In which Evil faces an insurrection, Good faces an unexpected betrayal, and Harry means to find out which side Draco is on. H/D, R.

November, 2005

"Here, sweet, have some tea," George said, crouching down in front of Harry. He was holding a steaming paper cup that smelled better than hospital tea generally did; Harry suspected some sort of unobtrusive culinary magic. He smiled wanly and took the cup.

"What I don't bloody understand is how she was able to do that sort of magic at all," Ron said, staring out the window at the grounds, arms folded tightly across his chest.

The doctor looked a bit defensive for a moment. "The level of warding against magic use is low in most of the rooms. Usually it's enough to take the patients' wands away to keep them from doing any magic, and in emergencies we have to be able to cast spells without delay," he said.

Ron shook his head absently. "That's not what I mean. Hermione was pants at wandless magic. She'd never have been able to cast something as powerful as you and Harry described, not without her wand, and I don't think she knew that kind of dark magic."

"She said she was turning into something," Harry said, looking down into his tea. "She didn't want to say what it was."

There was silence for a minute before the social services worker cleared her throat tactfully. "Mr. Weasley, have you been in contact with a funeral home?"

Ron closed his eyes and ran a hand over his face. "Scrubbs and Boggins, in Ottery St. Catchpole. They buried my sister a few weeks ago. My father's owled them."

"I'm so sorry," she said, and sounded like she meant it.

Fred leaned against the windowsill by Ron - not touching, but a warm, solid presence nonetheless.

"We won't be able to release her body immediately," the doctor said apologetically. "You understand how important it is that we find out exactly what He Who Must Not Be Named did to her."

"Do you have any experts in dark magic on staff?" Harry asked.

"Not with this level of expertise. We're flooing in a doctor from The Hague, from St. John of God. He's a good man, very knowledgeable, a brilliant diagnostician."

The twins looked at each other; then, carefully and questioningly, at Harry. Feeling guilty and torn, Harry looked away.

"Can we have a few minutes?" George asked.

"Of course," the doctor said, getting to his feet with a glance at the social worker. "There are some forms we'll need you to fill out. We'll just go and get them ready and be back in a few minutes, shall we?"

Ron waited until they were gone, then turned to George, frowning. "What was that in aid of?"

"We've got our own Dark Arts expert, you know," George said quietly.

"Right, Harry, but -"

"Not Harry," Fred said. "Malfoy."

Ron's silence stretched ominously long before he spoke. "First, if you think I'm letting that bastard set his hands on Hermione you're mental. Second, I can't bloody believe that the two of you trust him to -"

"We don't trust him any farther than we can throw him," Fred said. "What Draco knows, Lucius will know, and in short order - unless Harry unbends enough to Imperio his mouth shut or Obliviate him afterward."

"I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you," Harry told him.

"Look, we're not suggesting this because we're whole-heartedly in love with the idea," George said. "But we've got to find out what the hell Voldemort is up to, and Malfoy's the one who's done graduate study in fucking up the universe."

"He's done that, all right," Ron said sourly.

"The question is whether he'd tell us what he finds out," Fred said. "I think Harry could get it out of him. Malfoy's got a soft spot for him, as bizarre as that sounds."

"Well, that's one question," Harry said. "Another question is how much it would hurt us when he tells Lucius."

"Maybe the question is whether every bloody one of you has lost your mind," Ron exploded. "Harry, come on - as much as he hated Hermione, and as much as she hated him, you don't really think she'd - God, how the hell can you even suggest it?"

"I didn't suggest it," Harry reminded him sharply. "Just because I fancy him doesn't mean I think he's Albert bloody Schweitzer. And I know as well as you do what Hermione would have thought of this." Maybe better, he thought with a sudden pang of guilt.

"You don't think she would have thought that finding out what Voldemort's plans are is a bit more important than whether or not she hated Malfoy?" George asked.

Harry wanted to answer, and couldn't. He didn't know anymore what she would have thought. Not the old Hermione, not the person she'd been before Voldemort got hold of her. He wondered if he'd ever known.

"It doesn't matter anyway," Ron said. "This is a bloody hospital, they don't just let people waltz in off the street and do autopsies."

"Malfoy's not just anyone," Fred pointed out. "He co-teaches Defence at Hogwarts. I'd think that'd give him as much pull as he needs. And he'd only be assisting anyway."

"Look, you two," George said. "We don't love him either. But if you're going to veto this, do it because the risk of him finding out something that will help his father kick our arses outweighs the benefit of whatever he might tell us, not because Hermione hated him when you were fifteen years old."

There was a long silence before Ron pulled out a chair and sank down onto it, straddling the back. "Look," he said wearily. "Hermione was my best friend and then she was my wife, and I don't think I did the right thing by her in either case. I feel like I owe her something now. I just… don't know what. I don't know if I owe it to her to see that she's left in peace and doesn't have Draco Malfoy of all bloody people laying hands on her spleen, or to do whatever it takes to find out what Voldemort did to her and see to it that he never has the chance to do it to anyone again."

"Ron," George said quietly. "Hermione's gone. If she was going to come back she'd have done it by now."

Harry looked away, ashamed of the sudden cold chill at the thought of Hermione coming back as she'd been before she died.

"Wherever she's gone, she's beyond all of this. You have to do what's right for the people she left behind, including you and Harry, and if that means letting the bloke from The Hague take care of things and pretending Malfoy doesn't exist, Fred and I won't say a word against it."

Ron rubbed a hand over his face. "I haven't cleared Malfoy of any charges, you know, no matter how many writs and injunctions that bloody solicitor of Snape's throws in my face. How the hell would I justify letting my prime suspect sit in on the autopsy?"

"What's he going to do, destroy evidence right under the nose of St. John of God?" George asked. "You could ask someone else to go in and observe, someone we trust who knows to watch Malfoy like a hawk. Remus would do it."

Ron shook his head. "So what's your vote, Harry? You get one, you know."

"I don't know, " Harry said. "I can't believe Hermione wouldn't have wanted us to do whatever it took to put paid to Voldemort. I just don't know if sending Malfoy in there is a good idea."

"There's something else, too," George said quietly. "St. Mungo's is a Ministry hospital, not a private one. And however great a prat Percy might be, he didn't kill Ginny out of pique. He's keeping something out of the Ministry's hands that he thinks was worth Ginny's life. God knows we never listened to Percy before, but maybe it's past time we started."

Ron made an aggravated noise, pushed out of his chair, and stalked back over to the window. Harry watched him, then met George's eyes.

He wasn't Slytherin enough, that was the problem. He couldn't sit here in this cold, sterile hospital lounge hours after he'd just lost his best friend and make calculations about who was on what side and what it would mean if he and Ron weren't on the same one, couldn't coordinate who ought to be told what and what not to say. He was increasingly tempted to chuck it all and say it was every man for himself; and that more than anything made the decision for him, because trying to be a side unto himself had bought him nothing but disaster. "I think it'd be a good thing to have another set of eyes," he said to Ron. "And right now the only sets that are qualified belong to me and Malfoy, and I can't do this. The bloke from The Hague might know what he's doing and he might not, but we know Malfoy does."

"He's also going to tell his father -"

"Yeah, he will," Harry agreed. "But he's going to tell us first."

"God," Ron said. "Let me sleep on it."

Harry nodded.

"But I'd want someone else in there besides Remus, someone official who's got the power to take Malfoy into custody if he so much as sneezes wrong."

"As long as it's someone who won't jump the gun and take him in whether he sneezes or not," Harry said. "That'll do no one any good."

Ron opened his mouth to answer, then paused as someone knocked discreetly on the door. "Let me sleep on it," he said again. "I'll decide in the morning."

"Right," Harry said, and took a drink of his tea as the doctor opened the door.

It was going to be a bloody long night.

 

When the fire in Severus' office flared green, Remus set his newspaper down on the tea table and renewed the warming charm on the teapot. In his lap, Crookshanks looked up expectantly.

Fred and George stepped out of the fire together, looking pale and exhausted. "Hullo, Remus," George said, coming to sit across from him in the chair in front of the fireplace. Fred, apparently for want of anything better, sat down on the floor by Remus and leaned his head against Remus' knee. Crookshanks set a paw on the top of his head, kneading softly.

"Bad year for Weasley women," George said with a strained attempt at a smile. "Seems it's more than a girl's life is worth even to be related to us by marriage."

It's going to be a bad year for more than the Weasleys, Remus thought, and charmed the teapot to pour out three cups. "Where's Harry?"

"Outside," Fred said. "Or that's where he said he'd be, anyway. Said he wanted to fly for a while."

"Hermione's really gone, then," Remus said quietly.

"Yeah," George said, reaching out to take hold of the cup that drifted toward him trailing wisps of steam behind it. "One of the hospital's ghosts will sit vigil with her tonight just in case she does walk, but I think she'd have done it by now."

"Used to be family that did that," Fred said in between breaths across the surface of his tea. "Our gran used to talk about laying her parents out in the parlor."

"It's the Headmaster who does it when a child dies here," Remus said, unsettled by the image of Severus sitting, patient and unmoving, in the silver-edged dark by a child's corpse. "I don't know who does it when it's a teacher. I think the last one who actually died here was Professor Binns, and he made a remarkably speedy recovery. Not much point in laying him out after that."

"I think," Fred said, "that Harry was afraid Hermione would come back. I think he's still afraid she might, like Voldemort can call her back somehow."

"I don't doubt it, given what he's seen. And if he's worried about it, it might be that we'd all better be worried about it," Remus said, stroking Crookshanks' fire-warmed fur. "It took him years to understand that sometimes the dead are better off where they are."

"Does he think that about Sirius?" George asked.

"I don't know," Remus said. "But then, Harry didn't know Sirius, not really. Not the way he thought he did. Sirius had a way of making a good first impression, and once Harry's mind is made up about someone it's very difficult to change it. I can see, now, that what happened to Sirius was probably about the best end he could have hoped for, but Harry… I don't know. It's hard, when you're a child, to know that someone you've lost could have come back and didn't - it's hard not to see it as a betrayal, as them not loving you enough. It's hard not to see it that way as an adult, come to that. It's a difficult way to learn that sometimes love isn't enough."

"Hermione's autopsy is tomorrow," Fred said. "They've called in a Dark Arts expert from The Hague."

Remus frowned a little. "The Hague. Yes, I suppose…"

"We told Ron he should have Malfoy assist," Fred said.

Remus winced. "Well, you've got nerves of iron, I'll say that for you. And I think you're right, for what it's worth."

"Would you be willing to go and keep an eye on him?" George asked, apparently addressing Crookshanks.

Remus was silent for a minute, sipping his tea. "The last time I saw her was at your sister's funeral," he said, petting Crookshanks absently. "Yes, of course, if it'll make Ron feel better."

"I don't think anything short of flinging Malfoy into Azkaban is going to make Ron feel better," Fred observed. "I think the only thing that's stopping him doing it now is the certain knowledge that Harry would hand him his arse."

"I think if Ron thought he had enough evidence he'd haul Malfoy in and worry about arse-handing later," George disagreed. "As it is… we're blind, aren't we? We don't know anything and we've got no sources of information. Remus, what in buggery is the Order doing?"

Remus was silent for a while, sipping his tea, before he sighed and said, "The Order is… just now realizing that it died many years ago, I think. An organization like that can't survive long just being against something; it has to be for something as well, and unfortunately what the Order was for was Albus Dumbledore. Without him, it became nothing more than a collection of greying men and women who never expected to be fighting this long. Everyone in the Order, individually, means well - but as a group, it has no more energy to offer. I think even if Harry were to take it over tomorrow, he'd only find himself saddled with the collective human equivalent of Grimmauld Place."

"God," George said, thunking his head against the back of the chair. "Bloody Dumbledore. He's screwed us from beyond the grave at every step."

"It's strange, isn't it?" Remus said slowly. "That suddenly the dead are so very… influential. I haven't thought of James and Sirius as much in years as I have since I've been back, or been able to see them so clearly, not even when I was here during your fifth year. Bloody hell, I feel as if I should be able to see, as if I should be able to open my eyes and know what it is that Voldemort's aiming at, and I can't. Of course, it's entirely possible that if I could it would be because it's too late to stop it, so I suppose I should be grateful for my blindness while I have it; but…"

"There are places where the boundary has always been thin," George said, frowning down at his tea. "The ghosts talk about them. Something happens that leaves a residue so strong that it soaks into the walls, and it can pull you in if you're not careful, especially if you're a ghost already. You wind up trapped there forever, replaying something awful over and over. It's a form of immortality all right, if you choose to see it that way, and Voldemort already has an anchor back to his past if that music box is what we think it is."

"Which means that Task One should be to find that bloody box and get rid of it," Fred said grimly. "If Percy has it we might be able to get him to see reason."

"Or not," George said. "Either way, we know every hiding place Percy's ever managed to ferret out. If he's got it, we find him and we'll find the box."

"Boys," Remus said, apprehension making his voice sharper than he meant it to be. "First of all, if Percy has it he'll certainly have given it to Lucius by now. Second, I can't see Voldemort being content to just replay part of his past and drag the rest of us along for the ride. Unless there's something else he thinks he can do with the… technology, so to speak."

"I think Harry needs more help than he thinks he needs," George said. "He and Malfoy together pack a fuck of a punch, but keeping the very barrier between life and death from thinning is an awfully tall - Crookshanks?"

Remus looked down into his lap. Crookshanks crept forward toward the arm of the chair, fur rising in a crest along his back and his ears laid flat against his head. A low growl began in his throat and rose slowly in pitch and volume, going on for an unnervingly long time before it died away.

Fred glanced nervously around. "What in buggery does he see?"

"Is it the pensieve cabinet he's looking at?" George wondered, shifting to get up and go look.

"Stay there," Remus said sharply as he shifted Crookshanks off his lap and rose.

"D'you hear that?" Fred whispered.

Remus did, just. He whispered a silencing charm over the fire and the sound grew clearer in the sudden quiet: the thin, sharp sound of liquid dripping slowly onto stone.

"Lumos," Remus said, aiming the tip of his wand at the pensieve cabinet. A flare of light caught and sparkled from a thin line of pensieve fluid that spanned the lower edge of the cabinet doors, drops growing heavy and falling to shatter on the floor with slow irregularity. Mist splashed from the floor where they hit, lingering like a skim of ice on the marble, luminescent.

Fred cast from behind him and the doors of the cabinet swung open. The liquid in the pensieve was spilling steadily over the edge, drops running together in strangely gravity-defying patterns until they fell from the bowl in lengthening streams.

"Is it meant to do that, Remus?" Fred asked nervously.

"No," Remus said.

A long thread of liquid spilled out of the bowl, glowing amber in the firelight, and splashed a low susurration of whispers onto the floor, whispers that rose into the air like the luminous mist, tumbling over each other with frantic urgency - men's voices, women's, children's, too fast and too intertwined for Remus to make them out. Unnerved, he cast again, arching the edges of the bowl up and over to meet in the middle and seal the liquid inside.

One last long drop hit the floor, and a woman's voice, exhausted and despairing, said clearly: It's so dark. After a long, tense silence, Remus sighed, spelled the cabinet closed and locked, and slipped his wand back into his sleeve. "I told Severus to get rid of that bloody thing."

"What the fuck?" George asked. "Were those Snape's memories?"

"God only knows. I hope so. It's better than the alternative."

The pointed silence of Weasley curiosity burned against Remus' back. Smiling a little, he turned back toward them, not quite turning his back on the pensieve cabinet. "Albus, toward the end - well, maybe before that, I don't know. He… collected memories, I suppose you might say, like some people collect butterflies. Other people's memories. Some of them from people I know would have lobotomized themselves before they let Albus Dumbledore rummage about inside their brains recording things for posterity. I'm ashamed to say that by the time the Wizengamot convened there were any number of people who knew about this - including Harry - but no one until then had thought to question it. Well, it was Albus, wasn't it? And we'd all been raised to believe that whatever Albus did was good and right by definition."

Fred and George exchanged an uneasy glance. "Do you think he knew…" George began, then trailed off.

"No," Remus said quietly. "I think you would have found out rather quickly if he did."

Fred glanced sharply at him. "You did, though, didn't you?"

Looking down, Remus rubbed absently at a smudge on his sleeve, rather wishing they'd all turned in for the night about half an hour ago. "Not as such," he said. "I didn't know. But you were still learning to be careful then, I think, and I spent more time around you than Albus did. You hadn't had enough practice to be flawless at it, but you were clever enough that I could tell myself I was a cynical old bastard who needed to stop listening to overwrought Italian operas on the WWN. And then before I knew it you were too old for it to be any of my business anyway."

"I -" George said, then cut off abruptly. Remus glanced up to see Fred staring blindly at the pensieve cabinet, his expression blank with concentration.

"What's all this in aid of?" Fred said slowly. "How's it helping him get what he wants? What exactly does he want? That's what we've tripped over all along, isn't it? It's all well and good to say that he wants to live forever, or wants power, or wants to see us all dead, but those aren't motives so much as… I don't know, stories you tell children to explain why people are bad. This is more than that. Death. Visions. Muggles and Muggle-borns. Dementors sucking up people's souls and spitting them back tainted. That portal in the forest."

"Albus Dumbledore and other people's memories," George said. "The Chamber of Secrets. Old houses. Necromancy."

"That can't be all," Fred said almost to himself, sounding perplexed. "Why wouldn't we just give it to him and walk away?"

"Because he'd need us to sustain it," George said. "You remember what Harry said? That Hermione told him she was becoming something, that if she died of it it would make Voldemort more powerful? Which would be why Harry isn't having visions anymore. Voldemort must have decided he can't afford the risk."

"And if the taint was still there, and if it leached out… God. In the end he could poison the entire world, and how would we ever stop it? It'd come for us first."

"What are the two of you talking about?" Remus asked.

"If only we knew what they saw," Fred said. "Hermione and Barty Crouch. And what was happening to Hermione before she died. Here's where Malfoy Junior earns his keep, right enough."

George was frowning a little, looking suddenly uncertain. "And it's a fine theory but bugger me if I know how he'd do it in practice."

"Sirius fell through the Veil," Fred answered. "Bellatrix will have told him, if he didn't know already. It can be done, I'd bet. You'd just have to…"

"…change your bit of the universe. Or change yourself. Become."

"And everyone else, everyone you needed, everyone you'd use. Which would have to be all of us, to be on the safe side, though he probably wouldn't care how many of us were destroyed in the transition. Voldemort doesn't really seem all that sociable, does he, when you come down to it."

"God, what a gamble," George said, sounding a little awed. "If he fails, that's bloody it this time, isn't it? No skulking off to hide in the forest until he can set up shop on the back of someone's head."

"Boys," Remus said. "What exactly is it you think Voldemort's trying to do?"

The twins looked at each other, then at him.

"It's better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, isn't it?" George said.

 

Harry woke with fingers combing slowly and gently through his hair. Intellectually, he knew that he should have been alarmed at this, that the fact that someone had got through his wards and into his bedroom without him noticing should have brought him bolt upright with his adrenaline surging. Instead he tilted his head a little into the stroking fingers, not opening his eyes, floating in a dim, blurry contentment that kept the world away from him like a thick cotton padding. "How are you doing that?" he asked, listening incuriously to his own voice as if it were coming from the wireless.

"Would you believe I learned it from the animal trainer in a traveling circus?" Draco answered. "He was Muggle-born, almost a Muggle himself, not even enough power to earn the Hungarian equivalent of a Hogwarts letter, but he could do this one thing. He used it to control the tigers. He didn't really understand what he was doing, or recognize what I was. He thought the tigers just liked him."

Harry shifted onto his back and blinked his eyes open. They felt tired and sore, and he was glad there was only the one candle lit. "Draco," he said. "I don't even want to think about what hour of the morning it must be. Why are you here?"

Draco hesitated, looking away. "Someone owled me from the hospital. I don't know who. The letter wasn't signed and it wasn't a bird I recognized. I'm… sorry. About Granger."

Harry closed his eyes, wearily cursing the twins. "Will you do something for me?"

"It depends on what it is."

Harry had to laugh, a little. "And what you get out of it? Slytherin to the bone, aren't you? I'll owe you a favor."

"Maybe," Draco said, his fingers slowing, tangled in Harry's hair. "Ask."

Harry opened his eyes and looked up at Draco. "St. Mungo's is flooing in an expert in dark magic to do Hermione's autopsy. Will you help, if Ron asks?"

"Hm, so this isn't a favor for you at all, it's a favor for Weasley."

"No," Harry said, reaching up to catch Draco's hand. "It's a favor for me."

Draco opened his mouth, then closed it again, giving Harry a narrow, thoughtful look. "I'm tempted," he said finally. "If for no other reason than because I want to know what you're up to."

"It wasn't my idea," Harry told him. "Fred and George suggested it."

Draco was silent for a minute more, thinking. "And what do you think I can tell you that St. Mungo's expert can't?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just want to be sure."

"And make sure all interests are represented?"

"Yeah," Harry said. "That too."

"Good heavens, you are quite the born-again Slytherin, aren't you?"

Harry sighed and lifted himself onto his elbow. Draco drew his hand back, and Harry swallowed against the sudden depression crashing back down onto him. "It's not just that," he said. "It's… I've had years, you know? I might have been able to find him if I'd just fucking got down to it after school was over, instead of going into Auror training like I was just another testosterone-filled kid looking for an exciting job. And Hermione might still be alive if I'd found him."

"Or she might be dead right along with the rest of us if you'd found him before you were ready to," Draco pointed out.

"Yeah, well, I'm ready now," Harry said. "And I still… Look, I owe her something. Reparations, I don't know. And I can't do this myself. All I can do is send you and hope that wherever she is, she understands."

Draco's mouth quirked in an unreadable smile. "I'm an odd vehicle for your reparations, Potter."

"I know," Harry said. "I'm asking anyway."

"And I'm saying yes against my better judgment."

"Thank you," Harry said, then frowned as he realized what had been tugging at the edges of his attention. "Malfoy, my god, you smell like a distillery."

Draco winced. "Ah. Yes. Pansy's sobriety charms are a force to be reckoned with. Don't move the bed too suddenly, will you? I think my head might fall off."

"Since when are you in the habit of getting pissed on weeknights? Or at all, come to think of it?"

Draco sighed. "I have it on good authority that I did it because I'm an ass, a fool, and a selfish bastard who should hang up all pretense of being a functioning adult and go home where my father can make all my decisions for me."

"Ouch," Harry said. "You didn't deserve that."

"I'm starting to wonder," Draco said wryly. "And anyway, I could do worse than let my father make my decisions for me. He makes pretty good decisions, most of the time. It's just that when he makes bad ones, he really doesn't piss about."

There were a hundred things Harry wanted to say to that, most of them at the top of his lungs. He settled for, "Can we not discuss your father right now?"

"Yes, I can see that's not helping. And I really did come here to try, notably though I seem to be failing."

Harry smiled wanly. "That thing you were doing, that was nice. The tigers must have really loved that trainer."

"Go back to sleep," Draco said. "Longbottom made Severus cancel your classes tomorrow. The spell will hold over for a bit in the morning, but only if you sleep so it can settle in. And I have to be going - I've got just enough time to shower and pull myself together before breakfast."

"Right. Thanks," Harry said awkwardly, wishing he could find something else to say. The silence between them was so painfully unfinished, the gap between what was there and the unnamed something that should have been there so broad that he almost wondered if Draco had Obliviated him at some point. "Hermione's autopsy will be tomorrow afternoon. I'll let you know what Ron decides."

The look of fleeting disquiet on Draco's face as he rose was gone so quickly that it might have been a trick of the light. For a moment it seemed as if he was going to say something; in the end, he only tucked his hands into his pockets, gave a brief, absent smile, and headed for the door.

"Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if we'd been friends?" Harry asked. "Growing up, I mean. And… after."

Draco set a hand on the doorjamb and looked back, one eyebrow raised. "No, Potter," he said kindly. "Good lord, you were intolerable enough as it was. With the cachet of the Malfoy family behind you you'd have grown up into one of those odious nouveau riche who are always slapping other people on the back and puking on the help at garden parties."

Harry blinked. "I… never quite thought of it like that."

"I know you didn't. You probably thought it would be me becoming a Gryffindor and going to Quidditch matches with you and Weasley. That's partly why we were never friends. Go back to sleep."

The silence was too loud after the outer door clicked shut. Unable to think of anything else to do, Harry settled back down against the pillows and pulled the blankets over his ears to shut it out.

 

When he woke, the sun was slanting across the floor in the orange light of late afternoon and an owl was sitting on his headboard. Groggy and none too happy about being awake, Harry pushed himself upright, rubbed at his eyes, and put on his glasses. The owl shook its leg at him patiently. He untied the parchment with sleep-clumsy fingers and settled back against the pillows to read it.

Harry -

I was going to say I don't know what Hermione would say about this but that's not right. I do know. And you know you always want to do one last thing for people. Like Mum took Gin's favorite shoes to the funeral home and made them put them on her even though they told her they had a special pair.

Thing is, Ginny doesn't know Mum did that. Or if she does she found out too late to do her any good. I loved Ginny too, you know? She might have been bob's own pain in the arse sometimes but she was my little sister. She used to

Hermione's dead, but Ginny's dead too and Ginny didn't hate Malfoy. She just thought he was a twat. I know what Hermione would say but I know what Ginny would say too and just because Hermione's dead doesn't mean I have to agree with her. When you come down to it they're both dead because of Voldemort. If I turn down Malfoy's help out of loyalty to Hermione it would sort of mean I was turning my back on Ginny wouldn't it? I couldn't call myself an Auror if I had a lead and didn't take it. I couldn't call myself her brother. I think it's been a long time since I could call myself Hermione's husband.

I don't want to choose between them mate but I'm going to. Send Malfoy. Send Remus with him. And he'd better bloody find something too or I'll deport him back to Budapest until he gets it right.

-R.

Harry set the letter down and rubbed at his eyes under his glasses. "Fuck," he said, and his voice sounded flat and strange in the sunlit quiet.

Unnerved, he got up and went to stand under the shower until he was a bit more ready to face the world.

 

He'd meant to go find Malfoy. For some reason he found himself in Remus' rooms instead.

"Will you go?" he asked, clutching a cup of tea, Crookshanks curled in his lap. "It's a lot to ask."

"Of course," Remus said, settling into the chair across from him. "Harry…"

"What?" Harry asked when Remus hesitated.

"Hermione deserved more than she got out of life," Remus said. "But you have to accept that nothing you can do now for good or ill will matter to her."

Harry looked away, eyes stinging, threading his fingers into Crookshanks' fur. "I know."

Remus was silent for a minute, sipping his tea. "You need to talk to the twins," he said finally. "Soon. They have a theory you should hear."

Frowning, Harry glanced back. "About what?"

"Voldemort. What he's trying to do, and how. I'm not entirely convinced, but they make a very persuasive argument. In a way, you know Voldemort better than anyone else still living except for Lucius Malfoy. You'll be able to tell them if they're on the right track."

"I'll talk to them tonight," Harry promised.

Remus turned his head toward the door a second before the knock came. "I'll be right back," he said, levering himself stiffly out of the chair.

Harry poured himself some more tea, holding the cup up out of the way of Crookshanks' lazily batting paw, and watched Remus open the door to Snape.

"Lupin," Snape said. "Ah, Potter. You're here."

"Come in, Severus," Remus said. "Would you like tea?"

"No, thank you," Snape said, but he came in anyway, brushing past Remus to settle in an armchair like a roosting bat. "I was looking for Potter."

"You've found me," Harry said, prompting.

"I've received a request for consultation from St. Mungo's," Snape said.

"For Malfoy."

"Yes. This afternoon. I trust you know what you're doing."

"Handing off information to Lucius as surely as if I'd owled him myself? Yes. But whatever Lucius learns, I'll learn it first."

"By hours, if that." Snape studied him for a minute, silent, dark eyes inscrutable, before giving a slight shrug. "I assume you know what you're doing. At any rate, Minerva received an interesting letter from Kingsley Shacklebolt this morning."

"What about?" Remus asked, frowning a little as he sat back down.

"Do you remember Nihal O'Banion?" Snape asked him.

Remus rummaged in his memory until he retrieved a vague image of a tall, dark-haired boy with a face like the business end of a hatchet and startling sky-blue eyes. "Ravenclaw, a few years ahead of us?"

"And bosom friend of Lucius Malfoy, or so Lucius allowed him to believe, at any rate."

"Death Eater?" Harry asked.

"After a fashion. He was more of the Borgin and Burke type - he provided assistance to the Death Eaters without taking part in their more… active pursuits. I don't know whether he was actually Marked. I do know that he was one of those terribly unnerving zealots who are consumed by a belief about which they are utterly silent. And he had the strongest Sight I had ever seen. Erratic, of course, as that gift always is, but give him a crystal ball and he could see to the West Indies. Let him touch something of yours and you'd best hope the gift had deserted him that day or he'd find out things about you that you'd hoped no one would ever know."

"I remember that," Remus said. "Until the day he left school I was terrified that I'd brush by him in the hall."

"What's happened to him, then?" Harry asked.

"Specifically? No one quite seems to know," Snape said. "He worked at the Ministry, in the Department of Mysteries. Not, surprisingly, in any area that had to do with his particular strengths - he researched methods of instantaneous transportation that didn't involve as much risk as Apparating. In short, portals."

"Shit," Harry said.

"Last Monday, he came to work as usual and worked through the day without any visible signs of anything being out of the ordinary. Then at 5:00 he packed his briefcase full of highly sensitive documents from half a dozen areas, left the Ministry, and never returned. The evidence suggests that he was going to Lucius, but he never got there. An elderly Muggle found him early Tuesday morning in a field in the middle of the West Riding. His briefcase was gone, as were… various other things."

Harry frowned. "Yorkshire? For god's sake, why?" Before anyone could answer, a thought occurred to him, and he set his teacup down on the table before it spilled. "Unless he was on a broomstick, whoever killed him must have either snatched him right out of the Floo network or been waiting for him right outside Lucius' anti-Apparition shield."

"The evidence suggests the latter," Snape said.

"My god, Lucius must be furious," Remus said uneasily.

"He's got a spy," Harry said.

Snape gave a vaguely impatient gesture. "Of course he does. We all do. It's unavoidable in wars between sovereign nations, let alone a covert struggle that splits a single nation into three parts. There are two things that are immediately relevant about this, however. The first is that Lucius clearly knows something we don't, and the second is that we must make whatever use of Draco we can while we still have him, because we won't for much longer."

"Jesus, he can't go after this," Harry said tightly. "If Voldemort can snatch Lucius' spy right out from in front of the Malfoy gates, he can do the same to Draco."

"Potter, I despair of you," Snape said. "Draco is a Malfoy. He'll hardly Apparate to the front gate of his own family's lands."

Harry opened his mouth to snap back, but Remus cut him off. "Severus, you said O'Banion was a zealot. I didn't know him that well. What was he zealous about, exactly? The typical Death Eater purity-of-the-race business?"

If Snape was grateful for the interruption, he didn't look it. "That too, I suppose," he said. "To be frank, most purebloods of that era were wholly in favor of keeping wizardry to the wizarding world. No, O'Banion was a curator at heart, like many Ravenclaws. He felt that the Ministry was committing - well, war crimes, almost, in suppressing whole branches of magic. He felt the loss of every spell allowed to slip away from us as if it were his own child, as if he were trying to save them from a burning house. He saved as many as he could, against the day when dark magic could take its rightful place beside Charms and Transfigurations."

"Dark magic in general or some specialization in particular?" Harry asked, half expecting the answer to be necromancy.

"Exorcism," Snape said instead.

 

The sun was dipping toward the horizon already when Remus materialized in the Apparition point outside of St. Mungo's and was startled out of his thoughts by the fact that he'd nearly reappeared on top of Kingsley Shacklebolt.

"Steady, there," Kingsley said good-naturedly.

"Kingsley, my god," Remus said, his heart beating a bit too fast for comfort. The fact that it wasn't actually possible to Apparate half inside of someone didn't make it any less unsettling to have come within half a meter of it. "Did Ron ask you to come?"

Kingsley's eyes flicked automatically from one end of the alley to the other. "Let's go inside," he said, and someone who didn't know him might have thought he was evading Remus' question. Uneasy, Remus followed him to the brick wall and watched as Kingsley tapped on it with his wand.

The bricks rippled and parted like cloth, exposing a courtyard dotted with a handful of bedraggled flower beds. On the other side were large glass doors reflecting the evening sun. It wasn't the visitor's entrance, and Remus had been here only once before.

"This is the one we usually use," Kingsley said with a rueful smile. "It upsets the patients to have Aurors barging about the waiting room, or so I'm told. Considering how many of them probably got their injuries from illegal magic, I'm not surprised."

"Thank you for coming," Remus said, and meant it. This was going to be unpleasant, and it was good to have a friend there.

Kingsley sighed and trailed the tip of his wand along a rather forlorn bush. New growth sprang up in its wake, a slender line of bright leaves and blood-dark blossoms. "Makes you wonder a bit, doesn't it, how much longer this is going to go on. My god, Voldemort could live for another eighty years even if he doesn't find a way to live forever. If it hadn't been Hermione, it might have been her daughter, or her granddaughter. Even being an Auror, it never stops surprising me how long a shadow one person, one evil person, can cast."

They'd slowed to a stroll, neither of them terribly anxious to go inside.

"And now there's Lucius," Remus remarked. "God only knows what he wants, or why he chose now to try to get it."

Kingsley's wand moved in a subtle gesture that might have only looked like he was poking at the leaves again if Remus hadn't been in a position to see that he'd cast an Imperturbable Charm. "Two months after Percy began going to interview Lucius at Azkaban, the entire Malfoy fortune vanished," he said. "Or the part of it that's in coin did, anyway. Nothing was left in their vault at Gringotts but a bare floor. The Revenue department is beside themselves, but there's nothing they can do - as long as you declare your income, there's no law that says you can't store it in a sock under your bed if you see fit to, and the goblins won't say a word about who took it or where, or why. Well, we know who, more or less - it had to have been either Draco or Narcissa. As to why, it certainly looks as if he thinks he might need a lot of money on short notice and wants to be sure that the Ministry can't tie up his accounts in any way."

"Money for what?" Remus wondered. "Bribes? A pardon?"

"An army," Kingsley said. "In the last two weeks alone, twelve people have quietly taken vacation time and disappeared from the Ministry. Nine former Slytherins, two Ravenclaws, and a Gryffindor."

"A Gryffindor? For god's sake, which one?"

"Romilda Vane. She'd have been at school with Ron and Harry."

"Vane… her niece is in Slytherin. You think they've gone to join Lucius?"

"That or Voldemort. I'm not sure which one would be worse. Lucius knows what Voldemort is going to do, and knows he's going to do it soon, and there's no telling whether Lucius means to stop him, help him do it, or wait for someone else to stop him and then step in and pick up the pieces afterward." Kingsley said. "I think we've just about run out of time."

Remus rubbed a hand over his face. "Then I suppose we'd better go in, hadn't we?"

 

Inside, it was surprisingly quiet. There was a fountain down one of the halls, splashing softly to itself, and the nurses' shoes squeaked a little on the wide tile floor as they crossed tall rectangles of amber light latticed with shadows. On the other side of the room, a receptionist bent over a ledger under the glow of an oil lamp.

"Excuse me," Kingsley said to her. "We're here to see Dr. McBride. Kingsley Shacklebolt and Remus Lupin."

"Yes, he's been expecting you. Please have a seat," she said briskly, then turned to the portrait on the wall behind her, a small girl in a stiff Elizabethan ruff playing somberly with her dolls. "Theodosia, will you go and tell Dr. McBride that his guests are here?"

The girl glanced up at Remus and Kingsley, her eyes dark and large in an unsettlingly pale face. Without a word to any of them, she set down her dolls, gathered her skirts, and ran out of her frame.

"She's a bit shy," the receptionist said indulgently. "She used to hang in the front reception area, but it was too noisy and she spent all her time hiding in other portraits' frames so we moved her back here. Dr. McBride will be out shortly."

True to the receptionist's word, within five minutes a dark-haired, disturbingly young doctor came out from a side hallway. Remus vaguely recognized him; but in the wizarding world one vaguely recognized most people, and doctors tended to look much the same in their green robes with the skull-and-wand blazon. "Mr. Shacklebolt. Professor Lupin," he said. "If you'll follow me?"

"Thank you for accommodating the intrusion," Remus said.

"We don't usually allow observers," the doctor said apologetically over his shoulder. "But we're happy to accommodate Hogwarts and the Ministry, of course. I should mention, though - please don't feel that you have to stay through the entire procedure. It isn't as bad as one might think, but… well, it's the principle of the thing, I suppose. We even lose medical students sometimes."

"I think we'll be all right," Kingsley said amiably. Privately, Remus hoped he was right.

They left the hallway behind and began to descend, down a flight of stairs lit by floating globes of cold-burning foxfire and long enough that Remus' hip was distinctly the worse for wear by the time they got to the bottom. The light was a little unsettling here, flowing in glimmering waves down the long hallway before them as if something somewhere were burning. The air was almost imperceptibly foul with something that was less a smell than an unpleasant slick over the senses. Remus shivered in the chill and wished that he'd brought his cardigan.

"Professor Malfoy is already here, helping our expert set up," Dr. McBride said. "Professor Potter arrived a while afterward -"

"Harry's here?" Remus said, frowning.

"Not in the autopsy room," McBride said. "He's in the anteroom, where Mrs. Weasley was laid out last night. I've strongly suggested that he not go any further, and he seemed to be amenable to the suggestion."

"God, I hope so," Kingsley muttered under his breath.

McBride stopped at a doorway, knocked lightly, and opened it onto a room about half the size of the Defence classroom at Hogwarts. It was spare and clean, lit by torches and a large fire. At one end of the room was a discreet bier with an armchair next to it; at the other end, Harry leaned against a writing desk with his arms and legs crossed, reluctantly breaking off a conversation with a ghost. The ghost turned to look at the three of them, her face thin and unnervingly expressionless. Her hospital robe hung off her like rags from a broom; when she turned to drift out through the wall, Remus could see that there was something very wrong with her back underneath the shimmering fabric. The back of her head was gone.

"Melissa sat with Mrs. Weasley last night," McBride told them. "Everything seems to have gone as expected. I'll let you make yourselves comfortable. You're due in the autopsy theatre in ten minutes. Please leave your wands and everything else magical you might have on you out here - it'll be safe. Not many people come down here," he added with a rather bleak smile, and closed the door softly behind him.

Kingsley tactfully drifted off to examine a shelf of dusty books, leaving Harry to Remus. Rather wishing he hadn't, Remus went to perch his bad hip on a corner of the writing desk. "Harry," he said.

"Remus," Harry said, a little sardonically. This close, Remus could see that he was almost vibrating with tension.

"Go home," Remus said bluntly. "This is a bad idea."

Harry rubbed his fingers over his eyes, nudging his glasses up out of the way. There were dark circles under his eyes. "Remus, Malfoy's on the other side of that door. There's only one way out of that room. Whatever he learns here, he's going to tell me before he tells his father."

Remus, who had only by the skin of his teeth escaped having to make an Unbreakable Vow to the twins to tell them everything he learned as soon as he got back, had a moment of fellow-feeling for Draco. "Does he know you're here?"

"No. He'll find out soon enough, though. Remus, I need you to watch for something for me, something Malfoy might not catch."

Remus swallowed, rather unenthusiastic and unwilling to show it. "What?"

Harry raised a hand and made a sort of plucking gesture. A tiny ball of flame leaped out of the closest torch and flew to hover in front of his palm, rearranging itself into thin, twisting lines, a sigil that hurt Remus' eyes a little to look at. "This. Somewhere on her… on her body. Probably between the shoulder blades or on the back of the neck."

"That seems as if it would be awfully hard to miss."

"I'd probably miss it. The doctors would too, or so I hope, anyway. Draco, I don't know. It's very hard to see unless you've done far more dark magic than is healthy. Or unless you're a dark creature yourself."

"I don't recognize it," Remus said. "What is it?"

"It's… a binding charm, of sorts. A corruption of one that was originally used for medical purposes. It's very old. Voldemort has a certain fascination with old magic." Harry's voice was carefully neutral, but Remus could hear the bitterness in it anyway. "The original was used as a sort of heroic measure, to bind the soul to the body until a doctor could get there, or a priest. It didn't last longer than a few hours."

"And the corrupted version?" Remus asked slowly.

"Didn't last at all. It was intended to bind the soul to the body after death, but what the people who tried it found was that it worked very rarely - usually the body just disintegrated as soon as the charm was cast. And when it did work, it wasn't the dead person's soul that it bound to the body. It was something else."

"My god," Remus said. "Where did you find it?"

"Malfoy found it for me, indirectly. I went to see Poppy this afternoon and looked through every reference she had on the Hereditus charm. There was a sort of oblique reference to this charm in one of the books. I found a better one in the faculty section of the library." He gave Remus a small, sardonic smile. "Hermione would have been proud of me."

"She always was, you know," Remus said quietly. "What if it's not there?"

Harry snapped his fingers and the flame vanished. "Then I'll have to hope Malfoy and the bloke from The Hague find something, because I'm back at square one."

"Why would anyone use something like that?" Remus wondered.

"Because they loved someone too much to let them go," Harry said, and didn't meet Remus' eyes.

 

Brother Karel was short, pale-haired, and somewhere north of forty, with curiously old-fashioned half-moon glasses, almost colorless eyes, and an air of patient good humor. When Remus and Kingsley came into the operating theater he was drying his hands and looking over a tray of quietly bubbling potions. Draco was standing by the autopsy table just outside the pool of light, his hair drawn back with a ribbon tied loosely at the back of his neck, looking unsettlingly like a younger version of his father. Both he and Brother Karel were wearing surgical blacks, closer-fitting than regular robes with sleeves that ended at the elbows. The room was so cold that Remus' breath misted in front of him.

Hermione was on a marble table, covered to the shoulders in a light blue surgical blanket. Even with the torchlight lending color to her skin, she didn't look asleep. People told each other that the dead looked like they were sleeping, but it was never true, and at the moment Remus wasn't sure what purpose the lie served.

He wished he hadn't had to see her like this, but better him than Harry and Ron.

"You must be our guests," said Brother Karel in a pleasant voice with an accent like the pitch and yaw of a boat on the sea. "Don't get too close, please. Not that I imagine you'll want to, but all the same. You've left your wands and any other magical items outside?"

"Yes, we left them with Harry," Remus replied.

Draco looked up. "Potter's here?"

"Did you expect him not to be?" Remus asked.

Draco's face tightened a little, but he didn't answer.

"You're a werewolf, aren't you?" Brother Karel asked unexpectedly.

Remus blinked a little. "Er, yes."

"My father was one, rest his soul. It's terribly bad for the joints. Please do stay back, though - some of the charms I'll be using will be thrown off if you come too close." He gave Remus a good-natured, apologetic smile. "Not that I suppose you'd want to."

"Yes, of course," Remus murmured.

"It seems we're all set. Shall we begin?" Brother Karel turned and tapped his wand on a small, faintly glowing orb. A mist gathered above it like cigarette smoke over a lamp, half-solidifying into a miniature of him that echoed his movements a second behind them. He turned back to Hermione, resettled his glasses on his nose, and reached out to set his hand gently over her forehead as if he were testing for fever. A pale scarlet glow gathered like mist between his skin and hers.

"The deceased is a white female, 170 centimeters and weighing, let's see, 61 kilograms," he said. "Not malnourished, brown hair and eyes, pupils measuring… eight millimeters in diameter. Petechiae are present in the eyes, but not on the face. Rigor mortis has mostly passed off…"

Remus was starting to feel ill. God, not already, he thought, and made a stern attempt to get hold of himself.

Brother Karel muttered a charm under his breath. For a moment nothing happened; and then a thin trail of blood spilled from Hermione's nostrils, trailing down over her cheek, startlingly dark against ashen skin.

"We knew that already," Draco said.

"It's a wonder how many things one knows turn out to be wrong when the proper tests are done," Brother Karel said absently, picking up a sponge to wipe the blood away from Hermione's face. Just before it touched her skin he paused, his face intent and unreadable; then, more cautiously, he cleaned off the blood and set the sponge carefully aside. "Not in this case, though. It was dark magic that killed her, all right. Whether it was of her own making or someone else's, now… You said this was wandless?"

"So Potter says," Draco told him.

"Was she good at wandless magic?"

Draco raised an eyebrow at Remus, who shook his head. "Not that I've ever seen," he said.

"Hm," said Brother Karel. "Well, let's take a closer look at her, shall we?"

Brother Karel folded back the blanket, then held his wand out over Hermione's body and drew it slowly down over her abdomen. In its wake, skin thinned and grew transparent; viscera flickered into visibility and vanished again in a slender moving cross-section, singing out high soft tones that sounded like wet fingers on glass. Remus had to look away.

Somehow it didn't help. The sharp, discordant sounds of organ damage reached him anyway, and Brother Karel's quiet voice, cataloging injuries. Kingsley nudged him a little in sympathy, gratifyingly solid.

"There we are," said Brother Karel, his wand pausing over Hermione's neck. Underneath the wand, her skin was shimmering and nearly transparent, exposing bone underneath. "That's what killed her, the high spinal break and the occlusion of the carotid arteries. The question, of course, is how it happened. Mr. Malfoy, will you draw blood for me, please?"

Draco pulled out his wand and picked up a glass beaker. He drew his wand over Hermione's arm at the bend of the elbow, opening the skin behind it, and whispered something that made blood well in the wound. Tilting her arm, he guided the flow into the beaker. When it was full, he set it down on the tray and reached for a towel, glancing down at his fingers where her blood had spilled onto him.

Draco went still for a moment, then lifted his hand a little further into the light. Looking distinctly unsettled, he touched his fingers together and then stretched them out. Oddly enough, Remus got the impression that he was looking not at the blood but at his hand.

"What's that about, I wonder?" Kingsley whispered. Remus shook his head slowly, unsure.

Whatever it was, Draco clearly wasn't going to say anything about it. His expression neutral once more, he wiped his fingers off briskly.

"Let's take a look, now," said Brother Karel, picking up the beaker and swirling it around. Then he frowned, peered more closely at it, and sniffed the bottle. "Well, now. What's this?"

"Potter and I made the acquaintance of someone who had had much the same magic used on him that we believe was used on Granger," Draco said. "His blood was very like this, only worse - thick, black, foul-smelling. Tasted like ripe death, too."

Brother Karel made a face. "I won't ask how you got it in your mouth," he said, glancing down at the towel that still bore Draco's finger-marks in Hermione's blood. "Did you get it on your hands? Best recast those protective charms."

"But she bled earlier," Kingsley said quietly. "From the nose. There was nothing wrong with her blood then, was there?"

"Well, it was a bit of an open question at that point," Brother Karel said. "Now… Mr. Malfoy, will you - ah, I see you're ahead of me. I believe the hellebore is in the second drawer, and the mandrakes below that."

Draco lifted a hand and brought a wheeled tray speeding to him with an unnervingly quiet whir of oiled bearings. He pulled a small cauldron from the stacks on the counter behind him, rummaged through the drawers until he'd gathered a handful of various kinds of herbs, then set up the cauldron over a portable burner and snapped his fingers. Fire flared to life underneath the cauldron and a roll of cloth floated out from his pack to unroll on the tray. Firelight gleamed on a row of steel knives, flickering red against the room's monochrome sterility.

"I tried this before," Draco said. "The first time I saw blood like this. It didn't work, of course; which is unsurprising, given how sensitive hellebore is to contaminants and the fact that I had to scrape the blood out of my clothes and hair. I'll be interested to see if it works this time."

Brother Karel resettled the blanket around Hermione's shoulders and watched as Draco examined the glass fronts of the cabinets, then pulled out a clear beaker of unsettlingly luminescent green liquid. He pulled the cork off, waved it under his nose, made a face, and then poured about half the beaker into the cauldron.

"What's that in aid of?" Kingsley asked.

"Wormwood oil," Draco said absently, turning his attention to chopping herbs. "It's a heart stimulant."

"A… why?" Remus asked.

"It helps with circulation," Brother Karel said, pushing his glasses up on his nose and watching Draco with interest. "Is that hyssop you're using? I don't believe I've seen that variation."

"Yes, well, when one doesn't have dried fairy brains to hand…" Draco murmured, scraping the herbs off the table and dumping them into the cauldron. He stirred clockwise and then counterclockwise, his lips moving in an incantation that Remus couldn't hear; then he picked up the beaker of Hermione's blood and poured it carefully into the potion.

There was a low, grating drone just at the edges of Remus' hearing. Then it faded, and the light around Draco dimmed as if the cauldron were pulling it in, or spilling darkness out.

"Ready for the mandrake?" Brother Karel asked.

"Yes, I think so," Draco said. He pulled a wickedly long, thick needle out from the middle of his knives and fixed it to the end of his wand. Another wheeled tray crept up behind him. Draco set down his wand, pulled open a tall drawer, and stared contemplatively down into it. After a minute he seemed to come to a decision and reached in to carefully pull out a white bundle.

Cloth fell away from the mandrake's face. Swaddled in white, it looked like a stillbirth.

Draco set it down on the second tray and folded the cloth away from its gnarled limbs, then picked up his wand and sank the needle at its tip into the cauldron. The low drone rose into audible range for a moment, then sank back down. Draco tapped the end of his wand and watched for a minute, then pulled it out and slid the end of the needle unceremoniously into the mandrake's stomach.

Remus winced a little and looked away. Suddenly he had a bit more fellow-feeling for the Muggle-born students who never quite seemed able to convince themselves that mandrakes were only plants.

For close to a minute, Draco and Brother Karel watched the mandrake. Then, just as Kingsley shifted and seemed about to say something, the mandrake shuddered all over.

Brother Karel cast with impressive speed, wrapping a silencing charm around the mandrake. Its limbs shook a little, then began to move slowly, as if it were struggling through water. Weak and sluggish, it managed to turn onto its side, mouth opening in what looked as if it would have been a thin wail if not for the silencing charm. Something dark and thick spilled out of the corner of its mouth in a thin stream as it struggled to lift itself to sit.

"God almighty," Kingsley said.

Small twigs scraped across the metal tray with a nerve-grating sound as the mandrake pulled itself aimlessly toward the edge, dragging almost useless limbs behind it, smearing black liquid in its wake. Before it had gotten more than an inch or two it convulsed, rattling the tray with the force of its seizure. Its mouth opened wider and wider, bark ripping at the edges, until the mandrake vomited out black bile, collapsed, and was still.

There was silence for a minute before Draco spoke. "Well," he said. "I've… never quite seen it do that before."

Brother Karel reached out with his wand to turn the mandrake over. "I have," he said quietly. "Only once, long ago, in an asylum in Prague. She was a strong woman, your Mrs. Weasley."

Draco's gaze flicked to where Hermione lay on the examining table, still as a waxwork doll. "What was it, then?"

With a flick of his wand, Brother Karel rewrapped the mandrake in its cloth and cleaned the table underneath it. "The patient's name was Andreas Marecek, and he came to the asylum believing that God had shown him the kingdom of Heaven," he said. "He might even have been right, but his other symptoms argued against it. Looseness of association. Delusions. A very low body temperature. And… he was fading, in some strange way. As if he were being pulled backward into a place none of us could see. In the right light he was almost translucent."

Draco went white with alarming suddenness.

Brother Karel pulled a bottle out of the cabinet, checked the label, and returned to the autopsy table. "There were two interesting things about him," he said as he pulled the surgical blanket back down to Hermione's waist. "First, he'd been bitten by something. Something with teeth like razors and a mouth that seemed to host every sort of contagion under the sun. The bite was fresh, and infected. Second, a few weeks before he was brought to the hospital he'd been very ill. Deathly ill. When the family told us this, they wouldn't look us in the eyes."

"There are charms that can be used to bind the soul to the body temporarily if the body is close enough to death," Draco told Remus and Kingsley. "If they've been used, enough of them should remain in the bloodstream to reanimate a harvested mandrake for a few minutes, at least until decomposition is fairly advanced."

"They're illegal, of course," said Brother Karel, spilling some of the bottle's contents onto his fingers. He traced something onto Hermione's sternum that glowed sickly blue, casting shadows on her face that wavered despite the steadiness of the light. "Not quite dark magic, but close enough. At any rate, the bite mark was on his leg. The doctors couldn't stop the course of the infection so they removed the leg altogether. It didn't help. Within forty-eight hours of his admission the patient was dead."

"What bit him?" Kingsley asked.

"The medical examiner believed it was a vurkolak - which is not a vampire, though the words are related via a sort of meandering linguistic pathway. Mr. Malfoy, will you hand me the knotgrass, please?" Brother Karel reached for the jar Draco handed him, unscrewed the lid, and sprinkled knotgrass over the the luminous ointment. Light flared upward and coalesced into a mist, creeping outward over Hermione's body like fog off the sea. "The vurkolak is a relative of the ghoul - not the house-ghoul, which is harmless and not strictly speaking a ghoul at all, but the true lichyard ghouls. Filthy things. It's better to be bitten by a rabid dog than one of them. But it wasn't the infection that killed him, and Mrs. Weasley hasn't been bitten by anything in any case."

"There was a rune Harry said to look for," Remus said. "He said it would be somewhere on her body, and that it would be hard to see unless you'd done quite a bit of dark magic. Or were… well, like me."

Draco looked over at him, eyes narrowed. "What did it look like?"

Remus reached for his wand, then remembered that he didn't have it. "Like this," he said, tracing the rune in the air with his finger instead. "He said it would probably be between her shoulder blades or on the back of her neck."

Brother Karel shook his head slowly. "This spell would have found it if it were. It localizes entry points for dark magic. Of course, it hasn't found anything else either, which certainly doesn't accord with what we know to have killed her." He dipped a finger into the jar of blue liquid again, eased Hermione's eyelid open, dropped a little of the liquid into her eye, then dropped some into her other eye. Blue light spilled out from between her lashes until Brother Karel tapped her forehead with his wand and the skin and bones of her head shimmered and grew transparent.

Inside her skull, the luminous fog darkened to scarlet-shot black, curling through who knew what spaces in a way unsettlingly reminiscent of a spider in its web.

"No entry points on the outside, and yet her brain is riddled with them," Brother Karel said softly. "I'm told Mr. Potter believes that Dementors sucked out her soul and then returned it contaminated. I'm not sure whether that would explain this or not. Either way, here's the magic she used to hang herself. It's not hers, of course, someone else put it there; the question is how - and, perhaps more relevantly, what happened to her own magic, of which there is none left."

"None?" Remus asked, disbelieving. "How can you just… take away a person's magic? And even if you could, how would you put something else in its place?"

"Well, that's the question, isn't it?" Brother Karel said. "Was it taken away, or just absorbed? And how has her brain been almost eaten away by dark magic that seems to have no entry point anywhere on her body?" He tapped his wand on Hermione's forehead again and ended the charm, hiding the unnerving fog.

Draco was standing very still, wand spinning slowly in his fingertips, looking at Hermione with the absent concentration of someone chasing an elusive thought. "Potter says that Granger told him if she died of whatever Voldemort had done to her it would make him more powerful," he said slowly. "There has to be a conduit of some sort."

"And yet," said Brother Karel.

"I know that binding charm. It's meant to hold body and soul together after the body has died."

"Filthy thing," Brother Karel said quietly.

Draco's wand snapped to a halt in the loose grip of his fingers. "And here she is, dead."

Remus winced. He'd long nursed a niggling suspicion that there was a fine mind under Draco's sneering and posturing, and while he wasn't displeased to have it confirmed, he could have done without the reminder that however fine a mind it might be, it still belonged to Draco Malfoy.

"Another reason to believe it's not here," said Brother Karel, but he sounded thoughtful, not dismissive.

"Yes, but," Draco said. "You'd have to know Potter. He has a stunning gift for getting things just exactly wrong. If he weren't right just as often, one could be led to a full and happy life by doing the opposite of everything he says."

Brother Karel raised an eyebrow. "Dimittis? How?"

"Because it's not just Dimittis," Draco said, setting his hand above Hermione's eyes as if to close them. Darkness gathered in thick, smoky tendrils between his hand and her skin. "That would explain many, many things, including her madness. By God, maybe Potter was on to something after all."

Kingsley cleared his throat meaningfully.

"I'm afraid you're losing us, gentlemen," Remus told them.

Draco gave them a sharp, irritated look. "Dementors suck out Granger's soul when she's on the brink of death and then give it back to her, apparently eliciting a miraculous recovery from the brink-of-death bit. From that point on, she's mad. She has visions. She feels, or so Potter says, that there's something in her struggling to be born. After she's dead, her own magic is gone but the dark magic that let her kill herself, the thing she felt growing inside her that might well have devoured her own magic like an ingested twin, remains. Meanwhile, she shows many of the same symptoms as a madman who thinks he's been shown the kingdom of Heaven, who has a virulent infection from a dark creature's bite rapidly killing him but who had in the recent past had the same charm cast on him that Potter was talking about, quite possibly the dark magic version of it. Both of their blood reanimates a mandrake but only to kill it again - actively kill it, not just fail to keep it reanimated."

Severus' voice flashed into Remus' head, and suddenly something clicked in his brain. "Dimittis is the fulcrum of a longer spell for exorcism."

"Casting out ghosts," Brother Karel said. "Ironically, in the Muggle world exorcism is the province of the Church, intended to cast out demons and harmful spirits, not a second and much more final murder of the already dead."

Remus shivered a little. He'd almost forgotten how cold the room was. "I don't even know what would happen if you used that against a living person."

"Don't you?" asked Brother Karel. "I do. I daresay Mr. Malfoy does as well."

"You'd think Voldemort of all people would want to stay clear of that one," Kingsley said.

"Know your enemy and know yourself," Draco said distractedly. His hand moved slowly over Hermione's face, trailing wisps of dark behind it. "Voldemort might come up a bit short in the latter department, but he's certainly assiduous about the former. Buggering fuck, where did he put the wretched thing?"

"Go on telling, then," Kingsley said. "What is it you think happened?"

"Dimittis is a very powerful spell," Brother Karel said. "More powerful in its way than Avada Kedavra. Dimittis destroys utterly, forever - but only if its target is already dead. The difficulty is that it's a terribly powerful spell but not a terribly bright one; all it knows is its target, which is why it's very dangerous to use on living things that have been possessed. If it's not carefully contained, it will tear through the life force of the living host on its way to the dead, rather like some sort of incredibly virulent autoimmune disease that moves to endstage on contact. If it can't find its target, it will keep searching, and keep tearing, until it does."

"But it's easily confused, which is why it can be controlled by the caster," Draco put in, moving his hand down over Hermione's neck. "I suspect that Granger didn't actually recover from being on the brink of death. I think she'd had exactly one foot in the grave ever since the attack. I think that if we looked for it we'd find traces of organ decay more advanced than it should be. And she had the Dimittis trying to push her out and the binding charm holding her in. Neither of them are the type of spell that will fizzle on contact with a countercharm. They'll only keep pushing at each other, creating more and more force between them until it builds - with the proper guidance, of course - into a mass of raw dark magic that will, for instance, allow a woman who's never been good at wandless magic to hang herself bare-handed."

"And it was supposed to go back to Voldemort when she died, was that it?" Remus asked.

"I believe so," Draco said. "But it obviously has to reach some sort of critical build-up. Once past that point, it clearly doesn't necessarily kill the host - it didn't kill Crouch, after all - but death releases the buildup like… well, in a very real sense like pushing at a door and then having it suddenly open, except that the force being exerted on the door is tremendous. If Voldemort can, metaphorically speaking, stand at the door and divert that energy just before it goes through…"

"That would be a tremendous amount of power to harness, and not at his own expense," Brother Karel said.

"Granger appears to have foiled him by killing herself before the build-up reached a critical mass," Draco said. "But I'm not sure we know much more now than we did before, frankly. If we can find the bloody sigils we'll know how he killed her, but we still won't know exactly what he means to do with this power he's collecting, or how he means to get enough of it to do something really effective. He can hardly have Dementors going about the place killing us off one by one as he stands over us and stops us from quite leaving our bodies."

"I don't see why not. It sounds like the sort of thing he'd do," Kingsley grumbled.

"Yes, he's not exactly the reigning master of efficient planning, is he?" Draco said dryly. "Nonetheless, he's clearly planning something on quite a large scale. If I had to guess, I would say that that portal on the Hogwarts grounds was not so much an attack as a test run. The next one will be much more powerful and probably faster."

"But the man at the asylum - he had the same symptoms as Hermione, and we don't know that he had the same spells cast on him," Remus pointed out. "So the function of the Dimittis must be to direct the energy back to Voldemort somehow; but the spell is supposed to destroy life force, not redirect it."

"Yes, that is the difficulty, isn't it?" Brother Karel asked. "But in a sense, when you perform an exorcism on a living thing, you are using the spell to redirect the energy - in this case, to redirect it to a space where it can be destroyed. The binding charm would have to be able to safeguard the power through the split second that the Dimittis gained the edge and expelled it. The Muggles have a weapon in which some sort of explosive chemical reaction shoots a metal bullet through a barrel that allows the weapon to be aimed. Envision that with a much more complex dynamic, and it's possible that that's what's happening here."

"But not if we can't find the goddamned sigils," Draco said in exasperation. "Lupin, come here."

Remus and Kingsley shared a surprised glance. "Are you sure?" Remus asked dubiously.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures. We want a dark creature and you're standing right there."

Remus took a slow breath and went rather unwillingly forward, narrowing his eyes against the pool of light as he stepped into it.

"If you don't want to do this then don't do it, my friend," Brother Karel said gently. "We'll need you to lay hands on her."

"Why?" Kingsley asked, sounding unsettled.

"To see if she bleeds from anywhere." Draco looked up at Remus and drew his hand back. Wisps of dark vanished back into his palm like ectoplasm. "The test Brother Karel used is a thousand years old and rather imprecise, but it's the only one really available to those of us who tan instead of burning and stay the same shape come the full moon. If dark magic killed her, touching her with dark magic again will make the corpse bleed. For us it'll only be a bloody nose. For you, the wounds themselves will bleed. Find the source of the bleed and we should be able to confirm our theory, or have to start all over again."

Brother Karel touched his wand to Hermione's stomach and a soft ripple of magic spread out around it. "And if the bleeding is internal, we'll know that too. I fancy it won't be, though, all things considered."

Remus looked down at Hermione for a long moment. Her hair looked dull and lifeless against her face, and her lashes were almost lost in the shadows under her eyes. "When Hermione was a little girl, her boggart was Minerva McGonagall giving her poor marks on an exam," he said, blinking his eyes against the sudden sting. "I remember she never had bracelets or hair clips or little toys like the other girls had, but she had a bookbag that was old and worn and so well-loved that you could feel it when you walked by."

Brother Karel's eyes were patient and understanding. Even Draco had schooled his face to expressionlessness, which for him probably constituted making an effort. Remus gave them a wry half-smile and reached out to set his hands on Hermione's arm.

Her skin was bitterly, shockingly cold, not the cold of living skin chilled but of meat from the refrigerator, and it felt clammy under his palms. More, it felt like a thin barrier over something that wasn't Hermione, something subtly but distinctly foul. It was disturbing enough that his first instinct was to draw back his hands and rub them off on his trousers, but he didn't. There was nothing left here of Hermione. He didn't know whether that was more reassuring or painful.

"Give it a minute," Brother Karel murmured.

"No, look," Draco said, pointing with his wand.

Red was pooling under Hermione's eyelashes, building until it spilled out over her temples in dark tears.

"In her eyes?" Remus asked dubiously.

"Clever," Brother Karel said. "Not visible on her body, a spell oriented toward the outside of her body wouldn't catch it, and opening up a corpse to slice into organs is not only immoral but actually illegal. What are the chances of finding it?"

"How would you put sigils in someone's eyes without blinding them?" Kingsley wondered.

"Excellent question," Brother Karel said. "Unfortunately for Lord Voldemort, the Church has dispensation to perform any number of surgeries if dark magic is involved; and whoever trained you, Mr. Malfoy, I doubt they taught you to care whether something was illegal or not."

"You'll want to pass on this bit," Draco told Remus and Kingsley. "Go make sure Potter hasn't chewed holes in the furniture. We'll be done here in a few minutes, hopefully."

"You're going to cut open her eyes," Kingsley said, not quite believing.

"Do you want answers?" Draco asked.

"God. That's…" Kingsley sighed, rubbing a hand over his forehead. "Desperate times. Malfoy, I should make you come out too. The Vatican might have dispensation but Hogwarts doesn't."

"Really?" Draco asked as he recast shielding charms on his hands, not sounding particularly interested. "I suggest you go and discuss that with Hogwarts' counsel. I suspect you'll find that we actually do."

"And if you don't, that smooth bastard will find a way to make it so you do," Kingsley grumbled. "Right, I'll leave it there for now. Remus, after you."

"Is there anything we can tell Harry?" Remus asked Draco.

"Yes. Tell him to go home. He looks like hell," Draco said absently.

Remus' first instinct was to ask how Draco knew. His second was to keep his mouth closed in case he found out the answer.

 

"I'm afraid I'm not explaining this very well," he said apologetically some ten or fifteen minutes later.

Harry shook his head irritably. "You're not the one who should have to. Bloody Malfoy, what the fuck is taking him so long?"

"Sometimes, Potter, people do like to take their time and do a job right," Draco snapped from behind them, making Remus start a little. Harry whirled like someone had blown a claxon in his ear and vanished, reappearing right beside Draco, who stepped fastidiously aside to put some distance between them. Not that it worked; Harry grabbed Draco unceremoniously by the upper arm and manhandled him into a corner, hissing questions over Draco's irritable protests.

Brother Karel closed the door behind him, glanced at Harry and Draco with mild bemusement, and came over to Remus and Kingsley. "We found them," he said simply.

"Well," Remus said. "At least now we know."

"We know more than we did before," Brother Karel said. "Is that really Harry Potter? I trust he isn't going to damage Mr. Malfoy."

"Harry and Hermione were best friends," Remus said. "Had been since they were small. He's… very anxious for answers."

"Malfoy!" Harry said sharply, and Remus looked back to see that Draco had maneuvered free and was making for the door. At Harry's call he paused, clearly unwillingly, and turned around.

"There's something you aren't telling me," Harry said after a minute, sounding not accusatory but puzzled.

"I'll answer you with another question, Potter: why are you so sure?" Draco asked grimly, and was through the door and gone before Harry could sort out an answer.

Brother Karel pulled a scarf out of his robes and tucked it around his neck. "For thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river," he said gently into the silence. "I'm very sorry for your loss. I won't ask what exactly is happening here, because I suspect that I'll find out if it gets through you and comes for us, and by then it will be too late. But… have faith in whatever you have faith in. All prayers are the same to God. Good night, gentlemen."

When Remus found himself imagining in great detail what the twins would have said to that, he decided that it was time to go home himself. It felt stranger than he'd thought it would, leaving Hermione alone in that cold room, and his footsteps echoed oddly in his own ears all the way down the hall.

 

 

 

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