Ch. 2
With a crack, Severus apparated in to an alley. Still dizzy from the trip and the smell of wet rank trash from the dumpster next to him, he felt his stomach flip. He held onto the edge of the dumpster and the wall in front of him as he threw up. When he was through, he closed his eyes and rested the side of his forehead against the cold wet brick wall.
"Damn it." After wiping his mouth with the back of his hand he headed toward the street.
It was well past midnight. There were many people out on the street. It wasn't the holiday; except for the whores working on the corner wearing battered Mardi Gras masks, no one out was in costume. One was bending down into the window of a car as he walked past them. Two of the girls evidently thought that such a young man would be an easy trick and perhaps they could roll him once they had his pants down. He didn't need Legilimency to learn that.
"Hey baby, want some company?" one girl said as she started to rub her hand on his chest.
"Yeah, we can teach you how to have a real good time," purred the other girl in his ear. He couldn't help but roll his eyes at the cliché of it all.
"I bet you say that to all the boys," he mumbled as walked past them. Brushing of the first girl's hand sharply when it strayed too close to his wand, she took it as a personal affront and started yelling at him.
"That's ok. Go back to your mom, you fucking fag! Go over a couple of blocks. There's a couple of little boys you can fuck with!" Severus, not turning around, sent a Silencio and the two finger salute over his shoulder at them. The night became blessedly quiet again.
Aside from the occasional drug dealer and vagrant staring at him warily, the rest of the walk was uneventful. As he approached a dingy stucco apartment building, he looked up and down the street and through the glass door into the entryway of the building, trying to determine if anyone or anything was out of place. When he decided that nothing was amiss, he took out his wand from the inside of his robes and slid it up the inside of his sleeve. Then he entered the building.
The hallway reeked of stale urine and cooked cabbage and was dimly lit by two bare bulbs that hung from the ceiling. The only sounds were the occasional cough from one of the bums sleeping in the hallway and the buzz of the flies that surrounded them. On his way over to the stairs, Severus stepped over a man passed out in his own fluids; he gave a moan when Severus accidently kicked him on the way.
When Severus reached the top of the stairs, he headed toward the apartment at the end of the hall. The cheap particle board door was once painted in a glossy white and was now yellowed, streaked with dirt, and badly chipped. He listened for a moment, and when he didn't hear anything he knocked loudly on the door. Listening again for a minute, he slid his wand out of his sleeve and pointed at the lock.
"Alohomora," he said. Upon hearing the click of the lock, he slowly opened the door and entered the dark apartment. Severus held his wand out in front of him, ready for anything that might come at him. A few steps in, he felt on the wall for a light switch. He listened for a moment and flipped the light on. The room was filled with a dim sickly yellowish light from a lamp in the far corner of the room.
Besides the lamp, the room was devoid of any furniture. The floor was littered with dirty dippers, fast food wrappers, and dirty clothes. There were a couple of piles of unidentifiable things, but Severus didn't stop and study them. Stepping over them quietly as possible, he headed toward the back bed room.
Severus slowly opened the door to a room filled with twice the clutter as that in the living room. Along the far wall was a dingy twin mattress and bare bulb lamp. On the mattress layid a toddler who that looked no older than two and a young woman. Both of their black hair looked stringy and greasy from neglect. From the look and smell, the toddler hadn't been changed in a while. Severus walked over to the bed. He noticed an overflowing ashtray, several broken glass tubes, and a couple of syringes. He picked up a blue bottle that was lying on its side, immediately recognizing it as one that he used to store the extract of dangerous herbs. So this is Bellatrix's idea of looking after someone, he thought, as he smoothed the young woman's hair out of her face.
Kneeling down, he felt for a pulse, he noticed the dark circles under her eyes and waxy pallor of the rest of her skin. Definitely not an overdose, but not far from it, he concluded. He looked over to the child, who was taking regular breaths. Aside from obvious neglect, she was healthy. He began to debate whether or not to wake her up for the trip, transcontinental apperation was hard enough. He only just mastered it in the past month, at the Dark Lord's command. An unmistakable crack from outside cut the debate short. He quickly picked up the toddler and grabbed the woman by her arm and disappeared with the same crack.
Outside, the building, a distraught Bellatrix was flinging hexes as she stormed the building. Her husband Rodolphus and brother in law Rabastan were in tow. Shattering the glass of the front door, Bellatrix stepped through the frame. She flipped her wand, and the man at the bottom of the stairs was thrown toward the opposite wall where he fell in an unnatural position, his back broken. As she made her way up the stairs she continued to fling hexes, blasting holes in the plaster and doors. The men behind her exchanged nervous looks. They both knew Bella could be tempestuous, but they had never seen her like this before.
"Wait here," she snapped at them when they arrived at the apartment door. "Kill anyone that approaches."
"What are you going to do?" Rodolphus timidly asked. Then he then flinched under Bella's stare.
"That brat is going to do what she was born for," Bella spat back before disappearing into the apartment with a flurry.
When they heard Bella's angry screech, the men came running into the back bedroom. They saw Bella storming around screaming unintelligibly. She was throwing fireballs out of her wand. The men stood there shocked at her display of rage but she soon turned her anger toward them.
"Don't just stand there, find them!" She stormed out of the room. The men could hear her entering the apartment next door, and they obediently followed.
It took the firemen twenty-four hours to put out the fire, and it burned so hot that it warped the metal on buildings 60 feet away. The estimate was that 36 people died in the blaze. The count and identification of the bodies weren't exact.
