J. K. Rowling owns Harry Potter

Chapter Fourteen

Having heard the telltale pop! of a wizard disappearing, Mark opened the door, shivering in the cold alley air, and stepped into the room.

The barman was still lying near the door where Mark had seen him through the window. Mark approached him first, although Alec was sprawled in the far corner with equally little sign of life, on the presumption that their conditions were the same. It took only a moment to tell that the barman was breathing, and though was clearly unconscious it appeared that he would be alright. A flicker of hope peeked through the terrible weight of fear and dread surrounding him, until he heard Gran's cry behind him.

"No! No!"

He spun around to see Gran sinking to her knees beside the chair in which Alec's grandmother sat limp, flaccid, her eyes open, and he knew there was only one possible reason for that scream.

Everything went cold and dark; he could not think. He had failed, more completely than was possible; Alec's grandmother was dead, and Alec surely was too. He was suffocating, choking on his own despair: nothing would ever be right again, nor did he even want it to be…

A strange sound managed to penetrate his consciousness, a sound unlike any he had ever heard. It was a rasping, hollow rattle, like the breath of a person dying, but louder and somehow far more terrible, as though it were the sound of death itself. The sound startled him somewhat into alertness, and he became aware that it was not just in his own mind that the room was cold and dark. He looked up.

Gliding past him from the doorway, advancing on his kneeling and sobbing grandmother, was a dementor, filling the room floor to ceiling, emanating a chill that penetrated to his core, turning his entire being to ice. It would suck out his soul, that he knew, and from the depths of his grief and despair he almost welcomed the relief it would bring to be destroyed utterly, to vanish forevermore, to simply not exist…

It was bending over Gran now, and she was prone on the floor… It was lowering its hood, ready to attack… He waited on the floor, his mind blank, his eyes closed, for seconds that felt like eternity…

Nothing happened. No mouth sucked out his soul; no icy hands gripped him. Instead a wave of sudden warmth rolled over him, as though someone had lit a fireplace near him. He opened his eyes.

A Patronus was in the room, and it was doing battle with the dementor. It had pinned it in a corner, and was charging it repeatedly; the dementor looked weakened. He watched in fascination as, with one final ramming from the Patronus' head, the dementor disappeared. It did not collapse to the floor; it did not flee; it did not explode. It simply vanished, as though it had been merely a mirage.

Something seemed odd about the Patronus, but Mark had no time to dwell on it, because the Patronus was not yet finished. It did not merely dissolve into mist, as had the one he had seen in Little Whinging all those months ago. It walked, rather, over to the chair where Alec's grandmother still sat (where her body still sat, he thought with a pang), and then it opened its mouth and it spoke.

"There will be an ambush, Emmeline. Be on your guard." It spoke in a low, cold male voice that Mark had never heard before, delivering a warning that had come far too late to be anything but a cruel reminder of the tragedy it had sought to prevent.

He startled abruptly back into alertness in the restored candlelight, the terrible, all-encompassing blackness and despair lifting, replaced by the awareness that he was alone in a room with four injured or dead people, only one of whose condition he knew. He could do nothing to help, but he could at least see how they were doing.

One glance at Gran told him that although she was in poor shape, breathing raggedly and muttering, she was very much alive and in full possession of a soul.

Alec's grandmother was next, and feeling for a pulse told him she was indeed dead. He shuddered, trying to block out the enormity of the fact. He walked away to escape the finality of it, turning instead to Alec, where he could still hope.

Alec was lying on his side, his left hand crumpled awkwardly beneath him and his right arm stretched above his head, as though he had dived into some absent swimming pool. He was not moving.

"What has happened here?"

Mark jumped. A pink-cheeked woman stood in the doorway, holding a wand.

Dementor patrol was a job very low in the ranking of Order tasks, but Hestia did not mind. It gave her the space to work alone, which she secretly preferred to having a teammate. There was, as well, the satisfaction of seeing immediate results, of saving people from imminent danger, rather than being involved in some long-term master plan of Dumbledore's.

It was, however, usually a rather uneventful chore, which made the sight that greeted her in the room to which she had followed the dementor all the more shocking.
Four bodies; one boy nervously examining them: something terrible had happened here, and her blurted question was almost involuntary. "What has happened here?"

The boy took one look at her and broke down completely.

"Noooo! Nonononono!" He sank to the floor and began to weep pathetically, huddling into himself in terror. Completely lost for what to do next, she knelt beside the boy and hugged him tightly. After many seconds, he whimpered, "Please don't kill me."

This horrified her still more; what this boy had gone through was unimaginable. "Of course not," she said, wondering what cruelties had taken place in this room.

This thought reminded her that there were much more pressing matters than the boy's trauma. "We must help these people!" she yelped, leaping up from the boy's side.

"She's dead," the boy mumbled, indicating the woman tied to the chair. With a shock Hestia recognized Emmeline Vance.

"They're alive, though," he continued in a monotone, pointing at the man (Tom the barman? What was he doing in Muggle London?) and woman on the floor, leaving Hestia no time to process the massive loss they had sustained. "I'm not sure about him, I didn't check before you came." He gestured toward the boy lying in the corner.

Hestia hesitated briefly about using her wand in front of a boy who might be Muggle, but he preempted her by asking plaintively, "Can you make them better with magic?" He began to cry again.

Thus freed to act, she examined the bodies. Tom and the woman were simply unconscious; each began to stir and awaken with a simple "Rennervate." She turned to the boy in the corner.

Though he lay on the ground, his arm reached over his head; he seemed to have jumped, and there was a good chance, Hestia thought, that she could guess why.

On closer inspection, her theory was confirmed when she saw his hand, which wore what she recognized as a Weasleys' Shield Glove. The glove had a large hole in the palm that appeared to have been burned through, presumably by some curse he had surely tried to block with the glove's protection.

She swallowed hard. She was familiar with these gloves and knew they were tough. Any curse which could destroy them like this would be powerful indeed. Would it also be survivable?

"Rennervate!" she cried, pointing her wand at the boy. He did not move.

She conjured a feather and put it to his lips. She thought it might have trembled slightly, but could not be sure. How to tell if he was alive?

Perhaps a spell to reveal human presence would not work on dead people. "Homenum Revelio!" she shouted, raising her wand. Emmeline Vance, dead in her chair, was not affected, but a greenish glow appeared around the two boys, as well as Tom and the woman, who were now awake. The boy was alive, and he needed help fast, or soon he would not be.

"Your friend is alive," the woman said, and Mark almost cried again, with relief this time. "I must take him to Saint Mungo's immediately." He did not know what or where that was, but could not muster the strength to ask. "I will be back soon. Lock the door and do not leave the room."

She lifted Alec from the floor, turned on the spot, and disappeared.

But the echo of the pop! had hardly died away when there was a knock at the door. "Police! Open up!"

Author's Note: Yes, I know that Moody claims of Avada Kedavra in Goblet of Fire that "There's no countercurse. No blocking it." But in the Battle of the Ministry Dumbledore uses the golden centaur to block it, and in the final battle when Harry puts a Shield Charm between Voldemort and Molly, Voldemort just looks around for the source, rather than ignoring it and using Avada Kedavra. It's not definite, but that's my theory. Also, the reason Alec's sacrifice didn't prevent Yaxley from killing Emmeline Vance is because he never actually meant to die.