Chapter 4: Reading the Signs

The only other time in my life that I had felt such despair was my graduation day, when I found out my parents had been killed. Days turned into weeks, which rolled into months, and we couldn't find anything.

Blue Team had permanently rented three rooms from Madam Rosmerta, but even living above a bar couldn't liven our mood. Matt and I shared a room while the girls took the second for themselves. The third room was for all our research. Dozens of boards had information stuck across them while tables overflowed with documents and books.

Aya, the most organized out of all of us, had managed to keep some semblance of order in the room, yet you could never tell just by looking. Any possible relevant piece of information was pinned to the boards and it looked like a giant collage. We would all spend countless hours staring at the boards, hoping to find connections that would enable us to open up a new line of inquiry.

I originally thought the problem would be us running into a brick wall after just a few days and not knowing where to go from there. In fact, the opposite had happened; we were always finding new possibilities and forming new theories. Any evidence we could find, however, couldn't support the theories. It was taking us weeks just to disprove each new thought.

We sometimes had to travel across the entire country to check out a location we thought might be connected to Voldemort, only to find we were chasing ghosts. We spent all of Harry's third year engrossed in our research, only to come up with more questions than answers.

On top of that, the English Ministry was stonewalling us when it came to the search for Sirius Black. With eight Omega's currently residing in England I would have thought that the Ministry would have fallen over backward for our assistance in catching him, yet we were told it wasn't our business and we were to keep out of the investigation.

Apparently because it wasn't an international manhunt the Aurors thought they could handle it on their own. What was worse was Dumbledore telling us everything was fine after Black broke into the castle not once but twice. I couldn't believe that it had happened with us residing just down the road, but not being allowed to perform nightly patrols of the grounds was what finally did it for me.

I had it out with Dumbledore two days after Black had been found in the boys dormitory. Never had I yelled at Dumbledore, but I couldn't help it. Black had been five feet from Harry yet Dumbledore seemed content that the boy was safe. I called him irresponsible and stormed out of his office. I was so frustrated from the lack of results from our research that I lost my temper. I couldn't see Dumbledore's side and he seemed content to not share his thoughts with me, one of the first times he didn't.

As I exited the castle I took off running and didn't stop until I reached London the next day. Usually a run that long calms me down but when Joanna opened the door to her teams flat I was still pissed as hell. Green Team did their best to calm me down but I could tell that they felt a little resentful about not being allowed to help in the investigation as well.

I felt really foolish a few months later when I found out exactly why Dumbledore didn't want me chasing Sirius Black around. I apologized to Dumbledore quite a few times, and each time he just waved me off and told me to think nothing of it. I did, however, tell him that in the future he needed to communicate his thoughts with me so I understood his motives behind the decisions he made. His reply to that was he wasn't sure the entire story behind Sirius himself, but knew enough about the friendship that James Potter had with Sirius to know that Harry was never in danger of being murdered.

"We may have thought Black a Voldemort supporter," He told me, "But so strong was the friendship between himself and James Potter that I believed he could never bring himself to harm Harry."

I myself thought this may have been a risk taken by Dumbledore, after all I found many instances where Death Eaters not only betrayed their closest friends but their families as well. Yet all turned out well and we gained in Sirius another man who believed in Voldemort's inevitable return and was committed to our side.

Dumbledore also told me of the prophecy that Sybill Trelawney had made during Harry's Divination exam. It troubled me to hear, even though Voldemort's return was something we had all come to accept as inevitable. What bothered my team and me the most, I think, was that it seemed to be happening sooner than we had hoped. True it had been two years since the incident with the Sorcerers Stone, but somehow I had hoped we'd have a much longer time. We still had no justifiable leads as to the whereabouts of any of his Horcrux's.

In preparation for the ultimate return of the Dark Lord, I instituted dueling sessions for all of us to hone our skills that had slowly become rusty after a few years dedicated to nothing but research. Turns out this was a very good idea, as many of us seemed to have lost our edge.

Dumbledore was gracious enough to lend us the Hogwarts grounds to conduct our sessions seeing as the student body had been dismissed for summer break. The combination of the wide-open grounds and the densely packed forest made for a variety of scenarios that we could practice.

At first I kept it simple and just pitted Blue Team against Green Team and that worked for a bit as everyone shrugged of the rust, but as we eventually got back into shape I had to change up the teams because Blue was just too good and Green was a man down. The best teams turned out to be the old vs. the new. Aya, Joanna, and myself, the Omega veterans, took on the rest of the team, some of whom had yet to see any action as an Omega.

Over the course of a few weeks we were back in top form and I felt satisfied enough to go back to the research that had been neglected. I did make sure to schedule a weekend full of sparring sessions at least once a month to make sure that we never fell that far out of practice again.

News of Bertha Jorkins disappearance in Albania reached me just as Green Team left for London. Immediate warning bells went off in my head and I don't think anyone believed that her vanishing in Voldemort's last known hiding spot was a coincidence.

Later that day Dumbledore sent word that Harry had woken up the previous night with a horrible dream about Voldemort. Events were starting to unfold just weeks after the escape of Peter Pettigrew and it seemed as if Voldemort had finally found one of his followers he had so long been waiting for. Blue Team stayed close to Hogsmede for the next few days, waiting for word from Dumbledore who was looking into the disappearance of Bertha and waiting for a follow-up from Sirius regarding Harry's dream.

When word finally came from the castle, it was Dumbledore summoning us to a meeting in his office immediately. Among all the information he had collected on recent events, he also told us he had found an ally who was willing to lend us aid...

Authors note: Sorry this is such a short chapter, but I couldn't think of anything really eventful that was going on outside Hogwarts for the team to be involved in. Thanks to all who have read and followed this story, I promise the action is coming soon, I just need to move the story a little more before we get to the rise of Voldemort and then the story should really start rolling.