Targets two and three were a fifth year called Liana Whittaker, and a second year, Rick Allison.
Sev picked Rick as victim two, because that broke up any pattern of 'working his way down' through the school.
Working on Rick, he had two assets in the name of Graham Goyle and Alex Nott, both in his year group. Through the friendship between Colin and Graham, the two boys were in fairly tight with Malfoy; even so, Sev went to ask Malfoy for permission to involve them.
Obviously, his judgement of their loyalties was as good as Malfoy's, probably better. However, asking Malfoy reinforced the impression that he was working for him, and that was important. Though Malfoy was smart enough to capitalise on others' strengths, he would come down like the plague on anyone who looked like threatening his position.
For the moment, his role as leader was fully secure because he was the only one with any contact with his mysterious master. But Sev knew that if he started to get wary of any of his underlings, their chances of making it to that inner circle were zero.
And Snape very much needed to be in that inner circle.
"Nott and Goyle?" Malfoy rubbed his forehead thoughtfully as he leaned back against the headboard. Year Three Dorm B had become a very strange mix of boys' bedroom and tactical planning centre. When Malfoy and his followers gathered in a corner to talk, you could never tell if they would be discussing the overthrow of the current wizarding system or Quidditch scores and Charms homework.
Sev allowed him a few minutes to contemplate the idea. The less you pushed something with Malfoy, the more convinced he would become that it had been his own idea. Malfoy was very much in favour of his own ideas.
"Yes," decided Malfoy slowly, "yes, we can use them. Put them on this. See if they can make it work. If they can..." He leaned across to rummage through his top drawer. "If they can, then give them these."
He reached over, and Snape took the contents of his cupped hand. It was another pair of the skull-and-serpent rings.
As Sev pocketed them with a nod and strode off to find Goyle, the sense of subtle triumph he felt was nothing to do with having his plan accepted. Malfoy had given him the rings, and more importantly the decision of whether or not to bestow them.
He was now, in all important senses, Malfoy's second-in-command.
His plan to deal with Rick Allison was less subtle than the previous plot. That had nothing to do with running out of ideas, and everything to do with not leaving patterns. Trying too hard to not leave traces left a trace all its own; sometimes, the best way to allay suspicions was to be obvious.
Malfoy had been uncertain, when Sev had first explained the plan; however, he had been quick to gather the double-edged reasoning behind it. "I like the way your mind works," he had finally said, with a razor smile.
Sometimes, the best way to hide a plot to get rid of mudbloods was to daub "Mudbloods go home!" in big letters over everything. Nobody would expect such blatantly thick-headed prejudice to be part of a larger deviousness.
Nott and Goyle's job was to make Rick's life a living hell. More importantly, they were to anonymously make it a living hell. If they were ever caught, they would deny everything, and certainly admit no ties to Snape or Malfoy.
However, Slytherin was the natural home of secrecy. When this sort of thing went on, nobody saw anything. Rick never reported what was being done to him - possibly because he was too petrified to dare tell anybody.
In some ways, this secret bullying was even worse than what Malfoy had done to Josh Matthews. At least Josh had known who was out to get him. Sev had carefully schooled Nott and Goyle to make no outward change in their attitude to him. Rick had been at Hogwarts for over a year, and this sudden attack from all sides was completely without warning, explanation, or clues.
Rick would open his books, and find vitriolic anti-mudblood passages scrawled all over them. Things of his would be broken or vandalised, and Sev ordered that there should always be a note claiming responsibility. All of them were signed in the same way - "Society for Purity". All of them told him to get his mudblood self the hell out of their school. All of them warned that he'd been cursed, and if he ever tried to breathe a word, he would instantly fall down stone dead.
Sev was fairly sure that at the beginning, Rick didn't believe a word of it. However, he had a good enough reading of Rick to know that he would try to deal with it himself first. By the time things got bad enough for him to think he needed help, he would have started to at least half-believe the story of the sudden-death curse.
So far as Sev knew, there was no real Society for Purity, but that was part of the beauty of it. Rick had absolutely no way of telling who might be in it, or how many there might be. And Sev made sure the Society took credit for everything.
Not just the things they'd done. He and the others kept up a near twenty-four hour observation on Rick's life, and anything that went wrong they took the credit for. When he got flu in February, they sent him a note to say they'd put something in his food. When his little sister back home broke her arm, they told him how they'd put a curse on her, and that it would get worse if he didn't leave.
When Nott and Goyle ran out of valuables to break or destroy, they got more inventive. Rather than removing things from Rick's stuff, they started to add things. Rather unpleasant things.
Sev's talent for potions came into play here. He never made anything particularly dangerous or deadly, but they were all things that looked extremely scary. Innocuous objects like quills or textbooks would be dusted with solutions that made his skin turn purple or his hands swell up. Rick quickly became terrified to touch or even eat anything that had been unattended for half a second.
In addition to the potions, there were what Nott referred to happily as 'presents'. At first these were things that were harmless but shocking to encounter - foul-smelling solutions shoved in his sock drawer, something slimy under the pillow, squishy grapes enchanted to look like eyeballs.
Then came the dead animals. These started small, with mice and small birds, and got progressively bigger. All of the animal corpses, in varying states of decay, were provided by Simon Lestrange. Not even Avery or Malfoy ever dared to ask him where he got them from.
On Snape's orders, Rick was abruptly left alone for almost two weeks with not the slightest explanation. Then, three days before the Easter holiday, Rick's bed was visited by the most unpleasant corpse yet; a dead cat, dug up from where it had been buried several months ago. It had been Rick's pet in his first year at Hogwarts, and had been in his family since he was two.
That Friday, Rick had packed up not just a holiday bag but everything he owned. Sev didn't expect him to be back.
Rick was not the only one to be leaving the school over Easter. Lucius Malfoy also packed his bags, and when Avery asked if he was going home, he smiled tigerishly and said "In a sense."
Sev used Malfoy's absence to put into play plan three, of which he might be a little less approving. Malfoy might want his scheming to go undetected, but he still liked to flavour it with a little cruelty. Sev's plans to get rid of Liana Whittaker were entirely too... nice.
Sev happened to know that Liana was a model student. Not only that, but she was studying languages, with the intention of working in one of the Ministry's international branches.
Sev also happened to know, having read a great deal, that on and off through the years, there had been an old tradition of transfers between wizarding schools. The European three, Hogwarts, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, had chosen one or two of their best and brightest students to make the trade once they had finished their O.W.Ls and were going on to take their N.E.W.Ts.
That tradition had never been actually brought to an official stop, but it had trailed off due to the increasing insularity of Durmstrang. The Dark Arts oriented wizarding school had largely closed itself off from the other two after the last Triwizard Tournament eighty years ago. Hogwarts and Beauxbatons, however, were still on semi-friendly terms.
With that in mind, at the start of the Easter break, Sev sat down and did something he had never done before in his eight terms at Hogwarts thus far; he wrote to his uncle.
His mother's brother, the man who had raised him, had always been too busy to pay him much attention. This was due to the fairly high-level position he held in the Ministry of Magic - a position that had to do with international co-ordination. He had links to figures in a number of European organisations, including the headmistress of Beauxbatons.
The letter he wrote to his uncle would have caused snorts of disbelief if anybody at Hogwarts had intercepted it; none of them would have recognised it as penned by Severus Snape. To the teachers and the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, he was a frighteningly quiet enigma; to the Slytherins, an icy, dark-magic using genius; to the Gryffindors, a vitriol-spitting master-hexer. All of those impressions were to a certain extent manufactured. But even Lily, who knew him better than perhaps anyone, would have laughed out loud if someone had told her this letter was written by him.
He wrote a nice, chatty, friendly letter to his uncle about his 'friend' Liana Whittaker and how he'd really like to surprise her. It was a sweet, light-hearted and selfless attempt for a caring student to do something for another.
Sev supposed it said something about his relationship with his uncle that the man didn't for one second find anything odd about it. The letter the Ministry owl brought back was much like the conversations his uncle had with him; vaguely approving in a politely distracted way.
Sev refrained from snorting out loud at his uncle's words about how he "knew you would make friends at Hogwarts; you're such a charming young man", but his lips did quirk up at the corners. He wondered if perhaps he should show that sentence to Lily next time she made one of her tiresome attempts to trap him and talk to him - she would probably choke so disbelievingly on it he could make a quick getaway.
However, perhaps aware how little his nephew asked for, his uncle made good on his promise to investigate, and, fortunately, to keep the gesture anonymous. He contacted the Beauxbatons headmistress, and a few days later Sev overheard Dumbledore and Malachite discussing it at the dinner table. Malachite was plainly delighted; he had been in a foul mood ever since the Darren Kaye debacle, and this was a way to give his house some much-needed good press. All the teaching staff seemed to agree Liana was perfect transfer material, and they were all utterly stumped as to who could have recommended her.
Being Severus Snape, he wasn't even slightly tempted to give them any knowing smiles.
The details would take time to work out, but the transfer wouldn't be until next year anyway. Everyone seemed to agree it was a great idea to establish inter-school ties again, especially in these dark times, and when Liana came back from her Easter holidays it was to find a neatly written letter propped up on her pillowcase.
Sev didn't need to have it confirmed by his uncle - he could hear the shrieking from way over in his own dorm. Liana proceeded to lead several of her friends in an impromptu conga line through the Slytherin common room and then out into the school, witnessed with amusement by the teachers who had all been lurking to see her reaction.
Malfoy and his skull-and-serpent gang were just about the only ones who didn't join in the good-natured applause.
"Your doing, I presume?" said Malfoy sharply when they had retired to their dorms. Sev had been expecting to do some fast talking to justify his actions, but to his surprise Malfoy seemed... amused?
"You're not angry," he observed. For anybody else, it might have been a question, but Sev always knew what he was reading.
"It's inconsequential." Malfoy waved away the whole issue airily. "So she gets away now; it won't matter in the long run. We'll get them all eventually. For now... let them run." He smiled darkly. "It makes the eventual hunt much more fun."
Sev knew something must have happened over the holidays to make him so cheerful. He quickly scanned him, looking for any visible sign of what it might have been, and noticed one important difference immediately.
"You're not wearing your ring," he observed. He had made a point of never taking his off, and the others usually wore theirs, but Malfoy had always made a big thing of displaying his prominently. It was, Sev knew, his way of thumbing his nose at Dumbledore and the rest of the school; showing off to everybody his sign of allegiance and revelling in the fact that they had no clue.
Malfoy smiled delightedly. "I don't need to. Crabbe, close the door." Crabbe did as ordered, and the four boys clustered around Malfoy.
With a smile, Malfoy took hold of the left sleeve of his robes and slowly, dramatically, pushed it back. He held his hand flat against his bare elbow for a few moments, then pulled it away with a flourish.
Beneath it, emblazoned on his skin, was a vivid red image. It looked a little like a tattoo, although Sev suspected it was nothing so simple as an injection of ink. The symbol he knew very well; he had seen it once before, blazing against the sky. A skull with a snake for a tongue; the mark of the Death Eaters.
He had seen it before; the others had not. Though the skull had hovered over the Forbidden Forest for over an hour on the night he had found the corpse of Auriga Cephus, it had been late in the night and few had seen it. The men from the Ministry Dumbledore had summoned had quickly taken away the skeleton and the magical note that had been left with it.
"Cool... What is it?" asked Avery eagerly.
Malfoy smiled, and produced the old serpent ring from a pocket. He tossed it in the air and caught it casually. "This; this, you can take on and off." He showed it to them all. Then he prodded his arm. "This, you can't. It's a mark of his favour, and this one can't be taken away. This is no temporary test measure - this is the real thing."
Sev had long suspected that Malfoy's master was a Death Eater; now he knew it for sure. He knew, however, that probing Malfoy would not yield any more information about who this mysterious 'he' was.
The others obviously didn't. "Who is 'he'?" asked Avery. "Did you go to see him? Will you take us?"
Malfoy smiled enigmatically, enjoying his knowledge. "All in good time," he said, in a sensible tone calculated to madden. The smirk faded into something more serious. "As for the rest of you; yes, very soon, I think. He's wary of new people, but thanks to Severus we're well on our way to proving ourselves." He gave Sev an approving nod.
"The mudbloods are all out, or on their way. We've purified our own backyard - now it's time to tell the rest of the world we're coming." He smiled widely. "What we need now is... a really big gesture."
