Chapter
3: Bane
Meli
was perhaps half an hour from finally leaving when a most unwanted
owl arrived to put a serious crimp in her plans. It was an official
owl, probably from Hogwarts, she thought at first, but the seal on
the envelope and the letterhead on the parchment immediately
disillusioned her. This letter wasn't from Dumbledore or Snape but
from the law enforcement division of the Ministry of Magic. That, as
well as the fact that the letter conveniently failed to mention why
she was being summoned, were sufficient to tell her everything she
needed to know, except whose body she would be identifying.
She'd had a letter like this one before.
"Go away," she said irritably, shooing the owl. "I'll be along shortly." The owl ruffled his feathers importantly and left in a snit.
Meli finished packing one last box, addressing it to herself at Hogwarts, then pulled out and set aside her recently-packed broomstick. Then she stepped outside the room and disapparated.
ooo
The last time she'd come, she had been thirteen and accompanied by a teacher. Now she was twenty-seven, old enough to be perfectly capable of identifying a body without an adult present but not old enough to be comfortable with the trappings of bureaucracy and ivory-tower mentality that assaulted her.
An official-looking receptionist directed her to an official-looking office at the end of a marble hallway populated entirely by official-looking people conducting official business. Fourteen years earlier, Meli had found that walk to be terrifying and intimidating; now it was just plain irritating. That anyone could carry on business like a well-oiled, apathetic machine when lives now hung in the balance of every major decision was inexcusable. The fact that the head of the Ministry himself did so because he refused to believe that Voldemort had returned—in spite of evidence like bodies that needed identification—only angered her further.
By the time an official-looking Auror came out to speak with her, Meli had to force her teeth apart to make any reply.
"Hello," the Auror said in a bored tone. "You must be Miss Ebony."
"Indeed," Meli growled. "And I don't suppose you'd be willing to tell me who in blazes you are and what this is all about?"
The Auror raised his eyebrows, thoroughly unimpressed and, to make matters worse for himself, rather condescending on top of it. "Alden Sandyman, Deputy Auror. And all this is about identifying some bodies."
She barely held back her fist. Assaulting a law enforcement officer, even one like Sandyman, could bring consequences that even she wouldn't be able to slip out of. She took a moment to calm down beneath the cool façade she wore like a second skin then smiled.
Her smile, as cold and calculating as a pit viper's, had its desired effect and more. To judge by the look on Sandyman's face, he'd probably wet himself by the time he managed to stammer, "Er, if you'll follow me?"
Once his back was turned, Meli permitted herself a smirk before returning to her customary mask. She followed him out of the office and down a hallway, this one more antiseptic than official, then into what anyone, Muggle or wizard, would recognize as a morgue.
There were three sheet-covered forms, one unusually small and another with something stuck in it that held its sheet up over it like an odd, squarish sort of tent. The third form, placed between the others, was covered with a blood-spattered sheet. Sandyman walked to that one first.
"Any stupid remarks to get out of your system beforehand?" Meli asked dangerously.
Sandyman's eyes widened, and he wordlessly shook his head. Then he looked to her, seeking permission to continue; she nodded firmly and set her teeth, prepared for the worst.
She had purposely not allowed herself to speculate on the victim's identity, but this was far worse than she had feared. The sheet pulled back to reveal a face torn by agony and hopelessness and terror. Every pore showed traces of red, and hair that had once been smooth gold was now tangled and burnished with blood. Wide eyes the color of the summer sky stared into eternity.
This was not a witch. She hadn't know anything about the world to which Meli belonged, but that hadn't saved her. As a child, she had chattered endlessly about magic and fairy-tale and pretend, and Meli had known that the time would come when she would have to tell her playmate about the grim reality of magic and Voldemort. She had never got around to it, hoping that, as a Muggle, her friend would be beneath notice.
So much for hope.
"Elizabeth Cameron Golden," she whispered, drawing a rattling breath. "Death Eaters?"
Sandyman hesitated but nodded. "There was a Dark Mark sent up afterward."
"How did she die?"
The Auror stared at her, taken aback by the question, but after a moment he answered, "It was a Sangriatus Poros that killed her. She'd had a few rounds of Cruciatus beforehand, as well."
Meli caught and held his eye. "And her husband and daughter?"
He swallowed, hard, then stepped to the body to Elizabeth's right—the one with something apparently stuck into it along each side.
"I hope you haven't eaten lately?" he said, almost apologetically.
Meli set her jaw. "As long as it doesn't smell sweet, I'll be fine."
Sandyman frowned, but he knew better than to ask. He slowly drew back the sheet to reveal another face frozen in agony and fear. The damage below that, though, challenged even Meli's stomach.
This one was a man in his late twenties, who in life had had well-defined muscles. Those muscles were now bared; his skin had been cut away in two flaps extending from his collar bone to his belly. The muscles, too, were cut away, revealing a now nearly empty body cavity.
He looks like—like a dissected frog. It was the only parallel her horror-frozen mind could find for the surgically precise cuts.
The worst of it, though, was what had caused the odd tenting effect of the sheet. His sternum had been broken, his ribs split apart to reveal the heart that still lay in his chest, now with a strange, ornate black-handled knife buried in it.
It was several minutes before she could again find her voice. "John Golden," she finally choked out. "Elizabeth's husband." She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. "How—?"
Sandyman cleared his throat. "It's the knife, Miss Ebony," he explained unsteadily. "The only magic we could pick up were traces of a Stunning spell and a… a few Enervations."
"It makes sense," she heard her own voice say aloud. "They would want him awake for the pain." She forced her eyes open again and looked across John's body to meet the Auror's eyes once more. "But I've never heard of Death Eaters killing someone this way, with almost no magic at all—especially when killing Muggles."
The other's careless air was long gone. "No. This is the first killing of its sort that we know of. You-Know-Who has developed quite the brutal imagination during his exile."
Meli didn't bother to reply, but she suspected that the Auror's theory was heading in a wrong direction. A killing of this sort so close to Voldemort's return was either a message or an initiation—or both. Either Voldemort was asserting his power once and for all, or he had taken in a particularly ambitious and inhuman initiate who had gone out of the way to impress him with excessive brutality.
It was oddly comforting, in spite of it all, to notice that Sandyman, for all of his bureaucratic trappings, wasn't following his fearless leader into willful denial. And if even an idiot like him realized that Voldemort truly had returned… well, there was some hope, at least.
The third body was as horrifying as the last, but for vastly different reasons. It was the Goldens' four year-old daughter, in life a miniature of her mother, in death very much the same. She alone hadn't been tampered with; she alone had died neatly and without much physical pain.
Meli played through the probable sequence in her mind. John had died first, and the others had probably been forced to watch. His torture and death had taken a great deal of time, requiring quicker executions for the others.
Elizabeth had been next, and because Sangriatus Poros was a slow-acting curse, she may even have been still alive when her daughter was killed with a Kedavra. The child was unscathed, but she had died screaming in terror.
Meli raised unreadable eyes to Sandyman once more. "Their daughter," she said, her voice aural marble. "Her name was Meli Golden."
Malfoy did it. He found Andrew's family. She swallowed. I have to tell them everything.
JUNE
1986, AFTER SEVENTH YEAR
When
they had arrived at the restaurant and the rest of the Camerons
hadn't been there, Meli had very nearly turned around and walked
right back out. She hadn't, though, and now, as if following an
atrociously written script, she sat across from Andrew at a table for
two, hoping and praying that the back of her neck would not go cold.
The ostentatiousness of the restaurant and Andrew's nervousness told her everything she needed to know, so she set her teeth and braced herself for the moment when she would have to wound his pride. Breaking his heart wasn't a real possibility, since she didn't see how he could love her; he was too focused on helping her—on fixing her—to have much room left for genuine affection. She was, in his eyes, not his beloved but his project.
With painful and pathetic predictability, he took it into his head to propose at dessert—which he had insisted she order, whether she ate it or not. As soon as the waiter was gone, she shoved aside the chocolate cake, the sweet fumes from it already threatening the security of her stomach. She over-calculated and actually pushed it onto the floor, but she didn't care and Andrew didn't notice; he was too busy fiddling with something in his pocket.
He pulled it free now, and it was, as Meli had known it would be, a black velvet ring box. He opened it and leaned toward her.
"Andrew, don't," she ordered, making good use of a glare she'd learned from Professor Snape. "Just put it back and walk away."
He set his jaw. "You know I can't do that, Meli."
"Oh, no?"
"No." He held out the box. "I love you. Is a man to stop his heart?"
She threw down her napkin. "He had better," she hissed, "or I will. I do not love you, Andrew, and even if I did, I would refuse your hand. There's a very good reason for my desire to remain both friendless and unattached. If you really cared for me as you seem to think you do, you would attempt to discover that reason, or at least honor it unknown, instead of forcing an issue you have no right to introduce."
She would have said more, but a cold clamminess touched the back of her neck.
She stood suddenly, spilling her untouched wine, snatched up her handbag and ran, hoping Andrew hadn't been seen with her. She didn't dare hope that he wouldn't follow her; a badly written script must, after all, play out all the way through. She could only hope that he wouldn't be followed.
Meli made it as far as the entrance to the nearest tube station before Andrew caught up to her. She stopped, her hand on the railing.
"You don't understand, do you?" she called over her shoulder.
"Then help me understand!" he puffed right behind her, far closer than she had expected.
She turned at last, her face cold and impassive. "You know that I come from a dark past, Andrew," she said, her voice deadly calm. "People who get too close to me end up dead—horribly dead. I told you as much five years ago."
"You're just trying to shut me out!" he shouted, drawing the eyes of not a few passers-by.
"And you're behaving like a child whose mother refuses to buy him a shiny new toy." Her voice was harsher than she'd meant it to be, but if it made him go away, she would go with it. "I do wish we could be friends, Andrew, but you won't allow it."
She started to turn away from him to go to the tube, but the back of her neck went cold once more and she froze.
"Phamelia," a hard female voice purred. "Fancy meeting you out here in the street."
"That's not my name."
Narcissa stepped into her field of vision to glare at her. "It is the name your grandfather gave you."
Narcissa Malfoy was the cleverest of her kind to be excluded from Voldemort's Inner Circle, and that exclusion was less the Dark Lord's preference than a convenient cover for her which he allowed because of its potential usefulness. She gave the perfect appearance of being a magical Mafia wife—either unaware of her husband's activities, or uncaring as long as her life continued normally. In reality, she was as cold-blooded and brutal as Lucius was, and, arguably, far more subtle and clever.
Meli met the Death Eater's eye without flinching. "My grandfather's dead."
To her horror, Narcissa's eyes flicked past her to rest on Andrew. "And is this young gentleman a friend of yours?"
"No," Meli lied easily. "I've never met him before; I just bumped into him on the street."
"You lying ingrate!" Andrew yelled, as she'd feared he probably would do. Try as she might to protect him, he would throw his life away; he was too stupid to be even a Gryffindor. "I've only just proposed to you!"
"Oh," Narcissa said quietly. "How touching."
"Andrew, run!" Meli breathed. "Get away from here now!"
She saw Narcissa's wand and whirled, then heard the words Avada Kedavra and saw a green flash as Andrew dropped in mid-stride… but her muscles froze, keeping her from somehow intervening. The Death Eater faded into the night, and Andrew hit the ground five feet from her.
Meli cursed herself for the show she now had to put on for the Muggles, but she had to play her abominable role to the end.
"Andrew!" she shrieked, at last dashing to him. She knew he was dead where he lay, but she couldn't let anyone know it. A crowd started to gather, so she looked up, a false hysteria supplanting the real hysterics that threatened to break free.
"Someone dial three nines!"
ooo
She stood silently at his graveside a week later, watching as soil was slowly piled atop his coffin. The Camerons had stopped trying to reassure her days before, seeming to understand that she would always blame herself. They all grieved for the same man, but she stood apart from them, half-truths and implied lies separating her from them. They believed him the victim of an undetectable congenital heart defect, and she let them do so. They believed he had left behind a new fiancée, and she let them think in that, as well. Andrew's ring, which she would never have worn in his lifetime, was on her finger now, and it would be there until her death—or so she vowed; it was a necessary reminder of the consequences of allowing anyone to come too close.
The Camerons had long since left, even Elizabeth and her mother, who had lingered over the grave, and still Meli stood beside Andrew's headstone. A strange tapping sensation, like a kitten starting to walk, crept over her spine, and a shadow crossed the grass in front of her.
"Hello, Professor Snape," she said, without looking up. "This is an odd place to run into you."
"Miss Ebony," he said gravely. "I thought perhaps the sight of a cheerful face might help you in your present state."
At the thought of Snape's being a cheerful face, Meli laughed out loud. She looked up to find a sardonic turn in one side of his mouth and a wicked gleam in his eye.
"In truth, sir," she said, still laughing, "I've had my fill of friendly faces this past week. I was rather hoping for a dour one."
"Then it appears I've arrived just in time."
She sobered a bit. "It was good of you to come," she said quietly. "Not to mention rather dangerous, in light of recent events."
His expression turned sour. "If either of the Malfoys so much as sniff their noses around here, I'll Obliviate them so completely they'll forget they have superiority complexes."
Meli smirked. "I didn't think there was a charm strong enough," she remarked. "Though it is a heartwarming thought."
They were silent a moment before Snape spoke again. "Have your plans altered at all?"
She shook her head. "No, sir," she answered. "I'm still going to university in America, it'll still be a Muggle university instead of Blackwing, I'm still going to hide myself among Muggles, and I'm still going to pursue a degree in primary education. What I do after that depends greatly upon what happens in the meantime."
Snape caught her eye. "Should you ever decide to teach at Hogwarts," he said seriously, "I would be happy to recommend you for either Potions or Defense Against the Dark Arts."
He had to be joking, she knew, but he'd hidden his humor now even better than he usually did. After a minute or so of searching for his hidden smirk, she smiled and took the offer at face value—for the moment, at least. "Thank you, sir," she replied. "I'll keep it in mind."
"Moreover," Snape continued, as if there had been no pause, "should you find yourself in need of assistance at any time, don't hesitate to contact me. My resources are limited, but I will help as I can."
She smiled faintly. "If not for you, Professor, I should consider myself fatherless," she said. "You've always been my protector, even when I didn't see it so." She nodded once, formally. "Should I need your assistance, I give you my word I'll contact you. Please accept my gratitude in advance."