A/N: so, because of the chapters getting too long, I'm doing a special Valentine's Day post. And in personal news: I legally married my partner today. You can see it on the Dallas Voice website.
A/N #2: This chapter gets a bit gory. This serves as your fair warning if you need to skip it.
Harry was dragging a barely-living Healer by his wrists, leaving a thick red trail behind him. Ginny's body was wedged in the doorway, blasting back the Inferi to make a path for the survivors. Severus' wand-work had chopped two of the corpses into enough pieces that they were down. Two other Inferi were still held to the bed with one last Relashio charm, which was proving to be ineffective each time it was re-cast.
Harry was experimenting with blasting charms, which would have never worked on a living body. Once the targeted Inferi realized her arm had been ripped off, it ran at them full-tilt. Severus noticed that the severed arm was also coming after them, and he immolated it without a second thought.
Ginny heard the scrambling behind her before Harry yelled, "Behind-"
Ginny was off-kilter, seeing the floor rise to meet her face as a corpse rode her to the ground, before hearing her boyfriend finish, "-you."
Ginny tucked her head in an attempt to protect her neck. Teeth bit into the robes, bruising the flesh beneath, but had trouble gnawing through the spell-enhanced cloth. It reared back and tried again, this time its teeth found purchase into the neck, and blood flowed as teeth pierced the skin, chomping at random. Harry carefully aimed and used a blasting hex to remove an arm and kept devouring the ginger, so he hexed the skull, reeling at the sight of bone and brain spattered across the floor. It didn't seem to care.
Suddenly, Ginny felt a wash of air and a heavy blow, the body that was on top of her seemed to disappear. She scrambled up from the ground and found Severus grappling with it as he flew without aid of a broom. Fire erupted on the corpse as Severus threw it into a crowd of Inferi that were still shambling forward.
Severus flew back, drenched in blood and sweat with a wild look in his eyes. "Go, get upstairs with the Healer. I'll hold them off." His voice was lower than usual, a feral fear dripping from it, but he stood his ground as he started pushing the pair towards the door. "Better idea, Harry..." Severus reached into Harry's new tactical robes, pulled out a vial from the left breast pocket, clicked something on the top of it, and threw it towards the pile of dead that was getting back up to give chase.
"What was that?" Harry asked as he and Ginny were helping the near unconscious Healer up the steps. An explosion roared behind them, leaving a blast of hot hair hitting them in the back. Severus nudged them up the stairwell as he closed the door to buy them a bit more time.
Fleur moved in beside Krum, shoving him back a step. She lit her right hand aflame and steadied it underneath the thing's jaw. The Veela took a deep breath, centered herself the way one would before you cast something big and Dark, and pictured the end result like you would any Transfiguration. She imagined her hand coming out through the top of the skull like a spear, then thrust with all her strength. She tried to spear her flaming fist through its head in hopes to destroy the brain. She felt her hand go through the soft tissue under the jaw with a sharp, wet, movement, then her fingertips went through the soft palate and bone at the back of the mouth, and kept going. Fleur screamed as she felt her thumb enter the strange emptiness of the sinus cavities. Merlin forgive me...
It reared back from the Veela, its jaws trying to open as it clawed at its mouth with the only free hand, letting the medi-wizard fall back onto the bed. They got their first glimpse of the wound. The chest was broken and had a gaping hole in it. Broken ribs gleamed around the blood and skin like a grotesque white picket fence. Neville stared down into that hole and retched as he realized half of the heart was gone and had been consumed. Inferi weren't supposed to be flesh-eaters!
"Oh, Merlin!" Neville said. The sharp tang of warm acid hit the air as he vomited at the horror before him. Viktor felt queasy already, and having the Auror throw up beside him made it even harder to keep his own lunch.
The inferi tied to the bed had finally broken free of the magical bonds. Both hands were clenched at Fleur's wrist, trying to wrench its head free. The now-deceased mediwizard shuddered and began to rise as one of the undead as well. Panic and rage competing for supremacy, Fleur let the fire in her hands blaze brighter as the impaled Inferi burned, letting her shove the animated corpse away from them. As it fell, the hands were frantically batting at its own burning skull. Fleur lobbed fireballs at everything coming at them now without any compunction or mercy. The broken corpse at their feet went still as flesh receded to expose bone, and the smell of burning hair hit the air. Neville, Krum, and Fleur exchanged a look between themselves. Just a look, no words, and they turned towards the rest of the room with one goal in mind: get to the stairs any way they could. There was nothing left to save on this floor but themselves.
I looked up and found Draco and Narcissa at the far door with a male Healer sagging between them. He wasn't dead yet. Great. I yelled, "Run!"
We tried. I sensed movement and turned in time for a corpse to tackle me full on and send us both crashing to the floor. My wands were instinctively doing the Sectumsempra curse as I sliced toward the jaw, trying to keep its teeth off of me, but it moved and I instead transected the throat. Black, dead blood splashed across my face in a luke-warm thick-liquid rush, blinding me for a second. I could feel it jerkily moving over my body, legs straddling my hips. It was dead, and I was grateful to realize that the corpse only wanted to kill me in this position.
I kept my right hand pushed into raw shoulder, trying to hold it back as it strained over me. Even with a wand in each hand I felt helpless as my vision was obscured by the Inferi blood. I wiped it out of my eyes with the back of my left sleeve as I tried to keep at least one wand on it. It snapped at me like a dog, and I screamed. My wand was nearly is its mouth as I cut its cheek so deep the wand tip scraped on teeth. It screamed and twisted, sinking teeth into my hand. I screamed as it shook its head like a dog with a bone. Through the haze of pain, my hand released, dropping my wand. I had two wands… where did the Elder wand go?
It came at me, cheek and neck sliced open, milky-blue eyes wide in fury. It was a wizard at one point, but the foreign look on him now reminded me more of a Goblin. It went for my throat. There was no time to grab the dropped wand, so I went for its eyes. I lunged into it, plunging my thumbs into its eyes, using our combined momentum to push them deeper than I could have done by myself. I felt the eyeballs rupture like peeled grapes, exploding in warm fluid and thicker things.
It screamed, shaking its head back and forth, fingernails breaking as it clawed into the back of my hands. My grip on the Inferi's skull was absolute until Draco was suddenly there, pulling it backwards, banishing it across the room to impale itself into a half-shattered wooden door. I looked down at my hands, shaking and dripping with sticky undead fluids. Amazing what you can do when you're terrified.
I was on my knees, grabbing the dropped wand and summoning the other. Narcissa dragged me to my feet, and we were almost to the door.
Draco steeled his nerves as he used a cutting charm and decapitated it, lifting the severed head by the hair. The jaw was still snapping at him, and panicking, he threw the head away and looked at the rest of the body as it was jerkily attempting to wrench itself free. Merlin's taint, it's still alive!
My wife looked at it in a mix of horror and curiousity, carving into its chest and summoning the heart with a simple Accio. "The head is gone, the heart is removed, so why is it still active?"
Pointing the Wand of Destiny at it, there seemed to be a sort of magical kinship between them. "Incendio." I cast, wondering if Wand beats Rock. Narcissa did the same with the heart, and Draco followed suit with the disposed head. I knew that the image of the heart burning to ash on the floor of Saint Mungo's would haunt my dreams some other night. Valentine's Day will never be the same for me.
We looked around at the other corpses who were fighting their restraints to attack us, each with that eerily similar look of consciousness in its face. They knew we knew how to finally kill them, and their struggles to be free became more frantic. Three of them broke free at the same time, and I blasted two of the corpses back, trusting Draco would get the third. Instead, he had spelled at the Inferi I had slammed across the room, and it took the opportunity and jumped him.
I tried to align a spell at it, but the Inferi was already on top of Draco's back. I hesitated for fear of hitting him, then I realized that it wasn't trying to eat him. These aren't the zombies of Muggle legend, Granger! It slammed Draco's head twice into the floor, hard. I gulped in fear for his life as it then looked up at me. Spellfire erupted from the other end of the hallway, and I could tell in my periphery that Fleur's team was alright and came up without any survivors. There was something in the eyes of this Inferi that hadn't been in any of the others. It wasn't just the communal consciousness, but there was an intelligence. There was fear. It held fear of us. Afraid of being stopped, as if it had orders to do something in particular. Afraid of failing its master, maybe even afraid of dying.
It shoved past Narcissa with an unnatural speed and scrambled through a gaping hole in the wall, as if it were late for some appointment. The white rabbit is off to see the Red Queen, it seems. I forced myself to focus, realizing my mental state was fragile if not already fractured. Fleur threw a fireball but missed as the undead creature scrambled and began to climb its way up between the walls. There's enough space to crawl between the walls? Blocking the stairways was pointless then... I knew it had to be stopped, that if it escaped, it would do something very, very bad. Draco was bleeding from his head, possibly even unconscious from the impact. Instinct took over as I cupped Narcissa's cheek and my eyes pleaded for her to understand. "Save our son." She nodded, putting her arm under Draco's and started dragging him to the stairs. Krum, Fleur, and a shell-shocked Neville was there to help them. It would have to do, it would have to be enough.
Narcissa felt a sudden rush in the room behind them as they went for the stairwell. Neville stumbled back against the wall as he used his wand to close the door. It slammed closed with Hermione on the other side of it, with a finality that left her feeling uncomfortable. She saw Viktor swing his wand around as a corpse came up from below them. Fleur reached to open the door, only to be surprised as Arnie Peasegood burst through and warded it shut behind him.
There was a rumbling whoosh of air as if a giant had drawn a deep breath, and the faint smell of brimstone told Narcissa that the second floor was now filled with fire. Flames licked the door as the orange-gold glow shone through the gap at the bottom of the warded door. They could feel the intense heat beating against the walls as Fire alarms went off with a high-pitched scream. Peasegood doubled down, shielding them all as they scrambled up the stairs, waiting for that tremendous heat to crack the wards and spill over all of us.
"HERMIONE!" Narcissa yelled, feeling powerless as she and Neville took Draco back upstairs. Fleur was lobbing fireballs down and incinerating the Inferi that tried to use the stairwell as Viktor and Arnie took point and cleared a way for them to regroup upstairs.
"She said fiendfyre was the only sure way, Cissy. These Inferi seem... not alive, but-"
"-aware. And damn hard to kill."
I slashed my wand outward, like a conductor ceasing an entire orchestra at once. The fiendfyre obeyed me, and a small part in the back of my mind knew I should be scared that I was able to do this now. Bodies burned, and I was grotesquely reminded of flame-broiled hamburgers by the smell. I recoiled as the smell and other things came over me, and I braced for the backdraft. Instead of heat spilling over, it was coolness, water. What the..? I raised my eyes to see sprinklers were flooding the room. Looking around, I saw that the corpses were burned to ash.
The room now cleared, I went over to the gaping hole in the wall where the quick Inferi climbed into. Alarms were louder now, and I had realized that there were two different ones going off, mixing together into a skin-crawling noise. Narcissa stepped into the room, and I heard her voice over the maddening noise. "Pote de Cristo!" It must be Italian...
I turned to face her as the water pounded upon me, soaking my hair and clothing alike. Narcissa looked shocky, like she finally saw too much as her eyes landed on the only burned body that didn't turn completely to ash. It wasn't an Inferi when I used the Fiendfyre. He was dead now, beyond any help I could give him. We still had one more corpse on the run. I laid my fingertips on the body's neck just under the jaw, and I went about decapitating and segmenting him into parts in case the body would be re-animated with the stone.
The Hit Wizard robes finally hit me, and only then I realized who it had to be. Narcissa was shaking at this. Shit. I should have grabbed my wife and said, "He's dead. Gumboil is dead." But I couldn't do it. I got to my feet. "Cissy."
She was still staring into the room at the dissected remains of Arnie's partner.
"Narcissa!" I yelled, pleading for her response. She turned, but her eyes had the thousand-yard stare as if she wasn't really here at all.
"We've got one Inferi on the run. We can't let it get away."
She stared at me with dull eyes. Merlin, I needed some help here! I walked up to face her, saw the emptiness like she were under the Imperious Curse, and I slapped her decently enough to leave my own hand stinging. Damn, that was harder than I'd meant.
Her head snapped to face me, and I braced for her to slap me back, yet she didn't. She just stood there, hands shaking in tight fists, eyes blazing with a fury that needed a target that deserved it. When she didn't slap me back, I said, "Bad thing went that way." I pointed at the hole in the wall. "We need to stop it."
She started to ramble in Italian. I couldn't understand much of it, but the fear and anger translated fine. I looked into her eyes and touched her mind. I didn't hear the door open behind me as Severus' voice called, "Hermione!"
"I thought I lost you."
No, I'm here. The intelligent inferi was still on the loose. Bugger this.
"Please snap out of it, Cissy!" I went back to the broken wall, stepping over Gumboil's torso.
Severus came in from a stairwell and was also drenched in blood and water, eyes blazing with the heat of battle. The sprinklers must have turned on in the stairwell, too.
"Did you see it?" I asked, unsure if he knew what I was talking about. He cast a spell, his eyes seemingly looking through the walls.
"Down two floors, end of the hall." His jerky motions betrayed the usual calm exterior he always maintained, but his voice was flat and distant. Maybe if I survived this, I could also go into shock, too.
I half-turned as I wedged myself into the gap between the walls. "I'll go down, you take my wife."
"Mione." Narcissa's voice cut through and it felt like a gentle knife in the gut. She tossed her pistol towards me, and I summoned it to catch it gently in my left hand and checked the clip. I looked at her in relief that she seemed coherent.
"The Goblins have the stone; we'll need a survivor to tell us who's been using it." I hadn't realized how much I had been looking forward to killing the goblins for this. I nodded as I wedged myself and slid down a level.
Harry was glad to see almost everyone on the top floor. He and Peasegood looked through the vials on his right side and figured out how to revive the Healer as Draco's bleeding head wound was being taken care of by his girlfriend Ginny. It was unmistakable, the connection between the pair of them. Almost like what I have with her.
The screech of the fire alarms ended as Viktor found the speakers and destroyed them with a vicious glee. The instant silence was almost too much as he watched Healer Strout fuss over the injured Healer as Gilderoy Lockhart huddled with the Longbottoms.
"How's Draco?" he asked Ginny. Her eyes darted around the room as if she had to get her bearings again.
"..um, his pulse is there, strong and sure. He's unconscious, but alive. I'm not certain if reviving him is a good thing though. Healer?" Ginny asked, and Strout came over and nodded her agreement.
The Healer that was injured winced as he nodded his thanks to the Aurors. "I'm Healer Rutherford Poke. Call me Ford. My brother Royden warned me that the peace treaty with the Goblins went bad."
Fleur put a consoling hand on Harry's shoulder. "The level is secure, 'arry. Go to her." Harry nodded his thanks as he realized her accent was coming back. He finally had a moment to decompress, and all he wanted to do was kneel beside Ginny and be there as Draco was revived. Ginny readily accepted him by her side as they both smiled through tears as they saw Draco's black and swollen eyes force themselves open to the sight of them.
"I... made it?" Draco asked, hope etching his face before the pain made him wince down to a squint.
"Don't scare me like that again, Ferret," Harry said, "else I'll dump you."
"We'll dump you." Ginny corrected, relief and grief and happiness all coalescing into a crushing hug between the three of them.
