Chapter Fifteen

"O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united" Genesis 49:6

There was less than a month before their magical contract was over. Snape wasn't entirely sure how he felt about this fact. Once part of him would be glad to get back to the comforting familiarity of his routine at Hogwarts and another part of him felt terrified that the past 2 months had changed him so much that even the habitual would feel strange. He felt off- balance and as though he had woken up one morning to find that he was really somebody else. He didn't know what had brought this feeling on. Possibly the unwelcome sexual re-awakening he'd experienced since he'd lived in close proximity to Hermione or maybe it was being in the Muggle world without anything recognizable around him. Perhaps both.

Perhaps, a small voice at the back of his mind suggested, you've gotten used to having Hermione to yourself and you don't want to have to give her up. He told the voice to shut up even as an inescapable feeling of dread overtook him at the thought.

His mind drifted over the events of the past few weeks. It was amazing that none of Voldemort's spies had seen him on either of the two occasions when he had been with Hermione as an animagus in the Dark Forest. It was true that he had not spent much time with her on either occasion but it was still incredibly fortunate for them both. Snape knew full well that if any of Voldemort's spies had seen them together, they would both already be dead.

Hermione was feeling listless too. University was far more challenging and difficult than high school. She was used to only working as hard as her natural curiosity and interest demanded in order to get top marks. At university, she was going to have to put in some serious hard yards to maintain a good grade point average.

Ridiculous as it seemed, the thought of Snape leaving in a month's time made her feel unbearably hollow. True, he wasn't much company at the best of times in the conventional sense but she would miss him. Since the night of the party, he had given no sign that he even realised she was female let alone that he was still sexually attracted to her. Suddenly, that thought brought tears to her eyes. It startled her that she cared so much about how he felt about her. When did that happen, she wondered? She also felt annoyed that after showing her in such a graphic way that he desired her, he had gone on to pretend it never happened ever since. She could tell herself it was because he was being a responsible guardian but it pissed her off none-the-less and didn't allay her insecurities.

Apart from all that, she was worried about him. She didn't want him to go to any more Death Eater meetings, especially not if he came back in the same state he did the last time. She was determined to go to the next meeting and sent her owl to Harry with a request to borrow his invisibility cloak for a few weeks.

* * *

Snape knew it would not be long before he was summoned again and sure enough, within a week of recovering from the cruciatus curse the mark on his arm began burning again late one evening. With an angry sigh, he pulled on his Death Eater robes and his mask, and apparated at the designated place.

Hermione awoke from a deep sleep with a start. She wasn't sure what woke her except perhaps the echoing quietness of the house. She frowned and got out of bed. Something told her that something wasn't quite right. She crept out into the hallway. Suddenly she noticed there was a dim light from downstairs. Was Snape still up, she wondered? She glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall; it read 1am. Impulsively she went downstairs. If Snape wanted to know why she was there, she would say she heard something.

The first thing she saw was a large black owl sitting on the back of one of the couches in the sitting room. Hermione recognised that owl and it only meant one thing - that Snape was out on Death Eater business. She went through to his room and sure enough, there was an open parchment with a Dark Mark on it. Hermione felt absolutely no conscience about picking it up and reading it. If Snape was in potential danger, she wanted to know about it and was completely unapologetic about it.

Her mouth fell open as she read it. She couldn't believe where they were meeting that night. How was Snape going to explain this, she wondered heatedly? Angrily she crumpled the paper into a ball and watched with surprise as it disappeared into a flash of green light. "Well, that was careless of you Snape. Obviously you're not supposed to leave these around for nosey teenagers to read," Hermione murmured.

She hurried back up the stairs and pulled on a track suit. She left her feet bare even though it was cold as any noise of footsteps at all would give her away. She pulled Harry's cloak over her and using floo, made her way to a pub in a village many miles away.

The pub was not far from Snape's family home and she could quite easily walk there in less than 10 minutes. As she could have predicted, Snape's home was really a mansion - a huge gothic pile.

The huge, rusted, iron gates were easy enough to get through with a simple metal bending charm. She had expected there to be some vicious charms protecting the place but only encountered similar tactics to the ones Hogwarts used. To a Muggle, the mansion would look merely derelict and deserted. As for the wizarding community, no-one would dare enter the Snape mansion without permission.

She snuck in through a ground level, library window. If Hermione has been in her normal frame of mind, she probably would have had to be forcibly dragged from that room. It had floor to vaulted ceiling of books of every size, shape, binding and language imaginable. The room itself was the size of a ballroom and had tall cases of yet more books and magical instruments lined up neatly along the centre of the room. The dark wood panelling and faded brocades gave the room a dark and neglected and austere air. Hermione was to find later that almost the whole house had a similar feel to it.

It was not hard to find the Death Eaters' meeting. She simply followed the hissing voice that was surprisingly loud and clear down corridors until she came to a well-lit room. Confidently she sidled in, knowing she could not be seen or heard. Her heart stopped for a minute when she saw the reptilian speaker. He was tall and broad shouldered under his Death Eater robes, and had a lean, broad face with slit-like, red eyes. Was this what Harry had had to face so many times, she wondered with a pang for her friend. He was truly hideous. He was hairless and had no nose - only tiny, flat nostrils. His mouth was thin and his skin a repulsive shade of parchment yellow. Dracula eat your heart out, Hermione thought inconsequentially.

He was haranguing his Death Eaters, around 200 of them Hermione estimated.

**". . . I also want to talk to you quite candidly about a very grave matter. We can talk about it quite frankly among ourselves and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate before to do our duty to ourselves, and to annihilate those Death Eaters who had lapsed - so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it again. It was that good breeding which is a matter of course and which I am glad to say is inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never speak of it. It appalled us all, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders should be issued and it should be necessary.

"I am referring to the Muggle-born Wizard Eradication Programme, the extermination of the Muggle-born among us. It is one of those things which is easy to talk about. 'The Muggle-borns will be exterminated', says every Death Eater, 'It's clear, it's in our programme. Elimination of the Muggle- borns, extermination and we'll do it.' And then they come along, the worthy Death Eaters, and each one of them produces his decent Muggle-born. It's clear the others are swine, but this one is a fine Muggle-born wizard. Not one of those who talk like that has watched it happening, not one of them has been through it. Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and--apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness -- to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough. This is a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and can never be written. For we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and deprivations of war, we still had the number of Muggle-borns today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and troublemakers. We would now probably have reached the stage when the Muggle-borns were still a large part of the body of the wizarding community.

"We took from them what wealth they had. I issued a strict order, which you had carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to be shared among the Death Eaters without reserve. I have taken none of it for myself. Individual wizards who have lapsed will be punished in accordance with an order I issued at the beginning which gave this warning: Whoever takes so much as a knut of it personally is a dead wizard. A number of Death Eaters--there are not very many of them -- have fallen short, and they have died, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to ourselves, to destroy these Muggle-borns who wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves personally with so much as a fur, a watch, a knut, a cigarette or anything else. We have exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it. All in all, we can say that we fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our pureblood wizards. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it. . . . " Hermione held her hand over her mouth in case she let slip any noise to betray her presence. Her eyes were filled with tears of disbelief and utter horror. She had wondered about these Death Eater meetings in a vague way from time to time but the reality of the depravity and evil was something she could never have imagined. She could not believe how blatant they were in their evil nor how completely they clung to their own self- image as 'decent' and 'well bred' and 'morally right'. It was ludicrous! It was deeply terrifying. Still, Voldemort was almost hypnotic in his rhetoric.

After Voldemort's speech several Death Eaters were called up to report on their activities. With such small numbers, they were not able to accomplish much anymore. Someone mysteriously disappearing; someone's name being smeared, someone losing their job at the Ministry, someone hexed; it was pitiful compared to the one-time scale of their operation that Snape had described to her.

Finally Hermione heard Snape's name being called. He came forward, taking off his mask. Hermione watched him anxiously. "Well," Voldemort hissed. "I hope you have some information on the black unicorn for me. It's your special assignment and I expect results."

Hermione raised her eyebrows. Her animagus had been made Snape's special assignment? He'd never told her that. She watched as Snape bent one knee to Voldemort the way the others who had come forward had. It looked automatic and practised to Hermione. As though he had been doing it all his life, as he probably had.

"Yes, my Lord. As I'm sure your spies have told you, the unicorn has not appeared again. However, in my family's library I have come across an ancient Arabic source regarding the creature." Hermione's ears pricked up. "Apparently, when the unicorn kills - it charges with its gold horn. Anyone whose skin is pierced by this horn has any dark power drawn out via the horn. The gold horn absorbs this power, turns red and then finally black before dropping off. The unicorn loses its magical properties and becomes an ordinary black horse. The blackened horn is then useless too."

Voldemort studied Snape with displeasure. "And how can this creature be destroyed?"

"It can't be killed until it's sacrificed its horn in such a way," Snape replied steadily.

Voldemort looked very displeased. "So, in order to be destroyed, this creature must destroy another's power first?" He hissed, eyes glowing.

"Yes, my Lord." Snape confirmed calmly.

"Truly, a dark creature." Voldemort said with a sneer. "Can it be caught?"

"The only information I could find was from the apocryphal writings of St Macrina. It reads:

*** "In the beginning, they were like the unicorn - wild and uncommitted such as cannot be caught by the hunter, no matter how skilful. Nay but he can be tamed only of his own free will"."

Voldemort's eyes narrowed with concentration. "So it can be tamed, if it can be persuaded," he mused aloud.

Well, you won't be persuading me, Hermione thought.

Voldemort's gaze came to rest on Snape. "Well Snape, you know your assignment now. Find and tame this unicorn and when you have, bring it to me!"

Snape didn't flicker an eyelid. "Yes, my Lord." He murmured.

"You have done well Snape so I will not inflict my usual punishment for your previous disloyalty to me," Voldemort said contemptuously. Hermione let her breath out quietly in relief. Snape nodded and pulled his mask back on, melting back into the crowd.

The meeting didn't last much longer, it had already been going for the two hours Hermione had been there and goodness knows how long before. One by one the Death Eaters melted into the night; either apparating or using one of the fireplaces. Voldemort was, mercifully, the first to go. Hermione wasn't sure when Snape went but the large, formal sitting room was empty inside of ten minutes.

(** Adapted from a speech given to SS leaders 4 October 1943 at Posen, Poland by Heinrich Himmler (source: Noakes, J. and Pridham, G. Nazism: A Documentary Reader. Volume III "Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination" Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1984, pages 1199- 1200.). )

(*** St Macrina's apocryphal quote taken from Madeleine L'Engle's 'The Young Unicorns'.)