A/N: last chapter- please don't hurt me for the ending. Thanks to all the wonderful people who've reviewed this story- I've enjoyed writing it, but all good things must come to an end.

Chapter 40

Lianna and Draco didn't get better when they arrived at Hogwarts. Draco, it seemed, was still traversing the wild roads of the spirit, and Lianna was groaning, trying to hold onto consciousness.

"It's like being ripped in half," she moaned, "but being alive. It's like having all your skin ripped off. It's like the shivery feeling you get when fingernails screech on blackboard, but a million times worse. It won't let go of me," and then she gritted her teeth and scrunched her eyes and couldn't say another word.

Adrienne took her sister over to the Hospital Wing, to find Madam Pomfrey not present. She took her sister into a room of her own, and settled her into the crisp, white-sheeted bed, before going to look for Poppy.

~*~

Hermione sat down, and stood up. She walked around the room and sat down again. She stood up and decided to go somewhere, before indecision sat her down again. She growled at the feeling of fingernails being scratched down the inside of her skin, and got up to go and check on Harry. The hallways seemed to be far longer than they had been two weeks ago- stretching off into the distance, beckoning for her to run to reach the end of them faster. The itching under her skin felt like crawling bugs, burning the impression into her and making her scratch her arms until they became red. She broke the skin in a few places, leaving her fingernails stained with bloody tissue. She reached the room where Harry and his pretty wife were being kept. She could smell incense burning in the room, and rushed to the door. Her hand clasped the door handle, only to pull it back, singed by the burning metal. "What the hell?" she hissed, stepping back and pulling her wand out to hold at the ready. She opened the door by charm, jumping into the doorway, wand at the ready. What she saw there completely disarmed her. She was totally unprepared for the attack.

~*~

He arrived too late, it seemed. There, just there, was a fading spirit- there, another. The roiling black and red aura was attached to the two bodies, making them attack in concert. He was nigh on tears when he realised one of the bodies was hers. He swore to himself, and began to chant under his breath, weaving figures in the air with his fingers. He cast the net of shining silver light over the two bodies, holding them in position. The spirit strained against the restraint, but could not break free. He was thankful. More than one spirit would break this bond- one needed rope made of more than one soul-stuff to hold more than one spirit. But, despite the two bodies, this spirit was one- and he recognised it. With a hiss, he realised that she must have broken free of her mutilated form to inhabit these- who invited her? With a glimpse, he answered his question: the one that now didn't exist. Damn. He'd have to do more than chain the thing- he'd have to banish it also.

She arrived on the spirit-plane, blinking her eyes open and rushing over, spreading her golden light over the dim landscape.

"Anything I can do to help?" she asked, her eyes worried, slight orange twirling delicately underneath the purple of her aura. He nodded.

"You remember the banishing spell we learned yesterday?" She, in turn, nodded. "Well, we have to perform it today. On this," he motioned towards the monstrosity that was bound by his silver net- though it was beginning to writhe and fight against it. She nodded with surety set in her face.

"Let's do it. Now," she added with a note of frantic urgency. They linked auras, the stuff of them flowing between them- dancing together, but not mixing. They began to chant, weaving figures of light in shining silver and glistening gold, a noose of tight rope to choke the spirit.

"What is it?" she asked in her mind to him.

"It," he replied, "is what stole your soul not so long ago. Don't hate it- but use your anger to strengthen you. Hatred will make you what that is." She nodded, fury contorting her face. They formed the noose, and cast it. It slipped over the neck of the spirit, pulling it up short, pulling it up and out of the bodies, letting them flop to the ground like marionettes that had their strings cut. The red-and-black roiling beast struggled and fought, lashing out at nothingness. It spun, losing control of its shape, trying to escape the death-grip it was caught in. The noose just fitted itself to whatever shape the spirit formed. The two spirits of whom this stuff was made gritted their teeth and held on. If either failed, they would have their souls, in turn, ripped apart. It wasn't a forgiving business.

Finally, after what seemed like a long time, the thing stopped its lashing, and flopped until it died, turning completely black and fading into dust that dispersed on the slight breeze that always stirred on this plane. He shook his head and released the enchantment. They separated their soul-stuff from each other, becoming individual again.

"I had hoped that nothing would ever come to that. It is a dreadful thing to take a life- a worse thing yet to kill a soul."

She nodded, wiping her eyes. "Better get back and clean up."

"No," he said, "First we find the spirits that belong in these bodies." She weakly nodded, squatting down to examine the lines stretching from both bodies.

"On to the search," she stated wearily.

~*~

Adrienne came back to a scene from hell.

In the hallway outside the room that Harry and Meredith had occupied was an unidentifiable body, chewed and torn apart. The innards were spilled across the hallway, blood splattered up the walls and on the portraits, a large pool under the body. The face was so battered as to have to discernable shape at all; the body was similar. Adrienne retched in disgust, as the smell of blood and warm flesh crawled up into her nostrils. Tears fought their way out of the corners of her eyes, burning her throat and sinuses. A second glance at the head identified the matted substance at the top of the head as hair- her mother's hair, her mind screamed. The tears of disgust that had been issuing from her eyes gave way to wailing sobs that tore out of her body from the very depths of her soul. She shuffled over on her knees to the body, messing the blood onto her knees and robes, and waved her hands around in frantic indecision over the body. When she finally tore her eyes from her mother's horrid end, she saw more scenes from hell inside the room.

The doorframe was painted in blood, in an obscene parody of the blood of Passover. The angel of death had obviously already visited here. Inside, there were candles lining the entire outer range of the room, and circles drawn on the floor in charcoal. In the middle was another torn form- this one had not escaped so lightly as her mother. It was dismembered, torn limb from limb, and these appeared to have been used as paintbrushes on the walls and floor. Blood was splattered everywhere, and intestines- small and large- were strewn in bloody patterns across the bed. The head was almost intact, however, and the glassy blue eyes stared out at her, pleading something unfathomable. She was vaguely aware of deep, keening wails emanating from somewhere, and after a while, she realised that they were hers. After what felt like forever, but must have only been moments, she roused others- Poppy came back, and promptly suffered the same fate as Adrienne had, falling to her knees and wailing, ruining her starched white linen uniform forever.

Lianna roused herself to the sound of two voices screaming loudly- panic and despair she identified. She got up from the bed of clean, crisp sheets and padded on unwilling feet to the door. She walked out into the corridor, past the two slumped bodies of Harry and Meredith- covered in blood that was drying in their hair and on their skin. They were blissfully unconscious. Lianna could feel horror bubbling up as bile in her throat. She rounded the corner to see Poppy facing her, blood soaking up the white linen of her uniform and matching the redness of her eyes and face. Facing away from her was her sister- with blood smeared all over her hands, arms, hair, clothes. Draco rounded the opposite corner as she did- with a similar reaction. They froze, looked at each other, were unable to move from where they were. A cold feeling crept up from her extremities, making her shiver and clutch her arms to herself in a vain attempt to warm herself against a purely spiritual feeling. Draco's eyes were cold- he had seen Hermione's soul fading, had known she was dead- had not expected her to have died in such a horrific fashion.

~*~

The cries echoed through the hallways, all the way down to the dungeons. Snape heard them, picked his head up. He placed the rest of his supplies- that he had not really needed, after all- on the desk, and strode quickly from the room. His pace increased as he heard that the voice screaming was his daughter's. He rushed past a stunned Minerva, who also seemed to be following the screams. He was running flat out when he rounded the corner and nearly ran into Draco. He stopped dead. Bled out on the floor was Hermione, her body so torn that it was almost unidentifiable but for the matted hair that was uniquely hers. He edged around the body, glancing into the room only briefly, before kneeling beside his daughter and burning the coldness in his chest out in tears. He grabbed one arm around Adrienne to anchor himself, and reassure her.

Minerva arrived, as did the majority of the teachers. Kirati rounded a corner behind Lianna, her face showing shock.

"What happened?" she whispered, loathe to break the thick silence. Lianna broke from her frozenness and rushed down to her mother's rapidly cooling body to weep and wail as her sister still was- Adrienne's voice was already wavering, unused to such strenuous activity as this. Kirati could feel the uselessness of the circumstance pressing in on her. The teachers were all crowded behind Draco, who slowly stepped forward to circle behind Poppy and put an arm around his daughter also. He began to cry silently, tears streaming down his face. The wails awoke Harry and Meredith around the corner, who took one look at their desecrated selves, crawled around the corner and quickly joined the wailing.

The cry insinuated into the very stones of the corridor, and even decades later, students crawled along the corridor with light steps, hoping not to disturb whatever it was that crawled down the back of their necks when they walked by. The story passed from fact to fable to myth, with characters made what they were not, but the moral staying true- life is worth living, but it can be snatched away by all manner of nasty things, no matter how many you've escaped before.