Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Eleven—Open Doors

"Lie still, Trainee Potter."

Harry rolled his eyes when he was sure Portillo Lopez's back was turned. He no longer had her in class, sure, but she was as bossy as she had ever been. She had already run several scanning and diagnostic charms on him, even though Harry had used them himself and they'd told him nothing was wrong with him. His arms ached a bit from holding his muscles constantly bunched with tension, and his leg where the tentacles had grabbed him and yanked him through the hole in the wall, but that was all. He would live. Well, maybe a pain potion and then he would live.

"I saw that, Trainee Potter."

Trying to fight the impulse to fold his arms and sulk like a child, Harry leaned back against the pillows on the bed and looked around. Now that he knew what the tattoo on Portillo Lopez's back meant, he was wondering if anything in her office would look different. It didn't, though. There were still racks of potions he didn't understand, and closed cabinets with the slight shimmer that told of powerful locking spells, and the bed that he had spent far too much time in, both this year and last.

Portillo Lopez had even driven Draco out of the room, and she'd never done that before. Harry bit his lip and wondered if there was something wrong with him, something severe she hadn't told him about.

But they'd been alone for twenty minutes. Why not tell him now?

Then he grimaced and shook his head. Maybe it was so bad she needed to prepare for the telling.

"Trainee Potter."

He looked up. Portillo Lopez leaned against one of the cabinets, staring at him. Harry blinked at her in confusion. The scarf she usually wore over her hair was present, as usual. Her robes were neatly pressed and without a crease or spot of dust. Her eyes were direct. The main difference was her cold expression, which he had never seen before.

"Battle Healer?" he asked, since he didn't think he should call her assassin, even if that was what the tattoo on her skin meant.

Portillo Lopez came a step nearer. Her wand was in her hand. Harry wondered if it had always been there, or if she had drawn it since he last looked. Her voice was so quiet it took him long moments to sort out the words. "Would you mind telling me how long you have been practicing necromancy?"

Harry dug his fingers into the blankets of the bed to keep from panicking, and reminded himself fiercely that she probably had some kind of special sense or spell that would let her find these things out. She hadn't told anyone else. That was the important thing. Harry thought he could avoid regular contact with Portillo Lopez, but it would be horrible if Draco, Hermione, or Ron found out.

"I don't know what you mean," he said. "I've been reading about it, but that's not the same thing."

"No one stinks of Dark and Dead magic like you do who hasn't done at least one ritual," Portillo Lopez said. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't seem to feel the need to. Harry did wish she would look away, because until she did, he didn't think he could move his eyes. "Tell me. What do you hope to accomplish with it? There are better ways to challenge Nihil."

Harry wanted to lick his lips, but he wondered if that would make him look weak to her. Then he wondered why he was worrying about looking weak, when he had so many other things to worry about, and gathered the courage to say, "I want to bring the dead back to life. Why else would you do necromancy?"

"To gather power," Portillo Lopez said. Still no change in her voice or her stance. Harry thought there were some of the dead around who were probably livelier than she was. "That is one of the major reasons that wizards practice the Dark Arts, and make no mistake, necromancy is among those." She paused, then added, "This is something like the Cruciatus Curse, Trainee Potter, do you understand? There is no way to adapt it to goodness or the purposes of goodness. The dead are always wrenched from their rest unwillingly, and brought back to life as, at the very best, slaves who know they are slaves and resent it. I am not sure who told you that you could accomplish good things this way, but—"

"Nobody did that," Harry snapped, because the last thing he wanted was for one of his friends or Draco to get in trouble. "I thought of it on my own."

Portillo Lopez watched him and said nothing.

"So many people died during the war," Harry said. He had to at least try to explain. And he wanted to do that for more than one reason. He'd been falling behind in his necromancy studies lately, with so many other things to do for his classes. Maybe he could inspire himself to take it up again if he reminded his mind of what he was fighting for. "They didn't get a chance to live. They left orphans behind. Or they suffered while they were alive, and their deaths were only the last thing that happened to them, not the worst. I want to give them that second chance. They should have had it, and no one else is going to give it to them."

Portillo Lopez smiled. The smile had old sadness in it, and Harry thought he could have asked what she knew about necromancy, and why she dedicated herself to fighting it so strongly. But he didn't really want to. He knew exactly what kind of speech she was going to make, and he had to concentrate on stuffing his ears with straw.

"Many people have that fantasy," she said. "But it is only a fantasy. One cannot manage anything like that, Trainee Potter. The people who come back from the dead would be bound to you, and they would do only as you liked them to. If that was a parody of life, that is what would happen, but they would not be able to make any real choices. They would only make the ones that you chose for them."

Harry shook his head. "I wouldn't ever want them to suffer," he said. "I would choose for them to live free and independent lives, apart from me."

"But that is the one choice you cannot make," Portillo Lopez said.

Harry glared at her. "You just said they would do whatever I ordered them to."

"But you cannot order someone to be free," Portillo Lopez said, with iron patience, "just as you cannot make someone live by killing him. That is the point I am trying to put across to you, and which you seem to be ignoring. You would achieve parody, and that only, not truth."

"You say that," Harry said. "But most people want to be necromancers because they like the power. Going into it with different intentions ought to make a difference."

Portillo Lopez's mouth twitched. "It does not," she said. "That only makes it worse in some senses, because the person is so convinced that they are doing right that they will not listen to reason." She looked pointedly at Harry.

Harry shook his head. "There isn't any other choice," he said. "Don't you see? Without me, they aren't going to get to live another life, because no one else will try to give them one."

"Perhaps," Portillo Lopez whispered, "you should accept the verdict of time and fate and nature, and concentrate on living your own life in a way that will make them proud of you."

Harry snorted. "They didn't die so I could make them proud. They died for other reasons. And I wouldn't care if they hated me when they were alive again. At least that means they would have a chance to feel something."

"I believe it does not matter what I say," Portillo Lopez said. "You have made up your mind, and you have chosen the view of things that places me on a villain's side of the line. Very well. Then I have no choice but to tell the truth to those I think can restrain you."

Harry lifted his head. "Even if I was kicked out of the Aurors, that wouldn't keep me from practicing necromancy." The back of his throat was dry, and his head was buzzing. He felt as though he was detached from everything happening around him. He could make grand pronouncements and mean them, because that was better than thinking about what would happen if he gave up his promise to bring people back from the dead.

Portillo Lopez gave him another quietly amused glance. "I did not teach you for a year without learning how little you care for official authority. I meant your friends and your partner. I hardly think they will stand for this."

Harry felt as though someone had reached into his chest, grasped his heart, and begun to rend off pieces of it. Yes, Draco would be angry at him. And so would Hermione, and Ron. They might not yell at him, but they would do something worse. They would search his books until they found the one about necromancy and take it away. And then they would keep a sharp eye out for the black candles, the salt, and other things Harry needed to buy to do the rituals, and take them away when they found them. Harry had been able to do that first ritual only because no one knew he was doing it.

If someone found out…

Portillo Lopez was using knowledge to force him into doing what she wanted. The only thing Harry could do was use knowledge back, so that she would do what he wanted.

"I know what you really are," he said.

Portillo Lopez paused and glanced back at him in puzzlement. "What do you mean? If you are going to call me a bitch or any other name, I quite assure you, Trainee Potter, I have heard the insult before and can resist it."

"I mean," Harry said, and clenched his hands together to stop them from shaking, "I know that you have a symbol on your skin like a wheel covered with deadly nightshade, and I know that that means you're an assassin who hunts necromancers and the living dead. And you must want to hide it, or you would wear the tattoo openly. So I'll tell people if you tell them about my necromancy."

Portillo Lopez's face turned grey. Then she said, "You stupid child. You have not the least idea of what harm you might cause by releasing that information."

"I think I do," Harry countered. He felt a little calmer, now that he saw her responding to the threat. If she hadn't, or had laughed, he wasn't sure what he would have done. "As much idea as you have of what you'll do if you stop me from bringing back the dead."

"I've seen a hundred of you," Portillo Lopez said with cool contempt. "You always think your necromancy is somehow different, as though you've learned something new, unprecedented in thousands of years of experiments. But you know nothing about me, and nothing about what oaths you transgress in exposing me."

"They're not my oaths," Harry said. "And that's all I care about."

Portillo Lopez closed her eyes and stood there as if in silent communion with someone or something. Harry hoped she was contacting her superiors, whoever they were, and asking for help. They would probably tell her to leave him alone, that someone who had performed one necromantic ritual was too small to be worth bothering about.

She has to think that, Harry thought, jamming his hands together. I'm not important. I'm not really the Boy-Who-Lived anymore, just one Auror trainee among the rest. Why should she care if I condemn myself to death or whatever she thinks will happen as a result of this?

When she looked at him again, her eyes were black with hatred, and Harry shrank back against the pillows, but her words were what he wanted to hear. "My oaths are more important than the damage you might do to yourself," she said, and her voice cracked like blocks of stone that someone was breaking with a hammer. "Very well. Drown yourself in darkness, and reach out too late to save your life or sanity."

She whirled away and stalked to the door. When it opened, Harry saw Draco on the other side. He smiled and held out his arms. Draco hurried across the floor and hugged him without glancing once at Portillo Lopez.

She stood there and gave Harry one more burning glance before she disappeared down the corridor. Harry snorted and squeezed Draco tight. "Have they got any information out of Nemo? And is that really Nemo?"

Draco's smile was sly. "Let me take you to where you can hear it for yourself."

*

Harry had a dazed expression when he came out of the Pensieve that Pushkin, who had questioned Nemo, had stored his memories of the interrogation in. He leaned back against the table that the Fellowship—all of them except Portillo Lopez, who had taken herself out of this for some reason—had crowded around and stared at Draco. "Is that true?" he demanded.

"I was right there when he said it," Draco murmured, a bit smugly. He had been worried about Harry and the way that Portillo Lopez was holding him in her office, but when a chance to attend the questioning had popped up, he had to take it.

Harry shook his head in wonder. "So that is him. And he's spilling all these details about the caches and the places that Nihil's soldiers are waiting and…" He looked at Pushkin as if he wanted him to continue.

"Yes," Pushkin said in a high voice, tapping his fingers together. His expression barely ever changed, but Draco had learned enough in his Observation class to tell that he was pleased. "He says that he does not know enough about Nihil's plan to give us the complete details, but I am rather inclined to distrust that. And I think I have a much better idea of what that plan was than I did before."

"Well, what is it?" Granger asked. Draco was completely unsurprised that the first question had belonged to her.

"We should have seen it sooner," said Pushkin, and Draco decided that the Observations instructor had a previously unsuspected streak of sadism in his nature that made him put off the announcement for as long as possible. "The names that these people have chosen for themselves. The way that they can apparently die and then return." He paused reflectively. "That is the key to the whole thing, truly."

"What?" Granger was bouncing in her chair, Harry holding his breath. Even Weasley looked as if he might explode from impatience. Draco took the time to note smugly that he was holding up much better under the suspense than they were, and then realized his hands were clenched so tightly that his fingers ached. He hastily tucked them out of sight under the table.

"They have discovered a way to truly pass through death," Pushkin said, "and come out on the other side. That is why I do not believe Nihil died when he confronted Auror Dearborn, any more than Nusquam died when we thought you had killed her." He nodded to Draco and Harry. "They have transformed themselves, and made death one more change, not the limit of their existence. If they are the living dead themselves, no longer the person or people they were born as, that would make sense."

Draco half-shut his eyes, remembering the information that Harry had received from a nonexistent pure-blood at the Christmas party they had attended. Harry had let him look at a Pensieve memory of that conversation, eventually, and the words echoed in Draco's head like bells now. He wondered that he hadn't noticed them more at the time.

But if you can ensure that part of you goes through death and survives, so that death is just another kind of transformation, like falling in love or being born or growing up, then it's not terrifying. And if you can control that transformation, and where the changed part of you ends up…

Draco shook his head. He had assumed without thinking that that way of speaking was poetic or a metaphor, not the literal truth.

"But how?" Ketchum asked urgently. "And if we can't kill them, then how in the world can we fight them?"

"And what do they want?" Granger asked plaintively. "They haven't tried to sell this secret or set themselves up as people who are superior because of it. They've just attacked and corrupted and raised armies. What are they doing with it?"

"I should have seen and heard it before," Pushkin said, "every time we pronounced their names. Nothing. Nowhere. No one." He turned his hand palm up on the table. "This is only a theory, unsubstantiated by the direct information that I believe I have received from Nemo on the subject. He did not want to tell me anything, of course, but he could not resist bragging and throwing out hints, and so I am more certain of the idea that they have created a way to transform themselves through death. This is speculation."

"We understand that," said Hestia Jones, sounding more impatient than Draco had ever heard her do. "Just get on with it."

Pushkin gave her a long, cool look, but nodded and finally continued. "They have chosen names made of nothingness," he said. "I wish they believe to reduce the world to the same thing. A rag of nothingness, drifting in space."

Draco frowned. "But that doesn't make sense," he said.

Other people were arguing at the same time. "That's ridiculous," Ketchum said, blunter than Draco would have been to someone he respected as much as the Observations professor. Draco rolled his eyes. That's Mudbloods for you. "You can't take one fact and turn it into a whole theory."

"They're still creating things," Jones said, pushing her hair out of one eye and looking skeptically at Pushkin. "Soldiers, grief magic, new ways of coming through death if you're right. That would imply they don't want to destroy the whole world."

"Yes, Nihil seems outraged," Granger said, "but outraged enough to destroy the whole world? Really?"

Harry looked thoughtful, and stayed silent. Weasley looked stupid, but he didn't add his voice to the discussion, either, which Draco considered a small mercy.

"I can only tell you what I suspect," Pushkin said calmly. "This is an intuitive theory; I cannot point to the evidence the way I could if it was logical. But I will maintain it in the back of my mind, and search out evidence that might support it."

"Which means that you'll let your conclusion predetermine what you see." Ketchum raised his eyebrows at Pushkin. "We'll investigate this together, and the next interrogation of Nemo should produce more."

Draco nodded in agreement. He hoped he would be able to attend the next interrogation in person as well. Nemo's face and manner hadn't provided him with anything more than what Pushkin had noted, but maybe, now that he knew the profundity of the secrets the man was probably protecting, they would.

Someone hammered on the door. Granger and Jones snatched up their wands, but Ketchum shook his head. "I told some of my trainees where we were meeting," he explained, standing up and moving to the door. "In case they needed to fetch me. They don't know what the meeting is about."

Draco scowled and let his raised hand drop back to his side, but he decided that he would remember Ketchum's tendency to give out information like that without discussing it with the rest of the Fellowship.

Ketchum blocked their vision with his body as he opened the door—though Draco had to admit that could be partially because he didn't want his trainee to see who was there—but they could all hear her voice. It was a sobbing, bleating mess, and Draco thought about that in detail before he heard her words and forgot about other things.

"Sir, Nemo's been murdered in his cell!"

Ketchum cursed and sprinted out the door. He still managed to let it fall shut so that it would block their view, Draco noted. And then the rest of them were on their feet and following, and could hopefully blend with the crowd in the corridors, so it didn't matter.

The crowd was there, shifting back and forth and raising confused voices. Ketchum, Pushkin, and Jones formed into a wedge and cut through the trainees, who fell back automatically when they saw full-fledged Aurors commanding them to do so. Draco ran after them, and hoped that no one would think he was anything other than an interested spectator. God knew what they would think of Weasley, though.

It was two turns and a flight of stairs down to the holding cell, and Draco was panting by the time he got there. He grimaced and put a hand over the place in his side that was aching. Perhaps I should be training harder, as Morningstar suggested. That little run shouldn't have tired me out.

"Stand back!" Ketchum's voice rang out, and the people milling around the holding cell door, who seemed to include few if any Aurors, fell back in automatic obedience. Harry dogged Ketchum's heels, and Draco stayed close to him. The door stood open, and he could see a long stream of thick, dark blood running out from under it.

That should have prepared him for the sight of the room, but it didn't.

Someone had cut Nemo, or the body Nemo was using, in half, and then scooped out each half like a grapefruit. Draco saw that much, though how he made his mind understand it, he didn't know, given the tangle of organs, flesh, and bones everywhere. He had to turn away then, because the explosions of red on the walls and the sheer thickness of everything made him want to vomit, or simply weep from shock.

Harry wrapped his arms around Draco and held him. He was standing curiously still, as if the sight of Nemo dead didn't move him. Or maybe he'd seen enough horrible things during the war that it didn't affect him as much anymore, Draco thought, leaning his head against Harry's shoulder. He would gladly think about the war rather than this, if it was the only way to banish the sight from his mind.

Shouted questions traveled back and forth, and Draco gradually learned what everyone else knew: that no one had seen the person who came into the cell, that Nemo had had no visitors since the official interrogation, and that the monitoring charms that should have detected any change in him hadn't flickered. They wouldn't have known he was dead so soon if the trainee who was supposed to take in food hadn't opened the door.

Draco shuddered. He had to wonder if someone had deliberately come in and killed Nemo so that he could fly to another body, one they wouldn't know the look of. Perhaps Nihil had been angry about his subordinate's failure and his easy capture and had come himself.

Or perhaps we have another enemy, one even worse, that we don't know about.

*

Harry held Draco, glad that he didn't ask for anything but an embrace right now. Harry's mind was racing so fast that he didn't think he could have replied even if Draco had been asking him questions about the murder.

He was thinking about the fact that, if what Pushkin said was true, Nemo could possibly be classified as one of the living dead.

And that Portillo Lopez's order was sworn to destroy them.

And that Portillo Lopez had been absent from the Fellowship's meeting.