A/N: Alpha love to WordsmithMusings, beta love to FaeOrabel!

Just an FYI we are a little over the halfway mark for this story, and I am now actively writing to get it done! Updates may turn to every two weeks instead of every one, but I will definitely have ten ready for next Monday!

**TW FOR THIS CHAPTER**

Murder/Implied and Referenced Abuse/Dark Magic & Rituals

Chapter Nine:

Hermione couldn't stand it anymore.

The awkward silence had pressed in on her all morning. It weighed her down like a heavy blanket, suffocating as it crushed her chest.

They'd woken early, couldn't look each other in the eye or manage much more than a few mumbled words. Every time Hermione glanced at Draco, she could still feel his lips on her shoulder. And Sirius was no better; his gaze practically burned into her so much she could do nothing but look away.

To try and ignore the feelings, Hermione had poured herself into research yet again. The chair in the library would soon have a perfect imprint of her arse.

With a disappointed sigh, she closed the volume titled 'Bonds: Breaking and Making'. Nothing. Nothing of value or use or anything even remotely similar to their situation. Every book she'd taken had been useless.

Yaxley's tattered diary sat next to her—still unopened. In truth, she was terrified to discover what lay inside its pages. McKaide's journal had been part of the Unspeakable library, accessible to those that knew of it. And yet his assistants' had been banished to the lower shelves of Hogwart's Restricted Section. Why? Why wouldn't it have been with McKaide's?

Pushing away the thoughts, Hermione grabbed the leather-bound book and cracked open the pages.

The first passage made her skin crawl.

I write these words in the hopes they aren't destroyed. If you are reading this, I am dead and gone. Probably long forgot, erased by history. It is a deserved fate for the role I played, the things I did. But I am as much a victim as any other to the twisted mind of Oliver McKaide.

When I first began in the Department of Mysteries, it was with the hope of eventually becoming an Unspeakable. I trained for months and took my tests, and finally, when I passed them all, I was placed under the tutelage of Unspeakable McKaide.

He was greatly ambitious, only taking on jobs he knew would earn him recognition from the Department Head and Minister. As his assistant, I was in the centre of it all. The first week I started, we tested the bonds between a bowtruckle and its chosen tree. It was gruelling work, heartbreaking, to hear the cries these peaceful creatures bellowed as we separated them, even worse when we destroyed the tree.

But I was told it was for a good cause (though what that cause was, I never discovered), so I pushed my heartache aside. I tried to appease myself that it was for the betterment of Wizarding society, that what we did here was important.

But all we did was blacken our souls.

I had been his assistant for little more than six months when McKaide began to research the Veil. We hid in the Death Chamber day in and day out, testing the shadowy depths with various objects. Once he'd been satisfied with that, we turned to creatures (the reason why he kept the bowtruckles).

The Minister visited us after a week to speak to McKaide. They barricaded in his office, speaking in hushed tones. I hadn't been there long enough to know much of their history, but I soon discovered.

McKaide never told me why I performed certain tasks; he never told me much other than 'Because I'm your better, and you're an apprentice.' I learned to stop asking questions quickly, lest his anger turn on me (and it had many times).

I never asked why I was collecting blood from Unspeakables families, why I brewed certain potions, why I had to research certain runes. I was curious, of course. I had snooped many times but never discovered anything of use.

I needn't have bothered snooping. It wasn't long until I had learnt exactly why I was doing these things.

We were resurrecting the dead.

Hermione's stomach dropped, and she felt bile crawl into her throat. Yaxley's journal continued in horrifying detail, documenting the same ceremony Hermione had performed, the one McKaide had written about in detail in his journal. But theirs was successful, or at least she thought.

Davies died today. A sickness, or so they tell me. McKaide destroyed his office in rage; the Minister had to come soothe him. There is something bigger going on between them, though I'm not sure what. The Minister visits too frequently and only ever to see McKaide. It's unsettling.

Hermione continued to read as tears pooled in her eyes. It was like watching an accident; she couldn't stop. She had to know what happened, what all of this meant. There had to be something more. McKaide never mentioned any of this in his diary or research, never said anything about Davies dying or the other experiments he performed. And now, she knew why.

McKaide has truly gone insane.

He told me to collect Muggles today so we could test them with the Veil. Even I'm not prejudiced enough to think that's a good idea. When I told him so, he grabbed my throat and told me I had no choice, the contract I had signed specifically stated I had to follow the orders of my superiors. If I wanted to keep my job and any respect I had in Wizarding London, I had to listen. If I wanted to keep my life, I had to listen. He gripped my neck so hard that I had bruises for a week.

I'm not sure that I care anymore. My soul feels shredded. Davies' widow came to the Ministry today to try and speak with us; he'd only been alive for two weeks before dying again. We had opened healing wounds, destroyed a family.

But like the fool I was, I listened. I was too scared to refuse him; his eyes held an insanity I did not want to rival. McKaide could have killed me in that moment, and I was sure the Ministry would have covered it up. I was too much a coward of death to risk it.

The first Muggle was a drunkard I picked up off the street, stumbling home from the bar. I waited until he'd gone inside, then collected him and a small vial of blood from his sleeping child.

He never came out of the Veil.

McKaide punished me for it, nearly broke my hand with the butt-end of his wand. He told me the blood I got was bad, not a relative, not even close. But how was I to know the child wasn't his?

The second Muggle was a woman, older in years and red-haired, though still full of life. She had a sister (and this time, I made absolutely certain they were blood relations) that I was able to take blood from before I snatched her from her job at a nearby factory. I only knew her as Violet from someone shouting goodbye to her.

She emerged after a few days, though her skin had withered to brittle leather and her fiery hair had turned white. Violet died after only taking a few shallow breaths.

I do not want to relive what McKaide did to me after that.

I remember every face, every way the Muggles passed, and I received a punishment for each one. We went through fifteen of them before McKaide told me to try a Wizard next. No one of value, of course. A country bumpkin that no one would miss.

I refused to learn his name. The only thing I knew of him was that he lived in the wilds of Scotland with his family. He was older, but strong, a likely candidate. I was sure he would die the same as all the others.

But he didn't.

We brought him from the veil three days later after forcing him in it. He was angry, and rightly so. But he couldn't leave. We had finally cracked it.

So we forced him in again.

McKaide became obsessed. We performed the same ritual five times, bringing the man back each time, angrier and angrier than the last. He tried to fight us off, but he wasn't much of a threat without a wand. Soon we began to change things in the ritual, swap ingredients in the potion, change the runes. Nothing worked except for the original mixture.

But then it happened—the bond.

We had changed a single rune to Ehwaz. It bound us together, tethered at the wrist by a glowing rope.

Hermione set the book down and wiped at her face. Tears freely fell over the cheeks, her body numb with knowledge. Her stomach twisted in disgust at the words on the page.

"Hermione? What's wrong?" Sirius grabbed her hand, the first contact they had all day. It opened a damn inside her, breaking the hold she had on her emotions.

Hermione let out a strangled sob, her heart breaking for the Muggles killed by the insanity of McKaide, the pain and torture they had to endure.

Sirius sat forward, gripping her hand tighter while Draco knelt beside her, rubbing soothing circles into her back. Hermione let her agony free, sobbing and wailing into the cold room. She felt tattered and broken, confused by what Yaxley had confessed. She trusted his words; what reason did he have to lie when he thought it would be destroyed anyway?

"Granger, what is it?" Draco mumbled, smoothing her curls from her face. "What's wrong?"

Hermione couldn't form the words, so instead, she pointed to the journal. Draco looked up at Sirius with a grim expression and grabbed the book. He skimmed its pages, his eyes going wide and face unreadable.

He barely made it halfway to where Hermione had stopped before snapping its cover shut. "McKaide. That's the Unspeakable that wrote how to do the ritual we performed?"

Hermione nodded and gripped tighter to Sirius' shirt. He placed a hand on her head and stroked her hair, the other cupping her face and wiping the tears from her eyes. "What does it say?"

Draco chucked the book to the desk and stood, tucking his hands in his pockets. "Nothing good. Nothing good at all."

"Hermione?" Sirius looked down at her, his kind eyes questioning.

"I just need a moment." She untangled herself from Sirius and wiped the tears from her face. When she had collected herself enough, she told them what she had learnt in the pages, what McKaide and Yaxley had done. The tears began again, but she ploughed ahead. They had to know too.

The room fell into a heavy silence. Sirius slumped back into his chair, pulling a cigarette from his pocket and taking a long drag. Draco's eyes burned a hole in the floor.

"I have to keep reading."

At her words, both men snapped their gazes at her.

"No," Sirius started. "It's obviously upsetting. Don't you think you should take a break?"

Draco sighed. "We can't stop her. And she's right; she has to keep reading. They could have discovered a way to break the bond."

Sirius pressed his mouth to a thin line and glared at the wall, lighting another cigarette, but said nothing. Draco nodded to her, though his gaze held something akin to worry.

With a bracing sigh, Hermione returned to her reading.

I wish I could say this was the end of it, but McKaide was just beginning.

We tried to cut the rope with anything we could, but nothing worked. McKaide even suggested cutting off Henry's (as I came to learn was his name) hand. Thankfully, we were both able to talk him out of that idea.

The Minister was less than pleased. When he learnt of our predicament, he flew into a rage, screaming at McKaide. They screamed a lot of things at each other, and that was when I discovered how McKaide had been allowed to do the horrible things he did. The bowtruckles were only a small part of what the Minister wanted.

Evil, vile man. He wanted to learn how magical bonds worked, how they could be created and destroyed. He wanted McKaide to create a way for all Wizarding kind to be bound to the Ministry. He wanted their magic.

It was ironic now that McKaide had become part of his own experiment.

The next day the Minister sent down three wholly unwilling participants. Two witches and a wizard, scared beyond reason, along with vials of blood from a relative. I feel sick now to think of how relieved I'd been that I didn't have to be the one to get them.

McKaide shoved one of the witches into the Veil and made the other two perform the ritual. It had worked, binding them the same as us. We studied them instead, trying all manner of curses and hexes and potions.

There was a part of our bond that connected out Magic, I could feel their core's. Henry's filled with icy terror, while McKaide's was blackened by insanity. Through the bond, I could tell when Henry's hold on his senses failed, unused to the evil things we did here. I wish I could say this made me reflect, but I was already too numb to it all.

The morning we discovered how to break the bond was the day I finally snapped.

It had been nearly a month of research, of spending every waking moment with a psychopathic wizard and a prisoner. A month of testing the limits of my soul.

McKaide killed one of the witches.

He had said he'd finally brewed a potion that would work, but in his delirious state, had added an entire vial of bloodroot nectar. The moment she downed the mixture, her body convulsed and thrashed. She died within seconds; there wasn't even enough time to retrieve a bezoar.

Once she died, however, the glowing bond between them disappeared, and we realised what it was that bound us. A life debt. Death reclaiming the soul we took from it.

Henry didn't last more than a day afterwards. I woke that night to McKaide standing over us both, his knife bloody and eyes crazed. Henry was dead before my sleep-addled brain understood what was happening.

Our bonds were gone, as was the hold of my remaining sanity.

I tried to grab my wand, but McKaide stuck the knife through my hand before I could. He told me if I tried anything, he would kill me. I was now his to use—just as guilty, just as condemned.

I was such a coward.

He snapped my wand and locked us inside the Death Chamber. The Veil swallowed the bodies of the remaining group. I can still hear the cries and screams as they were shoved inside, never to re-emerge. The Minister came to see us a few hours later, removing the dead bodies and bringing with him fresh subjects.

They experienced the same fate as the others. Forced bond and then death. The pattern repeated thrice more before I could no longer stand it.

Tonight, I kill McKaide.

There was nothing after that, no follow up note, just blank page after blank page. Hermione set the journal down with shaking hands.

"Hermione?" Sirius asked. Smoke lingered in the air; he had chain-smoked at least six cigarettes while she read.

Hermione shook her head, her thoughts still swimming. "There's nothing...no way to change this. The only thing—" Her voice cracked as fresh tears sprung in her eyes. "The only thing that worked was killing one of them."

The air crackled with magic. Hermione could feel it settle over her as she glanced up. Draco's face had lost all colour, while Sirius looked ready to explode.

"What do you mean?" Draco whispered. "How did they even learn—"

"Here. Read it for yourself." Hermione handed him the notebook, and Draco flipped to the last pages.

His face turned grim as he read, and the snap of the journal as he closed it vibrated in Hermione's ears. The silence was strained; Sirius crushed his cigarette pack in his hand.

Draco reached for a nearby piece of parchment and quill, immediately scribbling things on it. He wrote with fervour and blotted the ink multiple times.

Hermione watched him with heightened curiosity. "What are you working on?" Her voice was heavy with exhaustion.

"A potion," Draco replied. "Modifying what we had tried before. I think if we just adjust the levels of bat blood and unicorn hair..." He trailed off and tapped his quill to the parchment in thought.

Abruptly, Sirius stood and tugged his hand, the bond pulling and reappearing in glowing blue light. His brow was furrowed, and eyes hardened. "I was dead before this. Just kill me again. Put me back into the Veil; you can't live your lives shackled to me. We'd go mad."

Draco kept silent and stared at his paper. Hermione felt tears well in her eyes; she felt utterly useless and had no information to provide to make him see reason.

But Hermione refused to give up. She would find some way to stop this, some way to keep Sirius—all of them—alive. "We have time, Sirius. We don't have to rush this."

"Kingsley won't let us out of this house without the bond broken."

"Surely, once we tell him—"

"No." Sirius cut her off. "No, he won't."

"I never thought you'd give up so easily," Draco said, eyes narrowing as he twirled the quill around his fingers.

Sirius rounded on him. "And I never thought I'd be shackled to a Malfoy, but here we are. Do you want to die, boy? Do you?"

Draco pressed his mouth to a thin line, and the room fell into another tense silence as both men stared each other down.

Hermione slowly stood, "I think we could all use some air. Let's go for a walk." Her mind buzzed as fatigue took hold of her body. Walking would help, fresh air would help.

Sirius said nothing as he transformed into his Animagus. Draco said nothing as he led them toward the front door and retrieved their coats and hats to keep hidden. Hermione wished they still had those glamour rings; perhaps Harry could ask the twins for more.

As they stepped outside, Draco grabbed Hermione's hand and tucked it inside his pocket. The familiar hold helped ground Hermione, though her thoughts still raced as they walked in the cool evening.

They ambled in silence to the nearby park, a heavy mist settling around them. The glow of Sirius' leash bounced off the fog and cast an even brighter glow than normal in the setting sun.

"Do one of us really have to die?"

Hermione snapped her eyes to Draco. He kept his gaze on the pavement. "I'm not sure. If Yaxley's journal is to be believed, then it's the only way they managed to break the bond. But I think there's something missing. The last few pages are completely blank; it doesn't feel like the end of his story."

"I can't die, Granger. Not yet."

Hermione squeezed his hand. "You won't."

"I have Mother to think about, she wouldn't last another day without me, and I haven't seen her in over a month—"

"Draco," Hermione cut him off, stopping all three of them from walking. She looked up into his sad grey eyes. "I won't let you die."

Draco nodded, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. Sirius huffed and tugged on Hermione's hand, pulling them back towards the nearby park. A light rain began, turning into a steady downpour within minutes.

"Sirius, c'mon!" Hermione shouted into the thick sheet of water.

Sirius refused to turn back. Instead, he pulled them further into the park and toward a metal bench. He plopped down next to it, gesturing with his head for Hermione and Draco to sit.

"This is ridiculous!" Hermione shouted to him, tugging on the leash.

Still, Sirius sat, refusing to budge. Hermione sighed and looked through her wet fringe to Draco. He shrugged, and they sat. They were all soaked in moments.

Hermione angled her face upward, allowing the rain to cascade over her as she closed her eyes. It washed her emotions away, the doubt, the worry. Everything would be alright; she would make sure of it. And if she couldn't...

She would die instead.

The thought brought fresh tears to her eyes, and the rain washed those away, too as they streaked down her face. Hermione glanced over to Draco to find him doing the same. She squeezed his hand gently, and he opened his eyes and returned her gaze.

Hermione reached her other hand toward Sirius, running it softly over his soaked fur. The rain began to lighten, a quick spring shower come and gone in the same breath.

She looked back to Draco and gave him a gentle smile. "Let's go home. Your trial is in two days, and I have work to do."