"You two," Harry stammered in exclamation. "You're...you're behind this, aren't you? And all that rubbish about Pinnix and Moseby, that was all an act, wasn't it?"
"Brilliant, Potter," Atlas Filch growled. "You've figured us out. We're sitting here in a locked room in the dark with you lot because we're criminal masterminds." His stony visage fixated on Hermione. "What's a smart lass like you doing with a daft git like him?"
Hermione shot him a strange look. "It's the glasses. They make him look cute, don't you think?" She rose to her feet and stood right in front of the gargantuan wizard and the petite blonde. "So would either of you like to explain exactly what's going on?"
"Terry," Violet started to explain, her voice taking on a slightly defeated tone. "He took us here. I don't know what's wrong with him. I think he's...insane or something."
Atlas shrugged. "Nah. Not insane. Just young and stupid." He eyed Harry suspiciously. "I can see where you'd be confused, though. They do look a lot alike."
"Hey!" Harry exclaimed indignantly, although his attention was soon diverted by Hermione attempting an 'Alohomora' on the door with her wand drawn. Nothing happened. She then grabbed the handle and began turning it furiously.
"Believe it or not, we've already tried both of those things," Atlas Filch grumbled. "I've also attempted to apparate out, but to no avail. If this is anything like last time, the entire place is likely warded against most kinds of wizardry. Except maybe a few simple spells and, of course, blood magic."
"'Like last time?'" Harry and Hermione repeated together. Harry alone continued speaking. "What do you know about last time? What happened?"
Atlas Filch's frame slouched slightly against the wall. "I met Frank Nichten-Teach in the fall before that summer. He had a business proposition for me. I was an amateur herbologist and well...there's never been much call for those. Mostly we just run muggle flower shops and try not to seem crazy." Harry looked exasperated. He hadn't asked for the older wizard's life story. "The Serpent's Tooth made money for us much faster than we expected. Frank saved me from a life of total obscurity and I was naturally very grateful. So much so that I did something very stupid."
Filch's eyes glazed over for a moment and Harry nearly had to prod him to continue. "A young man approached me. Introduced himself as Frank Nichten-Teach's estranged son. He said he'd heard I was having problems with my flower shop, short-staffed and all that, and was wondering if I could offer him a job. He claimed he was looking to reconnect with his father; that if he had a respectable job, he could go back to him and show him what he'd done with his life." Atlas let a small smile form on his lips. "I tried to warn him that working in a flower shop wasn't so respectable, but between his pleading and a certain lady friend of mine doing her level best to convince me, I caved. I agreed to introduce him to the man I had running the shop while I was working at the Serpent's Tooth."
"Reginald Evans," Harry whispered breathlessly.
"Your grandfather, Potter. Yes." Atlas Filch sighed. "The lady friend in question was Rosella Pinnix, a Death Eater. Although I didn't know that at the time, of course. And the young man was Terry Nichten-Teach."
"What!" Hermione exclaimed at roughly the same time Harry did. "How? How could Terry still be so young-looking after all this time? Is he a vampire or...?"
Filch nodded in Violet Mogle's direction. "Best to show them the picture, love." Looking sheepish, Violet withdrew a photograph from the inside of her skimpy top and handed it to Harry.
"This was what I found that day that you saw me in the Serpent's Tooth," she explained fearfully. "If I had known what it meant at the time, I would have shown you, I swear it."
Harry barely heard what she said, as his eyes were mesmerized by the picture in front of him. In the black and white photo, Terry Nichten-Teach stood on the left side of the frame, sporting an RAF jacket while another young man shook his hand, his eyes staring intensely back at Terry. The other boy was instantly recognizable to Harry. "Tom Riddle," he declared softly.
"This must have been taken over fifty years ago," Hermione assessed as she looked at the picture over Harry's shoulder. "If Voldemort knew Terry when they were growing up, does that make him some sort of dark wizard?"
"No, I'm afraid it's much worse than that," Atlas Filch assessed grimly. "He's a muggle. He's Frank Nichten-Teach, in fact, as he was as a young man. Preserved forever in that photograph."
"Preserved. Just like Voldemort was in Riddle's diary," Harry said, the pieces suddenly fitting together in his mind. He promptly tore the photo to shreds. "We have to destroy it, the way I did with the diary back in second year. It was the only thing that stopped Voldemort from killing Ginny."
Atlas Filch cleared his throat. "I was speaking figuratively. Terry was not literally preserved in the photograph. I believe he has a much more powerful object at his disposal which allows him to accomplish what he has."
Hermione's eyes narrowed as Harry guiltily placed the pieces of the torn photo on a nearby table. "What are you talking about now? What object?"
"A green gemstone," Atlas explained. "I'm afraid I don't much know what it does, except that it's filled with dark magic and that Terry never goes anywhere without it."
"This is all fascinating," Harry stated without a hint of sarcasm, "but shouldn't we be doing more to escape? I mean, if this Auburn Summer thing is happening all over again, there should be four muggle victims out there, waiting around to die at the hands of Terry Nichten-Teach. We can't just sit here!"
"Actually, Harry," Violet interjected, her voice shaky, "they're counting on us to just sit here. We're the victims."
"Of course," Hermione exclaimed in her 'I've figured it out' tone of voice. "There were some experiments done where instead of four muggles, four people of different bloodlines were used in the ritual sacrifice."
"Let me guess," Harry groaned. "One muggle, one muggleborn, one half-blood and one pureblood." Both Hermione and Atlas Filch nodded in the pale light emanating from his wand. "I guess you're the pureblood, then," Harry remarked as he gestured towards Atlas, "and you would have been last time, too. One of the Evans' would have been the muggle," he swallowed the lump in his throat quickly, "and my parents were the half-blood and the muggleborn."
"Brilliant deduction, Mr. Potter," Atlas Filch commented with a trace of dry humor. "Would have been even more impressive if you'd also noticed that the door is now open." Harry turned to see that the door confining them to this room was now wide open. "A bit of wandless magic did it, I think, sometime during your little tirade."
Hermione tentatively stuck her head through the door. "Either that or this is all a trap."
"Maybe," Harry agreed thoughtfully. "But I think I'm willing to risk it. It's better than being cooped up in this room all night, waiting to be slaughtered."
In turn, Hermione, Violet Mogle and Atlas Filch followed Harry outside. Hermione and Filch had their wands drawn, although judging from what Atlas had said earlier, Harry wondered what good they would do. He was starting to not feel so bad about only being able to wield a rubber chicken and a fake sword.
Harry stopped suddenly in the middle of the hallway as his eyes caught sight of a picture hanging above a furnace vent. The figures in it were unmistakably his grandparents, his mother Lily and his aunt Petunia, looking proud, radiant and sour, respectively. "What is this place?" Harry asked no one in particular, his voice catching slightly in his throat.
"This used to be your grandparents' house," Atlas Filch explained bitterly. "The killer does always return to the scene of the crime, you know."
Harry temporarily forgot about their situation for a moment and tried to touch the picture frame, maybe even see if he could get it down and take it with him. He stopped when an electric shock ran through his body. Harry cried out slightly in pain. Hermione shot him a sympathetic look.
"Lily probably charmed it so it could never be taken down," Hermione mused. "She must have been a really clever witch." Wincing just a litte, Harry nodded and the four of them moved down the hallway, towards a light in the distance. As they approached the open doorway, Atlas Filch hunkered back in the shadows as Violet Mogle hugged the wall. Harry and Hermione moved as close as they dared, hoping to hear as much as they could before they made their move. Of course, they hadn't quite figured out what 'their move' was yet...
"No!" they all heard Terry Nichten-Teach's voice bellow. "The Stone of Preservation does not lie. This tells me nothing." Harry's eyes peered carefully into the room. It appeared to be your standard muggle living room, although not quite as spotless as the Dursleys'. 'Obviously there's no hated nephew living here,' Harry groused to himself. Terry Nichten-Teach, still wearing his wizard's robes (although now they made him look maniacal rather than comical), paced about the room, glaring hatefully at Lloyd Moseby and Elmira Pinnix. "I've replayed it all from the beginning. Nobody dies. Enough blood pours out to knock them out, but not to kill them. So why didn't it work!"
"I...I don't know," Elmira Pinnix answered, her voice a withering combination of deference and disgust. "My mother never said anything about...but I suppose she must have known. I tried to get it out of Atlas Filch, but he was so resistant to everything, I..."
The younger version of Frank Nichten-Teach let out a frustrated roar. "If we can't kill them, I can't become a wizard. If I can't become a wizard, then so much of Tom's plans will be worthless. He won't be happy. And what's more, I won't be happy."
Lloyd Moseby screwed up his nose. "Must you continuously refer to the Dark Lord as Tom? It's quite disconcerting."
Terry Nichten-Teach's stare was icy. Harry remembered the menacing look in young Tom Riddle's eyes when they'd met briefly in the Chamber of Secrets and had always thought nothing could rival it. This did. "I want you two to understand that we are on the same side. However, I am not one of Riddle's Death Munchers. When I signed up to follow Tom, there was nobody else who cared what a brilliant wizard he was. I gave him something that nobody else would."
"Devotion?" Elmira Pinnix tried. "Friendship?"
"That," Terry answered with a wicked smile, "and a certain old family heirloom. Something that only someone with the scope of his imagination could fully appreciate." His thoughts seemed to wander, but within a moment he had turned his attention back to the two Death Eaters. "Fetch them. Even if we still can't kill them, we can certainly bleed them almost to death. That's fun in its own right."
Looking slightly disgruntled, Moseby and Pinnix complied, only to run into the four of them before they had gone ten feet. "We decided to save you the trouble," Harry announced flippantly. He stepped into the room in a few quick strides, Hermione following behind quickly. After a few moments, Atlas Filch followed suit.
"Ah, Mr. Potter," Terry said with a dementedly pleased expression on his face. "I believe we've met before. It must have slipped my mind that I had already met your parents. In fact, I got to know them rather well. You never really know someone until you've seen them in a life or death situation, you know." He clutched his hands behind his back and approached Harry slowly. "Shame I couldn't do them both in, but I've since heard that Tom finished the job for me. Is that right? I suppose you could give me a firsthand account, seeing as you were there."
Harry fumed silently, but Hermione had a retort ready. "Maybe he should tell you the part about how Voldemort couldn't even kill a baby. How it reduced him to nothing for ten years." Terry flinched visibly. "Or did his Death Eaters leave that part out?"
"You really are a clump of worthless scum, Terry," Atlas Filch spat. "It's a miracle Frank turned out to be the man he was. Felt guilty every day, once he found out what you'd done here. He even came to visit Potter and that muggle family that raised him."
"Do you think you can humiliate me with tales of how I became a sniveling weakling in my later years? It won't work." His eyes gleamed ferociously, and his voice was shaken. Obviously, what Atlas had said had affected him. "Bloody hell. Kill them already. We can find others in the time remaining and maybe we can figure out what went wrong the time before." Lloyd and Elmira just looked at him dumbly. "I said kill them!"
Looking uninspired yet determined, the two Death Eaters turned to face the unlikely quartet. Harry moved towards them cautiously. Moseby sneered at him, knowing that the fact that he had not yet produced a wand was because he didn't have one to produce. As he strode towards the malevolent duo, however, Harry did pull out his fake sword and, with one swift chopping motion, rapped Elmira Pinnix's right hand, making her drop her wand. Simultaneously, from behind him, Hermione yelled "Expelliarmus" with her wand pointed straight at Lloyd Moseby.
Atlas Filch's theory about complex spells not working inside this house seemed accurate, as Moseby merely grunted and fell back slightly in response to Hermione's attack. Pinnix appeared to be stunned slightly, but otherwise none the worse for wear. As she made her way towards her fallen wand, Harry grabbed her arms and shoved her hard into a well-placed easy chair.
Filch must have decided that it would be worthless to use his wand, as he tackled Lloyd Moseby and sent him sprawling to the ground. The two of them struggled on the carpet, and Atlas Filch's edge in physical size seemed to be winning the day, as the much larger man had the Death Eater pinned down on the floor. Harry also saw that Hermione was moving closer to Terry Nichten-Teach. His eyes followed her curiously and he might have considered facing Terry with her, except for the swift kick in the chest he had just taken from Elmira Pinnix.
Harry's big disadvantage in this fight was negated by the fact that he was standing over Pinnix's wand, thus making them both wandless. He dare not attempt to pick it up and use it against her, however; not after the incident when he had used Moseby's wand at the Serpent's Tooth. There were other disadvantages, though. He didn't know what kind of a fighter Elmira Pinnix was, or if she had any kind of enchanted weaponry hidden up her sleeve. Plus, Harry had never physically attacked a girl before. (Unless he decided to count Millicent Bulstrode, which would require him to actually think of Bulstrode as a girl.)
Despite the knight costume he was wearing, Harry decided that chivalry was dead. He attempted to punch her jawline, only to clumsily miss as she ducked berneath the blow. Elmira Pinnix also had the time and foresight to kick Harry's legs out from under him. Apparently, Voldemort had taken the time to train this Death Eater in the martial arts. Although it was difficult to move with his chest encased in metal, Harry did manage to land on Pinnix's wand. Elmira moved to grab it from underneath his leg, but as she stooped to the floor, Violet Mogle maneuvered herself close to the Death Eater and sprayed her in the face with something.
"Pepper spray," Violet explained matter-of-factly. "I carry it around with me wherever I go."
Harry examined her skimpy genie outfit in a non-leering way. "Where do you carry it in that thing?" She didn't seem obliged to answer. "Never mind. Just help me up." After a few seconds of struggle, Harry rose to his feet and approached Elmira Pinnix. As she rose blindly to her feet, Harry smacked her head roughly with his plastic sword. She fell back to the floor, unconscious. 'One down,' Harry thought.
Harry's eyes found Terry Nichten-Teach standing close to Hermione, the green gemstone in his hand dangled before her eyes. Across the room (and much closer to where Harry was now standing), Atlas Filch and Lloyd Moseby still grappled with each other mercilessly. Indecision flooded him. 'Hermione's a great witch, and Nichten-Teach is only a muggle. I'm sure she can handle him. Whereas Atlas Filch looks like he's having a heart attack over there fighting Moseby. However, if I'm wrong and something happens to Hermione...' His thoughts trailed off. He knew what he had to do.
Taking large but careful strides across the living room that used to belong to his muggle grandparents, Harry removed the rubber chicken from his pocket, took careful aim and, pulling back on its rubbery neck, shot it in the general direction of Moseby. As he had hoped, Fred and George's practical joke hit its target, causing a nearby table lamp to fall on Moseby's head. 'That makes it two,' Harry added a little smugly.
Harry made his way quickly to Hermione's side, facing down Terry Nichten-Teach with a confident look in her eye. "You shouldn't come any closer," he taunted Harry, the green stone in his hand flashing around impressively. "This little gem really is quite powerful."
"You're a muggle," Harry needlessly informed him with a bemused grin. "What could you possibly do to us?"
A viciousness flooded the eyes of the eternally young muggle. "I could bleed your essence into any object in this room until you were nothing more than a shell. But please, continue to condescend to me."
"I can't help but notice that you're not doing that, though," Hermione retorted bravely. "So what exactly is your plan? If we stay here long enough, will more Death Eaters show up?"
"I don't need Riddle's cannon fodder," Terry growled. "I've been with him for sixty years, kept safe by the Stone of Preservation. I'll return to him, faithful as always and wait until that moment when he has need of me again."
"You-Know-Who hasn't let you out of your cage for twenty years," Atlas Filch commented smugly from the back of the room. "How long 'til you think you'll see the light of day again?"
Terry Nichten-Teach walked away from Harry slightly to face the large wizard. "For me, it will only be an instant. For you," his grin was pure evil, "it may seem like an eternity." Pivoting on his heel abruptly, Terry turned his eyes towards Hermione. "Oh, Miss Granger, there was one other thing I think you should know." Before Harry could stop him, he whispered something in her right ear...and then disappeared.
Harry was already on his way toward Hermione when the young man's image vanished from sight and the Stone of Preservation fell to the ground. His eyes did a brief once-over of Hermione, making certain nothing had happened to her. Harry then bent down on one knee and retrieved the emerald-coloured gemstone. "I can't believe he just left this here."
Hermione's eyes met his own. "Harry, I...I don't think he had a choice."
Before Harry could reply, several figures burst through the doors. Pocketing the Stone of Preservation on instinct, he watched as Hermione and Atlas Filch both drew their wands...only to see Charles 'Three-Arm Charlie' Fournier leading a team of Aurors into the house.
"Oh, bloody hell," Fournier called out. "I was told there were Death Eaters here." His eyes went from the still forms of Lloyd Moseby and Elmira Pinnix to Harry and Hermione. "Guess you took care of 'em yourselves. You kids just can't stay out of trouble, can you?" The two Hogwarts students shared a knowing look. Neither of them were currently inclined to disagree.