Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in CSI: NY are property of Jerry Bruckheimer, Anthony Zuiker, and CBS. No profit is being made, and no infringement is intended. For entertainment only.
All recognizable, people, places, and events in Harry Potter are property of J.K Rowling, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Rebecca Stanhope is my creation.
A/N: This is an HP/CSI:NY crossover involving the OFC from my HP WIP, Summon the Lambs to Slaughter. If OFCs offend thee, click the "Back" button now. For those who choose to read on, I hope you enjoy it, but if you don't, feel free to say so. Just keep it clean.
Sometimes, she wondered if he would be so eager to touch her if he knew what she was, if he saw the secrets that lived beneath her skin like latent disease. She didn't think so. He was a creature of facts and evidence, salted and seasoned by the streets of New York and rocked in its squalid cradle. So, she kept her silence, and her silence earned her moments like these, when magic existed in the real world and it was possible to divide by two and create a whole.
His lips were hot and hungry against her throat, and from beneath half-lidded eyes, she caught a glimpse of dark brown hair and pale nape and let her fingers play over the soft strands. As he was in everything else, he was thorough in his investigation of her exposed flesh, almost greedy, and she allowed herself a throaty purr of satisfaction even as her thoughts strayed into darker fields by far.
In truth, she wondered what all of them would think if the walls suddenly came down and all cards of the Tarot grinned up at them with vulpine, leering faces. Mac, with his gruff exterior and sense of military honor, and Stella with her unspoken loneliness and independence worn like armor. Would they be so friendly if they knew of her addictions and festering wounds? Or Sheldon, with his warm smile and medical degree. What would he say if she told him that everything he took as the gospel of Hippocrates and St. John was only reassuring myth?
Bones could be made or unmade in defiance of God. She had seen it with her own eyes-it and a thousand impossibilities besides. She had borne witness to the resurrection of the dead, rooted in her chair while the bodies of those who were no more and should never have been again flexed fingers devoid of flesh and stared at the world through empty, soulless eyes. She had seen them born, and she had cut them down again with the ceaseless raising of her wand. Bones had piled at her feet in drifting dunes and ground beneath her churning wheels as she raced across blood-soaked fields under smoke-blackened skies.
Such was the knowledge that she carried, the only legacy brought from the world she had left behind, and she longed to share it. It burned on her tongue like fire and honey, but her lips had been sealed by God's fiery hand and the promised wrath of wizarding law; even if she dared flout the latter in a final, irrevocable rejection, there was no one to believe her.
Not even you, love, she thought as his hands slid down the narrow, stiff curve of her spine and his tongue found the hollow of her throat. Especially not you.
Love? It's funny the things one cannot leave behind, isn't it, Miss Stanhope? The melancholy, wistful voice of Headmaster Dumbledore startled her, and she arched beneath her husband's mouth. For all your insistence that you've left us and all that we were-what you are-behind, it isn't truly so. We are dust in your pores, indelible as the mark of time. The robes are gone, yes, and the chair that once drifted up stairs that never rested easily, but traces remain. The occasional lapses in proper American dialect for example, or your insatiable predilection for tea.
And your wands, of course.
She bristled at the mention of her wands, tucked inside a velvet bag in the bottom of the dresser, abandoned foundlings left to gather dust. Their smooth shafts had all but forgotten the possessive, spastic curl of her fingers, and her fingers throbbed with sudden yearning, as though they had remembered the caress of a cherished lover. She closed her eyes against a pang of nostalgia and the sand and sugar scald of tears and concentrated on the exquisite nip of Don's teeth on her earlobe.
I'm not Rebecca Stanhope anymore, Headmaster. I haven't been for a long time.
Ah, but you are, came the reply, and the familiar gentleness in his tone made her chest ache. Your name may have become Mistress Flack, but true magic never dies, and beneath your mathematician's skin, you are still that fierce witch-child with a lion's heart and a serpent's soul. You still watch in the dark for the menace that makes its den in the unlighted places of the world, and you still understand that which you were never meant to know. Nothing can change that, and it is useless to try. It will only cause you sorrow.
Oh, but she had tried. She had fled Scotland with the despairing cry of the broken, kicked the dust from her eggshell heels and washed it away with a torrent of bitter tears. The whipcrack report of her Apparition into her St. Augustine apartment had still been ringing in the air when she had torn off her robes and unceremoniously stuffed them into the garbage can. Her wands had been next, tossed into a drawer with a choked sob of furious betrayal, and the banishment of Rebecca Stanhope, witch and Arithmancer, had begun.
In her place had come the Muggle college student, and after that, the Muggle graduate student. The numbers ceased to sing their sacred songs to her closed eyes and trembling fingers, and she no longer followed the threads of tantalizing possibility that had once danced and writhed behind her closed eyelids in joyous invitation. They faded, lost their glorious plumage, until they were ordinary integers of ink and paper. She had lost herself in the anesthetized comfort of mundane existence.
At twenty-two, she had moved to New York for graduate studies in advanced mathematics at NYU, and though the transition from sleepy Southern town to bustling urban metropolis had been stunning, she had never once reached for the reassuring heft of her wand. She had struggled onto the subways and over the dilapidated sidewalks with stoic determination, and when winter wrapped its icy fingers around the city, she had pulled on her mittens and scarf and pushed aside all thoughts of a surreptitious Warming Charm cast beneath her clothes. Magic was a childish thing she had put away, or so she told herself through gritted teeth.
But not entirely. The need for it still tingles and burns beneath your fingertips like slow, killing poison. On nights when Don is pulling a double shift and his side of the bed is barren and cold, you tremble with the longing to release it just for an instant, to let it flow from you in a crackling torrent. Your bones and sinews weep with the memory of power unleashed, ozone and Hera's lightning. You were always a stubborn child, and addictions die hard.
More than once, you've found yourself pacing the rooms of the apartment and wrangling with the urge to put pen to paper and weave upon the loom of time and chance.
Not a pen, she thought suddenly, and her hand closed spasmodically around his shoulder. Don, long accustomed to the inexplicable vagaries of her imperfect nervous system, gently shrugged free. Not a pen. A quill. With a fine nib and an eagle feather just like the one poor Neville loaned me on the first day of Potions.
An image arose in her mind of the Potions dungeon, dark and cold and damp enough to make her bones throb. The only warmth in winter had come from the simmering heat of bubbling cauldrons and the forty huddled bodies that occupied the rough, wooden benches. Breath had hung in the frigid air like confessions, and spiders had dwelt in the unswept corners. Once, in that room, she had sealed her fate with the errant scribble of a jittering quill, and every night for three years hence, she had passed the hours in its drafty confines and toiled beneath the pitiless lash of the Serpent King.
Ah, yes. The Serpent King. We come to him at last, and sooner than I thought we would. Dumbledore's voice was still kind, but there was an undercurrent of brisk anticipation now, a clandestine glee that sparked a flare of resentment in her belly.
Still a master manipulator, eh, old man? she thought bitterly. That hollow runs long and deeply beneath my skin, and the echoes of its creation reverberate in my fingertips and my teeth to this day, and to recall it too clearly brings bile and wormwood to my throat. I survive because I pretend that it does not exist. It is a wound that does not heal, and you do it no favors by prodding it while my oblivious husband seduces me.
What did you expect? sneered a laconic baritone inside her head, and she moaned. I was his favorite slave for twenty years, and all my loyalty earned was excuses and recrimination and a twisted handmaiden who dogged my every step. Did you really think your three years of noble sacrifice and bumbling hindrance would be worthy of respite? Foolish chit; clearly the lessons I struggled to drum into your obdurate skull were all for naught. Only precious Potter, chiefest among his conquests, has earned that peace. He will spill my blood and strip the flesh from my bones until he wearies of me, and then I will be cast aside.
Just like you were. The reward for unwavering fealty is obsolescence, or is that a lesson Godric Gryffindor never told you?
She flinched as the memories of mud and sour Curses filled her nose. Bastard. Oh, you miserable bastard.
Don froze in the act of cupping her breast and drew away from her. "Hey, you all right?" he asked, and drew the ball of his thumb over her cheekbone. "Something hurtin' you?"
The solicitous tenderness in his voice and the stroke of his hand were a throttling fist around her heart, and only her iron will stopped her from turning her face away and cowering like a snared rabbit at the foot of the bed. The language of compassion and sweetness with no thought for recompense were rare gifts that her suspicious mind could neither fathom nor wholly accept. Don had never raised his hand to her, and even their most heated spats had never progressed beyond the slamming of a door, but even so, in the withered cockles of her heart, she was waiting for the unspoken price to be levied. Mercy was never free, and love was never unconditional.
Things my teacher taught me, she mused with cynical hysteria, and even as she wrangled with the mounting urge to bury her face into the crook of Don's neck and cry, her mouth twitched in a convulsive smirk.
Always is never always, but never is almost always never. Friends die, and enemies prosper, and the blood of the innocent looks no different from the blood of the guilty. The gods dry no tears, but they drink from them with cupped and eager hands. There are places in the world where no one can hear you scream, and sometimes, even if they can, it doesn't matter because no one can help you, or, worse yet, they don't care. Dying is not the sole province of the old, and death seldom comes with dignity or meaning. Heroes die facedown in the dirt, and villains receive state funerals. Virtue goes unrewarded, and mercy and loyalty are for fools and children.
Those were the lessons life in the wizarding world had taught her, and she held their truths inviolate. With them, she had staunched the bleeding and reinforced her towering fortress walls, built them tall and high and without doors. She had been determined that there be no second lapse into weakness. The first had nearly cost her everything, and though her body was fragile, her mind and her will to survive were not, and a lesson taught by experience was one never forgotten.
She mustered a smile. "Yeah, I'm good. Just been a long damn day in the chair."
"Oh. Well, let me see what I can do about that." He offered her a lopsided smirk and got out of bed. "I'll be right back," he said.
"You, uh, calling the chase?" She raised an inquiring eyebrow.
"Are you kiddin'? I'm just bringing in reinforcements." He cast an appreciative, lingering gaze over the thin spar of her collarbone and the soft curve of one exposed breast and padded from the room.
She watched him go in silence, lips pursed in admiration of his retreating buttocks.
Not entirely sacrosanct, those rules of yours, pointed out the primly acerbic voice of Professor McGonagall. If they were, you never would have married your Muggle. But you did.
She had, at that, and the realization loosened the squeezing, thorny fingers around her heart. She still wasn't certain how it had happened, and in truth, she dared not question it too closely, lest the fragile miracle she had fashioned for herself from the dust of shattered dreams crumble between her grasping fingers. She cradled it to her breast, protected it from the light of unforgiving scrutiny and the infected shadows of her past, and every night, when she spooned against him beneath the sheets and her obdurate, bony knees jabbed him in the kidneys in their perpetual quest for total bed domination, she prayed that it would still be there in the morning. Because the last, best lesson that the Hard Knocks School of Witchcraft and Misery had taught her was that all one held dear could be taken in the passing of a breath.
Oh, indeed, murmured the belladonna voice of the Serpent King, and in her mind's eye, she saw the glint of a fang and glittering, oildrop eyes inside a pasty, sallow face. That lesson came the swiftest and hardest of all, and if the theory was painful, then the practical crushed you. You, the unrepentant chit with an ego as big as your mouth, who toppled a Ministry official with a display of vicious, Slytherin cunning Salazar himself would have applauded, and who charged across a cratered field with nothing but your wand and your brass bollocks and your unwitting sacrifice of fourteen, were a blubbing child in the end, a sniveling cub in a den of serpents. It stripped you of all your beloved pretensions of maturity and idealism and left you kneeling in the bloody mud with tears and blood and dirt on your face. And as soon as you could, you crawled away to lick your wounds.
Fuck you. It was savage and seething, the anguished howl of a wounded animal.
That was, I believe, entirely the problem. Dismissive and barbed with casual, cruel amusement. Isn't that truly why you left the wizarding world in your petulant wake and took your formidable skills with you? Isn't that why you muffled the persistent siren song of the numbers and ignored the burning ache of unspent magic in your wrists and fingers? Not because of the disillusionment that the horrors of war brought, but because you discovered that just because you made the hard choice didn't entitle you to whatever spoils your heart desired?
Oh, Severus, sighed Dumbledore.
Pay him no heed, Stanhope, ordered McGonagall crisply. You paid him mind for far too long, and look what it gained you. You owe him nothing, less than nothing if I may be so frank, and any road, if you hadn't gone, there would be no Muggle now.
It all came back to that in the end, to the Muggle rummaging in the kitchen in nothing but his birthday suit. He had been a gift unlooked for, and the thought of him slipping through her fingers as so many others had done sent cold terror into her belly. He was magical as a rock, and he was brash, and his vociferous support of the New York Rangers mystified her, but he was also gentle and fiercely protective of both her intelligence and her physical fragility, and nowhere did she feel safer or more cherished than when she was wrapped in his arms and listening to his heartbeat.
It had been four years since her private miracle on 34th Street, when destiny had arrived, not in a sleigh or the winged feet of Mercury, but on the tennis-shoed feet of a murder suspect hotfooting down the street in a desperate bid to outrun the long arm of the law. His hopes and left tibia had smashed against her spoked wheel when reflexes had proven too slow, and her wrist had snapped like green kindling in the ensuing tumble of tangled limbs. Don Flack had been hot on his quarry's heels, and even as she'd lain, stunned and stupid, on the sidewalk with her skirt bunched in a tumorous knot beneath her buttocks and her broken wrist sending bright flares of agony into her fingers, she'd marveled at how handsome he was.
She had meant to speak to him when the screaming suspect had been dragged away, but the city, fearing an impending lawsuit and eager to chivvy the craning onlookers away, had bundled her into an ambulance before she'd had the chance, and her only conversations that night had been with a beef-necked EMT and the taciturn, harried doctor who had set her wrist and written her a hastily scribbled prescription for manmade nirvana. Chance romance, it had seemed, was dead.
And then, Detective Flack had shown up in the hospital parking lot, nervous and sidling and lazily flipping his notebook from hand to hand. He had wanted to ask her more questions, he'd said, about the incident involving Lenny on the Lam. If nothing else, he assured her, they could get him for assault on a disabled person.
"Oh, I get my own felony category now? Hot damn," she'd retorted before she could stop herself, and the expression on his face had been so confused and quietly mortified that she'd instantly regretted it. "Look, I'm sorry. That was a binty thing to say."
He'd blinked at her, nonplussed. "Binty?"
She'd grimaced at the unintended reversion into British vulgarity. "Yeah. Yeah, binty. How can I help you?"
And so the fairy tale had begun. He'd driven her home from the hospital that night, arranging her in the passenger seat of his Taurus with persnickety care, careful not to jostle her arm or her pitifully thin legs, and when she was settled, he had gone to war with her chair. His command of invective had been impressive as he wrangled with the chair and his cramped trunk, and it had been all she could do not to howl with laughter as he'd grown more and more flustered and his accent had descended further into New York apoplexia.
She'd spent the ride home stealing sidelong glances at him as he drove and inhaling the scent of wool and cotton and polished leather, and beneath that, the musky, astringent scent of aftershave. It had produced an unexpected wave of nostalgia, and she had turned her face away to stare out the window at the artificial constellations formed by the towering skyline of the city.
Of course nostalgia found you. How could it not? Scent is the strongest sense bound to memory, and with every indrawn breath, you were reminded of wool and allspice and parchment dust and broken alliances. It was a potpourri you had long associated with security and comfort and home, first as a child at your grandfather's table, and later as the vigilant maidservant of the Serpent King, with his clacking bootheels and crooked nose and burning black eyes. But it was no longer a comfort by then. Time and circumstance had seen to that.
She pushed the intrusive thought aside. It hadn't been a comfort then, but it was now, restored to its pedestal by Don's patience. She'd sat in the car in front of her apartment for fifteen minutes, reluctant to leave despite the uneasy memories conjured by the smell inside the car. Three times her splayed fingers had grazed the cold metal of the doorhandle, only to return to her lap as a new question occurred to her. For his part, Don had watched her fumbling flirtation in amused silence, lips curled in a secretive smirk.
She hadn't expected to see him again. Her courtship plumage was as tattered and bruised as the rest of her, and years of self-imposed isolation had rendered her awkward and often garrulous, but he had called a week later, ostensibly to discuss possible departmental reimbursement for the damage done to her chair. She had been startled and secretly pleased to hear his voice on the other end of the line, and she had protested not a whit when the conversation had drifted to other topics. She had merely smiled and curled her fingers through the phone cord with girlish glee.
Another phone call had come, and then another, and three weeks after being mown down on the sidewalk on 34th Street, he had invited her for coffee at a nearby café. She had spent that first date with her trembling hands locked around her knees to prevent them from knocking over scalding coffee with an ill-advised spasm. She had smiled and nodded, and if he had noticed that her coffee went untouched, he gave no sign. They had passed four hours in idle conversation, circled one another in cautious interest, and when he had dropped her off at two in the morning, she had done a calipering, uncoordinated jig in the complex parking lot the moment his car was out of sight.
Coffee had led to other dates and other clandestine parking lot hallelujahs, and as two months slipped into three, she had grown accustomed to phone calls from a Detective Flack while she graded papers on Quantum Mathematics and Their Practical Applications in the teaching assistants' lounge at NYU. Late-night messages on her answering machine had become the norm, and more often than not, they wound up at the café, clutching steaming cups of too-thick coffee and speaking of everything and nothing all at once, a language within a language that moved her to surreptitious joy because she had never thought to speak it.
He had thoroughly unmanned her, and she soon found herself discussing topics she had sworn were taboo. She had talked about her grandfather and life within the walls of an institution for the broken and bitter, and she had even confessed an unrequited love for a professor under whom she had once studied. It was a liberty of which she would never have thought herself capable, and it had frightened and exhilarated her.
But for all her newfound freedom, there had yet remained secrets she would never divulge, subjects she would never broach. Like Judith Pruitt, covered in her own excrement and savaged by jackals while she had looked wordlessly on. Like the Game that had moved Judith to slit her pudgy, jaundiced throat with a shard from her handmirror and bathe the room in which she had died in blood, an ineffable scarlet letter no amount of scrubbing would remove.
Nor did she speak of Hogwarts, that citadel upon the Scottish moor that she would once have died to defend. No Hagrid, no flying; no Boy Who Lived or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named; no Dark Mark emblazoned across the sky over the smoldering husks of houses and charred human remains. No war cries, no Death Eaters, no sloughed flesh squelching under foot and tread.
And especially no discussion of the unspeakable eros of casting Cruciatus on the enemy, the nigh-orgasmic explosion of power as it tore through its human conduit and the smooth grain of polished wood in a flash of red and teeth-baring fury. No mention of how it had felt to watch a human being writhe and shriek under the relentless grip of absolute power, and no confession that twenty minutes after the fact, her panties had still been clinging to her sodden sex. That, above all else, was a story that would never be told, not even from dying lips.
Six months after that first coffee, he had taken her to a night game at Yankee Stadium, and after an evening of clapping and amiable hooting and eating hot dogs in the nosebleed seats, he had kissed her in his car. He had tasted of mustard and relish and the sole beer he had permitted himself, and only the fact that a lewd and lascivious charge would have hampered his policing career had stopped them from progressing further. She had been breathless and dizzy by the time the parted, and by the time they had reached the privacy of his apartment, she hadn't given a damn about that, either.
She had surrendered her virginity on his rumpled, bachelor's bed, scrabbling and gasping and twisting beneath him and wondering just why in the hell no one had told her that sex was like being reamed with a garden hoe, or that men were heavy as they moved and thrust against you. She had said none of that when it was over, of course. She had been too tired and too sore, and besides it would have been impolitic. So, she had settled for panting against his sweat-slick chest and murmuring that he had been splendid.
As painfully enlightening as their first tryst had been, it did not dissuade her from succumbing to his subsequent advances. By the fourth time, pleasure had bloomed in her cunt and belly like the sinuous caress of choking wisteria, coiling around her legs and arms until it teetered on the exquisite cusp of pain. She had come so hard that he thought she was having a seizure, and when he had disengaged himself and asked, in a queerly reedy voice, if she needed the paramedics, she had laughed until she'd nearly wet the bed.
You'd have succumbed even if it never stopped hurting, said the phlegmatic voice of her long-dead grandfather. Sex is power. Not as potent or as pervasive as the tuning-fork thrum of magic in your veins, but potent enough. It turns you on to see the glazed, mindless arousal in his eyes as he moves against you, to hear the ragged panting as higher reasoning shuts down and he is consumed by the frenzied need to rut and claim and drive you into the bed with every surge of his hips. To surrender control is to cede your heart, and his vulnerability is a stronger aphrodisiac than the cat-tail curl of his fingers between your legs. For it, you would endure any pain.
"Grandpa," she hissed through gritted teeth, mortified that he was dissecting her carnal proclivities from beyond the grave, but she could not deny the truth of his words. Her mouth had gone dry as shale, and there was a simmering, anticipatory wetness between her legs, as though her salivary glands had picked up stakes and moved across the corporeal border.
Six months after she had moved into his bed, she had moved into his apartment, and a year after that, she had found herself at St. Patrick's Cathedral, kneeling on shrieking knees beside Don in his dress blues, her cold, twitching hand clammy and restless inside the white cotton of his glove. It had taken a conscious effort not to swoon from the pain in her knees and the chafing terror of exposure in the house of God, and as she'd wobbled and swayed next to her handsome groom and stared into the icy, blue eyes of Father Carmichael, she had been seized with the awful certainty that he knew of the voices that whispered to her with the coming of the witching hour of dragons and gnomes on spindly legs and the piteous wailing of house elves left behind.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, she had thought with frozen clarity, and it had been such a Jonathan Edwardian thought that she'd quailed beneath his searching gaze.
She'd been so distracted that she'd missed her cue, and a restless murmur of burgeoning alarm had begun to ripple through the church before the crushing grip of Don's fingers around her own had jarred her from her reverie. She'd announced her assent in a ringing declaration that had echoed through the church, and when Don had raised her veil with tender solemnity and pressed his lips to hers, she had pushed the moment of unreasoning fear from her mind.
The rest of the evening had passed in too much dancing and too much wine, and she did not think of the priest again until the bedside clock had heralded the witching hour in bright, bloody digits.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, she'd thought dully, and her head had ached with the muzzy, nascent promise of a hangover. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Then Don had been on her and in her, and the melancholy had vanished in the blissful haze of consummation.
Life had settled into its trundling, uneventful rhythm. She had earned her Masters and exchanged the penniless idealism of the student for the unforgiving discipline of the associate professor, and Don had gone grimly about the business of unmasking the monsters that roamed their midst. There had been family dinners and pay raises and uncomfortable evenings spent fending off increasingly pointed queries by the in-laws about the possibility of grandchildren, and as the first year had given way to the second, the nebulous anxiety of Dark Marks and Unforgivables and unintended discovery had been usurped by the fear of the knock at the door in the middle of the night and the appearance of a grim police captain on her threshold.
Until the arrival of the owls, that was.
The first had arrived a month ago, carried by an enormous barn owl that had landed on her window ledge and squawked indignantly at the pigeon wire that had sunk its barbs into its talons. She'd stared at it from behind the sink, her fingers curled so tightly around the handle of the skillet she'd been washing that it had left a deep, red weal across her palm. Her mouth had worked soundlessly, and the world had greyed dangerously and tilted precariously on its axis, and she had spun her chair and rolled jerkily from the room so that she would not have to look into its avid, luminous eyes.
She'd had no intention of acknowledging it. In fact, she'd studiously ignored it for more than an hour, hunched on the living room couch with a book. But the owl had been so persistent; it had pecked on the window glass in a muffled timpani, hail clittering against the pane, and hooted and screeched and beaten its wings until she'd returned to the kitchen. At the sight of her, it had redoubled its delivery efforts, hopping madly on one foot with the other outthrust in a manic parody of a Rockette.
She had opened the window with trembling hands, and the owl had flown inside and settled itself on the kitchen table with an imperious ruffling of feathers. She had done nothing. She had merely sat in her chair and blinked at the parchment tied neatly to the creature's leg, a parchment bearing a familiar crest and her name written in green ink in a fine, flourishing hand she recognized all too well.
She and the owl had regarded one another in disconsolate silence for interminable minutes. The owl had hooted and sidled to and fro on the table, and now and again, it had thrust the parchment at her with an impatient snort, but she had made no move to take it. The only sound in the room had been the scrabbling click of the owl's talons on the kitchen table, as regular and lulling as the ticking of a clock, broken only by its periodic attempts to draw her attention to its leg and the message it carried.
It had been she who had broken. If Don had come home and caught her engaged in a sullen staredown with an owl dancing over the kitchen table, there would have been no lie ingenious enough to still his perpetually curious mind. So she had accepted the missive at last, and after offering it a saltine cracker and a nip from her water glass, the owl had departed with the sussurating whisper of wings. When it was gone and the apartment was still and silent, she had gazed at the letter in her hands, turned it over and over between her fingers. How heavy it had been, and the portentous weight of it as her fingers had mapped the planes of the parchment and the knobbled ridges of the ink had inspired a miserable, choking dread. She hadn't wanted to open it, and so she hadn't. She had burned it in the stove and flushed the ashes down the toilet, and when Don came home, she'd said nothing about it.
Two more owls had arrived the following week. One had been the same owl as the last time, and its burden had joined its predecessor in the New York sewer system, but the other had been a large eagle owl, and the handwriting on the parchment it carried had sent a nauseated lurch of recognition into the pit of her stomach. That one she had read, and when she had finished, she had sat at the table and laughed until she sobbed, a hysterical, shrill cackling that had prompted their neighbor, Mrs. Petrinski, to rap on the adjoining wall and threaten to call the police, no matter that her husband was the police. That had only made her laugh harder, and her hands had been trembling so badly when she burned the second letter that she'd scorched her fingers.
The lack of response did nothing to stem the tide of owls. Indeed, three more had shown up on her window eave the next week. The veteran owl of missives past had been there, and so had a scraggly hoot owl she did not recognize, and a snowy owl she most certainly had.
The first letter had proceeded forthwith to the flames, and the second, which had turned out to be a chatty note from Neville Longbottom, she had read in misty-eyed regret. It, too, had fed the flames of her oven. The last she had read a dozen times, and each time she had seen the signature at the bottom, she'd had smothered the urge to cackle again.
The Boy Who Lived, writing her. Wasn't that funny? It must have been, because she had cackled, thrown back her head and rocked and swayed in her chair with the letter clutched in her spasming fingers. Each time she had thought herself spent, her gaze would land on the untidy scrawl etched at the bottom, and another gale would erupt. It was not kind laughter. It was a ruthless, wrenching warble that had cramped her chest and made her eyes burn with tears. When it finally passed, she had crawled into the bathroom on unsteady hands and knees and slumped gratefully against the cool porcelain of the toilet.
I'm going crazy, she had thought giddily, and then she had burst into tears.
There had been no owls this week, but she knew it was only a matter of time. Wizards, with their long lives and nostrums against pestilence, could afford patience. What was a week to a soul gifted two hundred years? Another would come, and another, faster than she could burn them, and in the end, she would succumb. It was inevitable.
Because buried beneath the hatred and the resentment was a longing ache to return to those battlefields and the scoured moors. There had been death and betrayal, but there had also been moments of unimaginable happiness, and sometimes in dreams, she revisited them. Running with Seamus Finnegan across the Care of Magical Creatures paddock in joyous pursuit of Mischief, the Renegade Borgergup, and laughing even as the gap between them widened because it had felt so good to have the sun on her face. She had been part of the tribe, then, and Seamus Finnegan hadn't given a damn about the rubber wheels beneath her ass.
She had tasted absolute freedom on those moors, or rather, above them, unbound from the earth by a shove from George Weasley's powerful Beater's legs. Higher and higher, shedding cares as she had gone, laughing and giddy and breathing in the sharp, metallic, winter air and the smell of George's pullover. For a brief, impossibly eternal instant, she had reached out her joyous hands and brushed the face of a God she had all but forgotten in her suppurating bitterness. No moment before or since had ever been as agonizingly sweet.
For all its flaws and prejudices, the wizarding world afforded you the opportunities you made of it with your stiff-necked determination, and acknowledged your power whether they would or no. Lucius Malfoy might have despised your bent, gnarled body and the impure blood that coursed through your veins, but he did not deny that you were a formidable adversary and an Arithmancer of unparalleled talent. He tried to kill you, yes, but he put no less effort into the attempt than he did for the whole, and in a perverse way, you respected him for it.
What are you here, hm? You are impotent, regarded by many as a disposable object of pity. You are invisible, insignificant. Your students doze their way through your lectures, and the only one who listens when you talk and hears more than the indistinct, insectile buzz of the faceless is the Muggle you wed. What will you do when he is gone, shot by a fleeing hoodlum or worn down by the relentless grind of age? You have surrendered everything for nothing.
Take now, for instance. You are stranded in your bed, unable to rise and go to your chair, though it is but two feet away. You are helpless as a shucked mollusk. If this were the wizarding world, you would but need to stretch forth your hand and Summon it to you.
You still could, whispered the Luciferian voice of temptation, and it reminded her of Lucius Malfoy, cool and unctuous and wheedling. Only the weak-minded require a wand, and you are certainly not weak. There is no one to see, is there? It's only wrong if you get caught.
She stared at the footrests of her wheelchair and flicked her tongue over parched lips. Her vision was painfully acute, and the metallic spangles dusted over the black paint were bright as diamond dust. Each nick and scratch acquired from years of jostling through the crowded New York streets was an exquisite bas relief, and the blood burned in her veins like sulfur.
Just once. Soft, cajoling.
Don't you do it, shrieked a panicked, breathy voice inside her head. The first step is the most treacherous, and if you take it, there will be no turning back. Once will never be enough. It never has been. Like the Game and the nightshade thrall of Unforgivables, it will beckon with seductive fingers and fill your mouth with forbidden manna. Your craving will grow with each lapse until it overwhelms reason and prudence. And love.
The voice was right; it was also impossibly distant, drowned by the pounding of her heart and the heady, pleuritic throb of magic massing in her bones and tendons like pus. The world had narrowed to the glitter of spangled black paint and a hot, sexual tightening in her groin. Her hand twitched on the coverlet, and two fingers pointed at the chair.
Yes. Yes. Just one word, crooned the Luciferian voice inside her head, a cold, triumphant glissade.
"Ac-,"
"Ass? What about my ass?"
She uttered a yelp of surprise and snapped her fingers into a white-knuckled fist. Don was in the bedroom doorway, one eyebrow raised in inquiry and a smirk twitching in the corner of his mouth. He was holding a bottle of cocoa butter in one hand.
"Oh, shit, babe! You scared the hell out of me. You were gone so long I figured you'd mounted an expedition."
"Yeah, well, it was a bitch findin' this stuff." He jiggled the bottle of cocoa butter. "Goblins must have moved it." He ambled to his side of the bed and climbed beneath the covers.
Oh, not the goblins. They're too busy counting Galleons and Sickles and Knuts, oh, my, and standing guarding over gleaming, golden mountains. Garden gnomes, on the other hand, would do just that. They'd make a footrace of it, make a beeline for the nearest hedgerow with their spindly legs flying and the lotion clutched tightly to their leathery little chests like it was the Ark of the Goddamned Covenant. And wouldn't that just be a stunning visual? Oh, and don't forget the Cornish pixies. They're a bit of havoc, they are. Gilderoy Lockhart could tell you if he still had his mind. She bit the inside of her cheek to stifle a spate of hysterical giggling.
"Now, what's this about my ass?" he prodded.
"It's a fine specimen."
A breathless guffaw. "I'm glad you approve. I'd hate to think all those hours on the Stairmaster had gone to waste."
Now it was her turn to sputter. "You do not use a Stairmaster."
"No, I don't. Now sit up." He tapped her shoulder.
She sat up, and he scooted behind her and settled her against his chest.
"What are yo-,"
And then his strong, broad fingers were kneading the hot knots of tension in her bony shoulders, and articulate speech dissolved into a low, guttural whine of gratitude. They were not the lithe, supple fingers of which she had once dreamed, but they threaded over and into her skin with the deft knowledge of long intimacy, and she sagged into them. Her own fingers reached clumsily to stroke his bare shoulder.
"You ready to tell me what's botherin' you?" he asked after a contented, blissful silence. His thumb pressed gently into her nape.
"Mm?" It was logy, slurred with relaxation.
"You've been off lately, distracted."
"You noticed?"
He snorted. "Please. My badge didn't come in a cereal box."
She feigned surprise. "No?"
"Stop being a smartass."
She waggled her eyebrows at him. "I thought you only married me for my brains," she replied cheekily, but when his eyebrows furrowed and his lips thinned, she added, "Everything's fine. Really. I've just got a lot on my mind."
Like owls with eyes like searchlights that land on our kitchen table and offer me messages from beyond the Veil, and restless ghosts that tread the halls inside my head. And memories of magic that call me home.
"Work?"
She made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat.
He was quiet for a moment, and his hands stayed their restless roving. "Hey," he said in the tone of a man who had just discovered a live hand grenade between his legs, "this isn't about my mother, is it?"
She laughed, a bright, carefree chuckle, and one that was cleansing and sweet after so much hysteria. Don's mother had been thrilled to see her boy married, but from the hour of the wedding, she had been lobbying for grandchildren, dropping coy hints about the patter of little feet at every family get-together. When a year had passed without a bundle of joy, the hints had grown stronger, and by the second, she had dropped all pretense and demanded to know when Don was going to do his filial duty and produce a grandchild.
You have consummated the marriage, haven't you? she had once asked at a family dinner to celebrate his parents' wedding anniversary, and Don's father, who had been eating mashed potatoes with stolid gusto, had spluttered into his plate and hastily excused himself from the festivities.
For his part, Don had turned an alarming puce with indignation and embarrassment, but Rebecca could only laugh, torn between incredulity and amusement as visions of Mrs. Petrinski tapping her broom against the wall in furious accompaniment to their headboard danced in her head. The inexplicable laughter had stymied Mother Flack into fulminating silence, and the subject had been dropped. For the moment.
"Because I know she was out of line the other day," Don was saying. "I don't know what got into her."
"Baby fever. Every mother gets it when their boy gets married."
"Yeah, well," he murmured stubbornly. "It's none of her business."
"No," she replied agreeably.
"You're not, are you?" he said suddenly.
She blinked, puzzled by the non sequiter. "Not what?"
"Pregnant. We haven't exactly been puttin' our trust in the Trojan Man."
She sniggered. "No, I'm not. You've got the luck of the Irish." She patted his leg. "Why? You want me to be?"
"If I had the luck of the Irish, you'd've been a day late and a dollar short by now." He shrugged. "I don't know. Haven't thought about it."
"A day late and a dollar short," she repeated. "Charming."
And when that day-if you'll pardon the crass pun, Miss Stanhope-comes, and his inferior Muggle seed takes root in your belly, what will you do? asked the voice of Lucius Malfoy. You will be left alone in this apartment with his squalling legacy, and sooner or later, the puling brat will have a bout of accidental magic. How are you going to explain a coffee table floating down the fire escape, and when no feasible explanation comes, will he accept what you are?
You could just leave, suggested the Serpent King. You could Disapparate in the middle of the night and leave no trace. No paper trail, no eyewitness sightings, no farewell letter. You could put a thousand miles between you with the closing of your eyes and the turning of your will. You could even Obliviate him in a final act of Gryffindor mercy. He need not suffer.
Yes, you could. Lucius again, cream and arsenic on his tongue. And you want to in the darkest part of yourself, the grottoes and hollows the light will never reach. Your feet were always steadiest on bloody ground, and the taste of someone else's blood was always ambrosia on your tongue. How often did you thirst for mine? Morality and obligation are such bothersome fetters, and all that binds you to them is your inexplicable love for this idiot Muggle. Let him go, and the chase could be renewed, the White Asp and the Mongoose and sulfurous glory of war. After all, it's only hell for the losers.
Her body, which had gone soft as tallow beneath his hands, stiffened again, and Don huffed in exasperation.
"This whole seduction thing would go a lot smoother if you'd just relax."
"Do you believe in ghosts?" she asked brusquely, not looking at him.
"What? What are you talkin' about?"
"They're not restless spirits." It was vague, dreamy. "They come from the inside out. Sometimes they're like dust in your pores, and no matter how hard you scrub, you can never scrub them away, not really." And they're borne on owls' wings.
"Whoa, whoa." Uneasy concern had replaced annoyance. "Honey, are you feelin' all right? You want me to call a doctor? Hey, look at me." He was shifting, tugging her so that he could see her face.
"No, no doctor." Just wash away my sin.
He opened his mouth to reply, and she stopped it with a kiss because the ghosts might have been indelible, but they could be muted, smothered beneath salt and sweat and urgently moving flesh. He tasted of toothpaste and rye bread and faint basil, but that was fine with her. It was good and whole and sane, and with all those flavors on her tongue, there was no room for ash and wormwood and scorched rot.
He made indistinct noises in his throat for a while, trying, she supposed, to reason out this sudden onset of madness from his usually serene wife, but he was too New York cop and too male to ignore the gifts she offered for long, and eventually, his hands left her cheeks for less chaste places, and wheresoever they touched shivered and sang with pleasure and blessed relief.
What can wash away my sin? she thought giddily, and arched beneath his hands. His mouth and his tongue and his hands, subtle as serpents over her flesh, and the insistent pressure of his prick as he nudged and fumbled blindly at the juncture of her thigh.
She was frenzied, desperate, and she clawed at his shoulders and back with her short-nailed hands and left red, weeping weals. She was marking him, claiming him, getting his skin beneath her nails so that there could be no denial of their connection. There would be forensic evidence, that hallowed talisman of the Muggle world. That which was claimed could not be unclaimed, and if she marked him, she could not forsake him. Honor forbad it.
She made as much noise as possible near the end, when the bedsprings shrieked their triumphant aria and the headboard thumped its peg-legged accompaniment against the wall. Mrs. Petrinski helped, too, with the ceaseless battering of her broom handle against the adjoining wall, and as her shrill threats to call the law and the super and Michael-by God-Bloomberg seeped through the wall like the strains of a favorite song, she laughed and moaned all the louder. It kept the whispers at bay.
She bit him in the end, sank the sharpest edge of her canine into his shoulder when his muscles were locked and spasming and the only sound he could make was a guttural, panting groan. Because Lucius Malfoy was an indisputable bastard, but he was also absolutely right. Blood was ambrosia on her tongue.
It washed away the bitter tang of guilt that coated her mouth like phlegm, and it blotted out the furtive brush of owls' wings against the window pane, come like Mercury in the night.
This is my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, and it shall be shed for you so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in remembrance of Me.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.