Trigger Warning: Corpses, death violent tendencies, the usual tropes in a serial killer/murder mystery.
25
Renee drew in a sharp breath that pained her lungs as she nervously fumbled the key in her flat's door, swearing under her breath as the door made a truly loud creak, alerting anyone aside from Billy and Mrs. Jenkins who might be here to her presence.
She flinched, pausing in the darkened doorway, though she very nearly screamed when the sound of what sounded like a thud and a yelp reached her eardrums.
Renee clamped her hands over her mouth to stifle the scream that threatened to escape her lips.
"Billy?" she whispered, gingerly stepping over the threshold of the door. "Is it you?" She was met with nothing but silence as an answer and Renee gave her head a curt shake to clear it, about to flick the switch when she heard the unmistakable sound of what sounded like a body hitting the floor. "What the hell?" she swore, knitting her brows. She knew that sound.
Sometimes Billy sleepwalked in his sleep and was prone to accidentally hitting his knees or stubbing his toe. Though what struck Renee as odd was that her kid brother hadn't said anything. He usually got excited whenever she came home, and asked about her day at the restaurant, wanting to know more.
She felt her way inside and groped for the light switch. As fall crept on in downtown London, it got so damned bloody dark early that it might as well have been the middle of the night, instead of only going on maybe about seven o'clock or so…
Renee felt the light switch at the tip of her fingers and flicked it upward, shielding her eyes as she waited for the blinding warm light of the lightbulb in the ceiling fan fixture to flood their simple living room with light, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the change.
Though nothing happened. "Ugh, just great. Power outage," she groaned. "Billy? Is that you?" The young blonde continued to stand in the dark, eerily quiet house. "Goddamn it," she swore and stepped further into the living room. "Billy, if this is your idea of a sick stupid prank, it's not—"
A sudden shriek left her throat as she felt something hard and wet press itself against her hip and Renee was forced to throw herself to the side to avoid colliding with whatever that thing happened to be. A light little laugh bubbled its way up into her throat when she saw it was only the fake succulent their neighbor, Mrs. Jenkins, across the way had given her. Nobody wants a big sister that can't even keep a plant alive, Billy's babysitter had joked once.
But Renee's laughter immediately died on her tongue and her chest tightened and constricted, and she froze when the blonde felt something press against the edge of her black sneaker and she knelt down to the living room floor, wanting a look.
Reaching out a slightly shaking hand and lowering it, she immediately recognized said object that she placed her trembling hand down as Billy's face.
"Billy?" she whispered, a horrible coil twisting her stomach into hard knots as her heart crept its way up into her throat and she swore she tasted bile. "Billy, is that you?" she pleaded, her fear rising. She shook her kid brother's body but got no response from the boy in return. "Oh, god, oh, fuck," she swore, trying to contain her panic as she stood and slowly backed away, her hands clamped over her mouth. Her brother on the floor lay lifeless.
Lifeless. His dark hair scattered in multiple places, stained with dried crimson. His own blood.
His green eyes were wide open, but his jade irises held a sudden sadness and fear that no words or painting could ever match. His clothes, a simple t-shirt, and jeans were bloody. And the smell. The smell was the most disturbing thing Renee had ever sniffed. Her heart pounded as one question continued to race through her mind: where was he?
She was losing her mind, again. She could feel it unraveling, the threads of every happy memory Barreau could once recall, all but disarray of strings scattered at her feet. Her knees dug into the carpeted floor as she hit the ground next to her brother, her hands unsteady as they clawed at Billy's t-shirt, desperate to feel some sort of pulse.
Renee opened her mouth to scream bloody murder, to cry, but not a sound came out. Her eyes saw nothing; they'd lost all sight of what was and the things that could have been. The world turned into a blur, and so did all the sounds. The taste. The smell. Everything was just gone.
Renee paused trying to hold back the strange feelings rumbling inside of her, but she just couldn't. A lone tear traced down her cheek, and just like that, the floodgates opened. So many tears burst forth like water from a dam, spilling down her pale face. Her chin trembled as if she was a small child.
She breathed heavier than she ever had before as if she had just run a marathon. Renee was gasping for air that simply wasn't there. Her throat burned to form a silent scream. Is this what crying felt like?
Renee swallowed hard the bile that had crept its way from her stomach and up into her throat as she shakily rose to her feet and backed away slowly.
Have to…call someone. Cops, call the cops, no call Tonks or someone. Do wizards have phones?
Her brain couldn't process any of this. she prayed their phone lines still worked even though the power was out. Before she could turn on her heel to make a beeline for the kitchen, however, Renee's right shoulder collided against something hard and warm and she stumbled backward.
A startled scream left her lips and she looked up at the source. The moment her tear-filled blue eyes landed on him, at first, Renee couldn't process the information. Her mouth when dry and her throat and chest seized up, rendering her utterly breathless.
Everett's body looked taller and stronger in a set of pristine black robes that billowed and swished when he moved than it ever had in his jeans and sweaters combinations the frequent times the man had come into the Broken Spoon Café for a cup of his favorite coffee: black, just like his heart.
Reading the Morning Killer's methods in the newspapers, Renee never understood the sheer terror his victims must have felt before they died. Now she could. This murderer had killed her brother, and now, he was going to kill her too. The moment he took a step forward, Renee stumbled backward and collided with the glass coffee table.
The back of her knees hit the glass-covered wood and she fell backward onto the table, shattering the glass.
"WHY?" she screamed, baling her now-bleeding, white-boned hands into fists, her knuckles shaking with the effort to steady herself as she crawled backward on the floor, away from him.
No answer. Everett always was the quiet type. The man approached her slowly, calmly, deliberately, the tip of his wand raised and pointed squarely at her chest. His actions were controlled, not rushed.
He did not rush towards her or run at all. He remained…eerily and disturbingly unaffected by Renee's tears streaming down her cheeks, or the fact that he had to kick aside Billy's lifeless body in order to further advancing on her as Renee quite literally, backed herself into the furthermost corner of their living room, wildly searching for a way out.
Renee felt fresh tears sting and touch at her eyes as Everett continued his silent stalking towards her and she waited, her lips parted open as if to scream for help, praying that someone—Mrs. Jenkins, Lupin or Tonks, or hell, even Sirius—would hear her, but nothing but a strangled attempt at the speech was coming out of her mouth as she cried.
Renee was not a witch, though she was wishing right that she were. She wanted nothing more than to kill this man herself for what he took from her. She knew her chances of escaping were slim to none. Everett would catch her before she'd even get two feet away from him, she was sure of it.
Hell, he could snap her like a twig if he wanted, but something told her he'd rather use his wand, and then it hit her. He killed most of them with that wand in his hand, that's why there was no physical evidence, though all the victims she'd read about in the paper and on the telly all had one thing in common: expressions of utter terror on their faces, their eyes wide open, mouths in an eternal silent scream. Billy over on the floor was no exception to this rule. His wand hand raised, and Renee put her hands up.
"NO, Everett, don't!" she cried, the second she saw his hand give a flick, and he froze. Renee squeezed her eyes tightly shut and waited for…whatever spell he was about to cast, or for the feel of something to rip into her flesh and kill her on the spot, but it never came for her.
Renee swallowed and, when she had regained at least an ounce of courage, peeked open one eye and looked up into the man she'd used to serve coffee to, and was always polite and kind to, though she didn't particularly like the man himself.
He merely proceeded to stare down his nose at her blankly, but she could see those piercing eyes of green that, though she hated to admit it, were the man's best quality aside from his thick head of dark hair. They had the same look the restaurant manager used to attribute whenever he was trying to make up his mind on which pastry to order to go with his coffee.
"Everett, why?" she begged, practically pleading with the man to tell her why he'd killed her brother, and to her utter amazement, his wand hand lowered at his side.
Gasping for breath that simply would not return to her lungs, Renee slowly sat up on the table, careful to mind where she placed her hands, not wanting the glass to pierce her palms, and looked up at the killer, tears streaming down her cheeks. She had no clue how to go about this at all.
Did she cry? Beg him not to kill her? Scream for help and hope the noise attracted someone here? She didn't have much experience in dealing with psychopaths, save for her ex, John Newall, but that was bloody different. This was very, very new.
And very, very bad. Renee flinched when Everett slowly brought up his left hand, the one not clutching onto his wand, and hovered the pads of his fingertips just over her cheekbones. She could feel his fingertips on her tear-streaked face though the man did not touch her, for which she was glad.
Renee tasted bile, resisting the urge to smack his hand away, knowing that if she tried, such a thing would only provoke his anger further, and then he really would kill her, and she'd see Billy and their parents sooner again rather than later, yes…
It felt like an electrical surge that caused goosebumps to erupt all over her skin and the fine hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end.
He…he wasn't going to kill her? But…why? Her surge of confusion quickly began to fade, however, as she watched Everett raise his wand to her chest again, but before Renee could allow herself to feel the inevitable terror that soon threatened to consume her, he jerked his hand down and vanished on the spot the moment a loud, deafening crack! filled her dark living room that smelt of death.
This time, her scream, more of a half-choked bubbling sob, left her lips as her head whiplashed so sharply upwards at the noise that she felt a flaring white-hot lightning bolt travel up her neck and around the contour of her ear. She yelped, clamping a hand to her neck, and rubbing it gingerly before moving it back to cover her mouth with a trembling hand and felt hot tears leave her lids.
"Miss Barreau?" came Lupin's cautious voice.
Renee made a muffled noise at the back of her throat that instantly alerted Tonks's husband to her presence, kneeling on her knees in a pile of broken glass fragments, cradling her brother's lifeless body. Wherever Everett had disappeared to, the bastard had vanished.
She embraced her thrusting shoulders. Renee couldn't remember the last time she'd felt such shivering, such revolt, and self-disgust before, and her body went utterly limp the moment Lupin knelt on the floor beside her.
"Merlin…." He moaned, once his eyesight adjusted to the darkness and his sight landed on the lifeless corpse of her brother, not even seven years old. A pang of pity and overwhelming sadness pricked at his heartstrings as he quickly realized one of the Muggle woman's worst fears had come to light, and he and Tonks should have been here.
Her mind rioted with desperation, wanting to know what she'd ever done to deserve such a hellish life, a soul that wanted to be free of this pain and the clutches of the evil of this world.
She lost the last thing in this life that she had sworn to protect, and she had failed her little brother. She began to scream. The soothing words of Remus Lupin made little to no difference at all.
"Come away," he urged into the shell of her ear. "Y—you don't need to see this. Come. Now."
Without waiting for Renee to respond (she couldn't), Lupin took hold of Renee's forearm and violently wrenched her away from her brother's body. "No!" she screamed, immediately thrashing in the werewolf's strong grip around her waist, fighting tooth and nail as Tonks's husband worked to put as much distance between herself and Billy's body as he could. "I—I can't leave him! We—we have to-h—have to bury him! Let. Me. GO!"
"You don't need to be here right now," Lupin answered in a gruff voice, though his voice cracked and warbled as he risked one more glance back over at the lifeless six-year-old's body on the floor. "Tonks and I are taking you back. Sirius is just outside. We'll…we'll come back for him, Miss Barreau, I promise, but right now, you aren't safe."
Lupin's fear surged through his veins, squeezing his eyes tightly shut the moment his senses were assaulted with the scents and sights of the outside world the moment he forcefully dragged a violently protesting Renee outside of her flat, cringing as Sirius, who'd been sitting on the front stoop of the complex alongside Tonks, practically bolted to his feet, looking appalled and disgusted at her physical condition and the way Remus was forcefully dragging her down the steps.
"What happened?" Sirius demanded hoarsely, taking the steps two at a time to meet Lupin and Renee on the steps, his pale gray orbs narrowing in suspicion as they lingered uncomfortably on Renee's too-pale, grief-stricken, tearstained face.
Lupin felt a muscle in his jaw twitch as he took note of the shimmering unshed moisture that wasn't exactly tears glistening in his best friend's eyes, thinking he'd never seen Black flustered over a woman before, until this very moment. He shoved aside the inappropriate thought, lowering his voice as he took a cautious half step down the last step and onto the cracked sidewalk at his feet.
"Her brother was just killed. In there. It's him. We need to take her back. It's not safe for her here. No sign of the Morning Killer, Sirius. He's…gone."
"WHAT?" Sirius roared, losing all semblance of composure as his face rapidly drained of colors.
His breaths were coming in short, his chest was tight. For a moment, Black thought he might faint. His blood was pounding, roaring in his eardrums, and he could hear Tonks speaking to Lupin, and then to him, though all he heard at the moment was a horrible, fatigued ringing in his ears.
The world was terrible, vile, and wicked.
"Sirius, don't do something stupid!" Tonks urged desperately. "You don't want to risk yourself getting arrested and chucked back in Azkaban—"
"Why the hell did you tell me this, Moony, if not to do something about it?" Sirius roared, turning the worst of his wrath on his best mate.
Anger swept over his wretched body in a blackening torrent, and he almost launched himself through the front door of Barreau's apartment complex and went after Everett himself, the snake.
Sirius balled his hands into fists and kicked at the black iron-wrought hand railing. Black was making a truly terrible noise that belonged to neither man nor dog whenever he was Padfoot, a noise of anger, pain, and an utter sense of betrayal.
He pounded on the railing and then the front door, needing an outlet to vent his pain and frustrations against, wishing he could blow this whole building to pieces, and kill Everett himself.
Lupin was standing beside him, trying to put an arm over Black's shoulders, but Sirius violently wrenched away, not having any of it right now.
He flung himself against the wall of the complex, screaming bloody murder, a truly haunting sound, not giving a damn who heard.
Remus made no attempt to come anywhere near Sirius until the worst of his rage, that black tempest had run its course, and waited to approach until Black had let it all out and was panting in ragged gasps as the worst of his temper evaporated.
Sirius tasted bile in his mouth. He swallowed it. Lupin opened his mouth to speak further, seeing the growing look of outrage in Sirius's eyes, though was not given an opportunity as the moment Black reached out a trembling hand with the intent to set it on her shoulder and escort her back to Grimmauld Place, the Muggle woman immediately went into hysterics and started thrashing, fighting Lupin tooth and nail like a savage, rabid dog and screaming bloody murder as Sirius, with gently but surprising strength, took her arm.
"Don't touch me!" Renee shouted, tears still steadily streaming down her face. "GET AWAY FROM ME! LET GO OF ME!" she hollered hoarsely, desperately trying to scratch at Sirius's face, not wanting any man to touch her right now.
"Renee, stop, stop, it's me! It's me, it's me!" shouted Sirius, desperate to bring Barreau back to them and calm her down. They'd already made enough of a scene as it was, and as the worst of his anger fled, replaced with something much quieter and sadder, he realized that Moony was right, damn it. They needed to take her back home. She was not safe.
Not knowing what else to do, he cradled her head in his hands and tilted it slightly upwards, forcing Renee with no choice but to meet his gaze.
He wanted nothing more than to sweep her in his arms and Disapparate with her, take her someplace away from all of this. But he exhaled a deep, shaking breath and forced himself to remain calm.
The last thing he wanted to do was startle Barreau while she was in such an emotionally vulnerable state. He'd only seen her cry the once, the night she'd fallen through his bloody ceiling on accident but had never seen her lose composure.
Not like this. It was unsettling, to say the least, and a little bit frightening, if he was being honest with himself. He blew out a deep breath and forced himself to remain calm. "Renee?" he asked softly.
She met his gaze at the sound of his voice, which was unusually soft and not as rough and coarse, sensing the shift in Sirius's behavior for her benefit, and the look of heartbreak on her face almost physically hurt him as her face twisted and contorted with grief. Her eyes were red and glassy, fresh tears streaked down blotchy cheeks.
She continued to cry and showed no signs of stopping.
"Did he…did he hurt you?" he asked, fearing the worst, and not wanting and both needing the answer. Much to his relief, Renee shook her head.
"No," she croaked out in a faint whisper.
His concern melted away to something quieter and sadder as Renee ducked her head, quiet sobs wracking her shoulders as she sniffed, struggling to reign in her grief. Sirius found he had nothing to say in response, and neither did Lupin or Tonks. He wracked his brain in silence, but he was too Merlin-damned distracted.
The only thing he was able to comprehend and understand completely that someone he was growing to care for was falling apart to pieces in front of him and he had not the faintest clue how to help her, what to say.
One look over at Moony and Tonks told him they couldn't help him with this one, either, as they were just as lost as he was, and looked equally upset.
Hesitantly, and feeling like an awkward schoolboy, Sirius gently moved closer to Renee and wrapped his arms around her violently shaking form. She resisted at first, stiffening at the intimacy of the closeness of the unexpected gesture, though Sirius felt the tension in his own shoulders dissipate inch by inch as the woman turned and buried her face in his chest, letting herself cry with no restraint.
As his maroon velvet coat grew damp with her tears, Sirius tried to comprehend what in the seven hells had just happened. How the hell had she managed to give him the slip without him knowing?
How had Everett known she'd come home? And more importantly, when would he come back?
He did not give the questions a voice, as much as they burned for answers. All he could do in this instance was hold her quietly, not even bothering to look up and acknowledge Moony and Dora when the pair of them mumbled their sympathies and half-hearted goodbyes, saying they would alert the other Order members as to what happened, and send a team of Aurors to examine Renee's flat, as it was now a crime scene, and retrieve Billy's body.
He held her in silence, letting the worst of the waves of sadness pass through her. Absentmindedly, he rubbed circles over her back until her body had ceased to shudder with sobs.
"T—take me away from here. Let's leave," she said, a note of desperation and urgency in her choked voice as she pulled apart to look at him.
The way Barreau was looking at him now, with such pleading agony in her pale blue eyes glistening with fresh tears, it felt as though she herself had plunged her own two bare hands into his chest and ripped Sirius's heart out from him.
Only the strong grip of Black's hold on her held Renee in place. She had not even remembered her knees weakening or her chest hyperventilating, her soul feeling like it plunged into a dark abyss.
The images of her brother came crashing down on her in waves, and it only ceased to torment her the moment Black finally covered her sight with a numb embrace and a well-played kiss on top of her hair that sent a strange warmth through her chest, though she shoved it aside as the tears came pouring out.
She could have filled a well with them had she gathered all the wretched drops.
"I want to get out of here. To go back," she choked out hoarsely, feeling Sirius stiffen against her. "And…" she paused, swallowing down past the impossible lump in her throat that threatened to render her breathless. "And I…don't want to be alone. Will you…will you let me stay with you?"
More questions arose in his mind, and not without any measure of anxiety. But Sirius pushed them away and forced himself to be patient. Renee had said she wanted to talk, and he recollected Tonks' and Moony's advice from earlier in his mind. Renee had said she wanted to talk. They would. After a moment, he reluctantly drew away.
She looked up at him with sad, hollowed eyes, tears now utterly spent, her face much too pale.
A stray wisp of her blonde hair was stuck to her forehead, causing Sirius to reach up and brush it away with careful tenderness.
"Okay," he said, at last, relenting as he conceded to her request. "Let me take you home."
Renee nodded, her tongue refusing the release of another half-choked sob as she stepped back and gripped onto Sirius's forearm, squeezing her eyes shut, thinking it would be a bloody miracle if she didn't vomit when they got back. She'd not traveled by way of magic before save for the night in Echo Alley, and she was not eager to do it again.
But it was the quickest way, and she wanted to go home sooner rather than later, and she shoved aside thoughts of her comfort for right now, letting Black take her back. This place…was not her home.
Not anymore. Renee was smart enough not to look back, though if she would have opened her eyes and looked up towards the stoop a fraction of a second before she and Black Disapparated and went back, she would have seen the figure of Everett sitting on the front stoop, his listless eyes watching them leave.