Previously in the Darklyverse: Agatha deduced that the Ministry—particularly using its Obliviators—covered up Voldemort's death. The Order rescued Dirk Cresswell from three Death Eaters, whom they took prisoner at Grimmauld Place.
xx
December 4th, 1982: Agatha Savage
You'd be surprised how difficult it is for wizards to track other wizards. After all, Agatha's got magic on her side: you'd think she'd easily be able to magic her way into keeping tabs on somebody when she wants to. The problem, of course, is that the person she's trying to tail can do magic, too, and Agatha hasn't figured out a solution to determining where Owen Rosier, Head of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes at the British Ministry of Magic, goes when he Disapparates.
She does know some things: for instance, that Rosier isn't heading straight home after work—two or three times a week, there's a gap of at least an hour between when he Flooes out of the Ministry and when she hears the crack of Apparition announcing his arrival home. There are times, too, when he leaves his house after putting his kids to bed, and Agatha doesn't hear him return until the dead of night.
The explanation could be perfectly innocuous, she reminds herself. For all she knows, Rosier could be getting dinner out after work or meeting friends in their homes for Firewhiskey in the late evenings. But Agatha has checked the Leaky Cauldron, Diagon Alley, Hogsmeade—all the usual wizarding haunts—and Rosier has been nowhere to be found during those missing hours. Besides, he's widely known to be a pureblood supremacist: he wouldn't be dining out in Muggle establishments the way Agatha and Proudfoot sometimes do.
She starts paying attention to Rosier's social circle, trying to pin down exactly whom he might be meeting. It takes her a while to work it out: Agatha's got her own job, after all, and she's not looking forward to the conversation she'll have to have with Pyrites if she gets caught sticking her nose where it doesn't belong. Rosier isn't exactly making a bunch of social calls to people from other departments during the workday, but he tends to get lunches with not just Agatha's own boss but also Corban Yaxley, who's Head of the whole Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and Minister Malfoy himself.
So she starts staking out his friends' homes. Every evening she spends outside Pyrites's house, she's positive he's going to spot and catch and interrogate her, but he doesn't—as a matter of fact, nothing interesting happens at all. It's the same at Yaxley's place, but she's only been following Malfoy for four days when she strikes gold.
Agatha thanks the heavens that it's considered impolite to Apparate directly into your friends' living rooms—because it means she gets a full view of everybody who appears outside the front gate to Malfoy Manor that Saturday evening. Rosier, Pyrites, and Yaxley all make appearances, along with at least two dozen other witches and wizards, including Carlton Avery, Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation.
This isn't necessarily a conspiracy, Agatha reminds herself. Maybe Malfoy frequently holds dinner parties—maybe everything they're going to talk about in there is your run-of-the-mill high society crap.
There's only one way to find out for sure—but does she dare try to sneak in and spy on whatever they're doing in there? She's just starting to feel convinced that she's missed her opportunity before the last stragglers, a couple, Apparate just meters away from her. It's now or never Agatha tells herself. If she wants to know what Malfoy and company are doing in there, she's got to act now.
She's triple-protected today—Invisibility Cloak, Disillusionment Charm, and Polyjuice Potion—but she still keeps an anxious eye on her feet to make sure the Cloak doesn't flap out and expose them as she trails the couple across the courtyard and into the manor. She has to follow them closely in order for the front door not to bang shut between them and her, and the whole time, Agatha is terrified they're going to hear her footsteps or feel the swish of the Cloak against their calves.
Up close, even just looking at the backs of their heads, she recognizes the couple as the Lestranges—Rodolphus and Bellatrix. They were a few years ahead of Agatha at Hogwarts, not that she knew either of them very well there: they were Slytherins and didn't associate with half-blood Hufflepuffs like Agatha. Once they're inside, she pauses just inside the doorway and lets them get a few paces ahead of her, just until she feels like she can breathe again.
Agatha's obviously never been inside Malfoy Manor before, but it's about as ornate and pretentious as she could have expected it to be judging by the bloody peacocks they've got roaming around outdoors. It seems to take forever for her to follow the Lestranges down winding hallways leading into a dining room. Its occupants are laughing and chattering amongst themselves, but a hush falls over the room the second the Lestranges step foot inside. Agatha ducks in behind them and presses her back against the door, grateful for the Silencing Charm she thought to cast to quiet her own footsteps.
"Well?" Bellatrix squeals. No one answers. "Three of us missing! Hasn't anybody got anything to say for themselves!?"
Three missing people? There were four wizards reported missing earlier this week—that's got to be whom Lestrange is talking about; one of them was her brother-in-law, after all. Which of the four isn't one of them, and why don't they care about his disappearance?
And for that matter, what group do these people comprise? A fair few of the people in the Malfoys' dining room are high-ranking Ministry officials, but others Agatha doesn't recognize at all, so it seems unlikely that anybody's here on official business. The dinner party idea pops back into her mind, but that doesn't make sense, either—the atmosphere here is way too strained to be social. Judging from everyone's reactions to her, people are terrified of Lestrange.
"We're working on it," says Pyrites more demurely than Agatha has ever seen him. "We're putting more Aurors next week on the case. It's just—we suspect that the Order are using Fidelius Charms to protect their locations, so unless one of us identifies the Secret-Keeper, gets the secret out of them, and kills them—"
Hold on a second. The Order? What would the escaped vigilantes and their misguided attempts to protect innocents have to do with more victims going missing?
Not everyone who disappeared this week was a Muggle-born, Agatha remembers suddenly: it had seemed suspicious to her that there could be war-related casualties at Death Eaters' hands who were pureblood. One of the missing wizards, Rookwood, was Head Unspeakable and was supposed to have a lot of intel on the inner workings of the Department of Mysteries that Death Eaters could find valuable, and Rabastan Lestrange and Alecto Carrow were supposed to have been collateral damage on account of having been with Rookwood at the time of his capture. But if it wasn't the Death Eaters who captured the purebloods, and it was the vigilantes who did instead, then does that mean—?
A wave of horror washes over her.
She needs to get out of here. She needs to go before they find her and murder her like they've probably murdered—but Agatha can't move. She remains frozen against the door, tuning back in as Avery is saying, "Our claims aren't going to hold up much longer. I'm with Bellatrix on this—I think we need to seriously consider going public with who's really controlling the Ministry."
And that's the Death Eaters, Agatha supplies mentally. Death Eaters are running the Ministry, and she's standing right on the outskirts of a full-blown meeting of them.
"We've been over this," Malfoy sighs a little too weakly for Agatha to believe that he's not secretly just as scared of Lestrange as the others are. "If we come out, we lose our legitimacy. Do you really believe people will keep us in power if they think we're Death Eaters?"
"But we are Death Eaters," says Avery so matter-of-factly that Agatha feels sick. "I mean, what is the point being in charge if we can't do what we want to do with it?"
"I think our widdle Minister needs reminding how he's supposed to use the power he's been given," cackles Lestrange. She takes out her wand; the muttering around the room immediately goes quiet, at least until one of the ones Agatha doesn't recognize, a lanky man with a Slavic accent, says, "We don't have to say that we're Death Eaters, do we? We can still enact changes in the law without revealing…"
"Igor's right," says another one. "We don't unmask ourselves; we just…"
"Yes," Lestrange coos. "Do tell us your grand plan for Wizarding Britain. Shall we start by killing every last Mudblood in the country? Overturning the Statute of Secrecy?"
"Yeah, because that won't out us for sure," mutters Malfoy.
Lestrange gives a lazy flick of her wand, and Malfoy goes tumbling out of his seat to the ground. He doesn't scream or shout, but the look on his face as he lies there twitching says to Agatha exactly how much pain he's in.
"We need to make them afraid of who's in control," says Yaxley as if Malfoy's not even there—as if nothing has interrupted the flow of conversation. "Weaken their trust in one another. Death Eaters may be seen as fringe, but if we bring pureblood values into the mainstream—"
"Could they oust us if they wanted to?" another asks. "I mean, Lucius is Minister. We control his entire support staff; the Departments of Magical Law Enforcement, International Magical Cooperation, and Magical Accidents and Catastrophes; the Auror Office; the Obliviators; the Wizengamot—"
Well, that answers that question: the scope of this thing isn't just limited to Rosier's department.
"We can start slow," Malfoy drawls. "Lean more on the Prophet so they start framing Mudbloods and Muggles as the enemy, not Death Eaters. We don't have to change the laws just yet, but we can stop enforcing them—tell the Hit Wizards to stop making arrests for violence against Muggles—shift the Aurors' attention even more onto the vigilantes and away from us—"
And then—Agatha topples forward onto the ground when the door behind her pushes open.
Everybody goes still. She's still Disillusioned, but without full coverage from her Invisibility Cloak and with this many pairs of eyes on her, surely the group will be able to make out her silhouette. Before she knows what's happening, a dozen wands are out and pointed in her direction—
She hadn't even realized she was doing it, but she's holding her own wand inside her pocket. Quickly, Agatha takes it out, lurches forward as best as she can—
—and appears with a crack inside Obliviator Aurelia Reaney's living room.
xx
Within an hour, the Polyjuice Potion has worn off, and Agatha's spilled the whole sorry story. Reaney fixes them both a strong cup of tea. As they sit at the kitchen table, Agatha's unfocused eyes gaze unseeingly down at her lap. "Shit," says Reaney for what's got to be the dozenth time. "I just can't believe—we knew there was corruption in my office probably reaching all the way up to Rosier, but—"
"The whole Ministry," Agatha repeats. "Yeah, I know. I know they don't know it was me who crashed their meeting—even if I hadn't been Disillusioned, I was Polyjuiced—but how am I supposed to show up for work on Monday and face my boss, knowing—?"
"You've got to do something," Reaney presses. "Actually, no: we've got to do something."
"I just don't… what can we do?"
Reaney meets this question with a long silence before suggesting, "Write an exposé?"
"And put Death Eaters on both our backs? Besides, they said themselves that they're leaning on the Prophet—nobody would report a word of it."
"The Quibbler would. If they shared the story about You-Know-Who's body—"
"Yeah, and who believed it? I can't just show up in some crackpot magazine bleating about inadvertently walking in on Death Eater meetings. Nobody would buy a word of it, and anyway, they'd figure out immediately who we are if I explained what exactly I was investigating that led me there."
"But we can't just sit on this," Reaney protests. "I know you're scared—I'm scared, too, okay, and I wasn't even at that meeting underneath their noses tonight—but we have to take whatever platform we can find and spread this around."
"No one will believe us. They'll say we're insane or making it up. People know Malfoy is a purist, but they'll say there's no way his administration is literally just…"
She pauses.
"What?" Reaney frowns. "What is it?"
"It's—I just thought—we're not the only ones who want to stop the Death Eaters. The vigilantes—they broke out of Azkaban, and they must have a plan, right? If they're capturing Death Eaters, that's got to mean they're back in the game, doesn't it?"
"Savage, this isn't a game—"
"And I know some of them," Agatha mutters. "Abbott—Longbottom—Shacklebolt—my old boss, Moody—they were all Aurors, and they all busted out of prison. If I could just get in contact with them—"
"But you said the Aurors still with the Ministry have been looking for them for weeks and have turned up nothing. They even blocked the airwaves so owls can't reach them, didn't they?"
"Yeah, I know, but letters aren't the only way to send a message. They got alerted to Death Eater activity somehow so that they could find Lestrange and Rookwood and Carrow, didn't they? If I could only figure out how to draw their attention to me—"
Some of the old excitement is returning to Reaney's eyes. "You think they're tracking Death Eaters somehow?"
"They've got to be. Maybe they've put a Trace on the Dark Mark? If I could learn how to cast it…"
"But… nobody knows the incantation—or, at least, anybody who knows it is a Death Eater. It's not exactly common knowledge."
Agatha feels defeated only for a moment. "The incantation for the Dark Mark isn't known, but the incantation for Patronuses is. We know the vigilantes had modified it somehow so that they could use them to send talking messages. I could tap into the magical source and recreate the spell on my own… send one to them offering help in exchange for information…"
It's not really a plan on its own—it's dependent on the Order having a plan and being willing to let Agatha in on it—but they must know what they're doing this many weeks after breaking out of Azkaban, for heaven's sake, and she can't imagine they wouldn't accept the help. She and Shacklebolt were always friendly, and she reported to Moody for years: they'll know she's trustworthy and believe that she's not out to turn them back in.
For the first time since she stepped inside Malfoy Manor, Agatha feels hope, and she knows that hope is dangerous—for her, too, perhaps, but more importantly for the Death Eaters.
She smiles.