"We have to have missed some hiding places," I insisted, sprawled out exhausted on one of the couches in the Grimmauld Place drawing room.

Tonks' hair was nearly black in her own disappointment, and she agreed, "We may never find them. Let's just light a fiendfyre and burn the whole place down."

Moody simply suggested, "If this were a freestanding house, maybe. Don't exactly want to destroy an entire block of rowhouses, though."

She pouted, "It could be a little fiendfyre. Dresden can snuff it out once it clears the interior floors."

"We're not burning down the family manor," Andromeda Tonks insisted from the doorway. "You've had a break, let's start at the attic again."

After over a month cleaning out the Black Manor, it was totally safe. No more pests were to be found. The wards were nearly back to full strength. The books in the library hadn't attacked me for several days. Andromeda had even repaired some of the decaying furniture. But the horcrux was still missing, and searching the house top to bottom for secret hiding places was harder work than it seemed like it would be. Going up and down the stairs alone was a workout.

"Maybe you already got whatever you were looking for?" Ted Tonks offered, from behind his wife, trying to raise everyone's spirits. We had destroyed quite a few cursed items.

Everyone looked to me, and I shook my head as I levered myself back to sitting up on the couch. "Everything else was easy enough to break. This one should be basically impervious. And it makes a really distinctive sound if you do manage to destroy it." We hadn't fully looped the Tonks family in, but I thought they were probably pretty close to figuring it out. Dora may have gotten read in by Dumbledore for all I knew, but her parents weren't officially members of the Order of the Phoenix, so we were still employing some discretion.

"Maybe it's not even here," Moody growled. "Which means we've done all of this for nothing."

"I wouldn't say nothing," my godmother's voice echoed from the landing of the staircase as she walked toward the drawing room. The entire Tonks family looked surprised and turned to the voice. Moody seemed like he'd already spotted her, drew his wand, and moved to find cover but was otherwise resigned to her being there. "The place is basically fit to be the family seat again! Hello Andie. Andie's husband. And this must be Nymphadora."

Dora's hair shifted into a blazing orange as she drew her wand and stood from her chair, only stumbling slightly as she hastily withdrew her foot from the chair leg before tripping. "Bellatrix Black-Lestrange! You're under arrest!"

Ted stepped back into the room to clear the doorway for his daughter, drawing his own wand. But Andromeda held up her hands, palms out in either direction, not moving out of the line of fire, "Nymphadora, you can arrest my sister after she explains what she's doing here. Bella?"

My godmother came into view and relaxed against the wall just outside the door, hands empty of her wand and in her standard gothy black robes. She'd gone to more effort than she ever had for me, and actually fought her wild black hair into a braid. Without the halo of mad curls, and regarding her from a yard away, she looked nearly identical to Andromeda, except her sister's hair was a lighter brown. Clearly not discomfited by her niece pointing a wand at her, she said, "Harry didn't tell you?"

I had. That was the kind of secret that would have gotten me hexed. All the daughters of the Black family were terrifying, so the horcrux and Bob were basically the only secrets I was keeping about this operation. "Well we didn't expect you to visit," Andromeda said, somewhat lamely. "You're still a fugitive."

"And Nymphadora is welcome to see how well that holds up," Bellatrix suggested, a hint of her usual crazy singsong entering her voice as she held her hands out as if for handcuffs. "Take me in, copper."

"That's Auror Tonks to you," Dora said, clearly upset more about being called Nymphadora twice than the rest of the situation.

She glanced over to me and Moody as if to see if we had her back and I just shrugged and explained, "She wouldn't have shown up while you were here if she was worried."

"Such a smart boy," she beamed at me. "Well, if you're not going to arrest me, I'm not the only one for the family reunion."

Narcissa Malfoy's voice echoed up the stairway, "Are you going to hex each other, or should I have Kreacher make tea?"

Andromeda huffed, "Barely a word from either of you since I married Ted and now we're having tea?"

My godmother shrugged, "The head of the house was convinced that your reinstatement was to the benefit of the family." She nodded my way, clearly privy to the conversation I'd had with Draco about the Tonkses. "So it seemed like a good time to bury the hatchet. Figuratively, of course. Or I can go find some axes and we can murder someone as a family, if you want to keep to the old ways."

Andromeda and Ted had a silent conference in the way many long-married couples could. They glanced over at me and obviously dismissed me as too compromised to have an opinion. They glanced at Moody, who would clearly prefer to hex everyone at this point, but wasn't going to stick his heavily-scarred nose into Black family politics without an invitation. They glanced at Dora, who was unsure why this hadn't turned into a firefight yet. Finally, Andromeda ordered, "Put the wand away dear. We'll have tea before we make any decisions."

As Dora grudgingly sheathed her wand, Ted suggested, "Why don't the menfolk start another sweep of the house while you ladies talk?"

"Capital suggestion," my godmother acknowledged. "Such a wonderful use for a Hufflepuff."

"What's wrong with Hufflepuff?" Dora said, with some heat, as we escaped the drawing room to head back upstairs. Moody was a little behind, as he had to wait for them all to enter the room and sit down before he would leave, wand out and sidling sideways to make sure he didn't get cursed in the back.

Moody, Ted, and I managed to kill over an hour looking for secret compartments before we made it back to the second floor and looked in on the witches. They were much more relaxed. Whatever they'd been talking about had pulled the tension down to standard "family with a lot of baggage" level. Dora had unconsciously relaxed her metamorph to reveal more of her natural features, or maybe she was just adapting to her surroundings. Either way, she looked much more like her mother and aunt than she usually did.

I still wondered how Narcissa had come out blond-haired and blue-eyed, since the rest of the Black family lived up to the name with their own hair and eyes. Maybe she dyed it and wore contacts? I honestly assumed that Andromeda did something to make her hair a light brown rather than the walnut curls of her older sister. With her sisters and niece immediately available to compare to, Narcissa clearly looked a lot like them other than her coloration.

My godmother saw us in the doorway and asked, "Harry, you still haven't found the item you were looking for?" I shook my head and she suggested, "Have you asked Kreacher?"

I explained, "He stopped talking to us after we started clearing out his caches. He was hoarding cursed objects."

"Perhaps he still is," she said, and then called, "Kreacher!"

"Yes, Mistress Bellatrix?" the droopy-eared elf croaked, appearing from behind one of the cabinets. Elves were generally quiet enough at apparition and good enough at veils that it wasn't clear when they'd just popped in, or had been lurking the whole time.

She asked, "Did Reg leave an item here? Perhaps one he stole from the Dark Lord?"

The old elf wrung his ears with his hands and protested, "Kreacher is not to speak of it."

"Have you perhaps been moving it around the house so no one will find it?" my godmother pursued.

Kreacher whined, "They do not care for the treasures of house Black. Who knows what they do with them?"

Moody swore quietly and told him, "We're cleaning the ones that are safe and destroying the ones that aren't! Are you trying to keep us from destroying the item you're hiding?"

"What!" that suddenly got Kreacher's attention. "Kreacher thinks you were selling them. Truly, you want to destroy the amulet? Kreacher, could not! For years he tried. One moment!" He turned in place and disapparated.

"You really should pay more attention to the elves," my godmother chided.

"We thought we had," I argued. "That's the most words I've heard him say. Total! He's been avoiding us and just muttered insults if we tried to question him."

A moment later, Kreacher reappeared holding a large, oval-shaped golden amulet. The front had an elaborate S picked out in emeralds. "This be Master Regulus' amulet," he said.

Moody's eye was fixed on it, and he supplied, "There are some serious wards on that. It may shrug off anything we can throw at it."

"If all else fails, there's fiendfyre," I suggested, but I had my unicorn horn focus drawn. "That has to be it. Feels a lot like the others." It was just my luck that I'd probably been in close proximity to more of Voldemort's horcruxes than anyone else but their creator. The corrupt magic was palpable, even in the dark-aspected wards of the Black Manor. "But it looks like it's a locket? Maybe we need to figure out how to get it open. Kreacher, let's move it down to the dueling room for safety while we test it?"

The elf was about to comply when the locket, likely possessed of a Voldemort-consciousness of its own, proved that it had been listening. Rather than wait to see if we could force it open, it suddenly flipped open of its own accord from where it dangled from Kreacher's hands. Two dark eyes stared from the glass within and met mine, too quickly for me to avert them.

Even after years of not meeting peoples' eyes for fear of legilimency, I wasn't exactly prepared to get mind-read by a necklace. The eyes flared red, and then things got weird.

"Harry. My Harry," the woman—the apparition—said, standing in the room, tethered to the locket, slightly translucent. "And Bella. My best friend!" she said, turning her attention to my godmother.

She was even taller than Maeve's maximum height, with eyes and hair so dark that, without Andromeda and Narcissa nearby for comparison, you could assume that she was Bellatrix's sister. But her features were sharp, and I could see both elements of my grandmother and myself in them. Everyone in the room but Ted and Dora clearly recognized her. She'd obviously been over at the Black houses time and again, and Moody would recognize his friend Minerva's wayward daughter.

I'd never seen her before except for a few photos, but I could still recognize my mother: Margaret McGregor.

"How?" I asked, already forgetting about the eyes in the locket.

"You never told him how I died," she chided my godmother before turning to look back at me. "I didn't die from bearing you, Harry. It wasn't your fault! The Dark Lord: it was his entropy curse that killed me. There was nowhere I could go to escape."

Bellatrix nodded, as entranced as I was, admitting, "That's when I fully turned. To see him dispose of you like that. Just for leaving the task he'd assigned you."

The apparition nodded, explaining, "He used my death to make this horcrux. I can see that you know what it is. But I beat him! My spirit followed the ritual back. I'm in here, too. I've been here ever since. I'm so happy you finally found it. I need your help!"

I was having trouble thinking. I'd given Hermione the resurrection stone precisely because I knew how tempted I'd be to summon up my mother's apparition. And here she was. I had so much to ask her. So much I'd missed. To my left, I heard my godmother's voice, clearly just as affected, "Maggie. Maggie, I'm sorry. I did my best, but without you…"

"Bella, it's okay," she assured her best friend. "I need both of your help. He's in here too. I'm not strong enough by myself to defeat him. But with your help, we can force him out. Just take my hands…"

The rest of the room seemed to have faded away. Just take her hand, accomplish my goal, and get my mother back. Bellatrix was reaching forward. I realized I was, too. Hand still holding my unicorn horn focus.

It was vibrating in anger, and somewhere ahead of me I could make out the sound of Kreacher's agony.

All of this was too easy. Too perfect. My life was never either. But I had hope that it might be someday. I had hope that, if there was an afterlife, I'd one day meet my mother for real. I had hope that I'd dispose of the last fragment of Tom Riddle, whose voice it had been coming out of my mother's mouth.

The distinction was easy enough to miss under the haze of mental attack, but I'd also done enough research on horcruxes to know that none of that made sense. You couldn't make one remotely, the victim couldn't ride one back even if you could, and while my mother had died before Regulus Black had stolen the horcrux, it was unlikely in the extreme that her death had been used to create it.

And yet, with all that in mind, there was still a part of me that worried I was throwing away my chance of knowing my mother when I stared at Voldemort's eyes through the phantom and cast, "Excorio!"

The lie that was my mother's image blasted away under the stream of cleansing silver static, and I was perversely grateful to the horcrux for at least giving me a better visual of what she looked like than I'd ever had. Underneath the static, the locket screamed in pain, matched with my godmother's wail of anguish as she, too, realized how she'd been manipulated.

It seemed to hold on for hours, but I found out later it was only moments for the onlookers who had been growing increasingly apprehensive but unable to intervene through the powerful mind magic. Finally, with one last shriek, the soul was severed from the locket, a black shadow evaporating into the air, and I cut power to the spell.

My godmother and I both slumped to the floor in exhaustion as the rest of the people in the room sprang forward to help Kreacher, whose flesh was burned from the superheated chain of the locket that had wrapped around his arm to keep him from dropping it.

"I hope the last ones are easier than that," I told my godmother, and she nodded, eyes full of grim vengeance against the man who'd dealt her so much pain. If she hadn't already murdered him, she probably would have gone off to do it again.