A BtVs / Angel / Harry Potter / Sopranos / Highlander crossover. Minor spoilers up to season 7 of Buffy. Set after Season 7 BtVS, after Season 4 Angel, after Harry Potter graduates, and nowhere in particular in Sopranos / Highlander continuity.

All characters belong to their respective creators / film companies / etc. and are used without permission. This story may only be distributed on a non-profit-making basis.

Work in Progress. If you like this story, check out my other stories on the Fanfiction Net, Twisting the Hellmouth, and Fonts of Wisdom websites.

I'm British, so's my spelling. Live with it.


Bring Me The Head Of Harry Potter

by Marcus L. Rowland

XIII

"This just isn't adding up," Willow said an hour or so later, looking up from a sketch map of the clearing. "We've got seven places where Harry and I are picking up the psychic residue left by a violent death, but Angel says he can smell eleven distinct bodies."

"I'm surprised there aren't any ghosts," said Harry, "with this many violent deaths you'd think someone would hang around to tell the tale."

"We'll just have to do it for them. So, Angel, eleven bodies?"

"At least," said Angel, "possibly twelve. And the smell I'm getting from the other places is a little different."

"How different?" asked Kennedy.

"More abrupt, is the best way I can put it. Like the bodies were already decaying when they were turned inside out."

"They were already dead?" asked Harry.

"I think so. Maybe two or three days."

"You can distinguish the smells that precisely?"

"I've had plenty of practice."

"I can't remember exactly how many were supposed to have died here," said Harry, "but I think the Daily Prophet said ten or twelve. There were no survivors, the bodies were found by one of the dragon reserve wardens about a week later."

"Looking at this plan," said Dawn, "I'd say that the main attack came from above; the area affected is oval and kinda stretched to the west, like someone up in the air to the east did the damage, maybe someone on a broomstick."

"That's right," said Willow, "it must have been a very powerful attack, possibly Voldemort himself. It turned all the bodies inside out, turned most plants inside out too, poisoned the soil with complex organic molecules that were suddenly the wrong isomer." At their blank looks she said "A lot of organic molecules have 'handedness', two different forms according to the way they fit together. Sometimes a molecule that's safe in one form is deadly the other way around."

"Just one attack?" asked Angel.

"That's another oddity," said Harry, "if we're interpreting things right the spell was used once in the initial attack, at very high power, then a couple of times afterwards at much lower intensity."

"Like someone was mopping up survivors?" asked Gunn.

"No. People didn't die in those places, although there were bodies there."

"Then how did they get here?"

"Somebody planted the f'kirs" said Tony. "One time some guys I heard of wanted to get rid of someone, they were on their way to the swamps when they came across a four-car pile-up on the freeway and stopped to lend a helping hand. They dumped the body under one of the cars that was on fire, everyone assumed it was a hitch-hiker or something. Police called them good Samaritans for stopping to help, never figured it out." The memory seemed to cheer him.

"That makes sense," said Angel, "if someone had a few bodies on their hands and wanted to cover up how they'd really died."

"Brother Caedfel," said Kennedy. "Medieval murder mystery, can't remember which of the books it was. Someone wants to cover up a murder in the middle of a war and dumps the body on the battlefield. I think there was a Father Brown mystery like that as well."

"Did anyone on your side know how to cast the inversion spell?" asked Angel.

"I've heard it's easy enough to duplicate it if you have the right training," said Harry, "it's basically a high-powered version of a spell medi-witches use for surgery with all the safeguards taken off. I'd guess it's easier to cast than the surgical version, if you have the power."

"So there's the initial massacre," said Willow, "and presumably another one occurring somewhere else, killing Charlie Weasley and some of the other victims. For some reason nobody wanted to explain what really happened to them."

"Someone heard about this ambush," said Angel, "and realised that it'll be easy to add a few more bodies. It had to be someone pretty senior in the Ministry of Magic to do it, there'd be a lot of records to change."

"Percy," breathed Harry, "maybe even Arthur Weasley, their father, by then he was pretty much running the Ministry. But why? Why would either of them want to hide the truth about Charlie's death?"

"Friendly fire?" asked Dawn. "They were accidentally killed by their own side?"

"It's an answer," said Angel, "maybe not the right answer, but an answer. They're killed by their own side, and for some reason the Ministry doesn't want to reveal that another operation has gone wrong. Was there any sort of political crisis going on at the time?"

"You're joking, right?" said Harry, "Fudge was on his way out then, five or six different factions were trying to get their own candidates into his place. Arthur Weasley was the popular choice but he didn't have enough political pull to make him a forgone conclusion. Lucius Malfoy had a lot of backing, even though most people guessed he was working for Voldemort, and there was a looney faction that wanted to appoint that bitch Umbridge. Another lot tried to persuade Dumbledore to do it, but he turned them down. There were even people that wanted to ask you to do the job, Professor Rosenberg, once they knew about Sunnydale."

"You're kidding," said Willow. "I hardly knew wizarding society existed then, and in any case I'm a US citizen."

"They thought a really powerful witch..." He tailed off.

"Thought what? Thought that because I was seduced by the Dark Arts once they could get me to use them again? To kill Voldemort and his followers?" Her eyes turned black, and her hair darkened. She rose into the air, floating above the ground, the air around her crackling with dark energy.

Harry stepped back a few feet and said "Yeah, I think that was pretty much it. Really stupid, you would never have done it."

Willow landed, her eyes cleared, and her hair turned back to red. "They wanted the real dark forces, not just that illusion?"

"I think so."

"Morons. How many times do you have to tell people not to play with fire before they stop getting burned? Oh, push me far enough and I would have probably done it, but you wouldn't have liked what you got in his place. Voldemort was an amateur, he just wanted power over people. I had the power to destroy the world and came within minutes of doing it. I helped to destroy a goddamned city, even if we didn't know it was gonna happen."

"I know."

"And maybe, just maybe, you're starting to believe it. How many others will I have to convince?"

"Relax," said Kennedy, "they were fighting a war, and in wars people do stupid things if they think it'll help them to win. I doubt anyone would want you to do it now."

"They'd better not, because stupidity makes me cranky."

"Okay," said Angel loudly, "let's not get distracted here. At the moment all that we really know is that it looks like the official account of what happened here has deliberately been changed. We really have no idea how it ties into the bank fraud or the attempt to murder Harry. Kennedy, I think you just said something important. People behave stupidly in wars. Harry, what else was going on around the time Charlie was killed? Apart from the politics, what was happening in the war?"

"Not much," said Harry, "not on our side anyway. We were still building up our forces to attack Voldemort's bases in Europe; this raid was always a long shot, they weren't even sure that Voldemort was in Dracula's castle although some of his people were definitely based there. I think the Ministry thought there was a chance they could take him out without a full-scale battle, then mopping up the rest would be a lot easier."

"What about Voldemort? What were his people doing?"

"Some small-scale raids on villages in France and Germany, we'd pretty much wiped out their organisation in Britain."

"There was something else though, something you mentioned. A reason why Charlie's death didn't get much attention."

"Durmstrang. It was a few days earlier though."

"Did it happen a few days before Charlie was killed, or was that just the gap between the reports?"

"I think... I think I heard about Durmstrang at the weekend, someone heard about it in Hogsmeade on Saturday afternoon and bought the news back to Hogwarts. A lot of us knew people from Durmstrang, and it really upset everyone. We were still trying to get to grips with it when we heard about Charlie and the rest, I think Wednesday or Thursday."

"I hate to say it," said Dawn, "but the timing of that is kinda suggestive."

"I don't get it."

"I do," Angel said grimly. "How was Durmstrang destroyed?"

"Fire. There were no survivors."

"And Charlie was an expert on dragons, and we think that whatever went down was staged from the dragon reservation. Suppose he was killed on another raid, one that went so badly wrong that the only way out was to blame it on Voldemort. Maybe they had faulty intelligence, thought Voldemort's men had taken over Durmstrang. Maybe Voldemort's guys had seized the place and it was supposed to be a rescue mission, and they got over-enthusiastic. Whatever, I don't think we're talking friendly fire any more. I think we're talking war crimes."

TBC