Divination and added 'understand, supposedly worthless' in small letters. "Any other duds I should know about before I get invested?"
Sirius pulled out a chair, spun it around, and sat bow-legged to lean on the back. "Yeah, loads." He tapped her list. "Arithmancy doesn't get good until after Hogwarts, and you need to know everything from Charms, Transfiguration, and Runes first. Astronomy is only still taught because it's a 'classical' subject, and unless you go off the deep end and start designing rituals or perfecting experimental potions you will literally never need it. Transfiguration is actually three separate sub-branches, and the one with all the premade charms to transfigure specific objects into other specific objects only exists to help the lazy, weak, or stupid ease into the subject. Of the other two, focus on free Transfiguration. Self Transfiguration is for lunatics and animagi."
Taylor flipped her parchment over and started writing down his assessments verbatim. "Runes?" she asked, curious as to his opinion.
"In Hogwarts, it's just another set of languages," Sirius replied. "Not a single thing in the curriculum involves magic. Outside of Hogwarts, you need to know those languages inside and out to even get started with long-term enchantments, wards, wandmaking, or anything else that doesn't involve magic coming out of you and your wand right then and there."
"So it's important… But not useful on its own." And it was a language. Her power wouldn't help her there.
"Exactly!" Sirius started sorting her books, piling most of them off to one side. "Charms you can just take out of books, nobody gives a shit about the theory until they want to make their own, which is bloody finicky and dangerous besides. Potions is good to know the basics of, you never know when you'll need to brew something, but the high-level potions are a crapshoot even for masters so don't bother with those. Rituals are illegal and more importantly inefficient unless you become a mass murderer. Blood magic is more likely to fuck you than your enemy unless you know a lot about it, so just knowing how to identify it when you come across it is best. Occlumency is nice, and you should learn it when you have a few years to spare, but right now it won't be worth anything, and aside from surface thoughts you can always tell when someone is trying to read your mind. Summoning–"
"Summoning?" she said. "That's not on my list."
"Yeah, it wouldn't be right now, you don't have access to the really old stuff yet," he waved the objection off. "You'll see references to it in old books and they make it sound terrifying and powerful, but it's obscure and the truth is nothing from that field of magic has worked in over a thousand years, since before Merlin. Somebody really powerful put a stop to the whole discipline. Summoning involves attracting and binding things from other planes of existence to ours, and those things were never good to have around, so that unnamed hero put up a big 'Notice Me Not' shield of sorts around our level of existence."
A shield against things from other dimensions…
Taylor could feel her power emanating curiosity, but for once she was not going to indulge in that impulse. "Say no more." Literally. No more. She suspected that still-active magic field might be why this world seemed to be a forgotten corner of the multiverse. She did not want to know about that dimension-protecting shield. Not when it was strong enough to at least partially affect entities, and had been erected to stop other things from being drawn into the world. Her power should not be allowed to learn about that specific work of magic.
"You can always tell who's read that Muggle's works by how they react to hearing about Summoning for the first time," Sirius chuckled. "Old man Lovestuff."
"Lovecraft." And she hadn't read any of his works. People like Nilbog turned those far-out horrors into real-life tragedies. No, her aversion to the unknown was a lot more first-hand in origin.
"Crafty McLove, whatever his name was," Sirius agreed. "Nutter who was probably a squib raised by Purebloods long enough to internalize the self-hate and get a vague idea of all the stuff he should be scared of, then turfed out to make his own way. Yeah. You've got a great long list, but it's more like a tree where half the branches are rotten or don't actually exist. Focus on Potions, Transfiguration and more charms, do some reading on runes in your spare time, and you'll catch up on all of the useful base disciplines within a few years. From there, anything complicated just puts you ahead of the pack."
He took the last of her books, shut it, glanced at the cover, and stuck it on top of a big pile of other books. Of the two dozen or so she had on her table, only four had been left out of the pile. An introduction to Runes, two Transfiguration textbooks – fourth and sixth year, according to the titles – and a Potions theory book.
"You can't use anything from these," he indicated the big pile, "until you've mastered these, magic and theory." He indicated the four books left over.
The mountain was still there, but Sirius had pointed her to a trail leading up its lofty heights. "Thank you," she said.
"I'd hate for you to be stuck in this gloomy library for the rest of your life studying the likes of Divination because nobody told you it was a load of shit," he said seriously. "You're already a leg up on most people, being able to use a library at all, but that has its own pitfalls."
"Are there really no public libraries in the magical world?" Taylor asked. Sirius had brought up a subject that she had long since forgotten about, having access to Grimmauld Place and its book collection.
"Not in Britain," Sirius answered. "The rich Pureblood families all have their own private libraries. Why would they support a way for anyone to have that advantage, when their enemies could use it just as easily as them? They only tolerate the Hogwarts library because it's almost as old as their vaunted bloodlines."
Basic knowledge control, where the knowledge involved learning to bend reality to one's will… It made sense, but she wished it wasn't so.
Another problem for the future. For now, she had a much-reduced reading list to get to. Transfiguration would be first; it was time to crack that mystery. The wizard had wielded transfigured stone projectiles against her instead of much more direct spells, and she wanted to know why, as well as how to make such things herself.
The next wizard or elf to fight her would find her an even more formidable opponent. She was only getting stronger and more versatile with time.
The Hufflepuff common room was a hub of chatter and gossip at the most uninteresting of times, and the announcement of the Triwizard Tournament's revival could not be classified as anything of the sort. Everyone from the seventh-years down was talking about it. Harry himself was no exception, much to Taylor's amusement as she slithered into the brightly-lit and cluttered room for the first time that term.
"I wonder how many students Beaubaxtons and Durmstrang will be bringing," Harry said to some of the other Hufflepuffs in his year. They were all sprawled out on the various chairs, couches, and soft rugs that littered the room with casual abandon. "Does anyone know?"
"I heard that there aren't any rooms being set aside for them in the castle," Susan Bones said. "My aunt hasn't told me anything, though. I wish she had. She must have known."
"With expansion charms they could house their entire student body in Hagrid's shack," Hopkins suggested. "We don't know how many might be coming. Enough to compete with, but you only need one student for that." Taylor didn't know much about him, just that he was one of Harry's roommates, but he struck her as the sort to doggedly argue semantics at every opportunity.
She wound her way up the side of the couch and along the top, into view of the assorted Hufflepuffs – aside from Harry, who had his back to her. "I am here," she hissed.
"There you are, Hissy!" Harry turned and gently picked her up, lifting her to his shoulders. He turned back to his Hufflepuff compatriots without missing a beat as Taylor secured her grip. "They might only need one student, but surely they have to bring everyone who wants to compete?"
"They might hold a qualifier at their own schools prior to arriving," Hopkins argued. "Like I said, they only need one."
The discussion continued, and Taylor lingered long enough to catch up on all the gossip that had arisen over the summer and first week back at Hogwarts. The Triwizard Tournament was the big-ticket item, bringing in visitors from two other magical schools in other countries, but there were other things too. The new Head Boy for the year was a Hufflepuff, and there was some controversy over the Head Girl not being a Hufflepuff only because the professors didn't want their house overrepresented, or so it was said. The Defense Professor from the previous year had quit for unknown reasons. His replacement was an old Auror called Mad-Eye… Moody.
That night, after catching up with her son and the school gossip, Taylor set out to determine exactly how much of a threat Moody would be to her secret presence in the school. Pettigrew had not had to deal with a war veteran sporting a magical eye of unknown abilities.
It was a good thing, for once, that the elves at Hogwarts were so detrimental to her bugs. She kept them mostly dormant, so Moody would not have had a chance to see any unusual activities through walls even if his eye was capable of it. By the same measure, her never changing back to human on Hogwarts' grounds meant he could not possibly have seen the change occurring. The Map was safely out of his hands and presumably labeled her as Hissy besides, and she was well known to be a pet snake who often wandered the castle in the evenings…
He shouldn't have any reason to suspect her, so long as his eye did not see pure magic or anything ridiculous like that. Even her blood charm wouldn't be able to identify her as human were someone to use it and look at her; thus was the advantage of self-applied magic. No links between caster and subject to follow.
She meandered her way through the castle, careful to never appear too intelligent in her choosing of pathways. Her route took her by the Great Hall, and then the Dungeons where a few first-year Slytherins stopped to admire her, and then she wound her way up to slither by the Defense classroom.
Moody might know she controlled bugs, based on what had happened to the Death Eaters and her other opponent at the cup, but he wouldn't know anything about the specifics, and even Sirius did not seem to suspect that she could see and hear through them in sufficient quantities, so she felt safe sending in a single fly to scout Moody's office. The old man was not an ally… yet.
One fly was not enough to scope out the room by sight or hear anything intelligible, but the presence of a warm body was easily confirmed. Her fly buzzed around, lazily twirling from corner to corner of the small chamber, even swooping by to smell the – to a fly – appealing gunk sitting in a small container on his desk, which had an appealing, but mostly unidentifiable aroma.
A big, blurry shape spun towards her from below, and she deftly dodged her fly out of the way even as she slithered down the corridor outside his door.
"Damn fly," she heard as a snake, the words muffled but understandable. Her fly heard them as a rumble of distant thunder, and then a big red thing streaked up, and her fly was obliterated.
Moody didn't come boiling out of his classroom to apprehend her, so she assumed that he had written the incident off as a normal, everyday occurrence despite it being objectively rare within the confines of Hogwarts. She would be sure not to push that luck.
She slithered away, confident that so long as she was careful her disguise would hold. This was shaping up to be an interesting year already.
"Here I am, teaching Potions." Sirius wiped imaginary sweat off his brow and mimed flicking it at her from across the table. "What has the world come to, where Snivellus and I have the same job?"
"You have to start teaching before you can say you teach Potions," Taylor pointed out. "Besides, you said we're not brewing today."
"I want to live," Sirius said dryly. "And we wouldn't brew in the library if we did brew." He pointed at the nearest bookshelf. "Pop quiz. You read the reference book for potion ingredients. What ingredients would you get from that shelf of books?"
She had read the book, but her memory wasn't perfect, so it took her a moment to answer. "Parchment, ink, wood, but none of those are used for anything."
"Think darker," he advised. "Remember, that's not any old bookshelf, it's a Black family bookshelf."
"Blood," she guessed. Old, dried blood, either from unfortunate thieves or because somebody had decided to use it in the place of ink for a more esoteric tome.
"Got it!" He shuddered. "Toss forcibly-taken blood into a potion on the brew and you'll be adding more soon after, as you pick cauldron shards out of your body. Unless the potion calls for it, in which case what the hell are you brewing? Next question." He reached down and stuck his hand in a big sack, accompanied by the sounds of clinking bottles that made Taylor wince.
"They're charmed unbreakable, don't be a baby," he chided. "Potions for the practical wizard or witch, lesson one. Potion identification. Look at the color, texture, smell, special qualities or effects. Tell me what it is. Go!"
He set a potion on the table. It was contained in a clear glass vial, corked with an actual cork stopper, and when she took it and shook it the opaque green liquid showed no signs of moving.
"Blood-clotting Potion?" she guessed. The color was telling; few potions were solid green. Green meant herbs, herbs meant healing or bodily enhancement. Neither rule was absolute, but together they implied quite a bit.
"You didn't uncork it," he chided. "Smell is important. There are at least four potions that can be instantly identified by smell alone, and many can only be separated from several similar-looking potions by smell. I almost took an experimental Hangover Cure thinking it was a Headache Cure, once. Looked the same, but one was made by an idiot and the other was a well-tested potion commercially sold. The smell set them apart, and that was the only thing that saved me from the later renamed Diarrhea Inducer."
"When was this?" Taylor asked. She uncorked the vial, wafted some air over it, and smelled… pinecones. Just to be sure, she buzzed a fly over the potion bottle. The smell was different, almost unrecognizably so, through the senses of a fly; more akin to grass or just uninteresting dirt. There were no references on how different potions smelt to insects, so she had to build up her knowledge by experience. Moody's unidentified concoction had taught her that.
"Fourth year," Sirius said proudly. "Still think that's a Blood-clotting potion?"
"Yes, actually, and don't tell me you were already a heavy drinker in fourth year." Sirius was an incorrigible reprobate, but she didn't like the idea that her son was already theoretically old enough to start drinking on the sly.
"It is and I was," Sirius answered. "I offer no excuses, except that I was a poor Gryffindor disgrace to my family, stuck watching my best mate woo an uninterested girl, and hounded by my Head of House whenever I tried to get out of Transfiguration class. Truly, I needed the comfort of the bottle."
If that was the minimum agony level needed to become an alcoholic, Taylor herself would have died from alcohol poisoning long before getting her powers, along with half the population of Earth Bet. "Sure. Such agony."
"Try this one," Sirius suggested, pulling another bottle up from the bag. The liquid inside was mostly clear, but when she took it something within sparkled like suspended glitter.
She didn't need to smell it, but she did anyway. Rosemary with a dash of sulfur, which was just overwhelmingly sulfur according to her fly senses. The glitter was the main clue, though. "Blemish Remover," she said confidently.
"Right in one." He brought another potion up. "At this rate, you'll know all the potions in no time! Maybe even before I find a source for Veritaserum and Polyjuice. Could be a while on those."
Having just finished skimming a book with over a thousand potion ingredients, Taylor highly doubted that she would recognize every common potion before Sirius found someone to sell him the regulated ones, even if it took him a few months. But it was good to be making progress. Progress that didn't even induce a headache, for that matter.
The school term was off to a good start, in Harry's opinion. Classes were interesting, Snape was no worse than normal, Lupin was gone, and Dumbledore didn't suspect a thing. He had his mum's assurances that she and Sirius were working to get custody of him before next summer at the latest. He had his friends, and he didn't have anything more important than school to worry about.
He probably should be worrying a little about Hermione, though.
"The difference between external and internal magic is important," she told him as they headed to History of Magic. "Especially because of something they don't tell us here at Hogwarts. The Trace only applies to external magic."
She snapped her fingers, and a big spark flashed between her fingers. "I figured out how to do this over the summer."
"You broke the Ministry's rules on underage magic for that?" he asked. He may have created a monster. Hermione seemed so rule-abiding back in first year, before he whacked her over the morals with Snape. Nowadays, he suspected she only paid attention to the rules to better know which she considered worth breaking.
"That," she huffed, "is personal, wandless magic!"
"I can do almost the same thing if you give me a carpet, socks, and two minutes," he shot back. "No magic required. It doesn't seem worth the risk."
"What risk?" she asked. "You just said you could do it without magic. If anyone ever saw me, which they didn't because I'm not stupid, I could pass it off as that. And ninety percent of controlling personal elemental magic is control. It doesn't matter how small or useless, this is a stepping stone! Someday soon I'll be able to throw lightning bolts from my fingers if I keep working at it!"
"Okay, when you put it like that…" He would have done the same. "How did you get that far?" Was it something he could do? Back when it was just static hair he wasn't interested, but now…
"It's not really a skill, it's a natural affinity that can come up when someone is in the early stages of consciously controlling magic," she said sadly. "If you haven't already started showing signs and actively using it, you won't be able to start now. Unless you learn a wandless silent spell for lightning, which you can do but is much harder and not really the same thing."
They passed through the doors to the History classroom, and their conversation came to an end as they sat down. Binns was floating down through the ceiling to claim his place at his dusty lectern, signaling the beginning of a class of self-study.
"Besides, I was going to go spare not doing any real magic over the summer," she whispered. "It was that or start looking for a wand without the Trace."
Yes, he had definitely helped create a monster. An awesome, magically gifted monster dedicated to learning even at the expense of the rules she deemed unimportant. And she could now shock people with her fingers.
His best friend was amazing. He resolved to find something cool and unique he could do without a wand before the end of the year. He had to keep up.
That decided, he took out his personal book on the Magical Congo and started to read about the history of one of the world's most deadly magical environments. Apparently, even the water there was tainted with magical hallucinogens…
"Is this some kind of rebellion thing?" Harry asked. He, Hermione, Neville, Luna, and Ginny were out by the Quidditch pitch before dawn on a Saturday, and he would rather have been in bed. "They say no Quidditch this year so you have to thumb your nose at the Headmaster?" He could get behind defying Dumbledore in theory, but in practice… couldn't it have waited a few hours?
"Someone is grumpy in the morning," his mum hissed from the sidelines. She was having a wonderful time hunting mice and other small creatures through the tall grass, though he did wonder whether she was going to eat one once she caught it. And whether he should be worried if she did. It was probably just practice being convincingly snake-like for her… But he wouldn't be sure until he saw her spit a mouse out instead of swallowing it whole.
"Take the broom or I'll shove it between your legs," Ginny threatened.
Harry did the smart thing and took the broom before she could make good on her threat. Hermione and Neville needed similar levels of 'encouragement'. Luna had taken hers right away, though she was holding it like a club with the bristles out and swinging it around.
"Now," Ginny said once they all had their brooms, marching in front of them like a drill sergeant from a movie, or, closer to home, like the recently graduated Oliver Wood of Gryffindor fame. "There is no organized Quidditch this year."
"And it's a bloody shame," Hermione offered. "Quidditch games always make the castle so wonderfully quiet."
"I heard your brothers saying they were going to organize unofficial games," Neville offered.
"Yes!" Ginny pointed her broom at him. "You get it. Thing is, that means we don't need to have teams divided by house."
"Or to be the best fliers in our houses," Luna suggested.
"Also yes," Ginny conceded. "We have the core of a great Quidditch team here. I can see it now."
Harry looked to his left; Luna continued to swing her broom about. He looked to his right; Neville was trying to sidle away from Ginny's intense stare. And then there was Hermione, who he had never seen on a broom apart from her first-year lessons and that one game at the Weasleys, where she hung back and flew extremely carefully.
"It could be fun," his mum called out from somewhere startlingly close by. Ginny's smile widened, and Harry was sure there had been some plotting between the two of them prior to this.
"There aren't enough of us to be a full Quidditch team, though," Hermione objected.
"Fred and George were talking about five-person teams," Ginny explained. "Pick-up games, limited to a set amount of time so we can schedule them during free periods as well as on weekends. No snitch because of the time limit, so no Seeker, and only one Bludger so only one Beater. That's one Keeper, three Chasers, and a Beater. I was thinking you'd be the Beater."
Hermione crossed her arms, clutching her broom. "You want me to hit heavy, fast balls at other people to knock them off their brooms?"
"Yes!" Ginny cheered. "You'd be brilliant. Luna would be Keeper, because she has good reflexes. The rest of us would be Chasers."
Harry honestly had no idea whether this was the best idea ever, or a horrible disaster in the making. Did Hermione really have the mindset necessary for a Beater? Was Luna actually Keeper material? Would he and Neville make good Chasers? None of them had even tried out for their respective House teams, aside from Ginny.
"It's not important," Ginny added, lowering her voice to a more reasonable tone. "It's just for fun. We don't have to practice much at all. Just enough so we know how to play together whenever Fred and George can set up a game. It could break up all the study sessions?"
"My gran keeps telling me to be more active," Neville admitted. "If you don't mind me probably being shite…"
"I'm in," Harry decided. It would be fun.
"I will not let a single Quaffle by me," Luna declared. "Is there a rule against flying more than one broom at a time?"
"Uh, I'll have to check." Ginny looked at Hermione. "Please? I could ask someone else, but it wouldn't be as fun without everyone doing it."
Hermione sighed. "Okay, but if I stink at being a Beater I told you so-"
Something shrieked shrilly nearby. Taylor's dark form rose up out of the grass, sticking straight up. "Got something!" The grass rippled in a straight line away from her as whatever she had caught fled.
At least she really was just playing catch and release.
The Saturday before the other schools were scheduled to arrive, Harry fully intended to waste his afternoon lazing around reading. Nothing magical, just a Muggle book about a guy stuck on an alien planet by himself, forced to survive. It was rainy out, Hermione and Ginny were studying together, Neville was shoveling mud for fun in the greenhouse, and Luna was off doing… whatever it was Luna did in her free time when she wasn't with them. It was the perfect time to find a nice windowsill somewhere with a view and read.
Taylor was with him; she didn't have a book of her own, being stuck as a snake, so she would probably just fall asleep on the sill. It was that kind of day.
The alternating thumping of shoe and peg on stone preceded Professor Moody's arrival by a good bit, giving Harry ample warning before he went down one of the many moving staircases and ran into Professor Moody going up the other way.
"Harry," Moody grunted, stopping and turning around. "I was looking for you, kid. You been in contact with Sirius Black lately?"
"We exchange letters," Harry admitted. Just the one so far, but it looked like mail from Sirius wasn't being censored or intercepted, so there would probably be more. "You need to tell him something?"
"Nah, but I was talking to Dumbledore," and Harry instantly didn't want to hear the rest, but he listened anyway, "and he said something about you not going to Hogsmeade last year."
"Yeah?" He hadn't, so far as Dumbledore knew.
"Smart kid like you didn't ask around for ways to sneak out and go anyway?" Moody asked. "I'm not looking to get you in trouble, way I see it if you were in real danger in Hogsmeade everyone woulda been. But I've been trying to find some of the secret passages around here, and they've moved since my school days. Help an old man out?"
Harry was inclined to say no, especially as the Twins had entrusted knowledge of their passage to him and only him… But then he remembered that they had talked about telling the Professors since the passages were obviously evacuation passages. He hadn't heard anything about it since.
"I do know of a couple," he admitted. "I think they're for evacuating the castle."
"Four, leading out to Hogsmeade?" Moody asked. "They still separate?"
Taylor, wrapped around his arm as she was, hissed a low "if he already knows he'll find them eventually," which came out a lot more succinctly in Parseltongue.
"Yes, those, but they all meet up now, I think. You can't find them?" He started down the stairs, and Moody followed him. "There's one near every common room."
"I knew the Slytherin one, myself," Moody admitted. "The thing about this castle is that everything moves from year to year, not just from day to day, and the entrance secrets can change too. 'Near a common room' includes a big damn chunk of the castle, when you get right down to it."
Harry didn't see the harm in showing him, so he struck out for the Slytherin passage entrance. He'd located them all from the inside after the twins showed him the Hufflepuff entrance, and he figured Moody would like to find the one that he remembered best. "What do you need the passageways for, anyway?" he asked.
"You can never be too careful," Moody said. "What with the other schools coming over, I'm going to set monitoring wards that will trip on non-Hogwarts students. We lose a Frenchie, they'll threaten war. And then whine instead of doing anything, but still. I'd rather not deal with that."
"And if Durmstrang loses a student?" Harry asked as he led Moody to the Slytherin. It was down by Snape's potions classroom in the dungeons.
They passed the Potions classroom on the way, and from within a smooth, unamused lecture could be heard. "This," Snape drawled, "is a miserable excuse for a Draught of Living Death, Willerson. You overpowered it to the point where touching the potion is enough to put someone out for the day. Anyone unfortunate enough to drink it would die outright. Try again."
Harry spared a thought for the poor soul stuck revising under Snape over a weekend. Willerson was probably an upper-year Slytherin, because Harry couldn't imagine Snape giving up part of his weekend for anyone not in his house, but it was not a fate he would wish on anyone.
"Durmstrang?" Moody said, once they were out of earshot of Snape. "Karkaroff's the sort to leave the lost kid and say good riddance," he said darkly. "Former Death Eater, got off by ratting out his fellows. Careful around him." He lifted his flask and took a swig from it, then put it back in his robes.
"That smell again… Ask what he was drinking, I'm curious," his mum hissed.
Harry waited a few seconds so it wouldn't be obvious he was reacting to something he had been told, then asked. "What's in the flask?"
"Curious kid, aren't you?" Moody said as they went down a short flight of stairs. "Just water. Never drink from anything House Elves prepare out of sight, I say."
"It's probably alcohol," was Taylor's conclusion.
"Your snake hisses a lot, kid," Moody remarked.
"She's trying to sleep and I keep moving," Harry explained. "Here it is." They stopped in front of a tapestry of a grim-looking man with a unibrow and a farming scythe that had obviously been used for more than cutting crops in the recent past. He ran his finger along the weave of the bloodied scythe blade's underside, then pushed at the little knobby bit he could feel by the tip, a hard lump amid old threads. The tapestry swung outward, peculiarly stiff despite appearing to be hung by the corners and nothing else, revealing the entrance to the hidden passages.
"Right, right…" Moody glanced down the corridor, one way and then the other. Nobody was in sight. The dungeons were deserted at this time of day, and they had long since left Snape's classroom behind. "Well, thank you for– Stupefy!"
Taylor jolted as Moody stunned Harry. The old man caught her son before he hit the ground and took him into the tunnel. Harry's limp body was set on the ground, his arm sprawling out.
She had no bugs. She had no backup. She had a secret identity to protect.
Moody reached out to close the secret entrance, the light spilling in from the corridor sliced away by encroaching darkness, and Taylor decided none of those things mattered when a grizzled old man was trying to kidnap her son right under her nose. She would handle Moody the same way she had handled Sirius, back at the far end of this same system of secret passages. With him at wandpoint.
It took her one heartbeat to slither out of Harry's sleeve at full speed. Another two to shift back, just as the light cut out entirely. One more to draw her wand, and a final heartbeat to cast something far more violent than strictly necessary, her voice harsh. "Depulso!"
Moody took the banishing hex on the shoulder, caught turning away from the portrait with his wand down. He flew through the back of the stiff tapestry with a heavy tearing sound, immediately followed up by a thump as he hit the floor of the corridor.
Taylor jumped out through the tear, already going through the motions for another charm, a stunner like she would have led with had she time to think beyond the desire to hurt the one trying to steal her child. Light flashed from Moody's prone figure, and she had to drop to the side and interrupt her own casting to avoid a vibrant splash of purple light that carved a new gouge in the already trashed tapestry. Her bugs were coming, but they were spread out and few in number, unlikely to be of any use unless she was exceedingly tricky…
Moody was up, peg leg back to brace him as he cast another wordless spell, but she was up too and unlike him she had momentum. He was a bulky but battle-scarred old man, and they were roughly equal in how much of their bodies they had left, so she let her charge carry her into him.
He jabbed his wand into her side as she knocked him against the wall, which was about as dangerous as having a loaded gun in the same position, but she had hers to the side of his head in the same moment and neither of them cast.
He glared at her, his magic eye spinning rapidly. "Taylor?" he demanded. He then kneed her in the stomach, but she had been expecting something of the sort and let him do it, backing up with the blow and hooking her heel behind the peg leg he had momentarily put all of his weight on, sweeping it forward even as she pulled him off the wall. His wand left her midsection a fraction of a second before a spell shot through the space where she would have been, and as he toppled forward he tried to bring it to bear on her again.
She copied his move from a moment ago and drove her knee into his gut, crushing his hand and wand against his stomach in the process, and cast a 'Stupefy' down at his back as he doubled over.
It deflected off his robes – something she had not expected but probably should have – and he managed to bring his wand around again. She cast 'Protego' in time to absorb another red spell aimed at her hips, then jammed her wand forward, driving the solid magical force shield into his unprotected head.
Wizards, she was learning through experimentation, did not have the right mindset for close-quarters combat. She had thought more experienced combatants would know better, but Moody was proving her wrong.
Moody took the blow and tried to raise his wand again instead of responding physically or even just making space. She drove her elbow into his magical eye, bouncing his head against the wall, then attempted to stun him–
His wooden peg leg jumped up and jabbed her between the legs of its own volition, separating from his stump to do so. She grunted and tried to stun him, only momentarily interrupted by the painful blow, but he had his wand up again, and for the second time in less than twenty seconds, they both had potentially lethal weapons pointed at each other at point-blank range. His peg returned to his stump, settling back into place.
"Shouldn't have tried to kidnap Harry," she gritted out, thinking furiously. Her few available insects were coming, carrying the payload, but some were getting shot down by oblivious elves–
"Bloody 'ell, that what you thought I was doing?" Moody demanded, his voice rough. His wand didn't waver for an instant. "Good! Teaching the lad a lesson in paranoia, I was. Harry Bloody Potter going into a hidden passageway, alone, with an old man he doesn't know? Damn fodder for kidnapping or worse!"
"I don't believe you," she said.
"Told Dumbledore I'd be teaching the kid a special lesson today at this time," Moody retorted.
"Could be cover for your real plan." She remained unconvinced.
"Dumbledore trusts me," he said.
"I don't trust Dumbledore," she replied.
"Here I was thinking he was having a laugh not telling me 'bout you," Moody bit out. "You bloody well nearly knocked my eye through the back of my skull, woman! If I wanted you down I'd have wandlessly stunned you thirty seconds ago."
"Still don't believe you." But she did believe that Moody had just telegraphed his next move–
She stepped back with no warning and cast a Protego as fast as she could, wordlessly but not wandlessly. Not one but two bright splashes of red light detonated against the invisible barrier, striking it down almost before it could properly form, coming only a fraction of a heartbeat too late to hit her directly. Moody scowled and jabbed his wand forward, audibly barking "Stupefy" for a third stunner. This one she twisted away from, the spell passing just to the side of her shoulder.
Her wand was already halfway through the movements of her next charm when she dodged, and twisting to one side wasn't enough to throw her off; she finished a whispered "Scourgify" and immediately sidestepped an attempted kick at her knee. Moody blocked the charm that would have filled his mouth with soap with a silent shield of his own, one that decidedly did not break on impact like hers had, but their hectic back and forth had bought time. Time for a scant few dozen of her bugs to arrive on the scene.
A few spider bites wouldn't put down a determined wizard. She didn't have anything immediately painful or debilitating; she'd not gotten around to figuring out how to import bullet ants and the like, not yet. Her bugs were trivial here, trivial save for what they could convey.
She battered Moody's shield with two explosive hexes, enough to force him to drop it in favor of going back on the offensive; her assessment of his fighting style was that he tended towards attacking as his best defense, forcing her to fend him off instead of giving her the initiative, much like she was prone to doing. She threw up a better magical shield, then was forced to drop it, twice in a row. He was stronger in magic, more experienced, much more dangerous, and he knew it. She was already on the back foot, and he grimly pressed his advantage, forcing her back against the wall of the corridor, his magical eye whirling wildly in his head.
Then a beetle dipped in a potion from the Potions classroom splatted against the back of his neck, a tiny, insignificant projectile carried by flies. What worked for Lung would work for a grizzled old man.
Taylor ducked away from the line of fire as Moody reacted, slapping the back of his neck and then doubling down. His curses, the three he snapped off, were barely avoidable and completely unblockable. She sprawled out on the ground in a last-ditch effort to evade the third, completely incapable of defending against a theoretical fourth spell.
But Moody only had three in him. At the end of the third, he staggered and crumpled to the floor, his eye rolling angrily even as his eyelids closed.
She got up, kicked his wand away, her own trained on him the whole time, and waited until he started snoring… Then she stunned him, for good measure. It seemed Snape was right: Willerson's botched Draught of Living Death really was strong enough to work on skin contact. She wouldn't have called that a failure at all, as it seemed incredibly useful in ways the expected potency was not. Too bad Snape was liable to vanish the cauldron's contents at any moment. Maybe she could recreate it once Sirius got around to showing her how to brew.
Still, it served to get her out of this fight. She was fighting experienced wizards frequently these days; this made the second one in only a few months.
She needed to figure out what she was going to do with Moody before someone stumbled across her standing over him, with Harry stunned in a secret passage. Bereft of any third-party witnesses, it would be her word against his if that happened. One of them was supposed to be here in Hogwarts, and she was not that person. Worse, he knew who she was, and he would be able to figure out from what had happened that she was probably Harry's snake. She couldn't let him go to Dumbledore. She still didn't know if he was trying to teach Harry an over-enthusiastic lesson in safety, or actually intending to kidnap him, but either way he might tell Dumbledore, removing her from the castle at best, and leaving Harry with someone of unclear intentions.
Put like that, there was really only one thing she could do, short of killing him which was a terrible idea for a wide variety of reasons.
"Wingardium Leviosa." Moody's robes hauled him up, as people couldn't be levitated directly, and he only floated a few feet off the ground, but the important part was that he was floating. She pushed his body into the secret passage, past her still-unconscious son, and then turned on the ruined tapestry. "Reparo," she cast.
Some of the damage repaired itself. As best she could tell, all of the damage from hurling Moody into the tapestry was reversed, but not the long, straight cut he had cursed into it. It was good enough that she was able to 'close' the tapestry, casting darkness on the tunnel save for where the cut let light through.
It was good enough. Moody might have meant to kidnap Harry. It was only fair if she temporarily abducted him in return. He had questions to answer, and if he really was just a professor nobody would notice if he was missing for a few hours. Harry's 'special lesson' could go long.
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