Mmmmm Junior Mints and Rootbeer. Lovely.
Chapter Five
Harry walked into the office with the Daily Prophet in front of him. There wasn't much to read about. Maybe someone sighted a certain flying motorcycle, and then had to be covered up by a certain couple of wizards who knew the idiot who flew it in broad daylight. He smirked. Sirius was certainly getting on well.
He turned a cubicle corner into the aisle he "resided" on. "WHAT?!" He stared at the picture of the woman he had helped save in the newspaper. He read quickly.
Sylvia Tempest died in her home the night Harry went to the Burrow to visit the Weasley clan. He turned the pages and flipped around, making a great deal of noise as he looked for more information. When he found none, he went back to the page. She had died from blood loss, at least that's what the article said, her body barely recognizable from multiple slashing and tearing, like an animal had ripped into her. He recognized that form of killing. He'd seen it before.
Harry racked his memory for any instance of people coming back from the great beyond and only came up with Voldemort, but he wasn't even truly dead. Harry had VISITED the great beyond, God's Land, and came back due to the powers of his own spirit and will to live as well as the Aeternus Light, which was Astra's prized possession. Donovan and Zilia couldn't have come back from the dead! He had seen Sirius rip out Donovan's throat and seen Zilia die. He had taken care of Voldemort himself!
Harry rubbed his head and went back to the article, looking for anything that would give him a clue. There was a small picture that, if he squinted, he could read something carved into her forehead. He was afraid of that. However, he couldn't get much more than an H, G, R, and T. "Damn," he muttered.
Suddenly, he was knocked down by someone landing on him. He threw whoever it was off and over him, rolling on his back for leverage. He got to his feet quickly, avoiding a kick at him and then had to shield himself with a spell from another attack. "Ah!" He ducked as another spell shot out at him.
"Moody! I think that's enough!" Harry growled. He saw a flash of Moody in his vision before he reached out with such speed that the rather quick Mad Eye Moody couldn't quite keep away from. He grabbed Moody by the collar and threw him down onto the floor. "I've had it up to HERE with these attacks, Moody!"
Moody grunted and glared up at Harry. "You still have much to learn, boy! Constant vigilance! What if I had been someone trying to KILL you!"
"Then, you would be dead," Harry growled as he let Moody go and stalked off to his cubicle.
He rubbed his forehead and glared down at the reports in front of him. As he started up on one, he heard a sort of cough. He turned. Astra was grinning down at him from over the cubicle wall. "What?" he grunted.
"So testy," she grinned. She came around and leaned against the wall. He saw her cloak and recognized it as the one he'd seen her in when she'd come into the office before and when she'd come around while he was on patrol. It truly was black velvet with a satin lining and on her left breast was a strange sort of design that he had to concentrate on to recognize as letters. One was a silver M, but the other was a silver star shaped A.
She followed his gaze and tapped the initials. "Remember, I'm Mrs. Astra Malfoy. No more K there."
Harry grinned. "I suppose Draco is home with the baby?"
She blushed and coughed into a black leather clad hand. "Uh… yeah. Little Kevin gets his daddy to handle him since I'm away most of the time."
"Including changing diapers?"
She nodded and Harry suddenly had a nasty image in his head of Draco trying to change a wiggling and wriggling baby. Especially a baby boy, which he'd heard stories from Molly Weasley to know that little baby boys knew exactly what to do with their extra appendage.
"Did you have fun at the Weasley's?" she asked, smiling broadly at him.
He grinned. "Ron is getting very twitchy. Mrs. Weasley had to direct him to get Hermione a chair to sit on."
"The poor girl, she gets the one voted most likely to die of a broken heart if she decided to take the baby and leave him. However, I think she knows that, so I doubt she would ever leave him," she grinned.
"Don't say things like that, they'll probably come true and no one wants a distraught Ron Weasley crying on their shoulder," said Harry with a grunt.
"Did you read the article in the News?"
Harry sighed and looked to the offending newspaper. "Yes. I don't understand it, she was supposed to be under our protection."
"No… she wasn't. I looked into it. It seems that she just went home the very next night and didn't go out at all, thinking she was safer on her own if she just stayed inside. Like a person trying to keep back a vampire." Astra pulled off her gloves and Harry saw the platinum wedding ring on her left hand, the cladough ring with the garnet heart. She cracked her knuckles as she thought. "Then, the very next day, one of us went over to her house to check up on her and found her dead, shredded, on the living room floor, blood everywhere."
"Have you had the chance to see what was on her forehead?" Astra shook her head and Harry grunted in frustration. "I know it's something important. It's a message. For who, I haven't a bloody clue, but it's a message."
She looked around and looked rather nervous, though Harry remembered enough about Astra to know that if she looked only slightly nervous on the outside, it meant that she was a giant nervous twitch on the inside. Her right leg jiggled as she looked around. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"I think we can get some information on what is on her forehead. They're still investigating her body, or what was left of it, inside the morgue. The problem will be getting in there. We're aurors, so we might get away with just saying our names and going in and no one will suspect anything off. However, judging by what's been going on, we might need to sneak in there."
"Are you forgetting who is my brother-in-law?" Harry smirked. "Percy's the head of the Ministry of Magic. If he can't get us in, I don't know who can."
"No."
"Percy, please. We need to see what is on her forehead. It could be anything. It could be nothing. We don't know until we find out," said Harry.
"No, I can not let you go in there. It's top secret and you aren't at level with top secret files yet." Percy looked visibly uncomfortable as he sat in the big cushy chair behind his huge oak desk. He readjusted his glasses for the umpteenth time, looking like he was going to break out into a sweat.
"Percy, it's me, Harry. What is wrong?"
Percy readjusted his glasses again and looked at Harry above the rims. "There's nothing wrong. I just can't allow you access into the morgue at this moment."
"There's something wrong. You've never been this nervous before," said Harry as he gazed down at Percy.
"Percy, please. We need to see the body. Will you please just tell the Morgue desk that we're just doing some sort of inventory or some gofer guy activity like that?" Astra was gazing down at Percy with a decidedly more relaxed air to her.
Percy sighed and rubbed his head. "I….I can't." Then, he wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to Harry. Harry blinked at Percy and then nodded. Percy smiled and nodded, writing down something on another sheet of paper and then handed it to Astra. "I'm sorry, really. Why don't you go back to your desks and do your reports, all right Mr. Potter, Mrs. Malfoy?"
Astra glanced down at her paper and nodded. "Yes, sir."
Then, she grabbed Harry's arm and stalked out of the room, looking very much like she was going to break something along the way. They walked quickly, with Harry trying desperately to keep up with her, until they walked into a bathroom. Astra walked in and left Harry outside.
"Astra?" He blinked as he saw someone coming down the hall dressed in a black cloak. He looked to the restroom door and it opened suddenly, Astra grabbing him by the collar and kissing him as she pulled him through the door. Harry heard laughing from the man that was passing and the door closed. Harry gained enough of his senses to attempt forcing the odd girl off of him before Astra shoved him away, wiping her mouth on a hand and looking at her paper like nothing had happened. "Wh-what was that for!"
"Percy's being bugged. I heard someone coming down the hall, so I wanted to make sure it didn't look like we were about to conspire anything," she said in a calm and even tone as she looked over the paper.
"Bugged? You mean, someone is an actual bug in there or someone is listening in on Percy?"
"The latter. You could see it in the way he was acting. And then the notes. What does yours say?"
Harry looked to his paper. "Go to the morgue around five."
She nodded. "Mine says, 'I will help you. Five and then be quick. I can not speak this aloud'."
"Someone is watching in on Percy? Who?" Harry was getting confused. He knew that Fudge was crooked when he was in school, but Percy was the head now and he had power over everyone. Who had power over him?
"So we have to wait until five o'clock to get into the morgue? What is happening at five?" Harry rubbed his head as he looked at the paper in dismay.
"I don't know, but we'll have to wait until then. I'll see you in the elevator lobby, Harry. I'm about to go do some work." Astra kissed his cheek and started to walk off, but he caught her wrist. She blinked as she turned to him.
"Don't ever kiss me again. I'm serious, I don't like it." He had a sort of power radiating from him that forced Astra to nod. He let her go and she stared at him a moment longer before trotting out into the hall.
Harry walked out and noticed that on the door was a witch. He had been pulled into the ladies loo. He blushed hotly and stalked off down the hallway. Now some rumor was going to circulate that Astra and he were an item and Ginny would divorce him and leave him all alone. He shook his head and rubbed his hand over his eyes. Ginny had more faith in him than that.
At lunch, Harry went out to eat. The nearest place to eat was a muggle pub. He walked in, holding his robes over his arm like it was a coat, sitting toward the back after he ordered himself some food.
A tall and lanky man came over and placed his plate in front of him, dark hair and eyes peering at him. "Thank you," Harry said faintly as he pulled out a fork.
The man seemed to linger. Harry looked up at the man and he saw someone not much younger than he was. The boy couldn't have been more than nineteen. "Yes?"
The man shrugged and smiled faintly, walked away. Harry watched him walk away and had a sudden sense of danger. He pulled out a potion that Moody had forced him to use once and dropped a little bit on his food.
Harry pulled back sharply when a mushroom cloud of red erupted from his plate. The food on the plate had turned to ash and Harry stared at it all. That was what was supposed to happen when your food was poisoned. A literal nuclear attack on your food if it had any known poison in it.
He stood up and picked up his robes and stashed the vial in a pocket. He walked over to the bar and motioned for a burly man with a black beard over. "Yes, sir?"
"Who was the boy who served me?" Harry said in a harsher tone than he had intended.
"What boy?"
Harry grunted and walked over to the cashier. After paying for his non-existent food, he went into an alleyway, disapparating into his own yard. He stalked over the stones he had still yet to pull up from the ground and walked inside, finding Ginny at the kitchen table trying to feed Lily. She looked up when he came in. "Harry?"
"Ginny, I'm eating lunch here from now on," he said as he tossed his robes onto a chair.
"What happened? You're not fired are you?" she gasped.
Harry shook his head, rubbing his face. "I think someone tried to poison me."
She walked over and brushed her fingers over the scar on his forehead. He pulled her over to him by her hips and rubbed his forehead against her belly. "How do you know?"
"You know that vial of potion Moody gave me when I first started training under him? It worked. It blew up my food." He sighed and let her go, looking up at her. "And… Astra kissed me," he said with a slight flinch.
She smirked. "So you're going to be like Ron and tell me every little thing that you've done to disobey our marriage vows? Harry, I trust you and I trust Astra. I would trust you if I had even seen the kiss. As it is, Draco is the one that would have a fit, not me. I know you too well, and I know that Astra became a great deal craftier when she entered the Aurors."
"Something is wrong at work. I don't know what, but something is very wrong. Astra thought someone would know we were talking about what has been happening so, she pulled me into a kiss as this bloke was walking down the hallway and then pulled me into a ladies loo." Harry smirked up at Ginny, who was grinning. "What? I would have thought you'd be pissed off at me or Astra. Your grin is getting a little unnerving." He dodged a swat at his shoulder.
"It's like being back at school again. You are doing what you do best with Astra coming up behind you. Ron and Hermione can't help you as they did before, so it's only you and Astra now." She grinned a little more. "Besides, I like knowing I've got one of the most desirable men in MY clutches."
Harry kissed his wife on the mouth, brushing her cheek with his fingers. A breadroll hit his head. Lily cried, wanting to be fed. Ginny blushed at her lapse of memory and rushed over to the baby.
Harry smiled as he watched his wife and child doing a familiar feeding routine. Later that evening, he was going to break into a classified morgue with Astra's help. He shouldn't have snapped at her, but he really didn't like what she did. It made him feel disgusting, since it wasn't Ginny's lips he had been locked onto. And he never wanted to kiss anyone, but Ginny.