章 2252: 9
Chapter Text
Something was brewing beneath the surface of Britain's magical society. Taylor was an outsider, a newcomer, but the criminal underworld was much the same no matter where she went, across the ocean or across the multiverse, and she was well-suited to overhearing all of the chatter between the locals.
She heard the rumblings in Knockturn Alley when she went to replace her blood charm, as it had lost its potency. She heard them in the back-alley pubs, on the streets, in the dangerous artifact pawnshop. Something was happening, the rumors said. Death Eaters at the World Cup, another escape from Azkaban, and the Ministry had lost the escapee, gone before he could even be charged. Something was afoot, and the smart ones would keep their heads down. A gang war might be coming, though they didn't use those words here.
Barty Crouch Junior was at large, and the Ministry was covering it up.
She knew it was a bad idea to trust him to the authorities to do their jobs. At least the Protectorate had the decency to announce when dangerous criminals escaped their custody!
Soon after learning that, she decided that she agreed with the criminal element; something did feel like it was building in the shadows. The World Cup Death Eaters might be malcontents left over from the last war, but Barty Crouch Junior was supposed to be dead, dead on Azkaban, and his escape stunk of further corruption in the justice system responsible for putting him there. His motives were still unknown, and if there was someone behind it all, they were totally hidden.
All of that could be unrelated coincidences, but the situation put her in mind of Coil and his plots. The way he tried to rule from the shadows, a group of semi-competent and more importantly sneaky criminals in one hand, the local government in the other, or close to it. One foot in both camps, playing the criminals against his political enemies until he was on top of the heap.
She was a target thrice over, if that was the case. An enemy of the Death Eaters, the Pureblood political faction, and Harry Potter's mother. None of those things were publicly associated with her, but they were inherently true, and she knew who her enemies would be were she to come into the open in the future. And then there was Barty, who had targeted her specifically. He might come for her again.
She couldn't let this sit even if she wanted to, which she didn't. The insects in Knockturn Alley, including a few marginally magical ones her power had managed to bring into the fold, were often organized as she frequented the shadows in the evenings, listening and watching. Hogsmeade had its clandestine meeting places, and she watched those too whenever she got the chance. She visited the Ministry every so often, working piecemeal to establish herself in the bureaucracy, like she had with her Animagus form. Her insects allowed her to spy on the Minister and other important officials, though it was always a crapshoot whether they would be doing interesting things at the times she was in the building.
All of her spying and information-gathering netted her a collection of interesting facts about Magical Britain and the world beyond it, but little to nothing on the Death Eaters or their master. Voldemort was known to be dead, beyond what she gathered to be the usual fervent mutters that a dark lord as evil and powerful as him could never truly die, the same things she occasionally heard about Grindelwald, the previous dark lord. There was no word of someone recruiting or organizing the old Death Eaters, not even among the few mercenaries for hire that she happened across one afternoon.
Something was building, but it wasn't building among the common thugs, and unlike back home in Brockton Bay this world had a class of potential criminals who frequented their heavily-defended manors and the government, and nowhere else. They were much harder to keep tabs on, with their wards and constant apparition and house elf slaves. Harder still when she had next to no free time to go hunting. She stayed up late and went to work tired just to trawl the common criminal underworld, and her weekends were time with Harry that she refused to cut down.
She stomped into Grimmauld Place late one Thursday evening, coming out of the Floo with a shake to shed excess water. It was cold out, just shy of snowing, and the wind was driving the icy rain sideways. She was soaked and tired, and the drive home stood between her and her bed, unappealing in the extreme. Then there was work…
She tossed her jacket aside and sat down in the fluffy armchair closest to the fire, procrastinating. The insects she kept in Grimmauld Place, a thriving colony down in the basement regardless of where Sirius might think she kept them, spread out to reconnoitor the house.
Sirius was home, up in one of the unused bedrooms. He was looking at a picture frame on a dresser, and she withdrew her bugs out of politeness. He talked a big game about despising his family and she believed him for the most part, but everyone had their moments of sentimentality.
She wondered what had become of Earth Bet and the wider multiverse. Of the parahumans she gathered together for the final battle, many dragged from their worlds to fight and left with no clear way back. Of Lisa, Aisha, and everyone else who had survived…
She thought Lisa and Aisha were alive. She remembered them being there, in the end. That had to mean something. The others… She wasn't so sure. They might as well be dead, seeing as she would never see any of them again, but some of them weren't. It was a bit like an actual afterlife, either for them… or for her. Existing somewhere, but totally out of reach with no way to be sure.
Sirius came downstairs, bare feet slapping on wood. "Taylor, you here?" he called out.
"By the fire," she replied, putting aside her melancholy as best she could.
"Thought I felt the Floo alert ward go off," he said as he came into the room. "Get anything from the thugs?"
"Nothing more than the usual bluster with a side of petty crime." She had seen a vampire, or something similar, but that was the height of her evening and all the vampire did was flash his fangs at someone to scare them off.
"I've got something," Sirius told her. "My cousin Narcissa owled me asking that I meet her. I was bored, so I did. She's the same stuck-up bitch she always was."
"Narcissa is the one married to the Death Eater?" Taylor asked. It was either that, the insane one in Azkaban, or the alright one married to a Muggleborn. She thought she had remembered correctly; the name fit perfectly to the person Sirius described.
"Yup, and you wouldn't believe how huffy she got when she realized I'd asked to meet in a Muggle bar," Sirius said with a grin. "Once she calmed down, it was all 'you are the head of our noble house' this, and 'be a good Pureblood' that."
"She try to recruit you?" Narcissa had a connection to a Death Eater. The Death Eaters were stirring, ans Sirius might theoretically have reasons to resent his former allies after being stuck in Azkaban while they twiddled their thumbs, so it wasn't an entirely stupid idea.
"No, but she hinted that the old boys club still meets," he said soberly. "Not that they're doing anything, but I got the feeling she thinks something is coming. She wouldn't have approached me if she felt secure doing nothing. I think she wants a backup plan in case it goes sideways."
"Great. More warnings, nothing to act on." She heard a distant crash of thunder. "And the weather is going to shit, too."
"You don't have to leave, you know," Sirius offered. "There are spare bedrooms, or just the couch if you'd rather."
It was tempting, but she would have to drive home early and change there, and it wasn't worth it. Still, she was only bothered by the practicality of it, not the thought of staying. "Thanks, but that will just make it harder in the morning."
"I respect my guests and will not make raunchy jokes," Sirius chanted to himself, closing his eyes and sticking his hands behind his back. "I will not make raunchy jokes even if they give me the perfect opening. I will respect the scary bug lady…"
"Oh, fuck off," she laughed, rising to gather her coat from the floor. The drive home was only going to get less appealing the longer she put it off.
The second task took place on a dreary cold British morning, the kind that had Taylor longing for the relatively mild winters in Brockton Bay. Sirius hit her with a warming charm as they shivered in the stands set up on the edge of Hogwarts' lake, but it was a fleeting warmth, the kind that heated her skin but did nothing for the chill that had already seeped into her bones.
Her stump ached, more so where the false arm she wore pulled at it. The magic over her face to subtly change her features itched incessantly, explaining why witches didn't exclusively use glamors instead of more traditional makeup. She was singularly uncomfortable.
Whatever was going to happen on the lake, she hoped it would be either fast or worth the wait. Harry probably knew, he and his friends had put more effort into preparing Cedric for the tournament than the Ministry had probably put into designing the task, but she had avoided asking, wanting to be surprised. It involved water and possibly water creatures, both of which she could have guessed from how the stands were arranged.
"The Giant Squid is quite passive," Sirius was explaining as they waited. "In my first year some bloke jumped into the lake and the squid pushed him to shore. The House Elves feed it, so it doesn't try to feed on us two-legged morsels. Or the merpeople, come to think of it."
"It eats meat, though?" she asked.
"Oh, tons," he confirmed. "You didn't think all those old stories of boats getting dragged down by sea monsters were myths, did you? Poor Muggles, not knowing to bring a few fresh cows to sate the squid…. Not that those were the only sea monsters, mind you. There's a reason wizarding cruise ships aren't popular."
"Durmstrang arrived in a ship," a witch sitting behind them chimed in.
"Yes, one that has some sort of bulk portkey," Sirius retorted, not even looking back. "Bet you they didn't sail more than a kilometer all told."
"I'll take that bet… Mr. Black, is it?" the witch said. "Still single?"
"Nope," Sirius said.
"Pity," the witch sighed.
Taylor glanced over at Sirius, and he shrugged.
"Wizards and Witches, boys and girls," Bagman started up, his sonorous charm turning his voice into a deafening squawk before he managed to damp it down to something reasonable. Percy Weasley, presumably still on his internship with the Ministry, tapped his wand on Bagman to lower the volume, then left. "Welcome to the second task! Our champions are lining up at the shore now!"
The three champions strode out into line of sight, having been hidden by the little mediwitch tent until that moment. They were all wearing their usual school robes, and though Taylor couldn't see them very well from far away, they all looked antsy.
"They have one hour – only one! – to retrieve a hostage from somewhere in the depths of the lake, and return them here to the shore," Bagman announced. "As such, we'll let them get on their way… Now! Time has started!" He let off a flare from his wand, a pitiful red burst of fire that died quickly in the foggy morning damp.
Fleur Delacour shed her outer robes and pointed her wand at her head, before striding out into the shallows. Neither of the other champions followed, Krum busy doing something to his upper torso and head, and Cedric…
Cedric tossed his robes aside, revealing a Muggle wetsuit. His burn scars licked up from the neck of the suit, ending just below his chin. He cast several charms on himself, none of which Taylor recognized, the last creating a glowing white field that covered his body up to his head.
Krum finished his transfiguration, now clearly part-shark, and dove into the water, leaving Cedric alone on the shore.
"Krum and Delacour are off, but Diggory lingers on the shore, girding himself in all kinds of magical preparation," Bagman narrated. "No one knows what is happening beneath the waves, but he must be confident in his preparation to allow his opponents such a head start!"
"Don't bloody tell me they don't have a way for us to see the actual event," Sirius groaned. "Come on Bagman, what are you going to do, treat us to wizard stand-up comedy until they get back?"
A ripple of disappointment passed through the audience as the meaning of Bagman's off-handed comment sunk in. Nobody, Taylor was willing to bet, wanted to be here just to watch a blank lake for an hour. She certainly didn't.
Cedric had transfigured a trident out of a rock and was casting spells on it now. He even dumped a small potion on the barbed tines, sourced from his robes. He looked like he was going to war.
Armed with his wetsuit, magical layers, and enchanted trident, he walked into the lake. The water rose up to part before him, allowing him to literally walk down into the depths.
"He's got a flair for drama, hasn't he?" Bagman asked the crowd.
"More than you do, you bloody idiot!" someone yelled. "How are we supposed to watch?"
"Well, the… suspense!" Bagman said, grasping for straws. "Yes, the suspense, not knowing what is happening below, knowing the stakes, it's all very exciting."
"Those hostages can't be in any real danger, they only brought the tournament back with the idea that it would be safer," Sirius remarked. "What stakes?"
"Can't you do a scrying or something?" the same heckler demanded.
"Well, there wasn't the budget for a big scrying bowl," Bagman admitted. "We have a small one for security purposes, but–"
"I am sure we can arrange something." Dumbledore, who had been sitting with the other judges as Bagman blathered, stepped up and into the range of Bagman's sonorous charm. "Show us this security scrying bowl."
Some time passed, in which Bagman, Moody, Dumbledore, and Madam Maxime convened around a little bowl Moody had been carrying. In the meantime, absolutely nothing happened at the lake's surface.
Finally, Dumbledore uttered a spell and a massive projection of mist shot up from the bowl, spreading out to form five circular clouds over the shore. Three immediately shimmered to life, muted colors displaying views of the three champions from above, top-down. The fourth and fifth came to life a moment later, one showing three children floating limply in an underwater village, and the other showing a map of the lake with dots representing the locations of the champions and hostages.
Sirius whistled appreciatively. "That is some impressive spellwork," he breathed.
It didn't match the video quality Taylor had been accustomed to back on Earth Bet, but she thought that might just be because it was being displayed on clouds of mist, not something flat and solidly-colored. It certainly beat the televisions of this time period. Her power itched to study it; clairvoyance to the point of getting a live view and locational information… That was powerful. There had to be a reason she had never seen anyone using it or heard it mentioned.
"It's a shame scrying is broken by any kind of ward," Sirius said. After teaching her various magical subjects for months, he knew how she thought well enough to anticipate what she might think of this. "Even ones not meant to block it. Inside the wards it works if you can key it in like Dumbledore must have done here, but it can't cross them. It was a lot more widely used back before wards were common."
Up on the scrying clouds, Fleur Delacour was shown swimming in the depths with a bubble of air around her head, kicking her feet and using her hands to peer through clumps of weeds. She was the furthest from the hostages, who were roughly at the center of the lake. Viktor Krum was closest, but he was currently being waylaid by goblin-like creatures with webbed fingers and vicious teeth. Krum had teeth of his own, gnarled shark teeth by the dozen in a maw made for them, and was biting back as well as cursing with nonverbal spells. Some of his spells fizzled out in the water, but others moved as though unimpeded.
Cedric was catching up to Krum, and fast. The moving sphere of air around him was twice as wide as he was tall, and his trident sparked with electricity whenever something moved in the water outside of his bubble. He was jogging along the floor of the lake, his boots finding sure purchase despite the ground being a treacherous rubble of slick rocks and slimy weeds. Little flashes of light accompanied every footfall, coming from the field of glowing energy that encompassed him.
The other purpose of the magic field was made clear when one of the water-goblin creatures worked up the nerve to attack Cedric despite his massive bubble of air, jolting down into the air from above. Cedric spun his trident and dealt the monster a flashy shock, but it attempted to grapple onto his shoulder. Its sucker-like fingertips slid right off a panel of white light that formed just above his robes, blocking direct contact. Another heavy blow from the blunt end of the trident sent it crawling back into the water at the edge of his bubble.
"That's just not fair," Sirius said. "Send something more dangerous his way!" he cheered.
Taylor believed Bagman would have done so, had he the power, but it didn't look like he did. Cedric continued mostly unopposed, the other water-goblins having learned from the first's painful example, while Krum and now Fleur battled for their lives elsewhere in the lake. Cedric's steady progress made a mockery of the other champions, who looked wholly unprepared in contrast to him.
Cedric reached the outskirts of the mermish village long before anyone else. He was faced with a whole platoon of mermaid guards. This was the first Taylor had seen of their kind, and she was struck by how inhuman they managed to look while still being objectively more human than not. Their sharp, angular teeth and slitted eyes stood out in otherwise normal faces, and their gills were akin to gaping wounds without blood. The bottom half of their bodies, being the fish half, was less disturbing. Unlike Veela, they were clearly not human and could not possibly be mistaken for it under normal conditions.
They barred Cedric's way with their normal, unenchanted tridents, and for a moment it looked as if he would fight them.
Then he thumped his trident on the bare lake bottom, and the water rushed in to fill his bubble except for a tiny space under his nostrils and over his mouth.
"Diggory gives up his most powerful weapon just shy of his hostage, what could he be planning?" Bagman blurted out, having apparently remembered it was his job to commentate. He had been watching the scrying clouds as intently as everyone else, reduced to just another spectator.
Cedric, now immersed in the water, kicked his feet once to rise up off the lakebed. He gestured with his trident, first at himself and then at the village.
The merman in the lead of the group blocking him scowled and said something. Scrying, or at least this version of it, did not allow for sound, so nobody in the audience knew what he had said.
Cedric nodded, pointed his trident's tines down at the ground, and swam past them without fear. They let him go, following like an honor guard.
"They were supposed to put up a fight," Bagman announced, "but it seems they thought better of it!"
"It seems they decided dying in their own village wasn't worth whatever the Ministry paid them," Sirius muttered. "He could lay waste to them if he could expand that bubble far enough. They're pants at getting around in the air, you see."
Cedric swam through the mermish village. Meanwhile, Krum had finally fought off the water-goblins – she needed to ask Sirius what those actually were, or maybe Harry as he almost certainly knew – and was headed for the village, but had almost a quarter of the lake between him and it. Fleur was a distant third, closer to the shore she had started from than anything important, and visibly growing frantic as she struggled through a tangled patch of weeds while water-goblins nipped at her heels and slashed at her legs.
She had volunteered for this tournament, her and the others, but Taylor still felt bad for her. One of the hostages had the same hair as her and couldn't be a day over eight years old. Fleur was panicking for good reason, and even if it was fake the terror was real. If it was Harry down there, and she was in the position Fleur was put in at the start of the second task, Taylor wouldn't even have bothered competing. She would have taken one of the judges hostage herself, and threatened to drown him on dry land unless Harry was promptly, safely returned.
Then again, she had no other motivation to compete and no confidence in her limited collection of spells to get her through an event like this, so her options would be more limited. Fleur might have thought she was capable of getting there in time.
If Fleur thought that at the start of the task, she couldn't possibly think it now. More than half an hour had elapsed, and only Cedric was anywhere near the hostages. It would be a tight squeeze for Krum to get there and back in time. Fleur didn't stand a chance unless she pulled out an underwater jet ski or friendly dolphin pack to ride on.
Dolphins… Maybe Taylor could have completed this task if she was stuck competing. She could turn into any animal. A dolphin, or better yet a shark… That could be good. None of the current champions were capable of that; Krum was only partly shark.
"Are there Animagi who can turn into water-breathing animals?" she asked Sirius as Cedric approached the pillar with the hostages.
"Yes, but I don't know who would bother if they knew their form was stuck in the water… Magical creatures are at the top of every food chain in the water, and turning back underwater can be lethal." Sirius shuddered. "Go down too far and turn back and you're crushed, survive that and you can't go up again without your blood killing you. All while whatever made you turn back to defend yourself chomps on your spinal column. You think those Grindylow are bad? They're carrion-feeders!"
Given Fleur was once again struggling with the Grindylows, Taylor had to admit Sirius was right. She certainly wouldn't be swimming in the ocean for fun anytime soon.
Cedric cut the ropes holding one of the girls to the pillar, the only one in Hogwarts robes. He used the cut end to tie her to his trident, cast a spell on her head that enlarged her personal air bubble, and put his wand away.
"Oh, what's this?" Sirius said, leaning forward.
Cedric grasped his trident with both hands and straddled his unconscious hostage, gripping her with his legs. He pointed the trident back towards the shore and squeezed the handle, barking out a single word.
The scrying view of Cedric blurred, an unintelligible jumble of dulled brown, green, and blue, water rushing by at tremendous speed. The dots indicating Cedric and his hostage began moving on the map scrying cloud, faster and faster.
"An explosive escape by Cedric Diggory with his hostage, Cho Chang, and based on their speed we should be seeing them any second now!" Bagman shouted. "But what condition will they be in when they arrive?"
Taylor had only a rough estimate of how big the lake was, but Cedric had to be going at least forty miles an hour to be moving across it so quickly, and in the water at that. She wondered if his magical protective field negated all friction, or just most of it.
The dots that marked Cedric slowed just shy of the shore, and a moment later he rose from the shallows, Cho in a bridal carry in his arms, the trident secured to the back of his robes.
The audience broke into cheers as Cho woke up, looking bewildered, and Cedric set foot on the shore to win the second task. It was barely even a contest.
Fleur and Krum struggled on, with Krum reaching his hostage just shy of the hour mark, but neither of them made it back to the shore in time. The remaining hostages and champions were teleported back with emergency portkeys, landing just outside the mediwitch tent, and soon after the judges gave their scores, not even waiting until the other champions and hostages left the tent.
Cedric scored a ten out of ten from Dumbledore and Maxime. Karkaroff gave him a five, to immense displeasure from the audience. Krum received two sixes and a nine – Karkaroff again, he seemed to have no shame at all – and Fleur received threes across the board.
Not that Fleur cared. Two bursts of fire preceded her storming from the mediwitch tent, looking distinctly avian in appearance. "You may take your vaunted tournament and shove it up your rear ends," she shrieked at the judges, her English accented but entirely understandable. "I would quit if I could!"
"Fleur!" Maxime barked.
"Non!" Fleur yelled, her lips sharpening eerily, forming a pseudo-beak that became more and more real as she ranted. "She woke up, you pissants! She was choking! Your charms failed at the end of the hour!"
… All of which was conveyed to the audiences by Bagman's lingering sonorous charm.
"That should not have happened," Dumbledore said gravely. "Is she injured?"
Taylor knew a politician trying to spin something when she saw one; she noticed that Dumbledore hadn't canceled the sonorous charm yet. The cat was out of the bag, but he could make it look less mangy than it really was. Especially as it hadn't looked like Fleur's sister was choking on the scrying clouds.
"This close," Fleur hissed, holding her hand out with her thumb and forefinger just shy of touching. "Seconds. My sister is not your plaything, and I do not care if my parents allowed it! Touch her again and I will burn you!" Her fingers smoldered.
Bagman finally took the sonorous charm down, and Dumbledore's reply went unheard by the audience, but whatever it was, Fleur refused to be mollified. She walked away, her shoulders twitching as little wings sprouted from between her shoulder blades, and the French Headmistress followed her.
"It's possible the Ministry is just that incompetent," Sirius suggested.
"Possible, but not the only explanation." She needed to learn more.
"The charms on Cho had already been removed by the time the hour was up," Cedric said when Harry asked him during the celebration that night. Taylor listened closely, an unremarkable snake on Harry's shoulder. "But I saw Gabrielle – Fleur's sister – when she was portkeyed in. She looked fine until Pomfrey dispelled a glamor I didn't even know was there. She was soaked and blue in the face. Pomfrey had to spell the water out of her."
"She was glamored?" Harry asked. "So we couldn't see what was actually happening to her?" He sounded horrified, as well he should. That moved the odds of thing being an intentional attack from 'possible but unlikely' to 'all but certain', barring excessive Ministry incompetence to scales never before seen.
"Yes, and if the charm had failed earlier…" Cedric shuddered. "I might have brought Cho up from the lake, taken her to Pomfrey, and only then found out she was already dead, not unconscious. Viktor's hostage was choking too, but she said she had only been unprotected for a few seconds. Gabrielle… Almost half a minute."
Half a minute disoriented, underwater, tied to a pillar, with no air and no idea what was happening. Half a minute of drowning.
"They should never have used people as hostages," Harry said bitterly. "We thought it would be an object, 'what you would miss most', not who you would miss most."
"Yeah," Cedric laughed bitterly. "I know Cho is shaken up. She would have been even if it went right. She told me she was assured it would be safe, but they didn't tell her any details."
"Who was they?" Taylor hissed. Harry parroted her question.
"Dumbledore, Fudge, Moody, Bagman, Percy Weasley – he's assisting Fudge – and Karkaroff," Cedric recounted. "That's who Cho said was there. She thought she would get to stand on a raft or something."
"That would have been a sane thing to do," Harry said.
"Next time…" Cedric looked around, at the busy Hufflepuff common room. Their little discussion had an audience; everyone wanted to hear what had happened, but most of the other Hufflepuffs were pretending to be busy. "Next time, we're putting portkeys on everyone in Hufflepuff the night before the task," he announced. "Use them the instant anyone official starts talking about you participating, don't wait to be made a hostage, they might put you to sleep like they did Cho."
"I can make them," a seventh year volunteered. "Do you still have the one they put on you, or the one on Cho?"
Cedric nodded and handed over a small white disc the size of a coin. "Thought you might need it to study," he admitted.
"I can figure out a way to hide them," another student offered.
"In the meantime, we'll all work to make sure you crush the last task just like you did this one," Susan Bones said.
"Yes. Please." Cedric smiled grimly. "I don't know if it's just my winning at stake anymore. If it wasn't for you all… My only idea was a bubblehead charm!"
Taylor was proud of her son and his friends. They, along with the rest of Hufflepuff, had directly produced the impressive show Cedric put on at the task, but for them it wasn't just a contest now. It might be life or death, and that only spurred them on.
They could and would handle the dangers imposed by the tournament itself. She and Sirius would work on the rest.
Moody entered his office that night, well after the student curfew, to find a snake waiting on his desk.
"Some familiars wander far too much," he said aloud. "Where's your owner, reptile?"
Taylor shook her head.
"In that case…" He closed the door and fired several different charms at it, before transfiguring a metal bar across the frame to physically hold it shut. Taylor waited patiently as he cast another dozen spells on the room itself.
"Change back," he ordered once he was done. "If you're here to talk, that is."
She had anticipated this. She had it on good authority that the Weasley twins were asleep in their beds in the Gryffindor dorms. A few snake expeditions to their room over the last term had demonstrated that she had no chance of quietly finding the Map so long as they kept it hidden, so she had to work around them.
It was still a risk, but everything was a risk these days. She slithered off the desk and shifted back, hiding the pain of the transformation with little more outward sign than a grimace. "I can't do this for long," she told him. "It's risky."
"Nothing sees in here when I'm holding the security charms," Moody told her.
She shook her head. "At least one thing does. It's not being properly used for security purposes, but if it was I would never be able to change back without being noticed within minutes." She would have set three elves keeping a constant watch over the map, perhaps with some magic to make a record of locations and names for sensitive areas… The Map was by far the most effective magical security system she had encountered to date, and that was including the intentionally-added backdoor she was exploiting. Without that, it would be absolute.
"Of course," Moody growled. "Bringing that up in your report?"
"It will be on the list of things to fix, yes." The Weasley twins might not like having their toy taken away, but the needs of the many… They were probably the most accomplished smugglers and sneaks in the castle without it, anyway. If they had been learning from it instead of using it as a crutch, its loss wouldn't hamper them overmuch. "What happened in the second task?"
"Someone decided to randomly murder between zero and three children, based solely on luck," Moody said. "It wasn't you."
"No, it was not." She gave that statement all of the importance it deserved, a cursory acknowledgement. "Was it a Ministry ploy? A plan that was discarded as being too risky? A way to up the stakes?"
"Hell no," Moody exclaimed. "That Veela chick was important, we'd be halfway to war if she died in our territory, in our tournament, to a completely preventable danger put in to make things more dramatic. That's the sort of thing that got the Tournament shut down last time. No, I wasn't involved from the very start, but I know real danger to the hostages was never on the table. Someone weakened the safety charms and cast those glamors between us casting them and the start of the task."
"How long was that?" Taylor asked. "It's not my job, but… no dead kids. Not while I can do something about it."
Moody raised his flask to her. "Amen to that." He set it on his desk and learned forward. "It's being officially labeled as a mistake," he told her, his voice heavy with scorn. "Fudge. He thinks his career is riding on this being a success, and on there not being any more major upsets. Sirius Black being acquitted was a blow. Barty Crouch Junior proving Sirius wasn't the first to do it, and then escaping custody… He believes that any more bad press will end him."
"It's true, then." She had thought so, but it was good to hear from Moody. She trusted him as a source of Death-Eater-related information.
"Got it out of some old friends in the Ministry," he said. A crooked grin graced his scarred face as he looked up at her. "How'd you pull off the Animagus trick?"
She smiled mysteriously. "Does it matter, so long as I am registered as an Animagus? Perhaps my form changes with my mood. It would hardly be the only way magic behaves differently for me."
"Don't tell me then," he grumbled. "The fools at the Ministry didn't even think to question why you turned into a male Moose, what with the rack."
"I am very mysterious," she said. She remembered the Moose not being male at all; the curse she was using forced the same number of limbs and gender as the victim. Odd. She would have to look into that, once she had no more pressing matters to research… So perhaps sometime before the end of the century. "Back to Barty Crouch Junior. Did his elf escape too?"
"Nah," Moody said dismissively. "The elf died in custody. You put a fang right though a lung. It's just Barty, and as best the Aurors know he fled the country immediately after."
Taylor acknowledged her first confirmed kill in this world with a heavy sigh. So long as she didn't make a habit of it except in self-defense.
"Best we can tell, there are six possible suspects for the attempted murders," Moody said, getting back to the original reason she had come to talk to him. "No official investigation, so I can tell you all I want about it. Me, Fudge, Bagman, Karkaroff, and an unknown third party. Percy Weasley was there too, but he was never left alone with the hostages. Stuck to Fudge's rear end, that one was."
"The unknown third party," Taylor prompted.
Moody grimaced. "Bloody mess," he said. "Those girls were prepped for the lake two hours before the task was set to begin. They were put in one hour before, with charms meant to last for four hours at minimum. In that hour between being charmed and being placed in the lake, they were left in the Mediwitch tent, but Pomfrey had to leave almost immediately to tend to Malfoy's spawn, who somehow got a full-sized frog merged with his nose while in the general vicinity of Ronald Weasley. It took her the full hour to undo the damage, with Malfoy refusing to have his nose vanished and regrown with Skelegrow."
"Pomfrey is a suspect too, then," Taylor said.
"Seven, then," Moody agreed. "Problem is people were all around that tent setting things up. Everyone I mentioned, plus random students helping set the stands in the right places, Ministry officials, reporters… A security nightmare. Anyone with a wand and the know-how could have sabotaged the girls, and saving their lives involved undoing the spells, so we have no evidence to work with."
"This is going to be covered up? Like Barty's escape?" Taylor asked.
"Aye." Moody shook his head, his eye fixed almost exclusively on her. "I'll be lookin' into it, and I'm gonna try to get the Minister to give me a full set of Aurors as security for the third task, but there are things I can't do. Keep your ears open?"
"I hear anything related to this, you'll know," she promised. "Any idea what the motive was?"
"No, but if the one who did it just wanted to ruin the Tournament… Lots of ways to do that." Moody jabbed a finger on the table. "One intentionally misbrewed potion under the stands during the next task, and we'd lose half the student body. A single Imperius curse might lose us the Minister, or Harry Potter, or some other important person. Keep a close watch on the kid. He wasn't the target this time, but the girls might've been targets of convenience. There was talk of taking a Hufflepuff as a hostage for Cedric, and Potter's name was bandied about. Fudge was especially keen, him and his toady mouthpiece, but Bagman worked the 'maidens in distress' angle and they couldn't justify Potter as Cedric's hostage specifically, so it didn't happen."
They would drag Harry into their damn tournament over her dead body. Or, more likely in such a scenario, she would forgo the violent objection and simply spirit him away to Grimmauld Place, or, that insufficient, another country. Those unauthorized Hufflepuff safety portkeys might come in handy.
As it turned out, blasting the windows open was the tipping point between Grimmauld Place being a miserable sad-sack of memorabilia and bad memories, and a fixable miserable sad-sack. There was still a near-endless amount of work to do to make the place liveable, but it was at that point that Sirius figured said work might actually be worth doing. With natural sunlight, the musty old townhouse actually felt recoverable.
Having open windows – open in that they were holes with no glass for the time being – did have a few side effects. The carpet whined and writhed whenever a beam of sunlight hit it, for instance. He was going to have to hire a professional to check that, as he had no idea what was causing it.
Then there was the owl that had blithely flown in through the window, landed on his backside as he conversed through the Floo, and caused the lump on his head that he was currently nursing with a conjured icepack.
"Don't they teach you birds to wait?" he grumbled at the owl once he had retrieved an icepack to dull the pain. It glared unrepentantly from the mantle. "Bloody lucky I didn't pitch forward and fall through, that Ministry clerk still thinks I'm a 'dangerous character' even though I was cleared of all charges. He'd have stunned me and had me arrested for trespassing."
The owl hooted.
Off in the hallway, his mother's portrait started yelling. Another voice yelled back at her, just as loud, and with a rant just as filled with creative invectives. He might not know what the hat was, but it made for a great distraction for his mother's portrait. He was hoping that if he left them alone together for long enough, the hat would reveal its mysteries to end the torment, or his mother would self-destruct out of impotent rage.
Meanwhile, he had a letter from a tosser with a moody bird to read. "Not going to leave until I reply, are you?" he asked the owl, reaching for the letter.
It nipped at his fingers – "Bloody bird, I've eaten pigeon before, don't tempt me to eat you" – but he got the letter eventually. Parchment of course, sealed with a blob of wax, a Hogwarts seal to be precise. Addressed to him, all formal-like…
He cast a few simple detection charms over it, because he was nobody's fool, and when it came up clean he opened and read it.
All the flowery official language aside? He was being offered a job interview for the position of the perennially unlucky Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts. The interview was 'at his earliest convenience', and to be conducted by Dumbledore himself.
The Floo flared, and Taylor stepped through, dressed as a Muggle. "Evening, Sirius."
"Evening," he replied, partially distracted by the letter. "I like my women of the night to come in by the front door, though, you know that. Mind going out and then coming in the right way?"
"Is that why you never bother unlocking the front door?" she retorted. "Since it apparently gets so little use."
"Touche." He could have continued teasing her – she had such a fun variety of reactions to his jokes, he was never sure what he'd get when he poked her – but the letter sucked all the joy out of messing around, because like it or not, this was important. "Check this out," he offered, holding it out to her.
She took the letter, skimmed it once, then again, squinting at Albus' flowery script. "He's finally making contact?"
"Looks like it." He'd expected something sooner, what with his exoneration having happened months ago. He had also expected Moony to reach out before Albus sodding Dumblefore, given Moony was supposed to be his friend, but… whatever. "Think it's because of the guardianship application?"
"Could be." She handed the letter back. "Planning on going?"
Sirius felt he was being tested. Luckily, minor concussion or not, he was up to the task. "Obliviation, Imperius, Confundus, Veritaserum, Legillimency," he listed. "You'll sic the authorities on me and him if I come back obliviated or confounded, and I'm important, so that will end with my memories and impeccable good sense being restored and him under a heap of scrutiny. Dumbledore would never stoop to using an Unforgivable, but if he does I'll have scheduled an appointment to view my vault the day after, which will take me under the Goblins' Thief's Downfall, so it won't last long enough for anything to go horribly wrong. I won't drink or ingest anything during or after the interview. My Occlumency is pants, but I'll notice if he gets into my head so it's a moot point unless he ambushes me. Worst-case scenario, he finds out everything we've done and are doing despite my precautions, with the side-effect that he makes an enemy of me and lands himself in a load of legal trouble whereas we're the innocent victims. Best-case scenario, I wheedle his motivations out of him with him none the wiser."
"Have a neutral third party in the room with you at all times," she suggested. "Another teacher, one not under his thumb. If there are any like that."
"Don't look at me, I've not been to school in over a decade," he said. "You're the one who lurks on the weekends. Suggestions?"
"Flitwick and Sprout," she said. "One's competent and the other is a reasonable person. Three on one, he would hesitate."
Sirius suspected Dumbledore could take him, Flitwick, and Sprout at the same time if he wanted to, but there would be no way to keep it quiet or make it quick. So long as they were in Hogwarts, people would notice the all-out magical brawl. "That'll do." He flipped the parchment over, called out "Accio quill and ink", and deftly caught the feather and inkpot as it soared over from the mantle, startling the owl who happened to be perched right next to them.
"Dear Albus 'three middle names I can never remember' Dumbledore," he narrated, translating the necessary formal-speech of a generic acceptance letter into what he actually meant. "I'd love to apply for a job I have absolutely no interest in taking, in a position that we all know is cursed, especially when you specifically do not say what's happened to Moody that made him unable to continue teaching, unless he's just smarter than your average Defense Professor and getting out while he can. I, as we both know, am entirely suited to a position of authority over mischievous children, and am fully capable of stuffing their impressionable heads with useful and age-appropriate magical knowledge. I have even spent the last few months tutoring a sadistic, disturbingly violent and creative woman in how to best exploit magic to her own ends, so I have some experience! Rest assured that the meager salary Hogwarts can offer to compensate me is unnecessary, as I will in the event of taking the job require my payment in Snape's tears and mandatory nude lessons for the seventh-year students–"
"Teachers who creep on students lose their favorite limb," Taylor threatened.
"Which I of course would not be attending," Sirius smoothly amended. "But I believe there is much to learn from dueling while starkers, so it will be a core part of the curriculum should I get the job. I would like to conduct this interview with a jury of my future peers in attendance, to ensure they know what you are attempting to subject them to next year, so I can meet you at the earliest time both Professor Sprout and Professor Flitwick are available to observe the interview. Lovingly yours, the worst possible person to put in charge of children, Sirius 'homewrecker handsome devil' Black."
He looked over the two sentences he had actually written, which constituted an entirely reasonable and sincere acceptance on the condition that the aforementioned Professors would be in attendance, and deemed it good. He then folded the letter over, removed the blob of wax from the outside, and reapplied it to seal the letter with a bit of heat from his wand. The seal smudged to an unidentifiable blob, but if he had a personal seal he would want it to be a vaguely phallic-shaped blob, so that was good.
The moment the wax cooled, the owl swooped over to snatch the letter from his hands, pecked at his face in the process, and disappeared out the window. "Hogwarts owls are getting touchy," he grumbled.
"That letter was dated to a week ago," Taylor told him. "When did you last leave Grimmauld Place?"
He thought about it. He'd gone plenty of places… by Floo and apparition, mostly. Which took him all over Britain, to locations he never stayed at for more than a few hours.
That owl must have been flying back and forth trying to catch him all week.
"Bird's still a bloody tosser," he decided.
Dumbledore got back to him quickly, and the owl he sent with a date and time was much more personable. Sirius rewarded it with a strip of bacon, put on his fanciest robes as a lark, and apparated over to Hogsmeade, where he was set to meet Dumbledore, Flitwick, and Sprout at the front gates of Hogwarts.
Sirius was not nervous. He was here for subterfuge, not an actual job application. Because spying was less nerve-wracking… Somehow.
Dumbledore, and Dumbledore alone, was waiting at the front gate, all fatherly smiles as he welcomed Sirius in. "How have you been?" he asked.
"Well, it's nice getting my tan back," was Sirius' noncommittal answer.
"Ah, yes," Dumbledore sighed. "I am terribly sorry about that, Sirius. It was a hectic time. If I had known or bothered to investigate after the fact, a lot of regrettable hardship could have been avoided."
They entered the castle. Sirius looked around, taking in the sights as Dumbledore led him up to the Headmaster's office. The place hadn't changed a bit, beyond the things that were always changing, like the corridor layout and painting locations.
Sirius had absolutely no experience with job interviews, so he didn't know if holding one in a cramped office was normal, but he did notice that neither Flitwick nor Sprout was present as Dumbledore took his seat. "Is this the interview?" he asked. "Because I recall mentioning–"
"Yes, your letter," Dumbledore agreed. "Truthfully, Sirius, while I will happily interview you for the job if you wish, I will admit that I used the opening as an excuse to contact you. I need your help with something much too sensitive to discuss or even hint at by owl."
"Lay it on me," Sirius said casually, feigning only mild interest. In truth, he was nervous; this was not how he and Taylor had expected things to go.
"We are waiting for one more," Dumbledore said cryptically. "In the meantime… Truly, how are you? Have you been seeing healers? Mind healers?"
"I've been cleared," Sirius confirmed. "Physically, there were some tremors, but those stopped ages ago. Mentally, I'm fit as a fiddle." An 'immature, mildly deranged just as a baseline' fiddle… but that mind healer was holding a personal grudge entirely unrelated to his mental state. Was it really his fault his first attempt at flirting after Azkaban had fallen through? That was just a sign of being out of practice.
"Good." Dumbledore frowned. "It is far too easy to go without asking for help until it is too late. I only hope I have not made that mistake myself."
Dumbledore making cryptic comments about his own failings was one of the most ominous things Sirius had seen or heard in… at least a month. Taylor's spiders dancing around in what looked suspiciously like rudimentary ritual circles held the top spot for the year. Thankfully, he had been able to explain that sacrifices required something with a soul, not just something of the same species as the ones doing the ritual. And also that rituals tended to have magic backlash with mentally degrading properties. She stopped after that.
Sirius was finding that he was glad he knew so much about magic, and dark magic specifically. Being Taylor's designated authority on the subject let him sleep at night. He did not want to know what she would have become without him to warn her of all the common sanity-reducing pitfalls that marred otherwise impressively powerful avenues of magic.
"Dumbledore, is this something urgent? You– Sirius?" He knew that voice. It belonged to a man who had not bothered to contact him in the past few months. A man he had no real desire to speak to, at present, given the aforementioned silent treatment. Remus.
"Yes, it is urgent," Dumbledore said gravely. "Take a seat. I need both of you. Quite badly, if I am being honest."
Sirius glanced over at his friend – if he could still consider Remus that, given the complete silence between them and how he'd treated Harry – as he sat down. He had grayed, physically weathered well beyond what should have come to a normal wizard over the course of a decade, and his shoulders hunched.
"Been a while," Sirius offered.
"Yes." Remus looked ahead. "What do you need us to do?" It looked like the ignoring would continue.
"Sirius." Dumbledore steepled his hands. "Do you have access to your family library?"
"Yes." It was no secret that he was living in Grimmauld Place. That Taylor could often be found there was a secret, and hopefully one not at all related to the reasons behind Dumbledore's question.
Sirius had to tread lightly. He had no idea what this was about.
"Remus," Dumbledore continued, "are you available for another long-term assignment? This one will involve much less travel than the one you have just returned from."
"Yes," Remus confirmed. "I have a job as a Muggle bartender now… But that's not likely to last. If this assignment comes with pay like the last, I can take it as early as tomorrow."
"Then this will work," Dumbledore said. "Sirius, what do the Blacks know of Summoning?"
Were he a dog, his hackles would be up and he'd be growling. As it was, he went stiff, his muscles tensing. "When a wizard as powerful as you asks, the Black response is to say that we know nothing and like it that way." A policy that had served his family, and more importantly the world as a whole, very well over the centuries. What one powerful wizard could do, another could theoretically undo if they knew how. That was not in anyone's best interests. Nothing the Blacks had should be anywhere near the knowledge needed to do such a thing, but this was one case where safe really was better than sorry.
"Even You-Know-Who didn't use Summoning," Remus said thoughtfully.
"That's because it doesn't work anymore," Sirius answered, thankful beyond all measure that such was the unadulterated truth.
"Anymore, being the key word." Dumbledore let out a heavy sigh. "I will explain. Perhaps the two of you will have more insight. I fear I have made a grave mistake, assuming I could handle this on my own. Summoning, as in the act of calling and binding new existences to our world, no longer works. But I believe not every summoned entity was returned to whence they came when the wall, as it were, was erected."
The Headmaster's office did not darken, but a pall fell over their little gathering of three all the same.
"I suspect I have found one," Dumbledore continued. "Worse, I have no understanding of what it is, what it wants, how it was bound to this world, or what rules it operates under now. I believe it has either been turned to foul purpose, or been released to follow its own goals with no constraint."
"Details, Albus, we need details," Sirius rasped.
"And an explanation as to why you think we can help, if you can't deal with it," Remus added much more fearfully.
"I will start from the beginning." Dumbledore leaned forward, staring intently. He looked from Remus to Sirius, then back again. "These are the relevant facts, as I know them. Harry Potter was recovered from the rubble of the Potter home on the night Voldemort died. At this time, he was an unharmed, normal child, and there was no sign of terrible or fell magic in the home. I, after some deliberation and work with the magic that was present, constructed a blood magic defense tied to blood relatives of Harry, and chose to place him with those relatives, under that defense, until such a time as it proved unnecessary or he came of age and it ceased to function."
Blood relatives of Harry… Sirius had an inkling as to who that might be, Lily's sister, that miserable bint, but this was not the time to question Dumbledore's decision-making. Not when this was somehow connected to Summoning, which no amount of trusting bitchy Muggles could possibly invoke.
"I made the admittedly cowardly decision of leaving Harry on the doorstep, with Minerva watching from the bushes, so that his relatives would not have anyone to argue with on the matter of taking him in," Dumbledore admitted. "Minerva reported to me that she witnessed a woman of the household coming out of the house, stumbling over Harry in his basket, and taking him inside. And so I believed had happened. I contacted a local Squib, told her to keep an eye on the children living at that address, and read her occasional report whenever it was sent to me. The boy, she said, was growing up fat and healthy and happy, and with a baby sister."
This did not make sense to Sirius, but he kept his mouth shut. If Dumbledore was spinning a lie that didn't fit with the facts he was unaware Sirius knew, the worst thing to do would be to call it out now, while Dumbledore could still course-correct. And if he was telling the truth… Best hear him out, in either case.
"I made many mistakes that night and in the years that followed as it pertained to Harry," Dumbledore said. "I did not think to ask Minerva about the woman who picked Harry up that night, and how she fit into the Muggle household Minerva had been observing, beyond that she was obviously one of them. I did not actually tell my Squib observer who she was watching over, or why. I asked her not to use names in her reports, so that if they were intercepted nobody would know it was Harry Potter she was talking about. I trusted the only blood-based tracking charm I was able to construct, one that indicated whether or not Harry was in close proximity to a blood relative. Everything I heard, I expected to hear, and it was not until four years after that day, by pure chance, that I realized I had been blind."
Remus let out a little noise of confusion. Sirius felt much the same.
"The woman who picked Harry up that night was not Petunia, and though she had spent that entire day with the Dursleys as if a part of their family, she was not," Dumbledore said. "The boy Ms. Figg watched over all those years was not Harry, but his cousin, Dudley. The Dursleys never found Harry on their porch. The blood protections failed less than a year after I built them, unrecoverable. The blood charm continued to report that Harry was with a blood relative, but he was nowhere to be found and the Dursleys knew nothing of the situation. Harry was missing."
"That's when–" Remus began.
"Yes, Remus, shortly after, when I could not find him myself, I contacted you." Dumbledore nodded. "I could not advertise to the world at large that Harry Potter was missing, as that might simply send his captors further into hiding. I enlisted your help when and where I could, and we scoured Magical Britain and beyond. I put out subtle reminders of Lily and James, pictures, memorials, so that someone might recognize Harry if they saw him. But to no avail. We could not find him, not even as the years passed. I only had the blood charm, which continued to report the impossible, and without the original blood magic which collapsed years ago it could not be altered to lead to him. He was alive, of that I was sure, but nothing more. Until his Hogwarts letter went out."
"I followed the letter," Dumbledore continued, still speaking plainly and without embellishment. "It went to a different Muggle home, in a place far from the Dursleys' residence but still mockingly close to where the search began. I spoke to the woman who lived there. She claimed not to know any Potters, but her son was named Harry, he was the right age, and he had received the letter meant for Harry Potter. I performed some surface legilimency, merely picking up stray thoughts to check for oddities. The situation all but demanded it."
Dumbledore took a deep breath. "This was when I first noticed it. Lurking. Subtle, unexpected, an inexplicable presence in her mind. Her thoughts themselves were benign, aside from a rather unflattering assessment of what she would do if I posed a physical danger, but beyond them, something watched me. Something large and dangerous."
Taylor. He was talking about Taylor.
"I gave her the usual Muggleborn parent introduction to magic, and plumbed her thoughts every chance I got, taking care never to go too far lest she or it noticed the intrusion," Dumbledore admitted, his voice low and troubled. "The more I saw, the more I found to trouble and alarm me. Even the fleeting forefront of her mind was a labyrinth of insanity and other that I have never seen before or since. Segmented, with intrusions and watching eyes everywhere, an overwhelming exterior presence spying in from every angle. Passing, seemingly unremarkable memories were interspersed with impossible things, events and creatures and thousands of nonsensical perspectives, all seeped in horrific violence and terror. Malice and insanity littered her mind, all under the watchful eyes of something I did not dare look directly at."
Sirius was tempted to knock his knee into the table and see if Dumbledore jumped with fright, despite the gravity of the situation. Him saying all of this about Taylor made it feel less real. He would have noticed if she was psychotic or entirely insane. "Sounds like an interesting Muggle," he said.
"Heed me, Sirius," Dumbledore said gravely. "I am not exaggerating. I am not joking. I looked again and again. I asked about how she lost her arm, and she remembered creatures that do not exist ripping it from her body and burning it off in a place from a Dark Lord's nightmares. I asked about how she came to Britain, and the thing watching her loomed around her mind, warning me off even as she thought of the same woman who abducted Harry. I asked if she had seen anything like magic before, and she thought of Harry but also of a thousand impossible things, and the presence in her mind drew closer to me. I dared not look any further after that! On the outside she passes for normal, she may even be normal, but there is something other imposed on her mind, something I was wholly unequipped to deal with."
"You took Harry out of there, surely," Remus insisted. "I knew there was something not right about the Muggle he keeps insisting is his mother–"
"Do not speak ill of her, Remus," Dumbledore said sharply. "Do not speak ill of either of them, or the love he has for her. If she was some changeling horror lurking in wait, a monster in human skin, I would have taken Harry from her that first day and then, once he was safe, returned to strike her down. I know you miss your friends, and you dislike the way Harry does not treasure them as you do, but this is not a place for those ultimately petty resentments."
Sirius winced sympathetically as Remus all but sank back in his chair, verbally slapped with a vehemence that neither of them had expected.
"I went through a good many theories in the days after that first encounter," Dumbledore recounted, his voice hard. "I watched them where I could, and researched possession and insanity in the meantime. One by one, I eliminated the obvious possibilities. One by one, I crossed off every option as to what it could be. Not a ghost. Not a typical possession. Not a botched Imperius or confundus or similar. Not a magical disease. Not simple insanity. Nothing Muggle. Nothing magical. I was left with only half-told old stories and cryptic implications."
"Summoning," Sirius whispered, finally seeing the connection that Dumbledore had led with.
"Something of that ilk," Dumbledore confirmed.
"But… how?" Remus asked. "What makes this Summoning, and not simply some obscure form of possession? I don't know much–"
"None still living do," Dumbledore interrupted. "There exist few records of persistent Summons and how they behaved. I will get to that. For the moment, suffice to say I believed it to be something from that branch of magic. But what, I knew not. Its intentions, I knew not. The amount of influence it had on her, I knew not. The conditions for it sinking its grip into another, I knew not. Only that every time I entered her mind, it drew closer to me, and that entering another's mind was not something Muggles could do. Introducing her to the magical world may have been a grave mistake."
"What did you do?" Remus asked.
"Considering that I believed, and still believe, there is a good chance a good-hearted, innocent Muggle woman exists under the influence of that thing?" Dumbledore asked, leaning back in his chair. He looked every year of his impressive age, older than Sirius had ever seen him. "That she raised Harry with love? That she might be a danger to him, to others, and possibly to herself, all exacerbated by being in contact with anyone magical? That I might yet determine how to save her, or if life is cruel, only how to put her out of her misery and remove the danger? I obliviated her, and hopefully it, of every memory of magic and because he was magic, every memory of Harry. I took Harry away, to Hogwarts. I checked his mind, but it was clean of that thing's presence."
"That's all?" Remus demanded.
"If only," Dumbledore said sternly. "But no. It was not. Not with a danger lurking unchecked, with a woman at risk, with a situation that would inevitably pull Harry back into danger without intervention. I began to research Summoning whenever I could carve out time from my other responsibilities. I redirected Harry's diligent letters to his mother, so that she would not be reminded anew of magic. I avoided going anywhere near her and her Muggle life, in case the Summoned presence could latch onto someone magical over long-term exposure. I had an expert obliviate her when my initial effort proved insufficient, likely due to my unease at the time of performing it disrupting the intent of the spell. When Harry asked me about her, I delayed and then I lied."
"I have spoken to Harry," Sirius interjected. "He is," was, "devastated by what you told him. And it's not true at all."
"I've done him an immense disservice," Dumbledore freely admitted, his brow furrowed, "and I doubt he will forgive me if it does not come out to his liking. I would not, were I him. But his mother is in uncertain danger, poses uncertain dangers to others, and may yet be saved or doomed if I can just determine what is possessing her and what rules it operates under. It was the only lie I could conceive of that would not wholly backfire if found out, but would also prepare him for either her eventual recovery or death. If I told him she was dead, and he ever went to seek confirmation, he would never believe me again, even if I warned him of the dangers she unwillingly poses. If I told him she was sick, he would demand to see her, and if she cannot be saved he will never accept that she needs to be put down for her own good, and the good of the world. I told him she did not want to see him, so that he would not cling to undue hope, but also not believe her dead. The truth would have allowed for these hopes, but the truth of this situation is far too dangerous to spread, to a child or otherwise. Even the knowledge of it may conceivably facilitate it spreading to another, though I think I have ruled that possibility out by now."
"Is this where we come in?" Remus asked. "Putting her down?"
"Or helping save her?" Sirius said sharply, glaring at his once-friend. Remus was ticking him off, though maybe he had the right of it, given all that had just been revealed… Sirius didn't know. He didn't have to sound so bloody willing to 'put her down'.
"I have spent two years working on this whenever I have time." Dumbledore bent down and lifted up a stack of six thick books to the desk. The top book was smoking, though this seemed to be its natural state as Dumbledore wasn't rushing to put out the fire. "This is the sum total of what I have found. It does not contain anything of more than tangential application to the situation. I have reached a dead end, and I cannot go any further. This is where you two come in. Sirius, with the Black library and esoteric dark tomes. Remus, with your love for learning. Both of you, with your copious free time and personal stake in the situation, through Harry. Learn all you can about Summoning. Find out what is possessing her, whether she still exists under its influence, and what it wants. Does it seek death, destruction, domination, or something more esoteric? Find out whether she can be saved. Whether it can be destroyed, sealed away, negotiated with, or killed. Save Harry's mother…"
He fixed Remus with a stern glare. "For she is his mother, Remus Lupin, in heart and somehow also in blood to deceive my blood charm while knowing nothing of magic. I believe the love they share may be one of the only reasons he has come out unscathed from ten years of close contact with a Summoned evil, and it may even explain why she seems mostly normal. Love may yet be the answer to any number of questions."
Sirius frowned at the books. "What do these say, exactly?" he asked.
"You will read them all," Dumbledore said, "but in summary… This one speaks of the many failures to continue Summoning after the shield was placed, as a warning to the foolish who might persist." He took the smoking book off the stack. "These next three are studies of Summoning, specifically identifying old legends and which might possibly be attributed to it." They were dry, scholarly texts, the kind Sirius would toss over his shoulder if someone ever placed them in front of him. Remus books, those were.
"This one," Dumbledore continued, lifting the three books off the pile to set them to the side and reveal the fifth book, "is a partial recounting of how to Summon something, worthless now and incomplete besides."
Sirius' mouth went dry. That book, innocently blank-covered and bound in thick leather, needed to be burned. He wondered where on earth Dumbledore could possibly have found it.
"And finally…" Dumbledore revealed the final book, which sported an illustration of a demonic unicorn. "A recounting of a single persistent Summon, from shortly after its introduction to our reality, to its locking away three hundred years later. The black unicorn was known for 'haunting' specific individuals, who would hallucinate unnatural black unicorns until the apparitions took solid form and killed them, often after months of psychological torment. Most went quite mad before the end. A few tried to appease their unicorns, culminating in a new instance of the same black unicorn haunting another, the Summoned entity multiplying by coerced atrocities. By the end only a mass sacrifice could collect all of its incarnations in the same place to be banished, and the total death count is estimated at over a thousand individuals. But the pertinent details, the specifics… They are not here. Only the written accounts. From bystanders, from loved ones. From some of the victims themselves, who wrote even as the black unicorns read over their shoulders and whispered maddening secrets in unintelligible tongues into their ears."
"This," Dumbledore said gravely, one hand covering the haunting multi-eyed visage of the unicorn, "is my best source. It is also entirely insufficient, except to inform us as to the possible magnitude of the danger, and the nature of the threat. Summons are all unique, but if it is something akin to a black unicorn it must be stopped, carefully. I dared not spread this knowledge at all at first, and only desperation forces my hand now. What does one do when the mere act of observing an unknown threat could make it more dangerous?"
"Stay away until you know enough to end it in one strike," Sirius said. "Don't look."
"Exactly, and there is still the mystery of the second woman, whether she is still watching, and what part she played in all of this. Which is why I am not telling either of you where Taylor Hebert lives, and imploring you not to ask Harry," Dumbledore warned. "Do not go near her. Not for diagnostic spells, not to kill her, not to try and exorcize her. This is not within your power. I have reason to believe I may be able to do something, once I know what to do. That is where you come in."
Outside Dumbledore's office, Remus with the stack of books and Sirius with empty and slightly trembling hands…
"You start with those," Sirius said. "I have to clear out the traps in the library. I'll let you know when it's safe."
"Sirius…" Remus began.
Sirius shook his head. "No. Not right now." Not on the tailend of a terrifying revelation and a new quest that he was deeply, personally involved in. He didn't have space in his head for Remus and his issues too. "We'll talk when I get the library ready."
Which was any time he wanted. The library was already mostly safe. He had opened it up and cleared it out… for Taylor.
It was raining when he left Hogwarts, and when he returned to Grimmauld Place someone – Taylor – had put up plastic sheets over all the open window frames. Taylor herself was in an armchair, reading a normal Muggle book.
She looked up. "How did it go?"
How did it go?
He pulled up his meager Occlumency training, buried everything he was currently feeling as deep as it would go, and shrugged. "He gave me the same bullshit he gave Harry," he lied. "I didn't think it was the right time to press. Not going to be the next Defense Professor, either. Or so I remember… I'm going to Saint Mungo's next to get checked, but I think it was as I remember." It would be good to spend a night there for observation, if he could convince them to allow that. He didn't want to sleep in Grimmauld Place tonight. The last thing he needed was the still-dark ambiance of the house needling his new fears.
She considered him for a moment. "Guess it was too much to hope for some answers," she grumbled, her eyes dropping to her book.
Oh, Sirius had answers. Far too many answers… and yet, none of the answers that really mattered.
Such as what the hell he was supposed to do now.
Whether Dumbledore was right.
Whether Taylor was possessed by the stuff of nightmares.
Whether he had already fucked up well beyond any chance of recovery.
If Harry's next few years of schooling followed the trend of his first four, he would need a time-turner to survive years five through seven. He was at the limit of what he could do without sacrificing sleep, and once he started giving up sleep he wouldn't be able to maintain the same pace day in and day out.
Classes were beginning to gear up for the end of the year exams. Homework and essays were assigned with increasing frequency, eating up precious hours of the evenings and weekends. Tournament research stole another large chunk of his remaining free time, more urgent than ever. It was a grind, one he was beginning to tire of.
But the end was in sight. One more task for Cedric to complete. One set of exams. Only a few more months. Then the summer would come, and with it enough free time to sleep for a week.
Until then, he could make do with the fleeting moments of relaxation, or as was the case this particular Friday evening, play.
"Dodge and weave!" Ginny yelled as he and Neville ran a formation, tossing the quaffle between them each time she flew close to threaten one or the other. A bludger tore through the empty air between them, missing Harry's leg by a scant few centimeters. He hefted the Quaffle as he flew towards the rings and Luna, who was looking in entirely the wrong direction, down when he was coming from above.
Ginny dove for his hand, twisting her broom out in front of him to block his way, and he fumbled the Quaffle as he crashed into her. They tangled, their brooms veered away, and he had to concentrate on avoiding a crash, not seeking out the lost Quaffle.
He managed to arrest his fall well enough that his broom only scraped the uneven tideline by the bristles, bad for the broom but good for his continued health. It would have been a flawless recovery if they were playing over the Quidditch field with its flat surface, but…
The ominous hedges that had replaced the Quidditch field were a dark mass in the corner of his vision as he rose to chase after Ginny on her way toward Neville, who had recovered the Quaffle. Neville threw, too early, and Luna had to lean over to catch the Quaffle before it flew between her feet and out of bounds.
"Good try!" Hermione cheered, flying down with the bludger under her arm. "Ginny, do you have to crash into them?"
"We're playing Draco and his cronies today," Ginny said. "I'm no Goyle, but I can give them an idea of what to expect."
"Speaking of Draco," Harry pointed out. The twins hadn't arrived yet, but a quintet of Slytherins were flying out to meet them over the lake. "Is it game time?"
Hermione cast a spell that drew a line in the air in front of her, which somehow let her use the sun to tell the time. Harry hadn't gotten around to learning it yet, either the incantation or how it was meant to be interpreted. "Close to," she judged.
"Okay, last second pep talk!" Ginny announced. They all obligingly flew in close to her. "It's Draco, Goyle, Crabbe, Nott, and Parkinson," she said. "They're not very good at Quidditch, and the ones who do play on the Slytherin team play different positions. They're only here because Draco wanted to be a captain. Crabbe and Goyle are Chasers with Draco, Pansy is the Beater and Nott is the Keeper. Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle are probably going to fly like they go through the rest of their lives, with Draco as the important one and the others as meatshields."
"Sounds right," Neville agreed.
"Pansy is a bitch," Hermione said, the venom in her voice leaving no room for doubt as to whether that was a personally-formed opinion. When she'd had time to form such a personal disdain was a mystery to Harry, as he had never seen her and Pansy exchange more than two words at a time, but then again he wasn't attached to her at the hip.
"Yes, and she's going to be targeting you, which is good for us," Ginny assured her with a bright smile. "We benefit from it being kept away from the Chasers. Crabbe and Goyle can take more hits. Beat her black and blue with the Bludger, you're really good at trading shots." She smiled brightly at Hermione.
Hermione blushed and looked away from Ginny. Things were occasionally awkward between them since the Yule Ball. They acted normal most of the time, but Hermione blushed a lot more and avoided Ginny on occasion. Luna kept telling him to let them work it out.
"I won't let the meatheads foul me," Luna offered.
"I was… yes, exactly." Ginny nodded. "Harry, Neville, don't turn your backs on Crabbe or Goyle, even if Malfoy makes a good target. I'll handle him, keep them off me and be ready for a pass. Nott is a typical mediocre Keeper, I watched them practice last week. Shots to the edges, and mind the hoops… Who knows if the twins' conjuration will hold up."
"Wouldn't want to trust the red-headed dunces with anything important," Parkinson sneered as the Slytherins arrived, coming in quickly enough to catch the end of Ginny's instructions.
"It will be a horribly biased game, but your little hodgepodge team of weirdos won't be able to take advantage of that," Draco sneered. He was looking directly at Harry, for some reason.
"Me?" Harry pointed to Ginny. "It's her team." He had gone almost four years without having to deal with Draco directly, and he would rather that continue. Ronald Weasley was welcome to keep his nemesis all to himself. Ginny could–
"Go jump in the lake," Ginny hissed. The Slytherins all recoiled.
"That's our sister," Fred called out from below. He and George had arrived sometime in the last few moments, or perhaps were already there… They had perfected their disillusionment charms recently, and it wouldn't be the first time they had popped out of nowhere to startle someone.
"We're reinforcing the hoops, then the game can start," George added. "No fouls before the opening firework!"
Harry flew away from the Slytherins, and the rest of Ginny's team followed suit, flying around on 'their' side of the midair playing field while the Slytherins retreated to near their hoop. They all looked rosy-fresh, like they had just had their robes laundered, so Harry assumed they hadn't bothered to warm up before the game. He and the rest of Ginny's team would have already worked up a sweat if the wind of flying didn't continually wick it off them.
Soon, an audience of a few dozen spectators had gathered below, watching from the shore of the lake, and the twins took to the air, one to each side of the playing area.
"You know the rules, you know the time limit, you know the score," Fred announced. "Team Slytherin Supreme, with a win loss record of two to six–"
"Five to three," Draco shouted.
"Please, just because the majority of your team is illiterate does not mean you get to pretend the scores were different," Fred retorted. "Don't test us, snake. We're here for a good clean game, not your attitude. Being a brat will just lose you these hoops and our sterling commentary."
"Also this game, because that'll be another forfeit," George added. "Seriously. Shut up and play."
Draco's face reddened, but his mouth was set in a thin, flat line. The 'discrepancy' in his account of his wins versus the twins was due entirely to them counting any game in which he was a massive unsportsmanlike prat as a forfeit for his team, regardless of the scores. The scores of unofficial Quidditch meant nothing in the end, but he apparently cared enough to make some effort to avoid a repeat.
"Anyway, the Slytherin Supremes will be going against Ginny's Guardians," George continued. "Our little sister has a ragtag gang, with a win loss record of three to five this season. No forfeits among those scores, to date. Try not to intentionally provoke the Slytherins, sis, we have to be impartial."
"I want to play, not feel superior," Ginny said loudly.
"Then let the game begin!" Fred let off a flare from his wand, and a Weasley firework went up from the spectators on the shore, bursting into a fiery snake battling a red-headed imp.
Harry shot forward as the Quaffle and Bludger were put into play. The game was on!
Crabbe and Goyle immediately proved to be much like flying Trolls, big and slow to react, but dense enough that even glancing blows hurt, and with a single-minded focus on their prey. Harry spent most of his time luring one or the other away from Malfoy so Ginny could harass him unimpeded by his bodyguards. Neville worked at the same task, only rarely darting in to grab the Quaffle, as both Crabbe and Goyle consistently left him alone in favor of Harry or Ginny whenever they had a choice of targets.
The Bludger, usually an intermittent to constant presence among the Chasers, was almost entirely absent. Hermione always tended to send it at the other Beater more than the Chasers, but in Pansy she had met a spiteful match who was just as intent on injuring her personally. The two dove their brooms through the Chaser scrum more than once, Pansy wielding the Bludger like an inconveniently-shaped bludgeon, or fleeing it as Hermione whacked it at her dangling legs or exposed arms.
On occasion the Chasers would make a mistake, either on one side or the other, and the Quaffle would soar towards one of the rings, thrown by Malfoy, Ginny, or Neville most of the time. Luna caught her fair share of Malfoy's shots, though she let one through when it came within a hairsbreadth of breaking her nose, a cheap shot Harry wholeheartedly approved of her dodging rather than blocking.
Nott, on the other hand, was proving a poorer Keeper than Ginny had predicted. He flinched away from every shot, perhaps predicting retribution for the cheap shots at Luna, and blocked more by accident than anything else. Draco even took a moment out of chasing the Quaffle to fly over and berate him, though it had no effect on Nott's performance.
The rush of Quidditch, this time amplified by having to dodge bone-shattering sideswipes from Crabbe and Goyle, made it impossible to keep track of time or the score, at least for Harry. He had the vague impression that they were winning, and not by a small margin, but he didn't know and he played as though it was tied up, even to the moment that the ending rocket exploded above their heads.
The Chasers broke off, Ginny dodging a last ill-tempered ramming attempt from Crabbe on the way out, and Hermione flew down to join them, a bruise on the side of her face and electricity leaping from her fingertips as she clutched her broom. She was smiling widely and Pansy was flying with one hand to her ribs, so Harry assumed she had given better than she got. Luna came out to join them, her beautiful hair trailing behind her…
Harry missed the exact wording of Ginny's congratulations, but he snapped back to attention when the twins flew up between the two teams.
"With a score of three hundred and eighty to two hundred and fifty, Ginny's Guardians win!" Fred announced. George cast a spell that set the scores in the air in flaming numbers ten meters tall, for all to see.
"Yes!" Ginny led the dive down to the ground, where they dismounted their brooms and celebrated properly, basking in the – admittedly scattered and small – applause from their little audience. It wasn't the insane dramatics of a real Quidditch game with hundreds of cheering fans, but Harry didn't mind. The game was the fun part; the adulation of victory was just a bonus.
Hermione said something to Ginny as Neville high-fived Harry, and then Ginny said something back, and then–
Hermione shoved Ginny aside, flung one hand out, and blasted a spidery web of white-blue lightning out. The crackling energy converged on a Bludger only a few meters away, the Bludger from the game, striking it down from a trajectory that would have sent it right into Ginny's back.
The Bludger changed direction and shot off into the lake, acting as if it had been thumped with a Beater's bat. But there was no bat, and there was no wand. Hermione's empty hand remained outstretched, even once the lightning died away.
"Holy shit!" George yelled. Pansy Parkinson, who still had her Beater's bat, was white-faced, with the other Slytherins clustered around her in the air.
Hermione pointed one finger at Pansy. She waved it warningly.
The Slytherins were already flying away.
"We're going to need a new Bludger," Fred announced. "That one is fried and at the bottom of the lake by now."
"My hero!" Ginny said as she picked herself up. "But did you have to push me?"
"It was coming right for you," Hermione objected. She held her hand in front of her face, watching as smoke drifted off her fingertips. "That…"
"Wow," Ginny said empathetically, "that was… wow. I'm really envious."
"We all are!" Harry agreed. Hermione's constant practice with her lightning magic was really paying off. The last he had seen she was still only making sparks!
"I didn't mean to do that," Hermione said quietly. "If I had hit her, not the Bludger…"
Harry was going to say something, but Ginny got there first. She took Hermione's hand in her own and covered it with her palm. "You knew what you were aiming for," she said.
Hermione looked away. "Yes." She broke contact with Ginny, pulling her hand away, and turned to Harry.
"Bloody good thing, too," he said. As far as he was concerned it didn't matter what could have happened if she missed, because if she hadn't reacted one of them would have been seriously hurt.
Ginny frowned at Hermione's back, but Luna was there, saying something to her that Harry couldn't make out because he had a faceful of bushy brown hair to contend with as Hermione hugged him.
Their last game of the season hadn't worked out quite as he expected it to, but he'd had enough fun that he hoped they could keep things going next year.
Also, he was going to have to do something about Draco and his cronies, especially Pansy. Maybe his mum could help him with that. Or Ginny. Nobody got away with attacking his friends.
Taylor and Sirius had both been busy over the last few weeks; it was rare that they were in Grimmauld Place at the same time. Taylor actually missed his mildly irritating but often amusing presence. She made a point of spending more time in Grimmauld Place to try and run into him more often. There was no shortage of things for her to do there, especially in the library.
On this particular evening, fresh off an annoying day spent troubleshooting the library's needlessly proprietary computer software, she had decided she would try to break scarcity over her magical knee. At least on a small scale.
Theoretically, if she was interpreting the transfiguration textbook correctly, food could not be transfigured out of non-food material. She didn't know what the exact limits of that rule were, or how it meshed with the basic science behind what food actually was, a collection of molecules in certain configurations like everything else, but she was prepared to take the rule for granted for now.
Under that rule, there was a known exception. Food could be transfigured into other food, and conservation of mass need not apply so long as magic could substitute. This was, she assumed, an inefficient conversion, because if it wasn't a single raisin could feed a witch until she died of old age. But she didn't know that such applied to her.
Thus, her wand on the bread, and her headache as she focused on the mental image of bread transforming into more bread. In theory, so long as her power understood her intention, she was only limited by her power's magical reserves, however that worked. She was a long way away from having the theoretical background necessary to understand that. Being able to make practically unlimited food from a single crumb would be a powerful survival skill. She was willing to suffer to determine whether or not it was possible.
It was getting late. Sirius arrived in a burst of Floo flames, clutching a package. "Taylor, want some tea?" he asked, bustling into the kitchen. "Non-bug-infested tea," he added, casting an air spell that pushed at her flying observers until she chose to withdraw them.
"Yes, please," she yelled.
A few minutes later he came into the library, a dainty cup on a saucer for her and a mug for him. His idea of a joke, perhaps. She decided to ignore it. "Trying to rot the bread?" he asked. "You could just put maggots in it."
"Trying to make more," she replied.
"Ah, the holy grail of food transfiguration," he sighed. "Problem is it sits heavy in your stomach if you eat too much of it. Worse if someone else transfigures it. Good in a pinch, there's nothing wrong with it if you started from good, real food. Not so good if you have other options."
"I want it for the pinch." She took a sip of her tea, savoring the warmth as much as the flavor. "It'll be good for my bugs, if nothing else. I can make raw meat."
"Can't transfigure blood," he remarked. "It'll be very dry raw meat."
Taylor yawned and took a deeper drink from her cup. Sirius mirrored her action. "I've been at this for a few hours," she admitted. "Not going to get it tonight, I don't think."
"It is pretty late," he agreed. "Planning on driving home? It's hailing."
"Shit." She had intended to go home, it was only Tuesday and the library was gearing up for a major book transfer to a new branch, but… She yawned again and put her wand down. "I'll take the couch, if it's still on offer," she said.
"Anytime." He stepped away, running his hand along a row of books on the nearest shelf. "I finally managed to score us some Veritaserum," he said.
"Good!" She stifled another yawn. Now that she had stopped focusing on her transfiguration, her exhaustion was hitting her, though her magic-induced headache was only getting stronger. "How did you…" she trailed off, holding in a third yawn. Yes, staying here for the night was the right choice.
"Put out some feelers with the illicit potions people, got a hit, got confirmation," he said shortly, his brow furrowed. "Tested it on the guy's assistant, it's legit."
"Sounds like an… unpleasant job." Her headache was pounding and her eyelids were heavy. She put her arm on the table and rested her forehead on it, her nose pushed against the wood. She was really tired.
Inexplicably so…
Her eyes drifted shut, and the last thing she heard was Sirius apologizing.
"Sorry, Taylor."
Notes:
That is a real cliffhanger.
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