AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is your last warning for a very, very long time. This is a dark story and will probably shatter some cherished notions carried over from its prequel. If you had rather read something kinder and gentler, leave now and go to the library, and there you will find (unless, of course, it's checked out) a happy little vomitous tome called The Littlest Elf (highly recommended by one of my literary heroes, one Lemony Snicket) Or, failing that, ask me for a list of fics my roommate and I have stumbled across which…hm…did not pass our initial inspection.
You have been warned. If I get nasty emails or reviews after this chapter, I will not be sympathetic.
AE
Chapter 7: Schism
The Aurors did not at first seem inclined to permit Meli to follow the headmaster's wishes. Their chief had fallen, and they were determined to do their damnedest to figure out how it had happened and to capture and punish the culprit. Toward that end, they sealed off all entrances and exits to the Great Hall and questioned everyone present. Once a person had been interviewed, they were escorted by Aurors, either to their quarters if they had arranged to stay at Hogwarts, or to an approved apparation point just beyond the school's wards.
Blanche Ingraham did not appear to be anyone special, so the Auror in charge attempted to treat her like everyone else present. Snape and Zarekael were among the first questioned and escorted out, and shortly after their departure, Scatcherd pulled Meli aside for questioning. Unfortunately for Scatcherd and her superior, Meli was not in the mood to play ball.
"My orders are to remain with Headmaster Dumbledore," she told Scatcherd coldly.
Scatcherd snorted. "Your orders?" she repeated. "The only orders that matter here and now are our orders, Missy, so I suggest you make other arrangements for the headmaster's arm candy." She caught Meli by the arm and made a try at forcibly leading her away.
"You will remove your hand from my person immediately," Meli ordered coldly. "Unless you want an interdepartmental incident. I highly doubt that the person from whom I take orders will be of a humor to put up with you at the moment."
"Unless that person outranks the acting head of the Department of Aurors," Scatcherd sniffed, "his humor doesn't concern me a whit."
Meli pulled out her badge. "It should," she said through her teeth.
Scatcherd took one look at the badge and backed away. "My mistake," she said lamely. She glared daggers at Meli, but faced with an Unspeakable, she was powerless to do much except take advantage of the opportunity to exit stage left rapidly.
"Well done," Dumbledore remarked, the twinkle flashing briefly before hiding again beneath cold steel. "Assistant Minister Ebony couldn't have done better."
Meli's smile froze in place for the second time that evening. "Assistant MInister Ebony?" she echoed.
"Soon to be Department Minister Ebony, unless I'm much mistaken," Dumbledore replied grimly. "I tell you only because you'll need to know her name when they begin questioning you." He sighed. "No badge will effect an escape from that, not even an Auror's."
Meli cleared her throat and changed the subject. "Do you know what happened here?" she asked.
It wasn't a good choice of topic, she immediately perceived. The headmaster's expression closed, and he narrowed his eyes. "Beyond two or three minor details," he answered, barely audibly, "I know exactly what happened here. My only hope is that my worst suspicions will be proven wrong in the end."
They fell silent then, and Meli stood, immovable, at Dumbledore's side until both he and she had been questioned by the Aurors and permitted to go, under guard, to their rooms.
Once she was alone in her rooms, Meli found herself without a script. Until the very moment she had closed the door in her escort's face, she'd had a role to play and a specific set of mannerisms, actions, and speeches that were expected of her. Now, however, her only standing order was to wait for Dumbledore's call.
After a few minutes of aimless wandering, she at last came to some resolution and walked over to the wardrobe. It was a simple matter to change out of dress robes and into a set of wine-red robes more suited for daily wear, and she did it mechanically. After a moment's thought, she likewise altered her appearance charm, then absently played at her hair until it reluctantly consented to stay out of her face.
By that time Dumbledore still had not called, so she wandered over to one of the bookshelves, which were sparsely populated in comparison with the ones she had at Snape Manor, but she nevertheless looked them over, hoping to find something of interest. She needn't have bothered, though, for in her present state of distraction, she was unlikely to be interested in much of anything aside from the matter at hand.
How could she have been so stupid? She had never trusted facts alone, except in matters involving timelines or hypothetical argument; facts, as Crim had often pointed out, were only the beginning of truth. She ought to have trusted her instincts, she ought to have—
What ought she to have done? What could she have done? For all practical purposes, her hands were tied; Dumbledore had placed absolute faith in the intelligence reports, and what he said, went. She could, perhaps, have taken her concerns to Snape and Zarekael, who were also responsible for the security arrangements, but what could they have done, even the three of them together? Snape might have helped her to set up extra precautions, but she had the definite impression that Zarekael trusted Dumbledore's judgment absolutely. And what if, after all of those things had been done, the two department heads had still died?
And they would have done, she thought bitterly. As concerned as she was about security, her focus had always settled on the Minister of Magic or possibly one of the ambassadors. Never in a million years would she have thought of those two men as the preferred targets. All of her extra protections would have been in vain, for she would have been concentrating on protecting the wrong people.
These were unexpected targets, but, on reflection, they shouldn't have been. Of Cornelius Fudge's entire cabinet, only those two, Arthur Weasley, and Lucius Malfoy had survived, and of those four survivors, only three were targets, and the heads of the Aurors and the Unspeakables were the most desirable targets by far.
Something like this ought to have been obvious, Meli reflected. We should have seen it coming, but we trusted too much in incomplete intelligence.
That was the other thing that pounded away in her mind. Why had their intelligence been incomplete? She had reason to believe that Snape and Zarekael were in Voldemort's Inner Circle, and while that didn't necessarily make them privy to every plan of the Dark Lord's (she knew for a fact that the senior Crabbe and Goyle were also in the Inner Circle, and she was likewise aware that they were probably told little or nothing), they couldn't possibly have missed everything leading up to this…could they?
After all, there had been no warning about the assassination of Fudge—at least, no warning that the faculty had heard about, she reminded herself. She hadn't been Rasa then; she'd been Professor Ebony, and there had been no reason for her to know ahead of time that something like that was about to take place. It was entirely possible that Dumbledore had known about it—he'd certainly been much calmer then than he was now.
But Snape and Zarekael must have known something. They must have done. The questions remained, though: How much had they known, when had they known, and why had they remained silent?
Her roving eye at last settled on a paperback she'd kept from her stint in America—one of the few pieces of American literature that didn't annoy her supremely. She pulled The Raven and Other Writings from the shelf and flipped idly through it, passing by "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and a handful of other short stories and drifting through the poetry section at the back.
She wasn't much in the mood for poetry, but some of it, at least, had the virtue of being short enough to hold her distracted attention to the end. Narrative demanded too much thought, so she bypassed the story-poems at the front, at last finding her way to two brief verses a few pages from the end.
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a—
"Rasa!"
She looked up from the book to find Dumbledore's head floating in her fireplace. "Sir?"
"There is a meeting convening in my office," the headmaster told her. "Would you kindly come up?"
Meli closed the volume and nodded. "I'll be there presently," she replied.
She set Poe back on the shelf and stepped across to the fireplace as Dumbledore's head vanished. She waited for the flames to return to their ordinary color, then tossed in a handful of floo powder from the pot on the mantle and stepped a moment later into the headmaster's office.
Again, she was not the only one summoned. Snape and Zarekael stood miserably nearby, neither meeting either her eye or Dumbledore's.
Is it because they feel they failed? she wondered cautiously. Or is it because they have something to confess?
She did not receive a welcome, nor even a true acknowledgment of her arrival; her coming was simply a signal for Dumbledore to open two log books on his desk and set up a Dicto-Quill on each.
These were no ordinary Dicto-Quills by any means; it had required a great deal of magical improvement to elevate them to their present state. Each one was programmed, so to speak, to copy down verbatim everything said in its presence while it was active, and even beyond that, these Dicto-Quills changed color of ink and writing font for each different speaker. Dumbledore, for instance, was represented by wide, looping letters in bright orange, while Snape's words were in squared emerald green script. Meli, who had only just been assigned a log, now appeared on the pages in deep turquoise written print.
Snape and Zarekael shared a log because their activities were almost always interrelated. Rasa's log would very likely go off in a different direction, but when her activities intersected with those of the spies, Dumbledore made arrangement for one report to be recorded simultaneously in all logs concerned.
This was, not surprisingly, one of those occasions.
Rather than opening the floor to volunteers, however, Dumbledore looked squarely at Snape and Zarekael. "Report," he ordered.
And report they did, fumbling over words and stumbling over one another's narrative in their hurry to spell out a full confession of all that had passed. Meli felt her insides go hollow as she listened, as much because of what they were saying as because of the effect their words were having on Dumbledore. With every new detail they made known, the headmaster's jaw tightened, his face darkened, and his eyes grew harder and harder until they seemed to be nothing more or less than flint, wanting only steel to set them aflame and break Hell itself loose from its chains.
Not only had Snape and Zarekael known what was going to happen…they themselves had carried it out.
Snape had walked past the Unspeakable about twenty minutes before the drama unfolded and slipped poison into his drink, then, in the confusion resulting from that man's death, Zarekael had twice shot the Auror with a hand-held crossbow, which he had then evanesced before spinning away and running to Dumbledore's side.
"Why didn't you warn me?" the headmaster demanded, anger adding a strangled note to his tone.
It was Snape who answered, and Meli saw in his eyes the beginnings of a subtle defiance. "We had to succeed in this, or the Dark Lord would have suspected us," he said coldly. "And even if you would not have moved to prevent it from happening, it was necessary for your reaction to be fully genuine, or we would still have fallen under suspicion."
Once he was satisfied that Snape and Zarekael had recorded everything necessary for the public record, Dumbledore turned to Meli and demanded her version of the events. Due to her lack of warning that anything was going to happen, her report was much shorter and, thanks to her being in the middle of the scuffle, much less detailed. She could describe any of the shoes within spitting distance, as well as the fire that had temporarily walled her off from the chaos, but beyond that her only concern had been the safety of Dumbledore and Ghen.
At the completion of Meli's report, Dumbledore removed the Dicto-Quills and slammed the logs shut, then leaned forward, the heels of his hands on the edge of his desk, to glare at Snape and Zarekael.
"When did you know about this?" he asked softly, his lack of volume ten times more terrible than a shout would have been.
Father and son lowered their eyes to the stone floor. "Three weeks ago," Zarekael said.
Meli swayed on her feet and saved herself from a fall only by catching the corner of Dumbledore's desk in one hand. They had known, long before the security arrangements were put in place, not only that these assassinations were planned but that they would be the ones carrying them out. They had known, when Dumbledore expressed his optimism about the event in their hearing, that his confidence was unfounded and that they would be proving it so with their own hands. They had known, when they installed the security precautions in the Great Hall, that they could be flouted, how best to bypass them, and that they themselves would be doing precisely that in a week's time.
Snape and Zarekael had known everything…and they had told no one.
This is not happening, she thought furiously, hatefully fighting the tears welling up in her eyes. This is impossible. I know these men—they're Severus and Ruthvencairn. These are not monsters. They're spies, not true Death Eaters, and if somehow they did this, it still wasn't them.
When she had spoken to Zarekael after learning his role in the Goldens' deaths, he had told her plainly that the Goldens' murderer and her friend were the same man, but she had rejected those words. She had drawn a line with him, just as she had done with her grandfather, breaking them in two. On the one side were Voldemort and the Death Eater; on the other were her grandfather and Ruthvencairn. Her grandfather had been consumed by Voldemort, but even now she refused to see them as one and the same; she loved her grandfather, and she could not love Voldemort. They were separate entities, and so were Zarekael Ruthvencairn and the Death Eater who bore his shape.
So, too, were Severus Snape and the Death Eater who looked like him.
It had been the Death Eaters, the Dark sides, who had done these things—the Death Eaters and not her friends. What she was hearing wasn't fully true.
It couldn't be.
Dumbledore, unfortunately, didn't seem to see it the same way.
"You took advantage of your knowledge of the security arrangements," Dumbledore bit out. "You deliberately deceived both Rasa and me. I trusted you, and this borders on an outright betrayal!"
Meli felt that she ought to speak in the spies' defense, but she had no idea of what she could possibly say; certainly nothing she said would successfully calm Dumbledore. And in any case, there was a part of her that still spoke reason to her, and, not having compartmentalized either Snape or Zarekael, it whispered that Dumbledore's words were in every way true.
The impact of his accusation hit the two spies like a physical blow. Snape rocked slightly at its delivery, then recovered enough to look directly at the headmaster again, his eyes a tragic marbling of defiance and pain. Beside him, Zarekael wilted and lowered his head in shameful misery; he, unlike his father, submitted to Dumbledore's anger without argument and without a word. Meli witnessed his reaction with a pang, sensing that the bolt had penetrated far deeper than his physical heart, and the accusation with which it was tipped would spread through him as thoroughly as any poison. Whatever punishment Dumbledore doled out, it could never approach the level of damage already done just by those words.
Well-earned words, that infuriating reasonable voice whispered insistently. This was a betrayal, and not only of Dumbledore.
"Did you consider at all," the headmaster continued, "that your actions in this matter lay you open to suspicion of being double-agents?" He looked from one to the other. "After tonight, I have no way of knowing that your loyalties are truly to me. How am I to know that your only reason for keeping me ignorant was for the purpose of plausible deniability? How much is it worth to you, this genuine reaction that you deemed so necessary?"
Something stirred in Snape's countenance, a flicker that was almost too rapid to be seen, but Meli caught it, if only just barely: an old hurt that far predated this confrontation, mingled with a kind of hopeless anger that she had never seen in him. It was gone immediately, though, buried beneath the familiar defiance and pain.
"What exactly did you expect us to do?" he demanded, his voice raising slightly in volume. "We weren't just protecting the Order, we were protecting you. If you hadn't reacted properly—and we know you wouldn't have done—it would have placed you, us, and the Order in jeopardy. What more could we have done?"
Dumbledore had no chance to reply, however, for Zarekael leapt into the fray in his behalf. "Stop," he ordered coldly, his own voice raising. "He hasn't said anything that isn't true. We earned this, Severus."
Snape now turned on him, his eyes blazing with an intensity that spoke, not of the current pain, but of that deeper, older hurt. "We talked this over," he snapped. "We agonized over the decision, and we decided that this was the only way. He has no right to make us feel guilty for doing our job! If he wants information, he has to accept the way in which it's obtained and the people who obtain it!"
Zarekael shook his head firmly. "Yes, we agonized; yes, we agreed it's the only way," he conceded. "But that doesn't mean that what we did was right!"
"None of what we do is right, Zarekael!" Snape countered, his voice now reaching a proper shout. "But that doesn't stop us from doing it! Why should this time be any different?"
Take that, the infuriatingly logical side of Meli's mind taunted. If they're separate people, the Death Eaters and your friends, how is it that your friends agonize over the Death Eaters' deeds?
Shut up, her will snapped back.
"Everything we do is wrong," Zarekael conceded, "but the one thing we always retained was our integrity—we have never betrayed the trust of the Order. Our word means nothing now, Severus—we've sacrificed our personal honor this time, and it was the only thing left to us."
Snape narrowed his eyes in anger. "As far as anyone else is concerned, we never had any honor," he hissed through his teeth. "The only reason our word meant anything at all is that it came through Albus Dumbledore. It's his word and our blood, and that's all anyone cares about!"
Again the headmaster tried to break in; again he was overridden by Zarekael. "We made our choice," the apprentice stated. "We knew that what we did was wrong, and now we're paying the penalty for it. Reputation didn't matter because we knew the truth, but now we are what everyone else thinks us to be!"
"Knowing the truth is scant comfort when you're drowning in loneliness and screaming in your nightmares," Snape told him coldly.
His son shook his head. "Believe me, I know that as well as you do," he replied. "But what comfort do we have now? Little though it was, it was still something. What do you have to show the gods now?"
Meli blinked in surprise. Had this been a religious debate the whole time and she simply missed it?
Or perhaps it had always been a religious matter for Zarekael, which was why he was so fervently set in the view he set forth, and a nonreligious matter for Snape, which was why he had not for a moment considered the other's view.
She was wrong, however, for instead of dismissing the question, Snape answered firmly, "That I am relentlessly and uncompromisingly working to undermine a Dark Lord, and while the means may be foul, the ending is worth it. What better way to show dedication to the cause than to allow the destruction of your very self?"
Zarekael again shook his head, anguish reflecting in his eyes. "There must be a balance between benefit and destruction, Severus," he said. "What has this destruction gained us? Where is the benefit from this sacrifice? Yes, we had to do it…but did it truly balance out? If there is no balance, we risk becoming the very evil we're fighting."
Dumbledore at last managed to interpose. "Enough!" he snapped. "This arguing will resolve nothing." He surveyed the two of them, the first traces of sorrow surfacing in his own troubled countenance. "There is nothing more for me to say," he told them. "It will require a great deal of time and work for you to regain my trust, gentlemen. How much…even I cannot say."
He sank heavily into his chair and shook his head wearily. "You're all excused for the night," he sighed.
Snape hesitated, perhaps considering whether or not he should stay to say whatever it was that was still on his mind, but Zarekael departed at once, Meli in his wake. She wanted to be as far away as possible from anything reminding her of the confrontation, including the room in which it had taken place.
She hadn't been intentionally following Zarekael, and it certainly wasn't her purpose to catch up to him, but she did both and found herself walking rather awkwardly two paces back. They were going the same way, at least until they came to a cross-corridor, so, with an inward sigh, she stepped resolutely forward and offered him the closest thing to an apologetic smile she could manage under the circumstances.
"Sorry," she said hesitantly. "We seem to be going the same direction. Do you mind if I walk a little way with you?"
Zarekael nodded morosely but made no other reply.
Meli fell in step beside him, but it was strange walking with him when, ostensibly, they were complete strangers. "By the way," she said, again sounding as hesitant as she felt, "I'm Mary Jane Wilks."
He summoned up a scrap of amusement, then nodded again. "Pleased to meet you, Miss Wilks," he replied quietly.
They walked on in silence for a few minutes, then rounded an L-junction and found themselves in a stretch of corridor with no ready escape and Sirius Black approaching from the other direction.
Meli felt her cheeks warm and knew that her eyes must be burning with hellfire. She wouldn't have been pleased to meet Black at the best of times, but the current circumstances surrounding her and Zarekael's presence there gave her every reason to doubt that the three of them could escape the situation without a fight. Black had indeed been cleared by Peter Pettigrew's death, and it seemed that he very much enjoyed showing up at Hogwarts and parading through its corridors for all to see. He had somehow managed to miss meeting up with either Meli or Zarekael prior to this, but there was no way of avoiding such a meeting now.
Meli swore viciously under her breath, the sound inaudible to Black, who was still too far away, but quite discernible to Zarekael's sensitive ears.
The hated animagus never slowed his swaggering gait until he came within perhaps five paces of the others. There he halted and made an insulting show of looking Zarekael up and down, conveying quite clearly the impression that he didn't approve of what he saw.
"Ah," he said at last. "You must be Snape's spawn. Zakarl, is it?"
Anyone else might have been given the benefit of the doubt for an erroneous pronunciation of Zarekael's name, and in almost any other context, even Black might have done, but Meli, for one, was predisposed to think him guilty of doing it intentionally, and her temper was hanging by a thread in any case. Given that he had to have heard Zarekael's name properly pronounced several times during his seemingly pointless and certainly annoying visits to Hogwarts, it was impossible for her to conclude that he honestly did not remember the correct way of it. She widened her eyes in a hateful glare, to which Black was apparently impervious.
Zarekael, by contrast, winced, but, Dumbledore's stinging words about trust still ringing in his ears, he mustered up a civil tone. "It's Zarekael," he corrected mildly. "And you are…?"
Black offered a ridiculous foppish bow and smiled mockingly. "Sirius Black, at your service," he replied. "Perhaps you've heard of me? Of course you have. Snivellus and I go way back."
That was too much for Meli. "Keep a civil tongue in your head, Black, or I'll happily rip it out," she snapped.
He turned his derisive eyes on her now. "And who is your charming companion, Zakarl?" he asked.
The repetition of the mispronunciation was a clear indication, if any had been necessary, that Black hadn't made a simple mistake the first time. Somehow, though, Zarekael held on to his temper and said, his voice shaking with the effort of civility, "This is Miss Wilks."
"Miss Wilks," Black echoed, rolling the syllables out of his mouth in a way that awoke in Meli the desire to emasculate him. "Miss Wilks. Didn't your daddy teach you about keeping your place?"
She chilled him with her most cold-blooded smile. "No," she replied silkily. "But my granddaddy taught me about putting pricks in their place. Would you like a demonstration?"
It was a bluff, really, but her manner of delivering the threat seemed to awaken a doubt even in Zarekael's mind, to judge by the quick sidewise glance he dashed her way. She rarely spoke so casually about any aspect of her childhood, particularly any part of it dealing specifically with Voldemort, and she had never, in her memory, done so in this sort of context.
Black, of course, could have no idea that the "granddaddy" in question happened to be a Dark Lord, but he had picked up the message that that worthy gentleman was not a pleasant person and certainly was no one to be trifled with. His self-satisfied smirk slipped noticeably, but something malicious sparked in his eyes.
He's going to go for broke, Meli thought, her feelings in the matter strangely torn. A part of her wanted nothing more than an excuse to hex him into oblivion, even while another part of her marveled at his brazen stupidity in even considering such a move. After all, even the uneducated eye could discover by now that Zarekael was nearing the limit of what he would take, and it was quite clear that Mary Jane Wilks had already passed that point. If Black pushed them too much further, there wouldn't be enough of him to pour into a thimble and deliver to Harry Potter.
A thimble-sized urn, she thought off-handedly, even as she waited for Black to make his life-ending move. Do they make those, or would we have to transfigure something?
"If I thought you had the balls," Black retorted at last, "I might actually scrounge up some fear for my health, but seeing as I do that you're nothing more or less than a self-important little bitch who thrives on scaring lesser men than myself, I won't dignify your empty threat with so much as a drop of my sweat."
Somewhere during this speech, Meli's temper had passed the wall of emotion and settled into cold calculation. She thought it entirely possible that she could at any time rip off his arm and beat him to death with it and feel no twinge of emotion. While it was a dangerous state in which to be, it did afford her one advantage that was denied Zarekael: detachment. She lost the emotional drive to commit immediate violence and permitted herself to stand, staring at Black and musing over his last statement. Where a moment before she might very well have been using this same time to hex him with something truly malevolent, she now spent it in deconstructing his insult, examining its structure, and determining that he'd done a half-rate job at it. It was her intent to explain to him, in absolute detail, where he had gone wrong and how he could have honed the blade of his words and then to hex him nastily, but she never did have the chance.
Zarekael had not passed the wall as Meli had done, and while that meant that Black was not faced with the freakish, hollow countenance of a man who had left himself, it also meant that he was not dealing with someone who was able to step back and speak diplomatically. The petty animagus had not inspired a rage—not by a long shot—but he had insulted Zarekael in every point, kicking a man who was already down for no other reason than that he bore some stupid ancient grudge against Zarekael's father. The mangling of a name was dreadful but could be borne, as could, if necessary, the jabs against Snape, but those combined with the gross insult of both a lady and one of the apprentice's few friends proved to be too much, and the full force of all of them together quite overcame the restraint of his recent meekness.
He drew himself up, eyes blazing, and glared down at Black. "You, sir," he uttered through his teeth, "are a juvenile, ill-mannered, ill-bred, unkempt cur. No one should speak to a lady in such a way." He actually sneered at Black in a manner very like Snape's. "Didn't the Dementors teach you better manners?"
Something bitter-tasting hit the inside of Meli's mouth, prickling at the roof and gums, and she felt as if she'd taken a physical blow to the stomach. Zarekael hadn't touched Black, but he had still managed to score a hard punch beneath the belt.
No doubt about it, she reflected thoughtfully. Full points to Ruthvencairn for style, substance, and pun-related subtlety.
Black sneered back, but his expression lacked the full conviction Zarekael had employed. "Like father, like son," he retorted. "You're hiding behind words because you know you can't take me man to man." And then he had the temerity to reach out and shove his opponent.
Meli stared at the animagus in open shock, then looked back to Zarekael, expecting to see a drawn wand. Instead, the apprentice brushed himself off and gazed disdainfully down his nose at Black. "Reputations can be made or lost on the basis of what is said and what is not," he said softly.
If he'd thought through what he just said, he wouldn't have said it, Meli thought numbly. There's no way he would bring the row with Dumbledore into this.
Zarekael wasn't finished, however. "Only the intellectually stunted equate power with strength or might," he continued coldly, "while cities can rise or fall at a word. More often than not, boasting and making a show of physical force are compensation for actual impotence." He arched a derisive eyebrow. "Are you compensating for something, Mr. Black?"
There was a quick, sweeping motion, and Black had his wand pointed at Zarekael. Before he had brought it fully to bear, however, he found that Meli, too, had drawn and was holding her wand in a far steadier grip. "I'd put that away if I were you," she advised darkly, "or your manhood will no longer be in question."
Black seemed momentarily inclined to argue, but when she shifted her aim suggestively, he relented and lowered his wand.
"Bloody Snapes and their girlfriends," he muttered ungraciously. "Never a creative one in the lot."
Meli narrowed her eyes. "Why don't we just part ways now," she suggested coolly. "While all of us can do so under our own power."
Under the direction of her still-leveled wand, Black stepped aside, permitting Meli and Zarekael to pass him. As if to restate the point that Meli was under his protection, Zarekael offered his arm to her, and she walked with him, arm-in-arm, until the nearest cross-corridor, where they parted ways and went off by themselves, as previously planned, to brood on the other events of the evening.
Perhaps as a sort of harsh, unspoken punishment or perhaps in an attempt to give Zarekael a chance to redeem himself as soon as possible, Dumbledore summoned the apprentice and Meli soon afterward and informed them that their mission to Surrey would go forward as planned. While Meli found a small comfort in the fact that the headmaster still placed enough trust in the spies to allow them still to carry out missions, she saw, quite plainly, that it was likewise an opportunity for further grief; this would be a touchy task under the best of circumstances…but even a criminally optimistic individual could not reasonably expect the best now.
She planned their outing, chose her glamourie, hoped for the best…but she did not hold her breath.