CHAPTER EIGHT
The third time Harry followed the path from the trap door in the third floor corridor to the chamber containing the Mirror of Erised at the end, he was met by no resistance at all. It was for this reason that he'd left the dog – Sirius – standing beside the open trap door, keeping watch; as much as he would like some company, he didn't have time to go through all the tasks just because Sirius hadn't faced them before. He wasn't even all that sure that he could pass some of them on his own. The chessboard, for example, would seem just a little too daunting to Harry without Ron standing by to make the hard strategic decisions.
It was a little scary how much Harry relied on his friends. He wouldn't be able to this time around.
Harry stopped a moment before he stepped within view of the mirror, Hufflepuff's cup clutched in his hand. He glanced at his watch and marked the time as six minutes after seven. That gave him until just after nine o'clock at night to get the Horcruxes to the Death Eaters.
He stepped up to the mirror and met his reflection's eyes. Nothing seemed to happen for a long moment, and Harry worried that they might not have reversed the transfiguration entirely. It had felt right, though, once it had finally fallen into place. It had felt like the item was back to the form it wanted to be in, as if it was somehow sentient. It might well be, for all that Harry knew. Nothing in the magical world would really surprise him these days, and his knowledge of Horcruxes, though greater than that of most witches or wizards, was still lacking.
After a few breathless seconds, though, Harry's reflection dropped the locket into the goblet. Though the weight added to the cup in Harry's hand wasn't excessive, it was still perceptible. He glanced into the cup.
With his free hand, he almost reverently dipped his fingers into the cup to retrieve the locket. When he pulled it out slightly, the links of the chain dangled between his fingers, slightly glinting in the dim light. Satisfied, Harry replaced it into the cup and then withdrew his wand.
"Reducto!" he cried.
The glass of the mirror shattered with a satisfying crash. When the splintering reaction to the spell ceased, the remaining backboard stood uncovered with a hole clear through it, almost ripped in half. Harry thought he could feel the complex charms that had enchanted it fading out of existence, and he was somehow sure that one seventh of Voldemort's soul went with it. Harry delivered a vicious kick to what still remained of the mirror, causing it to crash backward and fully split apart against the stone floor. A sense of relief washed over Harry.
Three Horcruxes down.
Harry was sprinting back towards the trapdoor, the cup and locket clutched in his left hand and his wand in his right, before he even realised that his feet were moving. He'd wasted time getting rid of a Horcrux that he could have come back for, Harry knew, but he also felt far more ready to face the next two hours – which could be the last two hours of his life, if it all went sour – after scoring such a huge point against Voldemort.
He'd proven to himself in one charm that he could destroy the Horcruxes. When it came down to it, that confidence might be the difference between being alive two and a half hours from that moment in time or… well, or not.
Harry used levitation magic to boost himself back up out of the hole left by the open trap door. It was exhausting, but Harry had yet to figure out any other way of getting out without the use of a broom. Ron and Hermione had used the brooms that were supplied in the key room to get out the first time, so they weren't there to be used anymore. That was rather a pity, since Harry really wished he had a broom handy. He needed to get to the Apparition point as soon as possible, but he would have to get outside before he could summon his Nimbus from the Gryffindor Tower.
"You'll have to stay here," Harry told Sirius, who was still waiting in dog form by the trap door for Harry's return. "I can't take you with me. They know who you are, and you aren't protected from attack like I am. They'll kill you on sight if they can, for no other reason than that it would weaken me."
Sirius didn't seem particularly pleased by this, but he stopped at the entrance to the castle, refraining from following Harry outside. As the dog watched Harry's broom zoom magically toward them, Harry thought he saw understanding in those dark canine eyes. Or, at least, he hoped he did.
Harry really hated that cave. He'd been there and seen it all far too many times for his taste. He hated the sight of the cliff jutting up into the night, and the rock he had to bleed on each time in order to enter. He hated that it was shrouded in perpetual darkness but for the annoying green glow coming from inside that abhorrent basin, and he hated that huge dark lake and the thought of the hundreds of bodies that lurked beneath its surface. They had all disappeared from sight now that they were no longer needed to keep Dumbledore in his place. Most of all, though, he hated the fact that there were Death Eaters in the cave, and that he had to go inside and be near them if he wanted to live.
He wasn't ready.
He had to be ready.
When he entered, it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, for the small jets of light omitted by the four wands inside the cave barely made a dent in the darkness. After a few moments, he could make out Bellatrix Lestrange, one of the men who'd been ready to see him dead up on the battlements when the Death Eaters had invaded Hogwarts, and a young man who looked barely older than Harry himself. Harry had never seen him before, so he assumed he was a new recruit, probably just out of Durmstrang.
"Has wee little Potter lost his way?"
"I'm exactly where I mean to be," Harry returned. Even though he'd made it to the cave in very little time, he still didn't feel comfortable wasting time bickering with Bellatrix.
"Then has he lost his mind, I wonder?" Bellatrix cackled. "If the little baby had a brain, he would know that he should be crying for mercy right now."
Harry glared at her, though he was well aware that the blackened state of the cave meant she probably couldn't tell what expression he had on his face. Not that he actually believed she would care, in her state of mind. "You can't hurt me. The Vow said that I would be allowed to come, give you the Horcruxes and return back to Hogwarts without being harmed."
Bellatrix laughed again. The older man chimed in, though Harry had to admit that he, at least, sounded a great deal saner than the Lestrange woman. That wasn't a big accomplishment, really, but he supposed it had to count for something.
"You were right, Bellatrix," the man said. "He must be getting through school on celebrity alone, unless the Hogwarts standard has dropped significantly since I was there."
Bellatrix sneered. "Oh, it has, though. That Muggle-lover, Dumbledore, is the worst thing that ever happened to Hogwarts. The mighty Slytherin house is all that's left of the old ways, and Lucius says Mudbloods are squirming their way in even there." Bellatrix suddenly showed her teeth in a terrifying leer. "But old Dumbly won't be a problem anymore, will he?"
Harry just barely stopped himself from lunging at her.
"I'm going to kill you," Harry said as calmly as he could manage, but it was said through clenched teeth. He rather thought that might have given away the fact that he was using tremendous effort to reign himself in. "Right after I put that snake you call 'Master' in the ground, I'm coming after you."
This time it was the young man who laughed. "You English," he said, obviously amused at Harry's expense. His accent was surprisingly negligible. "You never know when to close your mouths."
Bellatrix nodded zealously. "You really should be quiet, ickle Potter. You're making silly threats that you can't follow up on, since you'll very soon be… what was it you said? 'In the ground'? I'd give it maybe an hour and a half at most. I'm not sure if I want to know the exact time so I can be waiting for it, or not know and be surprised. I do so like surprises!"
"You're mad," Harry breathed. "Lucius made his Vow on behalf of all of the Death Eaters. If you hurt me now, you die. You might even all die, though I'm really not sure exactly how it works. It might actually be worth it, if it would take out all of you miserable bastards."
"Oooh, isn't ickle Potter brave?" cooed Bellatrix.
"We don't have to hurt you," the older man explained, sounding exasperated with Bellatrix and Harry both, as if they were both of a far inferior level of intelligence than him. Since Harry was fairly certain he was missing something key, he couldn't really contradict such an opinion. "We just have to wait. If you don't give us the Horcruxes within the two hours, you die. If we don't let you give us the Horcruxes…"
Harry's jaw dropped. Missing out on something important, indeed. "You can't do that!"
"Why?" the man asked, his eyes glinting in a taunting manner. "Because it's not fair?"
"The little baby is out of his depth, playing with the big boys," Bellatrix mocked him. "Little babies shouldn't get involved in adult magic. They could get burned."
"You'll fall down dead in just over an hour, I'd say," the man guessed, glancing at his pocket watch, though Harry wasn't sure whether the gesture was merely for effect or not, because it seemed unlikely the Death Eater could actually know when exactly Harry had acquired the locket, or make out the display on the watch face in the dark. "Then we take the cup and locket from your cooling body and take you back to the Dark Lord to prove that you are dead. He will be so pleased. His two enemies killed within a week. He'll be running the wizarding world in no time."
Harry would have liked to have thought up some witty retort, but he really wasn't entirely sure he could actually use his tongue at that point. It, like the rest of him, seemed to be frozen in shock.
He was going to die. There was no way around it. Merlin, he hadn't even said goodbye to Ron and Hermione, or Sirius, really, for that matter.
He couldn't die yet. There had to be something he could do to save himself.
"Imperio!" Harry cried desperately. It hardly mattered to him in that moment that he had just earned himself life in Azkaban, should the Ministry ever find out.
The wizard who had just been rambling at him stopped moving, as if waiting along with Harry to see if the spell was going to work. Harry wanted so badly for it to work that he knew before the words even formed themselves that it was going to work. It had to.
The Death Eater's eyes turned glassy. Harry mentally pushed the order to take the goblet and locket from his hand into the other man's mind. The Death Eater took half a step, hesitated and seemed to almost stumble. Then it was over. The connection between Harry's and the other man's minds was broken.
"You can't think I'm so weak-willed as to be able to be held by a wizard inexperienced in the Unforgivables."
Harry had hoped exactly that, actually, but he didn't say so. But then, there was another person in the room who wasn't anything like as strong as the man he had just challenged.
Harry swivelled quickly to face the young Death Eater and recast the curse. Once again it caught him in Harry's mental web. However, much to Harry's relief, this time the spell held, and for a long moment it seemed that the young man was going to take the Horcruxes.
The last thing Harry expected was to be hit with a petrifying hex from the side. He had completely forgotten for a moment that there were two other armed and competent Death Eaters in the room, fully willing and able to stop him if the young man couldn't do so himself. Harry lost his hold on the Death Eater at the same moment as his body snapped straight and board-like, and he fell to the ground, jarring his back painfully.
"Now, now, ickle baby, that wasn't very nice."
"It seems you just failed your test, Hoskins," the older man said, though unlike Bellatrix he wasn't addressing Harry. "The Dark Lord will deal with you in due time."
Harry thought he saw real fear in the young man's eyes at that statement. He wished that he could speak so that there might be a way of bribing the young Death Eater – no, probably not a Death Eater quite yet, from the sounds of it – into helping him by offering him protection against Voldemort. That, however, was not to be the case.
It couldn't have taken more than twenty or thirty minutes of the Death Eaters standing around and Harry lying stiff on the ground, all of them waiting for Harry to eventually die, until Bellatrix eventually got restless. She seemed to be itching for a fight, and throwing insults at Harry when he was unable to react had not kept her happy for very long. Eventually, her eyes went to the young man, Hoskins, looking over him in a considering sort of way.
Harry decided that being subjected to the screaming and begging of another human being, even a would-be Death Eater, without being able to do anything to stop it or, at the very least, block it out was a thousand times worse than having Bellatrix taunt him. If he was going to die, he wished it would just hurry up and happen so that he could be freed from the heart-rending sounds. Preferably, he would die while Bellatrix's attention was turned away from him, so that at least she wouldn't get the satisfaction of seeing the life leave his body.
He was going to die with only Death Eaters as his final company. That was a sad thought, if anything was. He was never going to see his friends again. They would probably be joining him soon enough, though, because who would kill Voldemort if Harry wasn't there to fulfil the prophecy?
But then, if the prophecy was true, how could he possibly die right then? Voldemort was meant to kill him, or the other way around. If an Unbreakable Vow with Lucius killed him, that could never come true. Maybe Hermione had been right when she'd said that Divination was dodgy. Thinking about it was making his head spin, though it was still better than having nothing better to focus on than Hoskings' torture.
It couldn't be that long now, Harry thought to himself. He couldn't really keep track of time particularly well when he was more interested in doing everything in his power to block out the screams and pitiful crying. However, he had a feeling that he couldn't have more than maybe half an hour left. That seemed like mere seconds in the grand scheme of things, and yet, that was the rest of his life. It should have felt like years. It should have been years. It just wasn't fair.
But then, as the Death Eater had alluded to earlier, just because something wasn't fair didn't make a difference to the fact that it was happening.
Then he couldn't hear the screams anymore, and for one horrifying moment Harry thought that he had miscalculated and he was dying. It couldn't end just like that though, could it? Wasn't his life meant to flash before his eyes? Shouldn't there have been angels singing, or at least some Dementor-like creature with a scythe coming after him? Maybe those people who'd told him such things didn't really know. But then, how would they? It wasn't as if they'd ever died.
It wasn't until he heard a triumphant cry of, "They're down! Get Harry!" that Harry realised that he was probably still alive. He didn't think that his last ever hallucination would have featured this situation. Visions of naked Veelas all in a row, maybe, or perhaps just standing over Voldemort's dead body with the rest of the wizarding world cheering as if he'd just caught the snitch in the Quidditch World Cup final. Not those words, though. And definitely not the face of Bill Weasley looming before him. The redhead had a gash across his cheek that looked like it had been attained in a magical struggle. Blood seeped down his face from the open wound.
"Hey there, Harry," Bill said as he freed him from the spell he was under and helped him into a sitting position. From there Harry could see what looked like most of the Order milling around the small section of the cave beside the lake. "All right?"
"No," Harry whispered. "I'm going to die." He couldn't even tell Bill why. His chest, throat and eyes all burned as tears threatened to fall. The whole Order was going to watch him die and not be able to do a thing to stop it. He hoped that Mrs Weasley hadn't come along, or Ron or Hermione. He thought he really would break down if he knew that they were going to see…
He hadn't even said a proper goodbye to his godfather, he remembered once more. What would Sirius do without Harry there?
Bill frowned and turned towards the others. "Oi! They're all unconscious. Hurry up and tell him he can come in!"
Harry had no idea what Bill was talking about, though he did feel slightly miffed that he was being ignored in what could be his dying moments. He knew he'd always said he didn't like getting a lot of attention, but still…
But then Harry saw yet another person come through the entrance of the cave and beeline straight for where he sat with Bill.
"Snape," he breathed, his eyes narrowing.
"If I'm going to risk my life for your sorry hide, Potter, you will damn well call me 'sir'," Snape barked at him.
"Fuck you, sir," Harry replied.
"Harry," another person called, and Harry looked away from Snape to see Remus Lupin just over the ex-teacher's shoulder. "It's all right. He's the one who told us you were here. You need to give him the locket and cup, and then the Vow will be over."
Harry glared at Snape, stubbornly refusing to move. He couldn't trust the man who'd killed Dumbledore.
"Potter, don't be a complete imbecile," Snape sighed. "Even if I was a loyal Death Eater, I am surrounded by people who would gladly curse me if I tried to disappear with your precious keepsakes. Now hand them over."
Harry didn't like it, but he had to admit that what Snape had said made a lot of sense. He'd never admit that out loud, though. Over his dead body, as it were.
He reached out and offered the two Horcruxes to Snape, who also reached out to take them. Snape studied the items for a moment before handing them back to Harry.
"At least you brought the real Horcruxes. I fully expected you to mess it up and find fake Horcruxes. Typical Gryffindor bravery before brains."
"I hate you," Harry hissed as he snatched the locket and cup back.
"The feeling is mutual, Potter, let me assure you. However, I am on your side. I told you before we left for St Mungo's –"
Harry's swinging fist was caught by Bill before it could connect with Snape's jaw.
"I don't care if you're on our side or not!" Harry continued, straining against Bill's grip. "Yeah, so you made an Unbreakable Vow to kill Dumbledore. I'm not so stupid that I couldn't figure that out." Harry had, in fact, spent a lot of time thinking about just that while he'd been lying about uselessly and mourning. "That doesn't matter to me, though. You're dirt. Don't come in here and think that you can talk to me like you're still my teacher. I didn't respect you even when you were! Get the hell out of here before I kill you where you stand."
"Harry!" one of the Order members exclaimed, shocked.
"You couldn't successfully curse me if I tied myself up and then threw away my wand," Snape taunted, but then turned his back and left the cave. Harry had expected Snape to curse him into silence, at the very least. His old teacher had never been a man with a particularly even temper. For once, however, he appeared to have been able to restrain himself.
"Want to test that?" Harry whispered, still spoiling for a fight regardless of Snape's already obvious lack of reaction to him. He was certain Snape heard him regardless of his lack of volume. He'd always seemed to have excellent hearing, which had resulted in Harry finding trouble numerous times since arriving at Hogwarts. The Death Eater, however, didn't turn around or in any way acknowledge that Harry had spoken.
Only once Snape was well and truly out of the cave did Bill let him go. Harry sagged slightly, but didn't fall.
"Come on, Harry," Kingsley Shacklebolt said. "Let's get you back to Hogwarts and this lot to Azkaban before their reinforcements decide to show up."
Azkaban. Oh Merlin. Now that the Unbreakable Vow and Horcrux dilemma was at least partly over, there was still one more big consideration for Harry to address. There was an innocent man in Azkaban, waiting for him to do something about it. He was the only one who could. Harry groaned under his breath. As Sirius had told him, he'd waited for weeks already. He could wait another hour or so while Harry got himself and his godfather sorted out.
