DISCLAIMER: I don't own Harry Potter, or any of the Wizarding world created by JK. Rowling. I',m just borrowing it for a bit :)


It was eerily silent in the late night gloom as the three Aurors approached the house. Tense lines rippled through their shoulders and all stood with their wands raised, muscles bunching at the smallest movements as if expecting to be attack at any moment.

The smallest of the three and the only female of the group, Efren Yodelbroach, was particularly surly about their predicament. It was rare to get a case like this, unlicensed magic use and something that seemed like an unforgivable curse but wasn't quite one. According to the report they'd be given from the Improper Use of Magic Department in the Ministry of Magic (the case had been handed over to the Aurors after a twinge of dark magic was found), there was definitely magic involved, but not from any registered wand user. Usually this would have lead the department to assume that it was some of the accidental magic cases they got from wizards not yet old enough to attend Hogwarts, but the dark magic cancelled that out. No baby magic was powerful enough to render an unforgivable curse.

It was a fishy situation with no definite answers, and that was quite possibly Efren's least favorite type of case. She was a perfectionist. She liked to have every single square inch of the case laid out in front of her before she did anything, but now her team was being sent in with almost no information at all. It wasn't her style. The case was doomed to come up with little or no answers, and if there was anything she hated more than having nothing to work on, it was failure.

"What the bloody 'ell is that Potter doing? Sending us out in the middle of the damn night to some muggle neighborhood in the middle of nowhere…" The man to her left, the burlier of Efren's two male partners continued to mutter under his breath after a look from his other partner, a thin and gangly brunette.

"You're not trying to say that the man who defeated the dark lord doesn't know how to asses a little thing like an unlicensed magic case, are you, Gustus?" Efren hissed, just loud enough for the two of them to hear. Gustus shot her a quick glance, and then returned to staring at the house.

"No bu-"

"Then shut up before you bloody get us killed," he responded with presenting his partners with the gift of silence. Efren smirked in victory, and silently the three approached the front door of the residence.

As they neared it, what had appeared to be just a simple single-family home in a muggle neighborhood began to show distressing signs of damage. What had looked like a black gate from the sidewalk was actually the front door, giant splinters sticking out of a bend in the middle of the door, as if somebody had kicked it in hard enough to split the wood, but not quite hard enough to break it completely in half. The windows, though not broken, had hairline cracks lacing through the glass. The overhang of roofing on top of the door had collapsed in, and there were giant holes going through the roof. It wasn't yet clear if the holes were from something breaking in or something flying out but either way it didn't look good for whoever was inside.

Gustus, being the more intimidating (and large) of the three, approached the front door, Efren and the brunette, Liam, both with their backs to the wall on either side, wands ready to stun anybody that tried to push past Gustus. "Ministry of Magic," Gustus bellowed into the house.

There was a tense moment of silence, and no response came from inside the dark dwelling. "A 'right. You won't come out then I'm comin' in!" Gustus yelled, and pointing his wand at the half-wrecked floor. "Reducto!" The door flew off the hinges, crumpling like it was being squeezed in the hand of an invisible giant. The wreckage flew into the house, slamming against the far wall with a crash. The echoes of the impact of the door bounced within the space for quite some time before all was still and silent again. Liam and Efren exchanged a look, and Efren shrugged in response to the unspoken question, her eyes echoing his confusion.

Not one for empty threats, the rather large Auror stepped inside cautiously. He was tense, a stunning spell on the edge of his lips in case of a hidden attacker. The two wizards outside held their breaths, ears straining for the creaking of floorboards or the carefully controlled breathing of a hidden presence. After a few minutes of silence, Liam and Efren followed their coworker inside, the trio as tense as a cat before pouncing.

"It looks like somebody set off a bomb in here," Liam muttered, pushing the shattered remains of a couch out of his way. He had no idea where it'd been originally, but he was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be propped up horizontally against the wall like that. Actually, once it was mentioned, Efren began to notice that none of the furniture was resting on the floor. Every table, lamp, chair, and couch was against the wall in all forms of disarray. It was extremely curious, to say the least. Gustas nodded at the staircase leading to the second floor, indicating that he was going to see what the situation upstairs was.

Fairly confident that there wasn't anybody hiding on the ground floor, Efren cast Lumos and used the light at the tip of her wand as a guide light, making her way through the west side of the house, while Liam pressed off to the east. Liam whistled under his breath at the damage inside, taking into note the cracked dining room table and the chandelier that'd been thrown (?) with so much force it had burst a whole up into the next floor. "Weird," He whispered to Efren from across the house.

Efren was preparing to agree, when she tripped over something in the darkness, barely holding her hands out in time to stop herself from slamming face-first into the hard-wood floor. Liam, still bumbling a bit in the dark, jumped at the sound of a body smacking the ground. "Efren?" Her wand had dropped and rolled off onto another section of the floor, so it wasn't until Liam swung his wand around that she was fully able to see what had tripped her in the dark room. Her eyes widened, and she choked back a scream, swallowing the burst of panic with it. She tried to open her mouth, but the words wouldn't form, and all she got out was a few strangled squeaks before she finally got her vocal chords to work. "Oh, Merlin's Beard,"

"Bloody hell that's gruesome," Liam remarked dryly, gazing at the source of Efren's horror from across the room with a grim look of disgust.

Efren heaved herself out of the push-up position and back onto her feet, a bit pink from shock and physical exertion. She sighed, wiping her hands on her jeans and taking another look at their newly-found evidence. She wished ever so much that she'd had a chance to sit up before she'd seen what she was laying on top of. She feared it would be burned into her memory forever. Sure, being an Auror wasn't exactly a glamorous job, but it certainly wasn't a usual occurrence to find yourself face to face with an unseeing, cold, corpse. "Something told me there would be bodies," she muttered, wiping her face off on her robes, "I just didn't know that I'd get that close,"

Liam ran his flashlight over the area of the dead body quickly, startled to see that Efren was incorrect this time. "Uh-uh. Two bodies," he pointed with his wand and Efren followed, looking queasier by the second.

Being the closest to the bodies at the current moment, it fell to her to examine the bodies. Mentally forcing herself to hold her lunch down, Efren peered closer at the faces of the two bodies. They were opposite genders, around the same age, she could assume. The man lay slightly on top of the woman, as if he had tried to push her behind him in the moment of their demise. Both wore wedding rings, perhaps they were married to each other? Efren made mental notes of all of this for the report later. She was just beginning to check their pockets for wands when she remember that she'd dropped her own in all the excitement over discovering the assumed homicide victims. "Lee," she asked quickly, patting her pockets anxiously, "Did you see my wand, I think it fell somewhere

ov-"

"Found it," Liam interrupted her, his voice cracking a bit.

"Throw it," she replied, without looking up.

"Efren!" his voice cracked again and something about his tone made her look up. She froze. Liam had found her wand all right. It'd be kind of hard to miss, since it was pointing directly at his chest. It was being held by a small girl, somewhere in her teens. She was petite, with hair of some kind of dark color and deeply shadowed eyes. Her features were mostly indistinguishable in the dark, but it was very clear that she was holding Efren's wand in her right hand. Liam, caught off guard, had had no time to defend himself, and instead had his arms up in the air, wand in hand, surrendering lest she injure him, or worse.

"WHO ARE YOU!" The child screamed, wand wavering in her hand. Her voice was high-pitched and hysterical. Both Liam and Efren tried to answer, but they were cut off again with another high-pitched scream, "GET OUT!" a tremor ran through the floor, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Several of the articles of furniture fell off the wall and crashed on the floor. In the chaos, Efren's view was cut off as a bed from the second floor fell between her and her partner, along with a rather large chunk of the ceiling. Plaster dust filled the entire bottom floor, choking the air with thick white clouds. Signs of a struggle echoed through the dust.

"Ministry of Magc! PUT THE WAND DOWN!"

"You don't want to hurt anybody. Just put the wand down and-"

"STUPEFY!"

"DIFFINDO!"

A burst of color exploded in the room. Rainbow streaks mixing with the bright red plash of the stunning spell ricocheted around the room, lighting up the dusty fog that was still slowly settling down in the half-light. A cry of pain and a sting of muffled curses echoed overtop of the sound of something being banged on a wall. Efren hurled herself over the fallen divan, where she could see the scene more clearly. Gustus had the girl around the waist, struggling to hold her as she kicked against the wall, fighting against his grip like a feral cat. Liam was watching the scene carefully, both his and Efren's wands in his grip, on in each hand. His face was contorted in concentration, trying to aim a spell at the female, but afraid of hitting his coworker with the blast.

With no time to wonder how Gustus had gotten himself involved in it, Efren yelled for Liam to throw her wand, launching an immobulus charm at the girl the second she got a relatively clear shot. The small body immediately went slack and Gustus dropped her to the ground, heaving a sigh of relief. Now that he was still, the scratch marks on his face and arms were clearly visible in the wand-light. Laim shot an accusing glare across the room at Efren, who shrugged.

"You were taking too long," She smirked, the corners of her mouth turning up ever so slightly, "And besides, my aim is better than yours."

"She's just a kid," Gustus leaned over the body of the girl. She was awake, but unable to move, her eyes the only inclination that she wasn't sleeping. She was wide awake, eyes darting from side to side, pupils tiny with panic. "She's can't be a day over 17 at the very most. Lumos," he raised the light at the tip of his wand to their captured victim's face, studying her features. She had a curtain of dark hair and huge bright blue eyes. Her eyes were shadowed from lack of sleep and tear trails broke through the dusting of dirt on her face. Severe, high cheekbones and full lips gave her a feral, starved expression, and her hair was uncombed and wild.

Efren glanced over her quickly. In her opinion, the girl looked like a muggle drug addict or something equally distasteful. She shuddered a bit, wondering exactly how a person went around getting into that kind of condition. She was disgusted and never mind the fact that she had two bumbling idiots for partners: Liam, for one had let a child hold him at wandpoint. God knows how that would have ended if he'd been there by himself. And Gustus had just taken his sweet time coming downstairs through all the yelling. What kind of grown man couldn't hold a girl, and an emaciated one at that? True, she'd dropped her wand, but she fell, so that wasn't really her fault, right? Right. She clapped her hands in the darkness, pleased. She had a suspect. No matter how they'd caught her, at least this way they'd have something to show for the hours they'd spend working overtime to check out the house. This was just splendid! "Liam, Gustus, you two stay here and look for anything else suspicious. I want anti-muggle charms around this place immediately and one of you better start writing out a report, got it?"

Liam and Gustus nodded, both wondering why they were being bossed around by the youngest (and smallest) member of the Auror Department. "But what about the girl,?" Gustus nudged her with her foot, wincing at the memory of those nails.

"Oh her," Efren shrugged some of the plaster dust off of her robe casually. "She's going straight back to the Ministry," she bent over the little girl, smirking once again. "How'd you like to meet Harry Potter?"


A/N: So, this is my first fanfiction ever. I hope you guys like it. This is kind of a mix of a prologue and a chapter one. I'm not really happy with it, I can do so much better but I've been retouching and scrapping parts for three days now and I'm kind of sick of it so I decided to finally upload it. Chapter one will be coming really soon, I promise. And yes, the actual characters will come in Super soon, ext Chapter in fact. I don't really mind if you don't review, but I'd love to know what you think. I myself of guilty of reading and not reviewing, but I welcome constructive criticism and questions. Also, sorry for any mistakes. I proofread several times, but I'm horrible at proofreading so I apologize in advance. Thanks for reading :)