Chapter 26: Lost Little Boy
It was well after sunset the following evening when Severus left the castle and struck out into the Forest alone. Neshdiana had spent the day moping about the storeroom as she waged an almost physical war against impatience. He could see that she understood the necessity of staying away from Zarekael, but it was just as clear that part of her wanted to wish the whole thing away.
She had been alone, in spite of the coalition, and now that she wasn't anymore, keeping her from her one close friend would be like trying to keep pins from a magnet.
The hollow loneliness that Severus carried with him like an extra spleen resented her for it. What right did she have to find some light at the end of the tunnel when other people had no hope of it at all?
Still, it was brutal necessity more than petty vindictiveness that sent him slinking back to the place they'd portkeyed to the previous night. He had seen the crazed light in Zarekael's eyes, seen the calculated way it had been buried once noticed, heard the strain of forced sanity and the claw-gripped patience. Zarekael needed time to adjust, and if the so-called sister wouldn't self-regulate, the brother would have to.
He knew perfectly well that Zareakel had probably chosen another place entirely to settle, but there had been an unspoken agreement between them at parting that they weren't done talking. There were things to be said that weren't for Neshdiana's ears. So Severus would hang out there until Zarekael came (if he came, of course; he might not be in the mood for company, after all), and then they would have their short little chat.
Zarekael must have had some sort of alert system in place—either that, or he'd been lurking close by—because he stepped out to meet Severus within five minutes of his arrival.
"Good evening, Professor."
He looked calmer and a little less stretched for patience, which meant that, among other things, he'd fed again.
Severus gave a curt nod. "I'm not sure how to address you."
The boy (Boy? Simple arithmetic made him old enough to be Severus' father; why should he think of him as a boy?) narrowed his eyes in something that could pass for a smile. "Zarekael will do," he said. "None of my titles carry any relevance here."
That was true enough, at least. "Zarekael, then."
There was a brief silence before the vampire spoke again. "How does my sister fare?"
It was a straightforward question in and of itself, but something in the way it was asked told Severus that Zarekael had a good idea of the answer.
"I believe she's about to rip herself to shreds," he replied blandly. "She'd like to invite you to tea and introduce you to all of her friends, but she can't decide on the best time to do so."
Zarekael smirked, but it was edged with sadness. "Preferably at some point after meeting Andrea Underhill would be nothing but deadly."
Severus arched an eyebrow. "You know about Auror Underhill?"
"I belonged for decades to an American vampire clan," Zarekael reminded him. "We knew who the Aurors and Slayers were, and we most certainly knew about the Underhill-Heathertoes family; the Vlads have been feuding with them since Colonial times."
That was interesting trivia, to be sure. "Do you anticipate there being a time when a meeting between you and Underhill might not be deadly?" He wasn't sure he could put Neshdiana off indefinitely—to say nothing about forever.
Zarekael appeared to be following his train of thought. "If… Neshdiana… vouches for me, she may be somewhat appeased, but if you can testify to my being no threat, I believe that will end all argument. You have no reason to give me the benefit of the doubt." He actually stated this matter-of-factly; there was no hint of persuasion in his voice or expression. "So, when you think me safe enough to vouch for me, I think it will be safe to introduce vampire to Slayer."
Severus nodded. "Very well. Underhill may be a convincing enough argument to keep Neshdiana's exuberance at bay in that area, at least." He narrowed his eyes. "I can't promise, however, that she'll stay away from you; she's as impatient as Potter, and at least as undisciplined."
That might be an unfair assessment, but he wasn't going to qualify it. Neshdiana had once called her Gryffindor side—if in fact it was only a mere side—her "baser nature", and the more he saw, the more he agreed. There was enough Slytherin in her that she could be somewhat sensible some of the time, but it hadn't been showing up much lately, and it might have been a veneer the whole time.
"I have no doubt," he continued, "that she'll lose patience soon enough and come looking for you. Since she won't stay away from you, I've come to tell you to keep away from her. You and I both know that you need time to accustom yourself to being both alive and Undead"—he tried to ignore the irony of that phrasing and largely succeeded—"and that until you have done, you're not safe. Neshdiana claims to have taught Defense Against the Dark Arts, and unless she was even more incompetent than I begin to suspect, she ought to know something about fledgling vampires."
"She wasn't incompetent," Zarekael said softly, but with a hard edge to it that advised Severus to go no further on the subject. "She does know, but…" He considered, then gave what Severus thought was somehow an incomplete summary. "She is a woman of powerful emotion."
"Which blinds her and thereby renders her knowledge useless," Severus said bluntly. He stopped short of an overt sneer; after all, the brother appeared to be as defensive of the sister as she was of him, and in the meantime, he was a fledgling, with all of the mercurial emotions and violent reactions that entailed. "If only for that reason, then, stay away from her until you've got yourself sorted. And for that matter, stay away from Hogwarts and Hogsmeade until you're sorted—I hardly need to tell you that you're a danger."
Zarekael, looking more like a lost little boy than ever, nodded. "Yes, Father," he said meekly.
It wasn't mockery, it was self-forgetfulness, and he realized his mistake while the reply was still registering in Severus' mind. "Forgive me, Professor!" he blurted hurriedly. "I know—that you're not him."
There was a note of puzzled doubt, though, just as there sometimes was with Neshdiana when Severus said or did something she considered unexpected.
Severus narrowed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and decided that their meeting was over. "Just remember what was said here," he hissed. "I'll be happy to review your progress periodically. Good night."
Turning his back on a fledgling vampire he'd just wounded was not one of the smartest things he'd ever done, but he was fairly sure that Zarekael wouldn't budge from his spot. Call it trust—or a twisted knowledge of psychology, which was probably closer to the truth. Lost little boys, no matter how tall or how old, did not chase down and maul their antagonists.
Severus refused to acknowledge, even to himself, that he might know this from experience, but he did know it for a fact.
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Zarekael watched the man) he had to train himself not to think of him as Father, as Snape, as Severus; Professor, then—that might do for now) walk away in silence. It had been an unintentional misstep, but a bad one nonetheless, and he felt the professor's disappointment in him. It might even be imagined; the man wasn't his father, after all, and didn't have a father's expectations of him, but he felt the pain of that disappointment all the same.
How much more disappointed would they be—the professor and Meli both—if they knew what else was on his mind, beyond the torment of being (as the professor had so quaintly put it) both alive and Undead despite his best efforts? He was a strategist and a thinker, and even with everything else on his mind, he needed something to focus him if he was to keep the madness at bay.
Well, Taliesin had given him plenty to think about.
Meli had been brought by accident and as such had had some leverage to bargain with. Her demand for enhanced knowledge of this world had been brilliant—and more of a boon than she probably knew. Six weeks into her assignment, Avallach had felt that (in his words) she was doing an inadequate job and (in Taliesin's translation of what Avallach left unsaid) had made a complete botch of it, so much so that he'd pulled the right strings to have the originally assigned champion brought in anyway. Taliesin, who was (to put it mildly) disenchanted with the whole mess, had been forced to comply, but he had also managed to bargain for Zarekael to receive a corresponding upload to Meli's—complete with the resulting event-changes from actions she'd already taken. It was only fair, Taliesin had argued, and as far as it being unprecedented… well. It was unprecedented to have two champions, even if one wasn't technically a champion, at work in the same timeline. If Avallach wanted to whinge about precedent, he could forget about bringing in Zarekael to clean up the mess Meli had supposedly made of things.
And that was the snag, really—she hadn't made a mess of things; what had been mucked up was entirely Avallach's fault, not hers.
The Watcher had laid out a timeline for her and marked all of the events that couldn't be changed, with one silly little exception. He had counted too much on Dumbledore's ability to keep a Gryffindor-Slytherin semi-nutcase in check at the beginning, so while he'd flagged the Dementor's Kiss, which Dumbledore would have prevented, he hadn't bothered to flag Cedric Diggory's death.
And that, insanely enough, threw a shocking number of things out of kilter.
Diggory himself, Meli would excuse him, was relatively unimportant, but it had been necessary for Harry Potter to see someone die. Without that, he would be unable to see the thestrals, and without that, he would be less likely, if not entirely unlikely, to think of them as a way to get to the Ministry of Magic a year hence. That meant either that he wouldn't go at all or that he would lose considerable time doing so. In either case, the record of Trelawney's prophecy would survive, and so would Sirius Black. Lucius Malfoy would lose a little face with the Dark Lord, but he wouldn't have failed him completely.
Black, by virtue of his being the walking, talking embodiment of severely stupid recklessness, would single-handedly ruin a number of things, affecting both the Order and the coalition. He might die later in the war (that was as yet unclear), but only after causing his own side horrific casualties that it really couldn't afford.
And of course, if Lucius didn't fail, Draco wouldn't be given his mission to kill Dumbledore, and that would make it so much harder to ensure that Dumbledore did die when he was meant to. The headmaster was a tremendous meddler, and it was possible that his surviving even to the end of Potter's sixth year at school was a setback. For him to go on even longer…
Well. That had the potential to be at least as damaging as Black's continued survival.
Wretched, catastrophic consequences, and all because Potter hadn't seen someone die. Bad luck that he had turned around to face Voldemort after Lily was already dead; worse luck that Diggory was still among the living at the expense of the entire future.
Avallach could complain all he wanted about sending a toy soldier in to do a champion's job, but no matter what the rhetoric he threw around, it boiled down to him having underestimated Meli, and Zarekael was left holding the bag.
He didn't fault her. Diggory was as valuable a life as any other on the face of the earth, and he had as much right to be spared an untimely death as anyone else. Meli's sense of mercy far outstripped Zarekael's, but even he had a full appreciation of why she had gone to such extraordinary lengths to save Diggory's life. It was too much to say that he'd have done the same in her place, but he understood why she'd done it. For Diggory's sake, and for Meli's, Zarekael was glad that things had worked out in favor of survival.
It had left a wretched mess, though.
The situation was not beyond redemption, if so bright a word could be applied to so dark a thing—because in order for that "redemption" to happen, someone was going to have to drop dead in front of Harry Potter, and it was going to have to be someone who wouldn't have died if left to their own devices. And since the professor had wisely declared the school and Hogsmeade off-limits, that meant it would have to happen in Little Whinging over Potter's summer holidays.
That would have been a small window anyway, but Zarekael did also have to come to terms with being alive when he wanted desperately to die, as well as the almost constant gnawings of newborn bloodlust. He ought to have been able to spend half of his time hunting and the other half convincing himself not to walk out into the first promising ray of sunlight; there simply wasn't time for anything else.
Except that this, like so many other life-destroying forces that had popped up since he was still in diapers, was a fucking emergency.
The professor was long gone by now, so Zarekael turned and slipped away toward the crude beginnings of his campsite-soon-to-be-home, his cold, methodical mind already working out a list of potential targets in Surrey.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: ducking rotten tomatoes and howls of outrage I'm sorry I couldn't start out with a chapter to show you how cool Zarekael is! Believe me, I'd rather show him at his best. Unfortunately, as Snarky puts it, "he's not right" just now, and as much as I like him, even at his best he's really neither an angel nor a saint. (For my fellow Discworld fans, think of Lord Vetinari. Without the daily crossword puzzle.) He is a sadistic, calculating so-and-so, but if it helps, let me assure you that he will snap out of his über-psychotic phase sooner than later.
AE