It took everything Mary had to enter another government building. Her heartbeat quickened and hands shook as she approached the DVLA office, but this time she had her wand. She wore a light jacket with an interior pocket so that she could keep Cherry close to her heart. She raised her right hand to her chest for just a moment, reassuring herself that it was there, and opened the double glass doors.
"I don't see why we have to do this," Rion groused at her side. "You and Dad could enchant a car for me and conjure a driver's license."
Mary breathed easier inside. The atmosphere was brisk and impersonal, but there was light from the windows, no stern-faced wizards in robes to lead her to a dungeon-like chamber, and best of all, no bony and icy Dementors.
She looked up into the freckled face of her eldest, speaking just loud enough for him to hear, but no one around them. "If you want to get around like a Muggle, you'll learn like a Muggle. Are you sure you remember the identifying information I gave you?"
He tapped the side of his head with a finger. "Got it, and all of the rules and regulations for driving."
"Good," she said, handing him the official-looking documents that she'd produce for him. "Well, Hunter Matthews, take your first step to driving."
He grinned, his father's ivy-green eyes crinkling with amusement. "Thanks, Aethel Matthews," he said, then sauntered to the counter and smiled at the young, blonde woman who asked by rote, "What can I do for you?"
Mary rolled her eyes at his exaggerated confidence and went to sit in one of the plastic chairs in the waiting area. She picked up a magazine with a cover featuring a lovely young woman sharing a sultry look with the world.
How could everyone be so calm, she wondered, when Volde—he was in the process of turning them into slaves, or worse?
She put the magazine back on the table with a stab of conscience that caused her heart to contract. For that matter, how could we be so content here, knowing what is happening in our world? And Reg—what he wants to do is so dangerous. How can I bear it until he returns?
"I'll drive," said Rion, approaching her with a cheeky grin and a photo of himself encased in plastic. It reflected the room'A link! neon lighting, a small card attesting to his Muggle credentials. He held out his hand for the keys.
She shook her head. "Not until you're seventeen."
"Why?" Rion asked with irritation as they walked out of the building and toward her mother's compact car.
"I thought you said you'd learned the rules," she responded, enjoying the tease. "It's the same as having to wait until you're seventeen for Apparation."
Rion sighed for disgusted teens everywhere. "Whatever," he said, slumping in the passenger seat, suddenly embarrassed to be seen with his mother driving him.
She shook her head again and smirked as she headed to Parkland Circle and the Watts (temporarily Cattermole) residence. "Do you like staying here, Rion?"
"Yellow light," he warned her, as they approached a corner. "It's not bad but...it doesn't feel right, being so comfortable, knowing what my friends back home are living through."
She turned to him. "How do you know what they're living through?"
"Eyes on the road, Mum," he reminded her, sitting up to watch the traffic. "I'd been exchanging owls with a few people from school. Some of the Muggle-borns didn't think they'd be allowed back in Hogwarts. Peter Carson's aunt had disappeared, and we'd just gotten a free copy of The Quibbler before we left. It had a whole list of people who were missing. You need to maintain more distance from the vehicle in front of you," he added.
She sighed as she lessened the pressure on the accelerator. "I suppose if that list has been updated, we're on it and we're fine. Maybe the others got away too."
He shrugged. "Maybe, I hope so, but it isn't likely." He huffed a frustrated breath. "I'd just like to know that some of my mates are safe, but I know owls are too conspicuous and most of them don't have telephones. Isn't there some other way that wizards can stay in touch to know what each other are doing, some kind of link?"
Link! Mary jerked her head in his direction, bumping the curb as she turned into the Parkland neighborhood.
"Blimey, Mum," Rion exclaimed, "Should you be driving?"
A link, Mary said to herself, hands on the wheel shaking with new excitement as she pressed down on the accelerator. That's what Reg and I need, a link.
She made a sharp turn into the driveway of her parents' home and stomped on the brake with a screech, forgetting in her eagerness to put the car in park before turning off the ignition.
Rion rolled his eyes as he opened the car door. "Now I know what Bernie and Will meant about women drivers. I'm going to show them my license."
A link, Mary kept saying to herself as she ran inside. "Reg!"
The sound of his booming guffaw led her upstairs upstairs to the room Marty and Rion shared, where she found her husband, daughter and younger son watching a Muggle movie on the television.
"A sparkly vampire. Now I've seen everything," Reg chuckled and the children laughed with him.
"Reg," Mary interrupted, her voice breathy and color heightened, "I need to talk to you."
He looked up into her face and his expression changed, eyes widening and lips slightly puckering, as he sensed her urgency. "Tell me what happens later," he said to Marty and Regina, following his wife into their bedroom.
"Muffliato," he intoned, as he watched her remove her jacket and kick off her shoes.
She turned to him, her sapphire eyes glittering more than the gems that she wore as earrings. "We have to establish a link so that I can be with you when you go to the Ministry!"
"A link? Mary, we haven't done that in years. You know what it takes."
They had discovered the spell during their seventh year in the restricted section of the library, in a book entitled Magic for Romance.
The highest level of intimacy for a couple is the Two Become One Link, the text read. It is achieved when lovers, at their most compatible and passionate, have sustained intercourse and separate at the point of climax. If the link is successful, the couple may communicate with each other over long distances and share experiences until they reunite and complete their interrupted activity. This should only be attempted by couples who are truly in love, as an unsuccessful link can render one or both partners incapacitated.
"You were in St. Mungo's for a week the last time we tried," he reminded her, beginning to pace in his agitation. He used his wand, a rigid, ten-inch oak with hair from a Centaur's tail at its core, to lift the bed to the ceiling so that he could traverse the room unobstructed.
"The healer said it was too soon to try after Marty's birth," she pointed out, using Cherry to lower the queen-sized bed back to its original spot.
Reg stood on the opposite side of it. "We haven't been able to do it since before you became pregnant with Elsie."
"I know when it was, Reg!" she interrupted him, raking the front of her hair with her fingernails, as though she would dig a memory from her head. "You don't have to bring that up."
Her imploring didn't work. He knew her too well, as she knew him and that look of comprehension when his drawn eyebrows softened with his voice. "Maybe I do," he said, moving to sit at the foot of the bed and motioning for her to join him.
Mary dropped her head and black tendrils of hair fell forward. Reg pushed them back from her face when she sat next to him.
"You did nothing wrong, Darling. Ellie's death...it couldn't be helped. She was born too weak to live."
Mary shook her head as she felt the sobs, coming up from the womb that had failed her baby girl. "I was cursed, Reg! That horrible old woman in Knockturn Alley. She said there were enough Half-Bloods and I didn't need to inflict another one on the world!"
"I know," he said, pulling her quivering body next to his, "and I looked for her. But just because she said it doesn't mean that she cast a spell, or was even capable of it. Maybe she was nothing more than what Arthur Weasley said—a pathetic, hateful crone who couldn't stand to see anyone as happy as you were then."
Mary's staccato sniffling was more heart-breaking than loud wails would have been. She had never allowed herself the cathartic, weeping grief that she'd needed, always too concerned about putting it behind her for the good of Rion and Regina. No wonder the marriage had...diminished. Even when she'd given birth to Marty a few years later, she'd never been the same.
"I should have realized that you've never recovered from that," Reg said as he held her and she tried to make herself as small as possible, with legs tightly crossed and hands clasped in her lap, shoulders hunched with thirteen years of tension and martyrdom. "It was easier to not think about it and concentrate on my own problems, like a better job. I'm sorry, Mary." He rocked them back and forth, his mouth dry and eyes moist, as he croaked out, "I loved her too."
A cry broke from Mary, raising her arms to wrap around his neck. "Do you remember how quiet she was? She only lived four hours but in that time, she never cried."
"Yes," Reg nodded, pressing his lips on Mary's face. "She had your eyes."
"And your hair," Mary whimpered. She felt tears in the soothing kisses and finally knew she wasn't the only one who mourned the tiny Half-Blood. She twisted her head slightly to bring her lips close to his and wept the baby's name once more as she closed in on Reg's mouth.
"Please don't leave me here, wondering if you're still alive or if you've been taken," she whispered between once gentle kisses that were now desperate.
He stopped his carressing to stare into her face.
"Link with me," she whispered.
Reg nodded and lowered his head to kiss her again. Mary sighed with relief in his arms. She felt closer to him that she had in years and loved him so much, the father of her thr—four children.
For the first time in a very long time, it felt possible that the two of them could become one.
