After the feast, I'd used my semi-professorial privileges to get Mathilda back to the Gryffindor dorm after curfew, but then had to head out. Then I'd had the whole weekend to painfully adjust back to sleeping alone. It was especially trying since Penny and Percy were still together in the next bedroom over. Mister, at least, seemed pleased to be able to sprawl out on Mathilda's side of our bed. She was going to have a fight on her hands getting that back from the oversized cat.

Monday, though, bright and early, Moody and I met at Grimmauld Place and began the work of searching it for a horcrux. This work started with an hour standing outside until Moody was sure the wards weren't going to kill us for attempting entry. He was thorough.

Finally convinced that the infamous Black family wards weren't set to flash fry intruders, or him specifically, I channeled magic into the door plate and it opened. Draco had set us up, just as he'd promised. "Who's that?" the portrait of Walburga Black demanded.

"Harry Dresden, ma'am. I've brought help to clean the manor and prepare it for young Draco to take over."

The portrait frowned at me. "Hmph. Bella did suggest that Kreacher had fallen behind on the cleaning duties. Who's that with you. Alastor Moody! What kind of trick is this! Aurors in the house without cause!? Or are you here on Dumbledore's orders?"

Moody rolled his eyes. The artificial one could really roll. "Silencio!" he simply incanted, muting the painting. "I'm not arguing with a portrait. But, for your information, I'm retired. Now, let's see how bad it is."

I mouthed an apology to the portrait for my partner's abruptness, figuring that would get us in trouble later, but followed Moody into the dining room.

Once we were safely out of earshot of the painting, Moody explained, "I couldn't stand that woman when she was alive, and I'm not going to put up with that portrait. At least half of what's wrong with the Black family was her fault."

"Fair enough," I allowed, and gestured around the dining room. "This one and the dueling space in the basement are mostly clear," I told him. "But I bet upstairs is wrecked."

"Let's get to it, then," he shrugged.

By lunchtime, we had a rough overview of the house. We'd been attacked by two clouds of doxies and a boggart. We hadn't even poked our heads in the library, based on just what we could sense from the door. The garden behind the house was covered in animate, deadly plants. And Kreacher the house elf was constantly peering at us around a corner, muttering imprecations.

It was good to be out in the sun again, as we left the house to get something to eat. Moody hadn't even been too precious about where we ate, just agreeing to one of the pubs around the corner outside the Grimmauld Place neighborhood. Over his shepherd's pie, he grumbled, "We might have to hire Bill Weasley. Or bring in Lupin on the weekends. I don't really know the detection charms to find curses that layered. I'm worried we're going to fix something obvious, and unleash something that it was covering up."

I nodded. "The wards feel like they're all knotted up," or at least that was the best way I could describe it. "And if what you're saying about Walburga is right, she may have been adding crazy curses before she died, on top of the family curses. And who knows if Kreacher has added elf magic traps on top of everything else?" I ate my own burger for a few bites before venturing, "So… what if I had a solution to the problem that's not entirely legal?"

"Not asking your godmother for help?"

I shook my head. "No. Only Mathilda really knows about this, but I guess now that I'm graduated nobody's just going to take it from me. Though Dawlish would probably try if he got wind of it."

"Spit it out, kid," he huffed.

With one final look at the old man, considering whether he was retired enough as an auror, I explained, "I have a fae spirit that's bound to an artifact. A skull, but he's not a human spirit. He's basically an encyclopedia of knowledge, and can see magic and enchantments." I took a breath and added, "I call him Bob."

Moody regarded me in silence while he finished his meal, then said, "Beats having to subcontract. Go get it."

After a quick apparition to the Leaky Cauldron to floo home and back, I met Moody outside the house and we went inside. I pulled Bob from my bag of holding, and the skull's eyeflames flickered weakly. He was mostly nocturnal, but the Black Manor was so dark inside he'd probably be fine. "For the record," Bob assured Moody after a yawn, "I'm only doing this in the hopes that the Black library has some truly depraved pornography hidden away."

Moody just stared, and I shrugged, "He really likes porn. He won't tell me why."

"No big secret. It's just great," Bob contradicted me. "Pinnacle of human literary achievement."

With a sigh, Moody said, "I guess I've dealt with people with weirder hobbies. Let's see what he can do."

"Well first off," Bob offered, "the ward scheme for this building is trashed. Someone tied that portrait right in?"

"Guess that would explain why we couldn't remove the sticking charm," I agreed. Walburga was still silenced, but glowered from her frame. "Is it elf magic, or would she have done that herself before she died?"

"Looks like she was trying to put the painting in control of the wards," Bob agreed. "But she missed some connections, because the wards were already messed up. So she's just locked in. Be pretty easy to remove her if you want. And you probably should, if you want to fix this place. No wonder this place is infested, with how damaged the wards are."

We did that first. A weird hybrid of ritual casting and enchanting, it involved chalking runes onto various points on the wall where Bob could see the ward junctions, and empowering them once they were set up. Sure enough, as soon as that was in place, the sticking charm on the portrait was easy enough to counterspell.

"Maybe we can make this work, after all," Moody allowed, once the portrait of Walburga Black was wrapped up and stored to the side of the dining room. "Let's do a sweep."

By the end of the first day, with Bob's help, we had a better plan of what was safe to tackle and in what order. And, by the end of the week, we were starting to make progress with the worst of the enchantments, though the house was still, visibly, a mess.

We'd spent most of the day, Friday, battling the doxy infestation in the drawing room on the second floor. It was an immense room at the front of the house done in moldy greens. The curtains, which had looked black from outside, were green inside. The black might well have been the hundreds of doxies and their eggs that were nesting in them. It was gross. Fortunately, I'd gotten quite a lot of doxycide potion from Filch when I was at Hogwarts.

In addition to the infestation, the room featured several glass cabinets full of probably-cursed items and an immense tapestry with names and connections picked out in golden thread. We pulled Bob out to inspect everything once the last of the doxies was finished, and he explained, "Well there's so many magical signatures in the cabinets I'll need to look at them one at a time, but the tapestry is your problem with the wards."

We looked at the thing more closely. It seemed to have names and birth and death dates of the entire family going back centuries, under a heading of "The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black: Toujours Pur." The interesting thing was that there appeared to be no space to add any new names, but I could see Draco's name in the bottom corner, as well as those of the more recent generations. Well, the spots that were probably meant to be Sirius and the Tonks family were blasted off, nothing more than charred spaces.

I wondered, "Does this thing update automatically when a new Black is born?"

"Aye," Moody explained. "Tonks told me about it often enough. Walburga burned her mum off the tapestry when she married Ted Tonks. A few others that didn't meet her standards, too, it seems."

"Was she even the head of the house? Did she have the authority to do that?" I asked.

"That's what I mean," Bob explained. "The wards are, for a lack of a better term, leaking through those holes. It looks like the whole thing was meant to control who had access to the family's wards. By just burning people off, rather than removing their permissions properly, it's upset the entire scheme."

"So we fix the tapestry, we fix the wards," I summed up.

"Or at least make them so they can be fixed," Bob countered.

"And, as a bit of a bonus," Moody grinned, "maybe that means Tonks and her family can get back into the house and help."

"Problem," I shook my head. "This has got to be hilariously complex, using centuries-old enchanting logic, and probably stuck to the wall just as badly as the portrait if it's part of the wards. And I don't know anything about weaving, anyway. Any ideas, Bob?"

"It should be self-repairing," he said, eyeflames scanning across the artifact. "That's how it rearranges the tree when new children are born. Honestly, if the Blacks weren't dying out, it might have fixed itself with a few more children added in, when it needed to rearrange the names to fit them all."

"So we just get Remus and Tonks to hurry up having kids, and maybe Draco's parents have another heir? Next year, we can finally fix the whole thing?" I joked.

"Happy to watch!" Bob replied. He took a long beat before explaining, "But, if you want to do it faster, you should just be able to power the thing up enough to engage its self-repair. The magic it's using isn't that different from how portraits connect to their originator. There's a bit of soul magic worked in, even…"

"So one of our soulfire charms might do it?" I asked.

"Maybe," Bob allowed.

Moody added, "Don't try the ones that actually damage dark wizards, though. I bet there's some dark magic involved in this. It's the Blacks, after all."

Bob didn't contradict him, so I stepped way back, aimed my unicorn horn focus, thought about my pride in my friend Tonks, and incanted, "Libero!" The swirl of silver and azure light hit the spot we assumed she and her mother had been burned off of, and spread through the threads around the hole like all those visualizations of information moving through circuitry.

"That did something," Bob explained. "Hit it again."

I wound up giving the tapestry three more of the charms over the next half hour, wearing myself out pretty thoroughly with the amount of magic I was channeling, before the entire thing finally started to glow from the built-up magical energy.

The golden thread flickered with the silver of the soulfire I'd put in, and began to subtly rearrange across the whole tapestry to balance out the addition of Ted Tonks and Nymphadora Tonks next to the repaired hole that was now Andromeda Tonks. Sirius' name reappeared (with the current year as his date of death), as well as those that had occupied other holes that Walburga had created.

"That's done it," Bob announced, when the glow began to fade. "The wards are starting to flow properly again."

"And," Moody added, "We can get the whole Tonks family in here to help, now. Good work, Dresden!"