Angela's Note: Everyone experiences grief in their own way and their own time. You can not judge another by your own history. As tempting as it is to not believe, it is in fact possible for the same event to happen to different people, and wildly different results occur. What might send one woman into a rage might send another into despair. What might bring a man to the heights of hilarity might bring another to the depths of offense. Predicting the result of an action is hard to do, even when you know a person, because no one can truly see into the soul. As the idiom goes, judge a man not, before you walk a mile in his shoes.
Hermione gave herself three days.
She didn't label, even to herself, what those days were for. Recovery or wallowing, grieving or moping. She was angry, and then she was worried, and then she was only mournfully lonely.
She spent a great deal of that time in Kreacher's garden, laying across a soft couch that seemed placed just for that purpose, dozing in the sun under a willow tree beside a still pond, a few young fish just beginning to flicker across its waters.
That first day, after the couch appeared, a brazier had found a home beside it, a bulky golden-edged thing with carvings of kneazles upon its sides. It's fire gave off enough heat to be comforting in the already temperature-controlled area, and it wasn't long before Crookshanks had found his own new favorite spot across her lap in the outdoor area.
Hermione, on her way back inside, had seen the wooden door the house-elf had made for her cat to access the roof's paradise, and smiled.
Her first smile that day.
And that night, she had hot cocoa with dinner, and told Kreacher how wonderful his garden was already, even though the flowers hadn't yet bloomed and many of the beds were still uninhabited.
She worked on all the projects she hadn't finished or set aside. She avoided Harry's desk until she abruptly found herself sitting in his chair, looking at his halfway-finished work, wondering where he was.
She might have broken his chair in a fit of pique, but she repaired it, so not even Kreacher would know.
She put unused books away into the library. Then she pulled more from its shelves and stacked them by her favorite spot to read by the windows. But she didn't read them, she sat there, and tried to decide what she was trying to achieve by this self-enforced stasis.
Her mother hadn't wanted her to leave, but Hermione hadn't been able to stay. What was comforting the first night after dying, was smothering the morning after. She had wanted to be alone, until she got her wish. But she was reluctant to reopen the wards to her no-doubt concerned bodyguards and family.
It was Harry's desk that did it, finally. The gems both empty and full, the task unfinished and yet vital to another agenda. It took some doing, and a few hours of practice, but she filled the rest with her own power, and owled them off to the twins, with a request for a meeting the next morning in her kitchen over breakfast.
She reopened the floo on her way to bed, and slept the sleep of the magically-drained.
When she woke up, Vaughn was there, sprawled across her living area's sofa. His eyes when they opened were hazel now, a muddy mix of green and brown, and as tired as she felt.
He smiled, a little.
"Morning, sunshine."
"Morning." She replied, and that was the beginning of the fourth day.
After the twins came and went, and after Fallon came and did not leave, but stayed to speak to her in low worried tones, asking about her health, asking about her family, asking about everything except her dying, after Vaughn made the older man be silent with a harsh shake of his head, hazel eyes deep-set in an almost-right face, she went to bed again.
She made herself stop counting the days, because it didn't make the waiting any easier. She went back to class, loaded herself down with notes from helpful peers and professors, claiming a death in the family as the reason for her absence with no small sense of ironic humor.
She kept herself busy. Her mother always said that idle hands worked mischief, but perhaps busy hands could be just as liable to be persuaded towards it.
She found the stack of pregnancy books in a corner that she had ignored so studiously, the ones she and Harry had purchased before the end, and told Kreacher to donate them without a single quiver in her voice. Then she gave him two letters to deliver, one to Robard at the auror department asking for information, and the other to Malfoy in Diagon for yet another paid favor.
Hermione then found herself at Spinner's End, ready for her apprenticeship as if nothing had changed, because really nothing outside herself had. And it wasn't until the potions master laid a piece of paper in front of her, listing the components that might mutate or interfere with fetal development, that she realized she was a liar.
The numbness that she had built around herself splintered, and she was glad she was seated already, because there was a knot of something in her throat and a weakness in her limbs.
Six days. Six days, and nine hours, and some minutes. She was still counting after all.
A hand, staining from brewing, reached out and took the parchment away, and tossed it into the fire. Hermione watched this with uncomprehending eyes, the action so unexpected and sudden.
Then she understood.
"It's illegal to read people's minds without permission." Her voice sounded like her own, but the tone was too calm and too reasonable for the storm inside her.
"You have no grounds to stand on regarding illegality, Mrs. Potter. Not when you argue with me that good intentions trump such trivial matters as law and order."
There were things she could say to that. Good, reasonable rebuttals. But not this time.
"I'm not in the mood to argue philosophy today."
Snape sat in a chair across from her, the man's personal library perhaps the only room the older wizard seemed to naturally fit in other than his laboratory.
"I am sorry." Words she never expected to hear from the dour man, and they threatened to rip away the last threads that bound her calm stillness.
"What is legilimency like?" She grasped at a change in topic, anything to quell her memories, her restless storm of counting the days and the hours and the minutes.
Snape wove his fingers together on his lap, face stern as it ever was, and for a moment she thought he wouldn't answer.
Until he did, lecturing to her as he had often lectured about the properties of a potion.
"First, there is emotion. A layer of it, with no tactile touch but still hot or cold or wet or dry. For a Master, this emotion is a key to the mind, one that can be picked up and turned to open the door. There are words behind that door, and in the lazy, unorganized mind they ramble on in a steady breeze of wind, one after another and many not making much sense, but all secrets laid bare for the listening. The more academic mind rambles in patches like clouds floating past, easily grasped and held and listened too, if one knows which patch of cloud one wants, and that is no easy task either. The mind thinks a great deal, and the majority of it is not verbalized and more instinctive."
A short pause, as if inviting questions. When she spoke none, he continued, dark eyes locked on hers.
And Hermione realized she had forgotten to glamor her eyes that morning. Her hair had been easy enough to return to its former brown color, but her eyes had stubbornly fought the tentative magic she cast on them. She could have wrestled with them harder, as Vaughn was no doubt doing, but had found herself avoiding it.
It had become less disturbing and more comforting, to look into her eyes in the mirror in the morning and see physical evidence that she was not the same woman anymore.
"But behind the words, lies the memories." The potions master shifted his hands and resettled them again in his lap. "It is a dangerous place for the untaught to go, because inside those memories you are not merely an observer, but a participant. While viewing them, you are unaware of your own body and the state of it. A master Occlumens might lure the mind-reader in with a memory, then put their wand to his heart while he watches. This is why both disciplines are taught in unison to those who wish to learn the art of Legilimency, but Occlumency alone is necessary for those who wish only to defend their minds. In a battle between the two, it is the better Occlumens that wins."
"I died." Hermione said, and it hadn't been what she meant to say. She meant to ask about Occlumency, how to begin, if he would teach her. Things she would normally ask, on a normal day, about a fascinating topic.
The potions master said nothing for a long drawn-out moment. Hermione lifted her chin, and spoke again.
"My body not just killed, but obliterated. There was nothing left for Harry to assemble, so he built me anew from scratch, but he doesn't see things like we do, so some things didn't take. Like the color of my eyes. Like our… child."
She said the word, out loud, for only the second time in six days and nine hours and some minutes. And why she would say it now, to this man, she didn't quite know. But it felt like the right time and the right person, and maybe that was all that mattered.
"I can remove the memory, or deaden the emotions associated with it." Simple statements from him, and Hermione knew they were true. A normal wizard could obliviate a person, but it didn't always stick, or remove the right memories, or last for very long. But all of the Ministry team of obliviators were masters in the mind arts, which was why there were so few of them, and why the job paid so well, so she knew what was possible. "I can even change it, though the mind rebels against things that do not correlate with branching memories."
He can, but he didn't say he would, and either way it didn't matter.
"I can't be a coward. Bad things happen sometimes." Hermione said, but she dropped her eyes to the table top, looking at the empty space where the parchment had rested, and thinking about what she would be doing at that moment if she had never died.
Reading that list, and memorizing it, and reading more about every single item on it. She would still feel a little alien to herself, because there was something growing inside her that wasn't her, but it would be a good kind of alien, a bright kind, a wonderful fear of the unknown mixed with the sheer potential of it.
Instead of the alien she felt now, with her green eyes and her normal body to house her normal soul, a body that could touch and be touched, feel and be felt, and yet was missing something vital that she could not define in words, only as a restless feeling under her skin.
"I can help you define it." Snape said, and he had her attention again, because of course he was still listening in, because she hadn't told him to stop and that was in a way implicit permission to a man like him, just like Malfoy, not overly bound by ethics. The very definition of a Slytherin.
She wondered which emotion he had used as a key, and what door in her mind he was looking through. She wondered what he would think of Death. Maybe he really did want to help her, or maybe he was just curious. Either way, he was listening to her right now, and she trusted him to keep her secrets as tightly as he kept his own.
And Harry wasn't here to ask for advice, the rotten, lousy…
"Please do." Hermione said aloud, politely, and only had time to think about what it might feel like or look like or be like, before it happened, and there was no more time to think.
It happened.
She was smiling up into his green eyes, eyes that stared through her nose the way they sometimes did, but she knew she had his focus. She could feel it like a static on her skin, his Look, energy that passed through her fondly and familiar.
Until his Look left, a sensation of tearing and horror and heat that she never saw coming and did not understand.
She was confusion, given form. Utterly confused from where one end of her began and the other ended.
Then she had stood beside her great-uncle Frank's old car, the one the elderly man had always arrived in, bringing gifts for his favorite nephew, her father, and of course her too, with a pat on the head and a smell of citrus fruit. They would talk, and talk, and talk, and she would wait patiently for that pat on the head and the tangerine he would give her, as if the fruit was a precious gem and he a king of men.
Her great-uncle smiled at her, his face the youthful face she had seen in old black and white photographs, and she had felt loved all over again.
But he hadn't opened the door to take her with him, which she had always asked him to do and he never had. He just stood there by the car, smiling, waiting for her to ask him again, one more time, because this time he would open the door and she would get in, and they would ride out into the country to where the farm was with its rows of greenhouses and its small extravagance of a tangerine tree, too big for its house and too loved to be cut down.
"Hermione." Her name from behind her, as her great-uncles smile faded away, his hand resting lightly upon the car's frame.
She was no longer confusion, she was grief, and pain. Such pain she had never felt before, not great in and of itself, but like a spark with a steady wind upon it, giving it form and substance every moment she stood there in life without living.
She understood that pain. She knew it would grow, and grow, and grow. But she only had thoughts for Harry, because he stood there, and he was not the Harry she knew, and everything was wrong, it was all so wrong.
Thoughts against her own, guiding her, a steady hand that kept her from being swept away in that emotion of wrong-ness, gave her clarity to see and understand.
He was color and the absence of color, while around him the living died. She felt them dying, strings fraying on a thread one by one, twanging against her consciousness and falling away. She heard herself asking Harry to save them, and then watched him do so, while that black-white light burned brighter, and she knew that this was a new thing, because surely the spirits summoned before would have spoke of it, a candle given man's form and speaking to them, and been afraid.
She was fear, for herself partially, but for him mostly, because of that fire and what it might mean, and because she wasn't alive to help him figure it out.
Between them she could feel the soul bond pulled tight, a solid rope of hope that she might be able to tug herself down, a woman under water taking hold in the dark and…
Again, steadying thoughts against her own, bringing clarity in confusion.
She loved him. She would always be there, waiting, and she would not let herself forget it.
When Harry left the place of her death, that tether pulled her away and let her go at the same time, until she found herself back again by her great-uncle's car, holding a tangerine in both hands and smelling the special scent of it and the promise within, of tart sweetness and sticky liquid.
But she knew now where she stood, and she spoke.
"I'm dead, but I'm not going further than here."
Though she cradled the tangerine, and felt its thick skin, she knew this for a fact.
"Is he the Reaper?" Frank asked in his youthful voice, a projection of her own memory or the real thing, she might not ever know. But it was a question her great-uncle would have asked, were he living. He was always the sort of man to face a thing instead of hide from it, which had gotten him through one world war and helped him avoid another.
"I suppose he could be." She mused, thinking of traditional definitions of mythical figures, and wondering at it herself.
He was still smiling when she was pulled away again, that rope again and that voice, and the black-white form of her husband beside her, burning with darkness, and so afraid.
She was brave for him, and told him what she knew he wanted to hear, because he needed to hear her faith in him. She stepped into her body without hesitation, not knowing how it might be, and let herself cry and be gathered together into him, crying to feel his touch and crying to feel the air and the warmth of the room, and his hard bones under skin and to see that skin not burning and not a candle of shadow but a real human being, her husband, hers, afraid.
Steadying-pressure, steadying the tip of the world back onto its axis so that it could spin and not spin away.
Hermione opened her eyes, her own eyes, they were hers, because she used them, and looked at where Snape sat, as if carved from marble, every inch of him a stillness, a rock unbuffeted in the storm.
"I'm missing my innocence." She marveled aloud, in her own voice which was hers, because she used it. "The feeling of invulnerability. Which makes no sense, because the worst has happened to me, and yet I am still here."
"Not the worst." Snape corrected, as he always did, because he was who he was, a Slytherin, and they had to be correct, to the consternation of every person who was not in fact Slytherin. "But yes. Reality. All good things must come to an end, all beginnings reach their conclusion."
"Or merely take on a new form." Hermione countered, because she was who she was too, a Gryffindor if only for a quarter of one year, and that meant one didn't simply agree with a Slytherin out of hand. "But I already knew that, all of that. I've studied it, I've seen it."
"But you haven't felt it." And Snape smiled, just a little around the edges, an expression that would be a grin on any other man but him. "Even when the troll hurt you, you still expected to go on. Now, that expectation of going on is gone. Everyone faces it eventually, that inevitability."
"Then why did I feel afraid?" Hermione demanded. "If it is inevitable, and I know exactly what will happen when it does, have seen it even? Experienced it?"
The Potions master met her eyes with his own, and his voice was gentle as he spoke the truth she hadn't let herself acknowledge.
"Because Potter won't be there with you in Death. You will be with everyone, except for him."
She trembled, once, all over, like a dog shaking water from its fur.
"You see a lot in one memory."
"I know what you know, in one memory. As I would know the words of a foreign language I can not speak, when in the mind of a person who does."
"It's not possible." Hermione denied, not of the fact that he could see such secrets, but at the secret itself. Everything died. Everything rotted and fell to pieces and wasted away and turned into something different than it was.
"That's not what you believe." He said, and she supposed he would know, because he had been there in her mind with her, and she had let him in, and who knew what else he had seen or known or felt while he was in there, and maybe she was a fool.
But at least she was a grateful fool.
"Thank you, for helping." And for keeping my secrets.
"You are my apprentice." As if that answered everything, and maybe it did, but she had enough to think about as it was to bother spending time questioning this wizard's motivations.
She stood, intending to leave and go home and think, again, but maybe with less fear and avoidance and more proactive planning.
"I will teach you Occlumency." Snape said, and rose to pass her a book from the shelf. "Your assignment."
She took the book, and she nodded, grateful again.
Then she left through the floo, leaving the potions master to watch the green flames fade back to solemn orange and red and yellow, alone.
Harry found it disturbingly easy to move through the world with the help of vampires and elves.
Kraken had been joined by Hopper and Ruby, two elves who arrived on the doorsteps of the French Coven days after his own arrival. They claimed to have read the papers, just like every other person in the magical world it seemed, and had arrived in the late hours of the night with their bags in hand and letters of recommendation from Malfoy attesting to their capabilities in service and combat.
How Malfoy had known what Harry was going to do, or where he might be located, he could only guess. What had made the wizard endorse the two elves to join his hunt was even more baffling.
But the elves were there, and they had their own history with Luxe Sombre. Hopper had been forced to take care of mundane slaves until he was freed by the Ministry; Ruby had been a cleaning elf for a pureblood wizard who followed the Lady of Luxe, and a valuable resource to the Ministry in identifying key personnel after her own freedom. Both had ended up in Malfoy's hands after the new laws were passed, and both wanted a hand in action against Luxe.
There had been more elves, Hopper admitted, who wanted to join them. But Malfoy had said only two could usefully go at that time, and they two were the most skilled.
When asked how they had proved most skilled, Ruby had proudly proclaimed it had been a competition in combative magic. Which made Harry wonder just the extent of what Malfoy's training was.
He found out soon enough.
In a warehouse, another white room of wards like so many others he had seen. Magical spells flying across the room by desperate wizards and witches, tossed over tables and around walls, magic that he turned to ash or smoke or rain until the air was clouded and murky, bouncing off ceiling and floor if they didn't dissipate entirely.
Yellow bolts of light raced through that haze, yellow light spilling off spindly hands and pooling around them like a miasma of poison. Hard to tell which house elf it was that brought down which wizard, but that yellow light was unstoppable, weaving in and around and popping from place to place in an instant, the triumvirate of three working seamlessly ahead to neutralize the forces within while he dismantled wards and spells and the vampires worked their unique brand of time-manipulation to slow down the movements of their enemies.
Occasionally, a vampire might stop and kneel and drink from an enemy, and Harry counted that as the price of their help. The changed ones did not need blood to survive; but they did need it to bolster their power once it was exhausted, and all seemed to still retain their love for the taste.
Eleven vampires followed him, seven from the London coven, three that joined them in Calais, and the last single vampire from Romania, the only one to leave the coven there and embrace the change.
Which did prove they had some autonomy, despite what Brennan claimed. Or perhaps rebellion was seeded in the pattern of every vampire at their making.
Five warehouses they had raided together in a week, some large buildings and others mere rooms that had been magically expanded, or had trunks of magically expanded space inside them, that latter more difficult than the first to infiltrate. Ten wizards had died total, their souls allowed to pass on to Death, and two he shredded from the air as they rose to flee their dead bodies, the broken facets of their ruin clear to his eyes as purposeful evil.
The rest were sent to their respective Ministries, of whatever county or region they found themselves in, sealed under wards and magic reduced to a flicker.
Harry had made new discoveries, with no hand to hold him back other than his own. How he might tamp down the magical light in a being until it only duly gleamed like the spark found within a mundane person. How he could speak their names and interrogate their souls over their dead bodies in strange places of color and sound he had never encountered before, and the souls there would not speak lies.
How the Cloak could rise from his skin and reduce him to nothing but shadow and green eyes, and the terror that inspired among the Luxe soldiers. How it would rise to heal burns from spellfire or sink inside to weave bone back together and build it back stronger, a force of immovable solidity.
How the Stone in his heart loved to dance when he spoke to the souls of the dead, loved to spin in his chest and shine with stars of shadow in his vision. How its power sometimes flooded down to pool in his hands and reach out to touch a pattern and make it return to its origin. A table back into the mouse that bore it, a cup to a simple stone, a chair to a thread of hair, until the covens that gave them shelter only offered him things that had been made with hands and not transfiguration.
And every evening, he sent Kraken to Kreacher to report to him of home. As vampires woke and prepared for the hunt, he would sit in the quiet and listen to her day, the hours or minutes she cried, the books she read and the projects she finished. He would hate himself in those moments, for leaving her alone, for doing what he was doing, for being a coward and not wanting to show his soul to her. He had never told her the horcrux was gone; never told her that he had an inkling of his future.
He had told himself that he would know when to go home. He knew he would; he knew he would get his hands on a time turner, and he would not use that to go back and save his unborn child, but instead to remove a horcrux and give a riddle and vanish again. And that, too, made him angry, because no one had a timeturner that could go back more than hours, so how had he managed it? Must he make one himself? And how long would that take?
Then the knock at his door, Brennan or Cole or Kraken, beckoning him on to another night of sickly warehouses and dank alleys, elegant homes and apartment rooms and in them all the broken souls. Where he would break every potion and cauldron, reduce them to wood and burn them to ash and blow the ash away. He would speak to the dead and he would get another name, another place, another hint, and it never seemed to end, all paths leading him further away from where he really wanted to be, home and with her, all the more precious because he had lost her once already.
And again, reminding himself that everything he was doing was to protect her future. That he couldn't rest until the person who wanted to kill him was broken, and turned to ash, and blown away just like all her creations.
And if he took out his frustration on her minions, well. Harry was still a little bit human after all.
He knew the Green Death would come for him. Just as it had for all the others; every single one.
He knew he had only lasted this long because he was the least of them. He had caused little trouble; his role in the massacre of Diagon Alley a miniscule matter of warding the potion bottles. He was nothing at all; but Death had its eye on him regardless.
Death came to all men, small and great. To him, it would come far quicker than to others. To him, it would come personally calling his name.
Green eyes of death. Green eyes of fury and sorrow. Green eyes, green eyes, green eyes, as he had seen when he fled Priscilla's home, when he fled Dominic's manor, when he walked down the street as Death took Harold's hand and made the man's skin peel away to muscle then bone then nothing but flecks of ash and light, magic and soul.
Harold hadn't screamed in pain, though. He had already been dead. The body left behind had bore the brunt of Death's anger.
He wondered if he would be so lucky.
Green eyes, before him in the doorway with the sound of battle, and he sat there watching, still and silent, because there was nowhere to run but back to Her, and she would kill him and take more than an instant doing so. Better to let Death take him swiftly in the night, in the blink of an eye.
Around him, the others attacked. Bill and Harvey and Jessica, sweet Jessica, whose only crime was loving a man she shouldn't have loved. As his only crime was being born into a world that didn't want him, his only job offer a shady one, his only boss a dirty one, his only friend a horrible one.
One by one they fell, some to stone to shatter, others bound at the fingertips of a house-elf, others under the fangs of a vampire.
And he, waiting to die, embracing its electricity as it raced through him and the ocean spread before him and he was alone there on that beach, because no one had ever had the misfortune to love him.
Death stepped up beside him, as seagulls screamed overhead and the waves crashed, crashed, crashed.
"I know where she is." Robert said honestly. A boat was coming towards the shore, a old ferry boat like he had always dreamed of as a boy. "I'll tell you, if you let me have just one ride. I've always wanted one ride."
Death looked at him with his green eyes in his black-white face, the shadow of his staff like a reaper's scythe across the sand, held out casually as the unnecessary thing that it was.
"Tell me."
He told. He told everything. He told about the house in its gardens, the braziers lit with scarlet fire, how he had trembled stepping through the wards that bit at his skin and itched under his robes. How the Lady had laid her hands on him and kissed his cheek, and how he had worked his fingers raw until blood ran down his wand trying to brew her potions and ward her bottles and create her boxes. He was a small cog in her wheel, a small seedling under her tree, a spark in her fire, and she didn't love him either, no one ever had.
"Please." He ended, as he always did in life, please don't hurt me please don't go please love me, please I'll do anything. "Please, one ride on the boat."
The air smelled of salt, the spray from the waves cold on his hot face, the sand sticking between his bare, little boy feet, Death so large and consuming a cloud upon his perfect dream.
"It only takes one ride." Death said, and the dark-light cloud turned to mist that faded away, and the ocean was still there with its docked ferry boat, waiting for him, and Robert smiled for the first time in his death.
"Here." Brennan pointed to a place on a large brown map with no visible markings to Harry's own sight. "This fits the description. Small mountainside villa, large gardens, and warded under and over ground. If she decided to hunker down instead of run, it would be here."
Harry had considered that the leader of Luxe might decide to flee. There were enough magical hiding spaces in the world to lead them on a merry chase for years.
But to flee, one would need money and resources. And with the release of the British Ministry's statement days before, the magical underground was very aware of who was hunting whom. She would not have many allies willing to tie their fate to hers now.
Her best chance would be to fortify her hidden fortress and try to kill him before he killed her. No doubt she had an entire nest of things designed to do just that all around her.
"We will need to decide where we go from here." Hill this time, his voice aimed towards where Harry sat. "We can tell the Spanish Ministry of her residence in their jurisdiction, and let them siege this place, with hopefully none of her spies getting wind of their discovery. We can tell the British Ministry and let them argue over who gets a piece of her. No doubt a international team would be assembled. It would take a couple days at least to get through the pissing contest."
The ex-auror would know all about Ministry politics and how it complicated the apprehension of criminals. Harry, so far, had managed to muscle straight through the red tape on reputation alone, which would not be tolerated forever. But no magical government liked Luxe Sombre, and that was a major point in his favor. As long as he didn't stay in their borders for long and presented a capable scapegoat for any fall-outs, they suffered his presence.
But they did want favors. Brennan, and the leaders of other covens, passed the word along. They had sick family members, dead parents and children, disasters both small and great. They wanted his opinion on this magic or that curse, they wanted his autograph, they wanted his promise to leave them the hell alone and smile for the camera while he did it, clasping their leader's hand.
They postured and it meant nothing, because Harry didn't care about their problems, he cared about his wife, and he cared that his own child was out of his reach forever, even their soul itself gone into the colorful cauldron of Death that spawned out every soul in the world. And how did he mourn the unborn?
He fed Death more souls.
"I want her." Harry said into the quiet that had fallen. "Any Ministry would throw her into Azkaban or Nurmengard, leave her there to rot after a public trial. And from there, she might be tethered, but she would still be dangerous. I don't trust that some guard one day might leave a gate open, a boat in the slip, a broom in her window. She won't rest until she has me, so I can't rest until I have her."
More considering silence, no doubt communication by eyes and faces, all of it beyond him.
Then Brennan sighed, the sound of air expelled still a novel thing for the vampires among them.
"We are not enough, eleven bloodkin and three elves. She could have dozens inside, and numerous traps magical and otherwise. Even if we might take her, it would come at a steep cost. I suggest reinforcements, Ministry or otherwise."
Harry contemplated each pattern in turn around him, the black-threaded vampires that he had restored and the house-elves' yellow trademark. He had memorized them all the past week, to the best of his ability, the better to heal wounds and restore lost limbs.
"If you fall, I will raise you up." Harry said simply. "One vampire is worth half a dozen men, and you yourself worth a full dozen. I trust Kraken and the others can handle a vampire, which would mean they too can handle a dozen men. I doubt she has a hundred witches and wizards in her lair."
"She will focus her efforts on killing you, not us." Brennan returned. "You die, we stay dead."
Harry looked down at his hands, the emerald of his self a new pattern now, one of rigid cones and prisms inside humanity's looping malleable lines, a pale tapestry with sparkling dark threads.
The fire hadn't killed him. The Cloak was inside him now, roving under his skin and through his blood in a way that he could not explain with science, theorizing only that its molecules had bonded to his own and mutated them both into a different creature. Perhaps his blood under a microscope would yield the shape of a nuclei that was mostly human or something entirely alien. He would find out one day.
But for now, he only knew with an odd certainty that the Lady would find killing him a difficult thing indeed. She would first have to destroy the Cloak, and he had never in any of his years with it been able to fray one single edge of the Hallow'd cloth.
"I welcome her to try." Harry said, and didn't feel an ounce of boasting in the words, only simple truth. He wanted to face her, to look into her soul, and take his own measure of peace.
"Harry." Brennan again, speaking his name with resolve. Names were powerful among the vampires, who for so long could count on remembering little through their years and so clung to their own names with frightening purpose. "As you value my opinion, bring in more support."
Harry sat there a long moment, considering the time it would take to wait, to plan, to travel. Hours and days more away from his wife, who was probably furious with him in a way he would spend innumerable days trying to mend.
"The werewolves were eager to take on a coven of vampires not too long ago. Let's see if they would mind fighting alongside them instead."
Better they than the Ministry, than any governmental force.
Brennan waved a blue hand, and a vampire rose and was gone nearly too fast to be seen, Ruby slower on his heels.
Harry wouldn't be surprised if there were more than werewolves who traveled back from Britain.
The room slowly emptied, and dawn would be upon them soon enough. He hadn't found it too difficult to adjust to vampiric hours. He had slept very little in the last week.
"Your wife. She could be with you now, if you wanted it."
Harry did want it. He wanted it more than he could put into words.
He looked down at his green hands, black fingers, white knuckles. Saw the colors bleed and twist and intertwine, until his hands were black with green fingernails and spidery white veins. The pattern of them all human on its skin, something else entirely below flesh and bone.
"I'll be back soon." Harry said instead, and turned away from Brennan's statement as if it was a physical door he might shove open and find her there, his Viola. Too much temptation to bear face on.
"You're wrong." The vampire said to his back as he walked away, though whether it was in answer to his words or the fact that he hadn't asked Hermione to join him, he couldn't say.
Ruby arrived the next day leading forward half a dozen house-elves, two teams of three yellow patterns that swore themselves trained in combat. Harry was content to let Kraken test them and be leader over them, a house-elf better apt to know their capabilities than a mere wizard.
Weasley arrived the day after with two dozen werewolves, each one touched with the stamp of wolf at their core, some far more than others.
Two were familiar, the men he remembered meeting in Diagon Alley what seemed such a long time ago. They were the only ones to come forward to shake his hand exuberantly. The rest hung back, shades of grey and green and blue souls all looking toward him with unknown emotions. Weasley made a stiff bow as he introduced them, before making his proud claim.
"We've been training for seven months now, Potter, with Mad-Eye Moody himself. Neville's parents were friends with the man, and I suppose he got bored in his retirement. When Neville mentioned that we were trying to bring together a enforcement team for Mordere, he set himself up a house right beside the jail."
Harry had heard of the ex-auror from Vaughn and Fallon, though he had never met him. Vaughn had said he was as paranoid as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and liable to bite, hard.
"Thank you for coming." Harry gave his own bow in their direction, and ignored the way the werewolves jostled together in surprise. "We're planning the assault now. This way."
Two days of discussion. Two days of thinking of every variable, every way anything could possibly go wrong.
Two days of explanation of previous raids, of Harry's abilities, of vampire, werewolf, and house-elf capabilities. Two days to get onto equal footing.
Two days where Harry spent long moments with his eyes closed but his mind open, memorizing every inch of the new arrivals patterns. Looking beyond clothes with less and less hesitation, determined to get every feature right in the case of total physical destruction.
Two more days to miss his wife and grieve his child.
Two days that seemed to last an eternity, and still, Brennan did not think they were ready.
"No plan survives contact with the enemy." Weasley proclaimed after just such a statement. "Moody says a muggle came up with that. You can never predict every consequence."
Brennan was silent a long moment. Seated around the expanded tables, vampires and werewolves talked amongst themselves in hushed voices, parchments laid out before them in haphazard manners.
At his table, only Brennan, Weasley, and Kraken sat, and Harry figured it was a sight not often, if ever, seen in the wizarding world.
Hermione would be proud.
"There's a full moon in one week." Weasley began, and hurried on when Harry leaned forward, denial already on his lips. "A compromise, Potter. Brennan wants us to train together longer, so we will. The full moon would allow my pack to be at full strength, and full spell resistance. I've got wolfsbane. Allow us to be the front line, as discussed, but in our second forms. If that alone doesn't break their fighting spirit, the vampires will be right behind us with wands. The house-elves can move among us freely, easily, taking captive any that try to flee or hide. We could break them in one aggressive assault. You deal with any magical traps or injuries."
"Kraken and elves keeps watch on base until then." A high pitched voice, with a strong nod.
Harry faced Brannan, feeling outmaneuvered and knowing the vampire would agree even before the man nodded and spoke.
"A compromise. One more week, and we attack. Until then, we continue to raid outlying warehouses we've documented in Spain and France. No need to let the Lady think we've found her."
"Real world practice." Weasley smiled with sharp brown teeth. "Moody would approve."
Harry felt all eyes turn to him, their waiting stares nearly physical.
In one more week, he would have been gone from his family for half a month. The plan was sound, he knew it. Just as he also knew, deep in his heart, that he could push now to attack that very night, and they would give in. And they would probably succeed, though more would die, and therefore more would need to be brought back. Even that seemed little enough to stop him.
Could he wait. Could he?
Was he ready to go home?
"Alright." Harry said, and stood. "Tell them all the plan. I need to think."
He walked to his room in silence, through halls of purple stone and green wood, hanging emerald tapestries decorating the spanish covens walls.
Vampires ducked out of his way, some colorful and some still carbon black shadows. One by one they had come to him, as the Spanish vampire Lord had not taken the path Brennan had, for complete transition as a whole. He had instead given them each the option to change.
Some had fled the night of their arrival. He had heard rumors of vampiric resistance, especially in Romania. A force was growing there who hated the name of Harry Potter, and claimed he would be the death of vampires everywhere.
He couldn't deny it. Everyone died, and those he changed would die sooner than any he did not.
He reached his room and locked the door behind him, falling onto his temporary bed with a long weary sigh.
The Cloak rose from inside him, soft silken folds growing in length and breadth until it covered him from head to toe, casting his world into darkened light and some measure of visual peace.
It was too bad that it couldn't cover his thoughts in the same manner, for they spun in wider and wider circles, all focused back in Britain, back on the morning that everything changed.
His future self, so broken, so different. A piece of humanity so mutated that he might have thought it a true monster if it hadn't been himself.
Hermione. How was he going to show her what had become of him? How was he going to hear her voice change when she saw the cracks across his soul, the horcrux gone and his emerald color a flickering thing of light and shadow. When she saw the damage done that day in Diagon, when she and their child died, and only she came back to him.
It had been his idea to go to Diagon. His drive to get away from his future that had lead him straight into its arms. And he couldn't bear to admit it to her.
He was a coward.
Harry turned over under the Cloak, watched the black stars twinkle in a twilight sky, and fell into sleep.
At the fourth warehouse that week, they found dementors waiting for them. Sucking any joy of the hunt from the werewolves, any lust for blood from the vampires, any eagerness for protection from the elves.
Anything one wanted, they took and took, ugly umber chords of badly mixed soul colors, their pattern a rotten stain hanging in the air.
Long moments of hesitation, when Harry told the others to go on, as he held the two dementors trapped in a cage of purple iron and red flame. He didn't want them chased away by patronus; he wanted them gone.
While the rest moved on, Harry stood alone in the square room that made the entrance, brown wooden walls on every side, shadowy purple stone under foot of mixed granite and concrete. He peeled back the iron and flame, and felt the dementors come for him, eager brown hands outstretched, the hoods of their cloaks fallen away to show the empty holes of their gaping mud-brown mouths.
They tried to pull on his soul, and hesitated there a few feet away. They howled in their own broken voices when he laid his power upon them and pulled every shade of green away, yanking at the core of them.
They tried to flee as they unraveled, color by color, blue and purple and red's falling away at his touch. At their core, a spark of their true broken patterns, their original purpose twisted beyond the point of recognition.
They had been created, that much he was certain. Created for something important, perhaps even to rid the world of poltergeists or ghosts or horcruxes as Hermione suspected. But either they had been flawed at their making or twisted along the way by another more malevolent person. They were nothing but corruption now, and the Stone in his heart knew how to unmake them.
Brown was the last color he took, their true color if they ever had any. They were nothing but sound and moving light now, one wordless cry of despair as he unmade them in a beat of his heart. Any soul pieces they carried for fuel long since returned to Death.
Harry paused a moment, staring into the place they had inhabited, before dismantling his temporary cage and moving into the corridor beyond.
He didn't trust the feeling of satisfaction inside him as being his own; but he felt it nonetheless.
Hermione stared hard at the house-elf as he fidgeted, long hands ringing with nervousness.
"You won't take me to him."
Bulbous looked up at her with watery eyes.
"Kraken won't."
"You won't bring him to me."
"Kraken won't."
"You won't slip him this potion." Hermione idly raised a small vial of a very nasty, if nonfatal, concoction.
"Kraken won't."
"What can you do, exactly?" Hermione smiled pleasantly. She almost felt bad for the house-elf; almost. After all, the elf had left her as surely as Harry had, and without a word of goodbye.
Maybe she did feel a bit bad about trapping him in the anti-house elf wards she had installed in the kitchen. It might have brought back poor memories for him. But one had to do what one had to do, and she wanted news god damnit.
And she had known Harry would be sending in a spy to check up on her, and guessed exactly who it would be, the coward.
"Kraken can… Kraken can bring a letter!"
A burst of inspiration. Hermione smiled again, and this time it was genuine.
"Perfect. I've got one ready."
She held it out, and Kraken seized it with both spindly hands, holding it to his heart.
"Can Kraken leave now? Please?"
Kreacher was watching them both with narrowed, disapproving eyes. But it wasn't like the older elf had helped her any in her quest to get into contact with her husband.
One did what one had to do.
Her new and improved motto in life. It had served her well the last two weeks.
"Is he all right?" Hermione asked softly, even as she dismantled the warded circle with a few brisk motions.
Kraken let out a long relieved sigh as the slight glow at his feet disappeared.
Then he frowned.
"Master Harry is unharmed."
A pause, and Hermione seized on it just as the elf had seized on her letter. Like it was a lifeline.
"But?"
"Master Harry is unhappy."
A part of her felt vindicated. It was only right that he was as unhappy as she was. The greater part of herself squashed the sentiment. She didn't want him to be unhappy; but for heaven's sake, why couldn't he just come home? Then she could be mad at him in person, fight it out, and then have wonderful...
A knock at the door, magically bolstered to chime gently in the kitchen. Hermione straightened with a frown, even as the two house-elves popped away nearly in sync, the sound of their arrival by the front entrance instantaneous.
She only had time to walk into the hallway before the door had been opened, and with gaping shock saw Kreacher sail past her with odd grace, loose limbed and eye closed.
Her eyes darted to the door even as she slid back a step to stand in the eave of the door, wand in hand. Kraken stood there, hands blazing with white light, feet planted before the warded boundary he seemed to hold by physical strength alone. She could hear the sounds of spellfire though she couldn't see it, as whoever was on the other side did their best to hammer their way through.
Or more than one person, probably. They had broken her wards without alarm, and knew magic to outmaneuver house-elves. They would get through Kraken's ward if she didn't act quickly.
Hermione ran to the floo, heart banging in her chest. A quick pinch of powder even as she thought rapidly.
Fallon was gone with his wife, to an appointment at St. Mungo's. Vaughn was with his family, and she didn't know their address. Lucy had just left for the night, but she almost always stopped at Diagon to eat dinner with a wizard she knew. Hermione was supposed to be snuggled tight in her almost-unbreakable wards…
How many were there? Why didn't wizards have a bloody version of nine-nine-nine?!
She could floo herself to the Ministry, the smart thing to do. But that left her house-elves defenseless, and her house and all its contents open and vulnerable.
Who to call, who to call, who to…
You're my apprentice.
Hermione seized upon the thought and flung the powder into the fire as she shouted the address.
She jumped through and shouted into the empty foyer.
"Master Snape! Help me!"
Not her most erudite description of events and her desperate need thereof, but one did what one had to do.
She waited three heartbeats, just long enough to see black robes darken the doorway. She reached out a hand when he reached her, words spilling from her mouth as she pulled him into the green flames she still stood in, keeping the connection open.
And was more than a little surprised that he let her.
"Broke my wards, knocked out Kreacher, Kraken can't hold them, need another wand, no idea how to contact the aurors, should have learned that before now…"
The whoosh of flames taking her breath away as she turned into the open connection and then they were through.
She shut her mouth and ran.
Kraken was on his knees, shouting her name with mangled fervor, for her to run, to escape, to get away.
Then as she raised her wand, the barrier fell, and she heard the hissing laughter, wet and sibilant and all too familiar.
She had no time.
The vampire was there, hovering over Kraken in one heartbeat, silhouette just lit with the last of dusk's shadow, and then he was in front of her, cold hands on her neck and her wrist, face too close and mouth opening.
Something hit her from behind, pushing her forwards even as a hand wrapped around her side to haul her back, another hand raising a wand where emerald green light bloomed and spread and...
"Avada Kedavra."
Had she heard those words right? Almost whispered behind her ear?
The vampire howled when the spell struck him, hands releasing her to claw at its chest as it fell to her floor.
Then Hermione was being shoved gently aside as black robes moved past her with more words and more light, this time black as pitch and malevolent with it.
She knew about vampires. She knew how little one single person could do against them. She realized she should have went to the Ministry after all, but she was expecting wizards and witches, not their own supposed allies…
Kraken was at her side, panting. In his hands magic slowly pooled, his dark eyes locked on where Master Snape stood over a now still and silent vampire.
There was blood on her floor, pooling out from where the potions Master stood.
She knew about vampires. You couldn't cage them without bars of silver and wards that took a moon's cycle to make.
The killing curse wouldn't kill them, though apparently it would do them enough harm for you to work other magic over them, do damage that would be more permanent.
You never, never left them alive at your back. A wounded vampire was a vampire in the throes of bloodlust.
Master Snape turned to face her in one swift motion, gliding towards them without a glance for Kraken and his magic.
"We need to go, now. Company will be here in moments." Quick waves of his wand, and the unconscious Kreacher was hovering at their side.
"Now."
Hermione stumbled after him, feeling more than a little useless.
But a vampire. A vampire!
Where was Harry when she needed him?!
"You tell him to come back right now!"
She shouted the words at Kraken, and didn't hear his response until they reappeared in the Ministry atrium, an auror posted by the floos watching their arrival with wide eyes.
"Kraken can't. Master Harry is already left for the attack."
And if that meant what she thought it meant, she wasn't the only one in mortal peril.
To Be Continued in the Next Chapter: Pyramids of Ebony in an Ashen Sky
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