CHAPTER 6
YOU DID THIS
"Black's not here," Yaxley said flatly.
"NO!" Bellatrix rushed forward. "You're lying! He can't have disappeared!"
She kicked the charred wood with her boot as if the man could have hidden in the smouldering ashes.
"He's not here," Yaxley repeated and, with another fling of magic, smashed the windows open. Fresh cold air wafted in from outside.
His mission finally over, Severus pulled the Death Eater mask off his face and let it clatter on the ground.
His shoulders sagged. Never had he imagined he would feel relief knowing Black would — just not die today.
He must have been rather off if he was having such thoughts, if everything else hadn't convinced him of it by now.
He glanced for his wand, but the room was too dim and his vision too hazy to spot it through the debris. He had stopped a Killing Curse, for hell's sake; surely, he could manage as little as summoning his own wand.
Severus opened the palm of his right hand and called it; tried to, at least. All these years of seamless unison — now his wand had decided to play stubborn.
Why'd he done that? With the Killing Curse? He couldn't figure out the answer. There wasn't much he could figure out with things around him dawdling like that.
It felt tranquilising, in a way, how the ground under his knees kept undulating lazily — slowly, slowly — slowly, slowly. Or was he swaying?
A cool touch pressed on his palm, and he ascertained, with vague astonishment, that his wand had found its way back to him. He closed his fingers around it and, for a moment, sank in the familiarity of the smooth wooden handle.
He was tired. So much that he considered closing his eyes for a moment and letting the dizzy sway of his distancing surroundings lull him away. Only for a moment. How bad could it be?
It was a stupid idea, he had a hunch, and, reckoning tiredly that stupidity didn't suit him, he did what he could to pull himself together a bit. He brought an unsteady hand up to his right side, below the ribs, seeking to assess the damage. His hand was shaking, which was weirdly confusing — his hands never shook. Never.
And he was ridiculously cold. Yaxley had opened the window, he tried reasoning bleary. That should explain the cold.
Severus' fingertips moved along a rough patch on his coat. A tear in the fabric. Somehow the attack must have ripped through the garment.
He lifted his hand, looked at his fingers, not really expecting to find anything elucidating, and watched, bemused, as he saw them coated in something dark. Red, actually. Red and slippery. Blood.
He moved his hand back to the tear in the coat, carefully feeling the moistness in the fabric, trailing the extent of it, moving down, and down, and further down. Oh… There was quite a bit, Severus realised with awe.
It was a stab wound, bleeding profusely. This explained a lot.
Black, you imbecile.
He tried to pull his thoughts together, but thinking felt like walking through deep, murky waters. Slow and gluey, apparently futile.
It was strange, really, that he would feel so drowsily tired while his heart was fluttering like a frantic bird in a cage, and his breaths — it only now occurred to him — were mere shallow, erratic gasps.
He wasn't all right by any means, he understood with a chill of clarity and felt all of a sudden afraid to die. Seriously afraid.
He willed, with abrupt trepidation, whatever ounce of energy he had left into one thing and one thing alone — a healing spell.
If only he could remember the words, but instead, they taunted and eluded him, drifted to a distant place.
His wand was slipping out of his hand of its own accord as a darkening chill crawled on to him, magnetic and frightening and cold. He shuddered. And the jarring tremor tore him out of the deathly reverie with a start.
He would not succumb. Not in a way so pointlessly pathetic.
By the hand of Sirius Black.
Without strength but with resolve pulled together, standing on the edge of the world — it sure felt like the edge — he focused his mind on the words of the spell. And through the fog and the haze, he found them: three words to unfold the magic, and the rest flowed into memory.
Numbing, shivery fingers closed around the faithful wand.
He brought it up, drew a shaky, shallow breath, and worded the incantation. The words rolled soft and lilting, an ancient chant reverberating through his body. There was a coolness in his injured side; it amplified to a current of air seething through his innards, and he felt like grinding his teeth as the crude sensation heightened.
Rubbing sandpaper on raw flesh would not have felt much different to the mending spell working its magic. Uncomfortable as it was though, at some point, the pain subsided in part, and the dizziness and the fatigue gradually dissipated, and his mind was once again clear.
Severus lowered his wand and drew in a breath, guarded, not to aggravate the radiating pain in his right side, but steady. A steady breath. He should be all right for now.
He blinked. Lifted his head. And was greeted by the unpleasant sight of three hundred pounds of meaty thug towering over him.
"Need a hand?" Goyle asked and, before Severus could decline, grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him up, none too gently. Severus grit his teeth.
"Can you stand?"
Not yet ready to unclench his jaw, Severus nodded, probably too edgy. He was more than grateful when Goyle let go of his shoulders and stepped back.
"They're searching for hints," said Goyle, catching Severus' glance pinned on Yaxley. "Anything about where that thing is that Black was after — the stone."
It was a beak .
If shoving objects to the side with the tip of the boot could be called searching, then, yes, Yaxley was searching through the rubble. But then again, he had never been one to get his hands dirty on anything.
"They won't find any," Severus said drily, taking in Bellatrix.
She wasn't searching for anything. She simply stood, staring into the fireplace, where golden flames still glimmered softly to cast shadows that danced over her gaunt face and her dark, ruffled hair.
Across her left cheekbone, the blood had dried over the long gash that split her skin. Black's grand achievement — now a mere insult to her ego.
Still, Severus had heard her fending from impending death. Her words to conjure protection had been but broken whispers of fright so sheer they would wrench any man's heart.
Wicked as she was, she feared death just like anyone else. Just like Severus. But he already knew that about himself. Just as he knew he had been reckless.
In the chaos of everything, he had blocked the Killing Curse at the price of caution.
Bold as brass and thick as a brick. When had he ended up like this?
Anyone could have heard him word the enchantment, the irrefutable declaration of his true allegiance in this war.
Well, by the blank look on Goyle's face, at least he hadn't grasped anything. Not that it would be expected of him. Bellatrix and Yaxley, on the other hand… Severus would soon find out.
Almost as if she had captured Severus' thoughts, Bellatrix turned to face him. Her eyes glistened with the blaze of the burning fire.
"You," she seethed and took a step towards him; the air before her trembled with the power of her magic.
Severus closed his fist tightly around his wand.
Bellatrix's lips wrinkled to bare white teeth in a maniac scowl; fear fled her visage, and she was once more nothing but the merciless executioner.
She aimed her wand at Severus' heart.
"You did this."