Chapter 26.

A sleazy looking man climbed up the narrow steps and out of the ground. Acres of woods and brush surrounded him. He smiled at his own cleverness. He had created the perfect lair for himself.

He tossed two black plastic garbage bags in the back of his rusted pickup and drove toward the house, the place where the few people who even knew of his existance supposed that he lived. The bags went into the dumpster at the end of the long country lane. Wayne picked up his mail, or rather the mail of Fred Cox, whose identity he had taken on long ago. Junk mail, mostly. A book of the month club selection. A credit card bill. Fred had seemed to continue to conduct his business long after his death, nearly five years ago to date. It had been such a boon to Wayne, to find someone who closely resembled his appearance and who led a relatively isolated life with no close family ties.

The first Fred Cox, originally from Monroeville in Pennsylvania, had been amazed that someone would pay off his moderately large gambling debts for such an insignificant service-to buy a chunk of run down property for him at a tax sale. As Wayne had explained to him, it wouldn't do for him to buy the property outright. That would be one more thing for his bitch wife to try to snatch from him in the divorce proceedings. No, Wayne was a cautious conservative type of man. He invested in good old cash, hidden in various locations, none of them accessible to the evil bitch Sylvia, or so he told the original Fred. Wayne wanted this property for hunting and fishing, wanted it so badly that he was willing to pay dearly for it to keep it free and clear from the ex for a few more years, until the alimony payments were finished. He might even put a few rustic cabins out there and make some change renting them. Fred, the real Fred, allowed as he could see potential there. The real Fred had bought the property and settled the taxes with Wayne's money. Wayne had been the one to move in after poor Fred had met with a most untimely and secret end.

So now the acting Fred Cox, AKA elsewhere as Wayne Jenkins, owned his 120 acres of almost heaven West Virginia. His scattered cabins on one side of the road brought in enough official income from the hunting and honeymoon crowd to satisfy the taxes, and his under the table cash discounts brought a little more. He made a few charges here and there on his Fred Cox credit cards, paid them off each month, and moved small sums of money into his Cox accounts regularly. He curried the favor of a small number of good old boys, folks who admired his survivalist bent, folks who didn't mind doing some off the books construction work for his underground shelters for generous sums of off the books cash. He publicly left the area periodically, allegedly to do his consultant work, work which explained a bit more of his money. What kind of consultant work did Fred do? Curiously, no one around him knew, but then it wasn't something that needed to be known whenever cash exchanged hands. One contractor who did the most hidden of the excavations and construction had died suddenly when his car crashed into a creek at a remote location. The crash site was not in the immediate area of Fred Cox's property and no one had any reason to suspect that the contractor had been going to meet Fred Cox at a discrete location to talk over the deal on yet another clandestine job. It was never shared with any of the locals,and anyways, it was safer and more profitable to mind you own business in that neck of the woods. The unoccupied tenant house was regularly reported as drawing a small income from rentals, the taxes and utility bills were paid, and the man who had run the power lines from the tenant house to the underground dungeon was dead.

If anyone had been able to see the entire scope of Fred's dealings, it was almost magical the way things fell into place for him. Bad luck, pure and simple, hounded anyone who stood in his way. Few bid against him at tax auction time and piece by piece Fred's holdings grew to over five hundred adjacent acres of backwoods and brush, nearly all undeveloped on the surface. People still came and worked on his constructions but somehow forgot that they had ever been in his employ. Trees and brush grew up at an amazing rate over his diggings and buildings. Fred kept to himself mostly but stood a round at the local bar often enough to be well thought of. Fred himself was nothing to look at, with his long greasy grey hair and his often unwashed clothing. But when you did a deal with Fred, it seemed that you had gotten exactly what you asked for, even if in retrospect you should probably have asked for more or when you couldn't quite remember all that you had done. You can't blame a man for paying what you're asking for a piece of land when you asked for too little. And surely Fred had nothing to do with the misfortunes that caused you to need to sell land or perform services in the first place.

Fred loaded a few bags of groceries and some boxes into his banged up Ford truck and headed back into the woods. An opossum was dining on a run over rabbit near the berm of the road, and with a quick jerk of the steering wheel the opossum joined his supper as part of the gravel road carrion buffet. Fred smiled as he drove towards his hidden stronghold.

After a routinely boring day of work, Deborah caught a string out to the house alone to check up on Reuben and Victor. Snape had stayed to take a short nap before going over written exam papers-the loss of sleep over the past two nights was finally catching up with him. When she arrived, Reuben was in front of the house trying to direct two basilisks to follow a trail. The pair of young serpents was not cooperating; they appeared to believe that he was playing some new game with them, one that consisted of them making lazy circles around him while he shouted then knocking him over. "Mickey! Dorothy! Stop!" he commanded. The basilisks continued to romp in the yard. "Come here!" The basilisks turned their attention to him and began sliding and flopping on top of him.

"Having fun yet, Ruby?"

"No. All they want to do is chase each other around." Reuben pulled his jacket off of a fence post and walked with her up onto the porch. They went inside and let the basilisks continue to frisk on the lawn. "I hate when they're that age. They won't listen at all."

She glanced out the window and laughed at the antics. The tiny Dorothy was chasing Mickey, fangs bared, in a show of mock ferocity. "I take it that Victor is doing well if you're out training basilisks."

"Yeah. He's still sleeping most of the time, but when he wakes up he wakes all the way up now. He told me to get the hell away from him and let him rest, so he'll live. I creep up every few hours to deliver his potions and then I get out as quickly as I can, before he can put some sort of curse on me. God, he's peevish. Where's Snape?"

"Said he was going to take a nap." She lit a cigarette and watched as Mickey bowled Dorothy over and cut circles around her. "He hasn't had much sleep for the last couple of nights."

"Neither have you."

"I'm running on nicotine and adrenalin." She tapped her cigarette on the ashtray. "Any news about Wayne?"

"Not yet. I've had friends checking out some of the usual little hives of depravity, but so far nothing. I might have to set my sights lower. I heard from Eric and he hasn't gotten anything useful out of the rumor mill."

"So, where do you figure to set up a base of operations for finding Wayne?"

"I was thinking about here. Does Wayne know anything at all about this place?"

She considered for a moment. "Not to my knowledge. If he did know, I've changed all of the passwords for the wards. It might work out well, but if we do use this place we're going to have to make some accommodations for Severus. He has enough going on without being sucked into this mess."

"Meaning?" Reuben arched and eyebrow as he poured himself a drink.

"Meaning that I don't care what goes on here as far as hunting Wayne goes from Monday morning when we leave until Friday when we get here, around four. But from Friday at four until Monday morning this cannot be a madhouse." She yawned and stretched. "I was thinking along the lines of setting aside a part of the house for Wayne hunting use and a part for Sev and I to have a little privacy. What do you think?"

Reuben leaned back in his chair. "I'm thinking that we'll need the lab at times. But the rest of the time what we need is basically a room where we can keep everything and pop in from time to time to talk things over. Do you guys use the old lab?"

"Haven't yet. It's wired for electricity already, all I have to do is turn it on at the main box. I can set you up a computer and I can rearrange a couple of walls and make passages into the third floor guest rooms. There is a full kitchen up on the third floor already too, not that it matters to you, Ruby. It wouldn't take much work at all. Do you need the second floor lab?"

"I would like to have access occasionally. I'm not keen on doing some sorts of work in the magical Amish fashion. What if we used the third floor and attic for Wayne business and made the second floor lab common territory?"

"Sounds like it might work out. There's plenty of room in the new lab for all of us and Snape's likely to be more interested in the horses and the library than the lab. By the way, he wants to get together with you about some of your potions. I let him borrow one of your notebooks. Like me, he can't figure out what you're doing on some of the stuff."

"I don't know why not. It's all in there except for the parts I left out." Reuben grinned. "He's welcome to use those notebooks as long as I get them back, and yeah, I'll show him what I left out of anything he wants to know about. Tell him to send a crow or an owl or whatever the magical Amish are using to the third floor when he's ready."

"Will do. He's not as Amish as the rest of the bunch here, either. Hey, when he's here next, can you show him how to string? He should know that and I'm not a good teacher. Oh, and he's only done it a few times so remember to make him take the potion. I don't want our local string to smell like vomit."

Reuben grinned. "I'll remember, Miss Persnickety, if for nothing else but the sake of my own shoes. I have to come through it too, you know. I need to show him the anti avada kedavra spell too. You'd just confuse him with all of that pureblooded round about garbage." She shot Reuben a scow and he smirked. "Snape is not one of you frail little pureblooded things. He can do it the easy way."

"I don't care how you show him as long as he is safe with it. Don't get him killed."

"I won't. Trust me."

"I've heard that one before. Just don't get him killed. Make sure he's good on the pea soup curse before you try him on avada kedavra."

"Deb, you don't have to be so overprotective, but OK. How are we stocked for feeder rats for the basilisk children?"

"Hundreds of them. I need to freeze some off for the them anyway."

"Cool. We'll practice and you package." Reuben glanced out at the basilisks. "Those guys are going to love this."

"Dad! Dad! Come see this!"

Eric ran to his oldest son's bedroom. "What's wrong?"

"Look!" The boy pointed to a small rubber ball on the floor and began pulling his finger toward him. The ball rocked for a moment then slowly began to roll toward his feet. "Does that mean that I'm not going to be a squib? Is that what the powers are like?"

"Let's try it again with something else. Eric glanced around the room, searching for an object that wouldn't roll, something that couldn't possibly move so easily. He spotted a pack of cards on his son's desk. "Try the cards, Art, try that deck of cards."

The boy concentrated and began his beckoning movements toward the cards. For nearly a minute, nothing happened. Then one by one, the cards began to slide off the top of the deck and fall onto the floor. Jerkily they made their way toward him and formed into a heap at his feet. The boy looked up, his eyes full of hope. "I did that, didn't I?"

"Yes!" Eric grabbed the boy and held him tightly, until the boy cried out and squirmed in protest. "Dad, you're choking me!" Eric released his son and stood back. "You're crying, Dad."

"I'm happy, that's all. I don't know what made you take so long to find it, but you have the power. You aren't a squib, kid! Let's go tell your mother!"

Deborah returned from the house, smiling broadly. Snape looked up from a stack of papers. "Good news, I hope."

"The best," she said. "While I was at the house, a crow came. Eric's oldest boy finally showed signs of magic. It wasn't much-he moved a ball and a deck of cards then some keys, but he did it himself. He's not a squib after all."

"Your family was worried."

"Yes. He's almost twelve. We had been ready to pull him out of school and send him to a nil school, but now we won't have to. If they don't show ability by thirteen they have to be taken out, but now he won't have to go. I don't know why it took so long, but he's doing it now. Eric is going to take some accrued vacation time to try to catch him up some with the other kids. He's way behind some of his classmates, but he's going to be alright once he gets in some practice."

Snape could not recall any witches or wizards of his acquaintance who did not manifest their powers by the age of seven or eight. True, some muggleborns didn't recognize them as such, but the abilities were plain to anyone familiar with magic. "Don't your people realize that they're breeding magic out of their children with their obsession over blood purity and insignificant physical qualities?"

"I think to some extent that they do, but they're set in their ways. It's like the people here and their reluctance to have anything to do with new technologies that muggles have developed, take electricity for instance. I swear that some of them would go back to leaves and grass if they realized that muggles invented toilet paper. Me, I'm all for whatever works better, old or new, the same as Eric and Ruby, but we're in the minority in our world too. It's practically heresy to question the idea of blood purity. We don't go to war over it, but it's still considered unacceptable to interbreed. Take Victor. Most of the fine young pureblood women wouldn't give him a second glance. Nice guy, talented as all hell. They would never come out and say it but he's sort of a pariah in the social circles. He's one fourth nil. That makes him kind of a second class wizard, a mutt. Reuben's in the same boat. He was a pureblood, but he chose to become a vampire. That made him anathema, the same as it did Ian."

"Why did they do it?" Snape was instantly curious.

"Ian did it because he was dying and it was the only way he could survive," she said. "He had tuberculosis, and at that time it was incurable. Ruby," she thought a minute, "I think that Ruby did it because he liked the idea of living nearly forever." She smiled crookedly. "A vampire female figured into that decision, but you'll have to ask Ruby about that one. That's really his story to tell."

"Vampires never die?"

"They all get killed eventually, it seems. I know of a couple who have hit the thousand year mark, but most of them never do. At some point they all start taking too many chances and end up dead. I don't think that humans were ever meant to live forever. It's my opinion only, but I believe that somehow we can't face seeing our ways of life change and lose friends and people we love indefinitely and still want to live."

She paused a moment, considering what she would say-it was difficult to put to words. "Ian and I discussed whether or not I would change, it's something that you can't help but think about when you're getting older and your husband never will. I still don't know how I would feel when I started aging past where he was. And since he died, it didn't end up mattering. But I still don't know what I would have done if he had lived. Their way of life has it's drawbacks, but on the other hand, I can imagine being an old woman married to a man who was physically far younger than me and feeling ancient and ugly. Not a good scenario. I don't know if I would have been strong enough to let go of him when it came to that. Until you're faced with the situation, how can you know what you're willing to give up for someone you love? Ian was willing to give up his life for me. I like to think that I would have done the same for him but when I think about it, I don't know if I could have done it." She sighed. "I've cultivated an appearance of bravery all my life, but I also know that in many ways I'm as cowardly as the worst."

"I try to tell myself that I gave up command of Ian's people because I knew that they should be governed by a vampire, but the truth of it is that I chickened out. I ran from command. I didn't want to be the one who gave orders that got people killed. I didn't want to be the one who led people into battle. I wanted to be the one who did the things I had been doing-working on weapons, helping Reuben out with the medical team, anything except being out in front where it really counted and out where people could see the cowardly side of me revealed, out where I had to face that I don't have what it takes to be the fearless leader. When all was said and done, I was afraid. But enough of the glory that is me. "How was your day?"

"Gryffindores and Slitherins sniping at each other, Hufflepuffs looking oblivious or anxious, Ravenclaws acting as if they're annoyed by such petty bickering. Mean old professor saddled with a load of dismal potions essays to dredge through and grade. Business as usual."

She laughed. "Want some help digging through that mess of desperate bullshit?"

"Of course." He handed her part of the stack. "So far they have been wholly disappointing. Don't expect brilliance, unless we find ourselves witnesses to a testable miracle, it's not to be found in those."