17
The very night Tonks had been arrested, Auror Alastor Moody had technically been off of work.
Moody had been appalled and disgusted to learn that his young protégé and mentor had been lured out of her home until false pretenses, that he had written her a letter demanding she come here to this wretched alleyway that smelled of dank mold, death, and bodily fluids that caused him to scrunch his nose (what was left of it!) in disgust.
He let out a growl of frustration and Alastor 'Mad-Eye' Moody swore underneath his breath, leaning heavily to one side on his wooden walking stick for support as his magical eye swiveled this way and that, surveying the very spot in Echo Alley where he had stood.
The Morning Killer.
Just the mention of the unknown wizard's name was enough to send a chill down Alastor's spine and plastered as a quiet vibration under his scarred skin, what was left of him.
It had to be bloody going on five o'clock in the Merlin-damned morning, and he was no closer to find out what happened to Tonks than he was several hours ago, when Kingsley had sent him an urgent message via owl post explaining what had happened, and for him to meet him here.
In the half-light of the early morning, the alleyway was deserted, eerie.
It wasn't just that the air itself around the grizzled old Auror was still, it was that the air didn't bloody move at all. The leafy avenue was bereft of noise, as if every murmur and rustle were stolen away in the nighttime.
The sky above his head was empty, not just of birds, but of clouds too.
There was no weather at all. The air simply felt cold, chilling his insides. Moody could not shake the feeling that this place felt…off.
It was the kind of silence that falls right before you get knifed in the back. It sent a shiver down his spine and he felt his blood chill in his veins.
The wind was just as bitter as the day before, and the day before yesterday, coming straight from the north, but the scent was something else, metallic almost, with a tinge of acrid burning. It stank of burnt flesh.
Moody felt his stomach lurch and bitter, acidic stomach bile rise up from the pit of his churning insides and create a warm feeling in his chest.
He barely stifled a growl of frustration, already knowing he would find nothing.
Their target was a slippery little bastard, as cunning as a Kappa, and for a moment, he wasn't exactly sure why he had come to the scene.
If he himself already knew that he'd find nothing, then why was he here? Moody let out a low, guttural growl from the back of his throat and dipped into the pocket of his brown, tattered trench coat for his flask.
It could have been water in his flask, but it bloody well wasn't.
Moody uncorked the flagon and swirled it, listening to the chinking of the ice cubes, breathing in the fragrance that only years in an oak barrel could achieve for some of the finest Fire Whiskey known to all of Great Britain.
The Fire Whiskey turned down the raging volume on Moody's thoughts. It brought back to him memories of good times past, a world where Nymphadora Tonks-Lupin had not been falsely arrested and was now imprisoned for a crime that Moody knew Tonks had not committed.
Moody let himself dwell in them rather than think, closing his good eye and tilting the flagon back to his lips, drinking heavily until it was gone.
And in that moment, he was here, and yet he was not, existing in two perfect moments. Somehow, it steadied Moody's frazzled paranoia.
Tonks needed him to be the one to figure out who had done this to her, because her husband, Remus was certainly in no condition to help him.
He almost snorted at that, rolling his one good eye. Anybody who could think his protégé guilty of committing a crime, they were insane.
Perhaps it was because this was where his young protégé, a young woman who, admittedly, he felt had become very much like a surrogate daughter to him, had stood, back pressed against the wall of the cobblestones, before her life had irrevocably changed for good last night.
Moody clenched his teeth, grinding his molars in frustration, and barely stifling his growl of frustration, settled for his temporary release of frustration by giving a curt banging of his walking stick, sending a low wave of thunder through the alley.
It was early enough in the morning no other souls would be out wandering about, and even if they were, a simple Memory Wiping Charm or the Confundus Charm would set them off their path. Alastor sighed, carding his fingers through his grizzled mane of hair.
He still wasn't entirely sure why he had come here. He bloody hated this place, this alleyway. Moody hobbled and limped along the rough cobbled streets that caused his feet within his boots to ache like, well, mad. The buildings were tightly pressed together and loomed over Moody, like a forest of stone.
When he looked up, the roofs were so close together that he could make out only a sliver of the dull grievous skies that was mirrored by the tiny stream of light that trickled to the cold ground. Echo Alley twisted and turned back on itself, first to the right, and then twisting like a snake's body to the left.
From where Moody stood, whether he looked in front or behind using his magical eye, he saw nothing but stone. A deep baritone voice made him jump, and he swore underneath his breath, whirling about on the heel of his boot, walking stick clutched firmly in hand, though he felt the tension in the shoulders leave him when he saw it was only Kingsley.
"This is where Tonks found him tormenting the Muggle girl Remus is in charge of, right?" Kingsley asked, the man asking the question smoothly, the baritone of his voice reverberating through Moody's aching, old bones as Kingsley slid a hand into the interior pocket of his dark blue robes for his wand.
The low rumble of his voice was comforting as it wrapped around Alastor and transported the grizzled aging Auror off to a world where sound was the power that could change everything wrong with the world. It was rumored Kingsley was next in line to take Minister Scrimgeour's place if Rufus ever saw fit to retire from the post.
Kingsley Shacklebolt's voice seemed to boom across the sky itself. Moody would never dare admit this to anyone, but he could listen to Shacklebolt talk all damned day and never tire of listening to the man talk.
It was a voice to sink in as it wrapped you up. Yet, vibrating with power and command and experience. His was a voice with authority. His voice was deep, whenever he spoke, every head in the room would turn.
He had that rich, silky tone. He spoke as if he controlled the world, his experience seeping through. He would remind you of a stormy day. A rather nice one.
"Yes," Moody answered gruffly. "It is." He repressed a shudder.
Where Tonks found him. But it was where the Auror had lost him first. The man had Disapparated, leaving only Tonks and the Muggle girl, Renee Barreau, if that really was her name and she wasn't some imposter, Moody thought darkly, grating his molars even harder in an agitated fit.
Little over six months ago, a young woman barely over the age of nineteen had disappeared whilst walking down Echo Alley late at night, and then a few weeks after her initial disappearance, her remains had been found, dumped unceremoniously in the same location.
This very spot…
It had been Moody and Tonks's case, to track down this bastard and put him behind bars in Azkaban Prison, and the events that followed this tragic incident had sent what was left of his career as a veteran Auror into what Mad-Eye Moody could only describe as something of a free-fall.
Alastor was responsible for most of the fieldwork these days, given that Tonks was now a new mother to Edward Remus Lupin, though they called him Teddy after her deceased father, with Tonks staying behind her desk in an administrative roll, processing the necessary paperwork, warrants for arrest, depositions, summons to appear in court, those things.
Not quite as active as her former duties as an Auror were, but equally just as important, though Tonks had been more than happy to make the switch now that she had a husband and son counting on her to stay safe.
And now bloody look what had happened to her! The Morning Killer had somehow managed to get one over on Nymphadora, and she was left to rot in a dank prison cell in Azkaban unless he could convince the Warden to view both Tonks's and the blonde Muggle lass's memories of what happened here last night, and if they corroborated and were in sync, it ought to be enough, he hoped, to convince the Senior Undersecretary and the Ministry to put Tonks on a form of house arrest until her pending charges could be cleared as well as her name.
At least, that was the plan…
Moody let out a growl of frustration and swiveled his eye this way and that, though he was finding bloody damned well nothing, and he did not bother telling Kingsley to stop with the Revelio Charm the man cast.
If it would help set Shacklebolt's mind at ease, then let him do it.
"Constant Vigilance, Shacklebolt," he barked by way of response as he heard Kingsley heave a sigh of frustration when the incantation came up empty, as Moody already knew that it would. Dispassionate. Practical.
This was how he was forced to behave when on the job and in the field. He froze in his tracks as he had taken a hobbling half-step forward and kicked aside a piece of trash with the edge of his scuffed brown boot.
He thought of the advice he had given Remus's wife when she had been undergoing the rigorous training program to become an Auror like he was.
Whenever you saw something awful, you had to keep it locked away in a box, no matter what it was. The box is something you keep locked in your head, in the darkest corners of the recesses of your mind, and you only ever open this imaginary box to throw something else inside of it.
The actual work, the sights, sounds, smells, that the job entailed and brought with it, you had to keep it separate from your personal life at all costs. It was a simple piece of advice, really, neat, but not easy to follow.
There had been no one that had been prouder than Alastor the day Tonks had graduated from the Auror Training Program, passing with flying colors, though thanks to her innate clumsiness, almost failing Stealth and Tracking, though she managed to pull through, like always.
While he could not believe this had happened to Tonks, there was a small part of him that was grateful the young witch was not around to see how he had dealt with her arrest.
He was sure, yes, he was sure, that Kingsley had pulled a face and could smell the whiskey spirits on his breath, though Shacklebolt knew better than to comment on his drinking.
Mad-Eye Moody squeezed his one remaining eye shut, thinking that Tonks would be ashamed to learn that the box of horrors tucked away inside his head simply would not stay the bloody hell closed.
But Merlin's Beard, what he wouldn't give for it to stay shut. The nightmares he had. All your fault, the snakelike voice taunted him at the back of his mind, knowing that he should have been right at Tonks's side last night, and he wasn't. The voice sounded entirely too much like Snape's voice for his comfort, and Moody hated it, though he did not know how to make it stop.
Today, like he always wondered whenever he was out in the field like this on the job, he wondered how disappointed in him Tonks would be.
Moody stifled his sigh of disappointment as his magical eye swiveled to the right and cautiously looked towards Kingsley out of the corner of its line of sight.
Before the dead girl had turned up in Echo Alley six months ago, followed by a series of murders, all of them in a similar fashion, and all the bodies recovered here, right back where they had been snatched off the streets, Alastor had imagined himself in retirement.
A well-earned rest, and letting Tonks take over the grunt work as she steadily rose within the ranks, satisfied in knowing that Tonks had kept her own Box of Dark Thoughts, as he liked to call it, shut and locked up.
But it turned out he hadn't known himself at all, because if he had, he would have been the first one on the scene following Tonks's arrest last night, and he bloody hadn't been. Kingsley had been the one to take her.
Kingsley gave a curt nod, signaling he noticed Mad-Eye's eye, well, eyeing him, and shifted at the waist slightly as he pocketed his wand.
"They ought to seal this place up. Tear it down if they could." 'They', of course, being the Muggles, though Moody knew the Muggle Prime Minister wouldn't. Echo Alley was a low priority on that man's long list.
When Moody spoke, his voice was gruff, coarse, and rather hoarse, and he knew it was a side effect from the Fire Whiskey he had just chugged.
"It's not this place that causes these murders and does bad things, Shacklebolt. It's our guy. The Morning Killer. Besides, you ought to know better than most, Mr. Shacklebolt, if this creep didn't do it here, he would just pick some other place, a safe house, and the Auror Office would still be responsible for his capture, making sure he can't hurt anybody else," he spat, spitting the man's chosen alias as though it were a bitter poison on his tongue. A dumb name, he thought, but Moody could not manage to pretend to care.
What he did care about was Nymphadora.
Have to get you out, Tonks. No matter what. I'm gonna set you free, he thought, grinding his teeth in anger and annoyance at his actions last night.
Or rather, his lack of actions. If he had only gotten word sooner that Tonks was in trouble, he could have saved her, stopped Umbridge from sending her to Azkaban on a trumped-up charge full of malicious intent.
"Maybe." Kingsley didn't sound too terribly convinced by Moody's words, but nor did it really sound like he cared, as they reached the end. "Watch your step here, Alastor," Shacklebolt cautioned as he stepped over the very same discarded trash can lid that it was rumored the blonde lass, that Muggle, had been forced to step into by Tonks after she enchanted it into a Portkey.
Quick thinking on Nymphadora's part, he thought, impressed with her ability to handle herself under pressure last night as she had been, though there wasn't much about his young protégé that did not impress him now.
"You watch yours!" Moody barked by way of retort, locking his jaw, and feeling his facial muscles tense up, thinking this damned Echo Alley's walkway seemed to stretch on for an eternity, its own sort of labyrinth.
Earlier this morning, about an hour or so, Moody had received a Patronus in the middle of the bloody morning from Auror Runcorn, saying he needed to come as soon as he was able. They had taken into custody Tonks, arresting her on charges of the murder of a young Muggle girl.
Though not even fifteen minutes ago, Kingsley had sent him another message, telling him to come, saying that two teenagers, Muggles, had been taken into their own law enforcement's custody outside the alley.
One of them, Eli Vandherhilt, had been practically in tears and borderline bloody hysterical, and the other, Rob Hendrickson, calm, stoic.
They had found another body, less than an hour after Tonks had already been arrested and escorted back to the Ministry for interrogating.
Moody growled, silently seething as his magical eye swiveled to the left and right, peering through the buildings, searching for any sign that he and Kingsley were being followed as he allowed Kingsley to lead him down the dark cobblestone path of Echo Alley.
Where Tonks saw him.
He wondered if he and Kingsley would even find anything, if those punk kids had been telling the truth. Runcorn stated that they were, and considering the two Muggle boys had witnessed no acts of magic that they had been able to discern from their descriptions of the body they had found or the appearance in the alleyway of any suspicions persons (other than how the poor dead soul wound up sprawled lifeless in Echo Alley) they had not bothered with wiping their memories with a Memory Charm.
If they were telling the truth to Runcorn and Rosier, he thought gruffly to himself, it would prove to all of us Nymphadora's innocence.
Not that he doubted his protégé for an instant, but those within their own department and their Senior Undersecretary remained unconvinced, given the suspicious circumstances under which Runcorn had found Tonks.
The Ministry would likely agree to contain Nymphadora under some form of house arrest, proving Remus and Dumbledore were successful in convincing the young Muggle girl, Barreau, Moody thought her name was, if his memory served him correctly from what he could recall from Kingsley's message, to go along with allowing them to extract the memory of last night from her mind, and presenting both her memory and Tonks's to the Warden of Azkaban Prison and the Minister himself, in order to secure Tonks's release and send her home with her family where she rightfully belonged.
Moody let out a noncommittal noise that sounded like a grunt as he hobbled forward and stopped dead in his tracks, almost succeeding in barreling poor Kingsley Shacklebolt over, who was in the midst of staring down at the ground in front of him. What he'd come for.
"Merlin's left…" Moody swore, his voice trailing off, as his free hand not clutching onto his walking stick clawed at his side, his lungs heaving for breath, and his shoulders shaking, feeling like he was breathing a little bit faster than was his usual custom, although it was not exactly clear if that was from the physical exertion of hobbling all the way down this dank alleyway or the horrific sight that lay before him and Kingsley just now.
The clearing ahead of them, the cobblestones beneath their boots had been pained with some kind of thick red paint, the sign of the Deathly Hallows, Mad-Eye Moody was able to recognize the symbol immediately.
There was something almost occult about this crime scene, and Alastor was quick to decide he did not like it, a first impression that was enhanced by the small tableau laid in the center, the body in full display for him to see.
Merlin's left testicle, Alastor thought. He WANTED me to find it.
The Morning Killer had left another calling card. Another victim. The body was that of a young boy, about fifteen feet away, directly in the center of the table.
The lad had been posed in a kneeling position, bent over so that he was almost praying to his Muggle God, dressed in jeans and a ratty old t-shirt that had ridden up his chest and to his armpits, but the dried, caked blood made it difficult to tell what color the t-shirt was.
Permanently red now, Moody thought, a little bit sad, as his magical eye and his good eye remained fixated on the corpse as it moved quickly over the body, wanting the details of how their murderer had killed this lad, but not wanting to look at the corpse any more than he already had.
This boy had been someone's son, someone's brother or cousin, surely. He had a family, a home, a pet, perhaps, and now…none of it mattered.
There were numerous stab wounds from the looks of it, dark stab wounds on the boy's torso, the blood around now mere pale brown smears.
The grotesqueness of the crime scene made Moody shudder, and he was not a man who displayed his emotions on his sleeve like this at all.
He's going to get what he deserves, Tonks, Moody swore, promising his partner here and now he would do whatever it took to get her out.
A deeper pool of crimson red-stained beneath the young boy's head, which was tilted awkwardly to the left, his profile facing away from Mad-Eye.
This was a dispassionate crime. Aloof. Our guy doesn't bloody care.
For a moment, it felt like the entire country of Great Britain came to a standstill, and then Moody's magical eye drifted towards something else.
"What the hell is that on the ground?" he barked, jolting Kinglsey out of whatever swirling dark thoughts were going on in his coworker's mind, pointing towards the ground with a curt jerk of his wooden walking stick.
Kingsley Shacklebolt shot Alastor Moody a truly withering glance. "It's a boy's body, Alastor. Surely, your magical eye could tell you that?" he growled, kneeling into a crouch below the body to examine it.
"Don't touch him!" Moody growled, pointed ignoring Shacklebolt's snarky comment and lumbering forward, leaning heavily on his stick for support, taking a couple of careful steps forward, anxious not to disturb the crime scene until he and Kingsley could take care of the body in a second, though first, they would have to determine the identity of the boy.
But still, he knew he needed to make sense of what he was seeing and ensure that it wasn't his magical eye acting up again or playing some horrible trick on him.
There was more blood on the cobblestone street beneath his boots, stretching out in a circle at all angles of the boy's body.
Something white was sticking out near the bottom of the kid's sneaker. Grunting with the effort, Moody prodded gently at the boy's shoe, trying to be as cautious as he could to not disturb the crime scene too much, but wanting to know what that was that the murderer had left on the ground.
A calling card? He wondered, giving a curt rap of his walking stick, and almost instantaneously, the blood-soaked plastic card floated in mid-air, until Moody carefully reached out with his thumb and forefinger and plucked it from the air. The kid's school ID, but too faded to make out.
Too faded, and now permanently stained crimson, besides. Completely drenched in the kid's blood, that precious life force, now stained brown.
The pattern of blood on the ground seemed too uniform to Alastor to be considered accidental, and he knew The Morning Killer had done this.
Moody furrowed his scarred brows into a scowl as he continued to keep his eyes fixated on the ground beneath where the body had been placed.
It was only when Alastor reached the edge of the bloodstains that he realized just what in the seven hells they actually were, and he recoiled.
"What?" Kingsley demanded, noticing the sudden shift in his partner's behavior. "What did you find, Alastor?" he murmured, coming over to stand behind Moody and peer over the older grizzled Auror's shoulder.
It seemed to take Alastor ages to find his voice, and when he did manage to speak to Kingsley, his voice was gruffer, coarser than before.
"We got us one sick puppy, Shacklebolt," he barked. "Contact anyone you can at the Ministry. Get me Dumbledore and tell the man and Remus to meet me at Azkaban Prison straight away and bring the Muggle girl."
Alastor heard Shacklebolt ask again what it was that he saw, and he did not immediately reply, but that was because he did not know-how.
He heard Kingsley let out an audible gasp and a murmured exclamation of a curse even Moody dared not repeat out loud and heard him immediately wave his wand and conjure a Patronus to send a message.
We're getting you out of here, Tonks. And soon, he promised, gritting his teeth in anger as his magical eye and his good eye remained fixed on the gruesome sight before him.
He could tell Kingsley was just as disturbed as he was, and he knew that their killer was still after Tonks.
Moody's magical eye counted not one, but seven locks of Tonks's all-too-familiar dark maroon wavy tresses, and counted the red stains as best he could, but it was hard to keep track of them all on the stones like this.
Several dozens of bloodied handprints were pressed against the stone.
"What's your verdict, Alastor? I've not yet heard back from Dumbledore," Kingsley murmured after a moment spent in a heavy silence. "What should I tell him?" he demanded; his baritone voice quiet.
Moody's magical eye swiveled to the left to regard his partner on the force.
"Tell it to the man straight, Shacklebolt. Tonks did not do this. I don't know the Morning Killer's name, but we're gonna nab this bastard, and soon. We have a killer on the loose after her, and I don't think he's done."
Without so much as a word, he knelt to the ground and plucked a single thread of Tonks's hair off the ground, nestling it into the pocket of his brown trench coat, and turned on the heel of his boot and Disapparated.