Chapter 3 - Christopher Lupton

Lizzie woke up on a floor laid mattress to opaque light on her face from a high and dusty window. Charlie's arm was wrapped tightly and protectively around her waist. She played absently with the ends of her hair in intense thought. Her dream was odd and even now she couldn't really place the details, but relatively speaking she'd slept remarkably well for the last few weeks in this shabby basement-style apartment in the heart of London. She credited that to the man lying next to her. She couldn't remember the last time her sheets weren't drenched in some volume of cold sweat when she woke, or the last time she hadn't woken to reeling pain in her forehead, at least not without sedatives or potions to help.

Lizzie snuggled up to Charlie's warmth when she felt him stir, knowing that he'd be on his feet in moments because he didn't often care to linger in half a slumber like she did. She rolled over to stare at his sleepy face while his eyes rustled to life just below the surface of his closed eyelids. His hand moved dreamily and almost automatically from the curve of her bare waist to her neck before it made destination on her face. Lizzie closed her eyes and opened them to blue ones staring softly back. He rubbed them roughly with his other hand and blinked them into focus before moving his hand from her face to her hair and kissing her forehead.

Goosebumps broke out over Lizzie's body as he pulled the sheet back on the mattress and grabbed for clothing lying in a pile on the floor from the night before. She watched him dress and make his way toward the door to check that enchantments and their surroundings were safe. This was usually when he took a casual stroll down to the coffee place on the corner and back in case there was anyone suspicious lurking around.

Lizzie rolled over and coddled the blanket for what she knew would be at least ten more minutes of sleep before Charlie would insist that she wake up. She looked at the calendar on the wall marked with their rendezvous date. Hermione was situating her parents somewhere safe. Ron was helping his brothers and parents secure precautions for going into hiding. Alastor establishing a new network of safehouses since Dumbledore was the secret keeper for most of the ones that previously existed. Kingsley, on the other hand, was protecting the muggle Prime Minister, and other order members would be moving Petunia and Dudley out of the country under completely different alias. The order hadn't written but communicated minimally using patronus charms.

Charlie took Lizzie when they apparated off the mountainside after Dumbledore's funeral. He'd changed his hair blonde for the time being and went by the name Nathan, while Lizzie was hardly recognizable with black hair and the name Mandy should anyone ask, though she'd only left the small confines of this apartment once since they'd arrived.

Charlie insisted they hide in plain sight, so to speak, and Lizzie didn't protest because in any event there was a particular place in London she needed to go, she just didn't know how to ask him about it without revealing too much of the plan. Then again, if for some reason they didn't reunite with Ron or Hermione, she assumed she'd set out with him on the horcrux hunt instead. But she didn't want to think about that possibility.

The door opened and she smelled the coffee immediately. Dirk Creswell lent him a considerable amount of muggle money for the time being, and though he paid next to nothing for the shabby little dump owned by an elderly woman who lived upstairs who only really wanted someone around to check in daily to make sure she was still alive, and didn't care who, it worked out rather well.

Lizzie rolled over; the bare caps of her shoulders exposed over the blanket while she pretended to still be asleep. She heard him set the paper cup down on the table next to the mattress and felt his body hovering over her as he sat down and prodded at her face in as annoying a possible way until she acknowledged him.

"Get up," he said quietly in her ear. He attempted to entice her nostrils with the smell of coffee, but Lizzie groaned. She heard him sigh but it sounded laced with amusement. "Get up, Lizzie," he said a little more assertively.

"Are we being attacked?" She asked a little indignantly.

"No, but I know too well that you'll lay here all day if I let you," he retorted a little harshly.

"Then, don't let me," she said quietly as a smirk broke out at the left corner of her mouth that he didn't see.

"What's that supposed to mean?" He asked close to her ear but judging by the way his hand moved over her bare waist and hips under the covers, and then rested inside her upper thigh, he knew the answer. "I already got dressed," he said.

"You're kidding, and here I thought sure you went down to the coffee place starch naked," Lizzie said sarcastically. He snorted back a laugh. Something about being completely alone with him and nothing else to do but silently run through her plans in her head had accelerated their relationship into a full-blown affair. She didn't want any of the Weasleys to know yet, much less Remus who she thought might maul him the way Greyback had his brother. His hands were warm, and she could easily drift back to sleep if he just lied here with her like this for a little longer. He held her for a few more minutes to appease her silent request.

He watched her get up on wobbly legs, transfixed with hunger in his eyes, and tempted to pull her back. He'd traced the scars so noticeable on her while she slept, wondering where some came from. Her eyes were exhausted but brightened some the longer she sipped at her coffee.

"Charlie, I need to go somewhere," she said suddenly, pulling on an overly large flannel and buttoning it down her exposed body.

"No, you're not leaving until we are clear to rendezvous with the others," he said coarsely for what was probably the sixth or seventh time.

"Just for part of the day. I can make sure I don't look like myself," she said defensively.

"It only takes a quick gust of wind to expose the scar on your face. No," he retorted.

Lizzie looked affronted and resolved to do something she'd been thinking about for a while, almost just out of spite and defiance toward him and his futile protectiveness. Charlie tried to soften a little and gave her a reassuring sort of hug, then went to the kitchen end of the apartment to make something for them to eat. Lizzie discretely dug in his bag for a blade and locked the bathroom door behind her with it in hand. He looked up at the sound and frowned toward the bathroom door with an underbelly of concern and distrust.

Lizzie stared at herself in the mirror for a few long minutes. She knew she wouldn't be returning to Hogwarts; she knew she was being hunted to a degree like never before with Dumbledore gone, she knew everyone she was affiliated with was in terrible danger, and that alone made it all set off a fire in her veins. Lizzie washed her face and then lit a fire in the sink with her wand. She held the blade to it until it glowed while she looked at the light dance across her face in the reflection. In terms of identification, it didn't matter that she learned to change her most identifiable characteristics on a whim, she couldn't modify real features, and more importantly, she couldn't conceal scars, not ones from evil curses or goblin blades at least. The burnt skin on her wrist had given her the idea days ago when she compared it to some of Charlie's burns. Being with someone who worked with dragons and the bullshit story about working with him in Romania had made her contemplate it even further.

She moved the sleeve of her shirt up over the mark on her left arm, the one carved more than two years ago by Voldemort himself and stared down with contempt. She wadded up the hem of her shirt and bit down on the fabric like a gag while she pressed the hot blade to the surface of the skin. She picked up the blade and could tell from the way the skin melted that it would heal and make the original drawing, at a minimum, rather indistinguishable.

Her hands shook, her arm seared in pain, her jaw had locked around the fabric of the shirt, but she had not screamed. Sweat broke out at her hairline and her eyes watered as she lifted her bangs over forehead. Waiting for the blade to heat up felt like eternity. Her scar was only about an inch long, but could give her away instantly no matter what she looked like.

Lizzie took a deep breath and pressed the blade to her forehead not knowing what to expect. She'd anticipated pain, but not what she felt. An unfamiliar scream ran through her brain and an even more unfamiliar one escaped her throat. It broke and ceased instantly with a crack on the tile floor that knocked her unconscious.

Charlie banged on the door before busting it open with a spell and splashed her face frantically with cold water until she stirred. She looked back at horrified eyes and she had no words of explanation. His eyes flicked between the blade and the fire, her arm, and her face with a mixture of horror and anger.

Lizzie propped herself up onto the toilet and looked into the mirror. You could still see the scar, even with the bleary vision, but the skin near it had seared enough to force anyone to strain to see a lighting bolt. At least a quarter of her forehead was seared, but she didn't care, vanity no longer mattered to her. Her eyes were red and blood shot but she was satisfied with the outcome. Charlie came back with something to put on it and she caught his hand.

"Let it scar. That's the point," she said shortly. He clenched his jaw and gave her an astonishingly dark look for a pair of bright blue eyes.

"It will scar anyway, it's a goblin blade, I'm not letting it get infected," he said through gritted teeth and mended the raw skin.

"Shortsnout, if anyone asks, house fire if muggles ask," she said and he looked back at her incredulously. There were no words from him about it. He opened his mouth to say something but nothing escaped.

"Get dressed then," he said when she reentered the kitchen. She shot him a strange look.

"I assume this was to go out and it must be important if you mutilated yourself to do it," he was obviously frustrated, and Lizzie could tell. She'd spooked him.

"Want to get pancakes?" She asked innocently while she buttoned her jeans and pulled on a jumper. He stared at her.

"Charlie... Let's get pancakes. No one is going to know it's me. I'll tell you where we're going after and why," she said with some resolve to give him a bite of what he'd obviously wanted to know more about for a while now. He exhaled, nodded, and they left up the stairs and onto a busy London street.

Charlie grabbed her hand and they walked alongside each other for about half a block. "Do you think dementor babies would be cute, relatively speaking of course? I mean if they're breeding, I'm sort of curious," she said with a slight trace of a smile, it was a rather foggy and gloomy day. He looked over like he hadn't heard her through his attentiveness about people passing by. Lizzie rolled her eyes.

"Look, Charlie, I was never expecting a romantic getaway or anything but please lighten up a little bit?" Lizzie asked. He exhaled and rubbed his face apologetically.

"Yeah, sorry," he said with a weak smile. Lizzie stopped at the corner and his pulled his arm close so he'd face her.

"I'm sorry if I spooked you," she said. Charlie looked down, not wanting to tell her what was spooking him because he wasn't sure if what he'd seen in that tiny little apartment was even real. Some of his dreams had been disturbing to say the least.

They entered a cafe and sat down at a table in the corner out of earshot of most people. "Are you going to tell me where we're going?" He asked. She looked up at him over the menu and then up at a waitress who was waiting to take their order.

"Two pancake plates, please, and two coffees," she said, the woman nodded and walked away. Lizzie looked at Charlie for a moment.

"I don't like the blonde hair," she said. He rolled his eyes but smirked a little involuntarily.

"I want to visit an orphanage. I don't think it's far from here," she said.

"Ties back to you, or to...?" He asked.

"My man, little t," she said with a tiny chuckle to lighten the air. "Tommy tom," she added to clarify. He stared intently and the remnants of amusement left her face.

"Look, I don't want anything I tell you to be tortured out of you, but getting rid of him is going to take a lot more than a duel. Dumbledore and I were on a mission to dismantle his...erm... holds... and I'm continuing it," she explained.

"His holds?" Charlie asked, smiling up politely at the waitress as she set down the coffee.

"I mean that in an extremely literal sense. He's not in just in one place. He's in several. We can't do anything about him until we do something about that, or he will just keep coming back. Unfortunately, it entails probably the darkest magic known to our world," she said non-chalantly and took a sip of coffee.

"What does an orphanage have to do with that?" He asked.

"It has everything to do with everything," Lizzie said cryptically. Her eyes sparkled at the sight of the pancakes and she ate and relished in several bites before continuing.

"Sorry, pancakes are like an old friend," she said with her mouth half full. "The girl who watched me growing up used to take me out for pancakes and it was only thing I ever looked forward to," she explained.

"Look, I didn't grow up in an orphanage but him and I share far too many similarities. His tyranny started there, and I want to know more, if it's still open," she said. "If it's not, I still want to walk around."

Lizzie had approximated the location and sure enough, after several detours, they spotted the iron gates of what used to be Wool Orphanage that she recognized from the memories. To her dismay, it looked boarded up, but not quite entirely. Lizzie looked around, flicked her wand, and they discretely slipped through the gates and into the dark building. Charlie lit the tip of his wand and peeled his eyes for any signs of life. It looked like it hadn't been inhabited in a few years. There was a thick layer of dust on every surface and caked into every nook and cranny. Lizzie focused on the whisper she expected to feel if a horcrux were nearby.

Lizzie stopped in the main center stairwell and looked up at where she knew a little girl had hung much like her friend had at Sacred Heart years ago. Lizzie closed her eyes and saw her sitting on the ledge ready to jump and drop, and when she opened them, she swore she saw her staring back. Lizzie was transfixed on the figure until Charlie tugged on her arm to shake her back into reality.

"What are you doing in here?" A man's voice sounded from the top of the stairwell. A second man followed him out with rolled up blueprints in hand and stared down at them confused. The first man, blonde, not a day older than twenty five, made his way down the stairs while Charlie noticeably tried to come up with an excuse.

"Who are you?" The man asked.

"Nathan Fitzgerald, this is Mandy," Charlie said.

"Let me guess, you came here to check out the ghosts? Hot site for the supernatural lovers," The man asked indignantly. Lizzie shook her head.

"I own this place, we're in the process of renovating it into something else. I would appreciate it if you left before I call authorities," he said assertively.

"It was an orphanage before, wasn't it? When did it close?" Lizzie asked.

"Bloody Cyprians bought it decades ago when the former warden died. I bought it a few years back and got all the kids into a program at one of the boarding schools, the government agreed to house them. Been sitting on it vacant for a little while..." he said.

"The Cyprians?" Lizzie asked as her insides iced over.

"Haven't heard of them?" He asked hotly.

"I... grew up in Cyprian Council," she admitted with a cracked voice. He raised his eyebrows.

"Whereabouts? Mandy, you said, am I right?" He asked, obviously interested.

Lizzie nodded. "Surrey," she said and Charlie pinched a tiny bit of skin on her back to be careful.

The man looked very intently at her. "I'm Christopher," he said. "Christopher Lupton... do you want a tour?" He asked. Lizzie recognized the name but couldn't place where. She felt a sharp piercing scream run through her ears for a moment and winced noticeably.

"Sorry," he said. "I just wanted to ask you something and figured we could meet in the middle on whatever curiosity you had in this place," he suggested. Lizzie nodded.

"How did you get out?" Christopher asked. "He's not old enough to be a husband, though you do look rather young for..." Charlie cleared his throat a little affronted. "Sorry, not what I meant," Christopher added in response.

"I...well my uncle passed. I was raised by him. Took the opportunity to run away," Lizzie lied.

"Who was your uncle?" He asked.

"Brian... Teller," she said, Katie Teller having first come to mind with an involuntary cringe at the thought of her least favorite classmate at Sacred Heart, she thought her father's name was Brian. Then she remembered why the name Teller came so quickly to the forefront of her mind.

"Ah, explains why you're here then," Christopher said. Lizzie looked back confused and he looked even more so by her expression.

"Brain Teller... Emily Teller. The ghost story. I assumed that's why you were here," Christopher said.

"What's the story?" Charlie asked, reading a mild shock on Lizzie's face.

"Emily Teller was taken from here and killed in the alley just up the block. That same day, the warden, Ms. Wool was found dead in her office. Nobody knew who took Emily. Brian Teller, her older brother, saw a man walk through the front doors with her. Her organs were dispersed throughout the orphanage, the shell of her body found in the alley, the only one they didn't find was her heart, and the psychopath didn't even leave her eyes behind in the actual body they found. The Cyprians bought it and converted the place to a Catholic orphanage shortly thereafter. Most got stuck in the congregation unless they were adopted by someone outside of it," Christopher explained.

"We've seen a lot of weird stuff here," he continued as they walked and Lizzie tried to focus on the air. "Found reference to a girl who had hung herself back in the thirties. Found thousands of tally marks on the back of a closet door and assumed kids were kept in there. Found a bunch of eyeless dolls in the boiler room, a pair of severed human feet hanging in the attic like you'd hang a pair of shoes with a note about escape attempts. It's all bizarre," he said grimly. Lizzie had been peering into rooms as they walked past. Her body was cold and she couldn't shake the sense of foreboding. Charlie had a hand protectively on her waist and was noticing her expression grow colder.

Lizzie thought she should know by now that there were no coincidences, yet somehow knowing the girl she'd already known was murdered by Riddle was the aunt of the girl at Sacred Heart who had slit her wrists in the bathroom, made her extremely uneasy. She wasn't actually there when Katie did what she did, but this seemed to suggest she might have been and wondered if she'd altered her own memory of the event like she had with Melody, who was also incidentally related in the exact same way to of one of Riddle's victims.

"Why did you buy it?" Charlie asked.

"My... Father joined the church when I was eighteen. He was promised my girlfriend whose dad was his business partner. I ran away with her. We had plans to shut the creeps down," he explained.

"Christopher," Lizzie whispered under her breath. "Nadine's Christopher," she added.

"You knew Nadine? I've been looking for her for about eight years," he said with a crack in his voice and wide eyes. Lizzie's eyes were wide too.

"What do you mean? I know she ran away. Her father faked a burial," Lizzie asked.

"She did, and he did. We lived in a small apartment near here for almost a year. Then we went up to the cliffs one afternoon and she disappeared. Didn't jump, no body recovered, she was gone. I thought they kidnapped her or something. I've been trying to find her ever since while simultaneously trying to shut down any of these places these creep cultists have hold in," he said bitterly. Lizzie didn't have words.

"I'm so sorry," Lizzie whispered with a huge boulder of guilt in her stomach.

Christopher nodded. "I thought maybe the guilt got to her, if she wasn't abducted. This little girl hid in my car the day we left and begged Nadine to let us take her along. Nadine refused because she thought we'd get caught. But that girl... Lizzie or Libby, or something like that I think her name was. She just stayed in her head it seemed. Nadine asked about her a lot, wondered if she did the right thing, guilt," he continued.

Lizzie could feel Charlie staring at her, her hands and face had gone clammy, and she shook her head back into the present.

"Um... you mentioned dolls. Did you ever find anything else in here? Artifacts, jewelry, odd books? That type of thing?" She asked.

He sighed and thought hard. "No... not that I know of. I got a bit spooked with the feet situation and hired a group of guys to gut the place. They found some faded pictures and files I told them they could chuck. I'd imagine some shoes and clothes left behind. I did tell them to hold onto anything valuable though, so unless they swiped it, I don't think there was anything," he explained.

"Was it like a company?" Lizzie asked.

"I don't remember their names, no, it was a couple years ago," Christopher said. Lizzie nodded. He stared back at her rather intently, noticing the calculating expression in her eyes. Charlie tugged her arm a little.

"Sorry..." Lizzie said. "Little lost in thoughts is all," she said weakly, thinking hard about the web of relations that had been spun just in the last several minutes.

"Nadine had that expression a lot. It's been a haunting really... not knowing," he said with reddening eyes at the thought. Lizzie wanted to say something comforting to him but didn't know what.

"Go ahead and look around I suppose," he said. Lizzie looked up at him and images raced through her mind of Nadine yelling at her to get out of the car, him running the cliffside in panic, them living an apartment not unlike the one her and Charlie were crashing in now. Her eyes swam and her head hurt but she knew she needed to look around more, drop into Riddle's world if she could, if only to completely rule out the possibility a horcrux was hidden here.

"Thanks, Christopher," she said quietly, and she walked down the long corridor of closet-sized bedrooms with Charlie following close behind.

"He lived here then?" Charlie asked.

"Yeah, from birth," she said with a cracked voice, almost pitying a young and severely neglected Tom. She stopped at an empty room and paused. In her bones she knew it was his like a muscle memory or habit of stopping at your own bedroom or office. No name on the door, it was completely empty, and she looked around before flicking her wand and uprooting the floorboards.

"What the hell?" Charlie whispered, casting a silencing charm in the hall and hoping Christopher hadn't heard.

"I'll fix it. I just need to..." she said as she got down close to the ground and looked feverishly for something of value.

"Maybe it was in her room then," Lizzie whispered.

"Whose?" Charlie asked. Lizzie didn't know where Leah would have slept, but closed her eyes and tried hard to fall into an eleven year old Tom's headspace from sixty some years prior.

Lizzie opened her eyes and stared at a separate room she'd apparently walked into. Assuming her instict was correct, the floorboards were uprooted and she looked around again to no avail.

"Are you doing this to all of them? There must be fifty rooms," Charlie asked nervously. Lizzie shook here head.

"No... just one more and then I think it's a lost cause," she said. He frowned in confusion while she used repairo to fix the demolished floors in the bedrooms. Then she walked quickly down to the warden's office and a stabbing pain shot through her scar.

He had a little girl by the wrist in this room, not unlike the way Lizzie's uncle snatched hers. Ms. Wool fell to the ground and the girl tried to scream but he slapped a hand over her mouth. Lizzie focused. Bouncing on his neck was the locket, and she opened her eyes.

"Lizzie?" Charlie asked, trying to steady her.

"We don't need to look here anymore," she said. The locket was hidden in the cave, and someone had since stolen it. Unless he hid a different one here after the fact or when he came to adopt an orphan for sacrifice, there wouldn't be one here. It would be too obvious. Dumbledore had visited him here. He wouldn't risk that.

Still, she left with more information than she'd hoped for and when Charlie unlocked the door to their drabby abode, she sat down and tried to rationalize the entanglement of lives she didn't realize were at play here.

Tallies in the closet, boiler room, eyeless dolls, feet, why feet? She thought. Wool died the same way Father Matthew had. Emily was the sister of Katie's dad, who was unhinged no doubt from treatment at that place. Katie died in a bathroom like Myrtle, Melody was Myrtle's niece, and Melody hung just like Leah. Then Christopher bought the place because the Cyprians had after Wool died, meaning Lizzie would have ended up there had Vernon ever followed through with his threats to drop her at an orphanage. Nadine had in fact run away, and her father had buried nothing in her grave, but she'd gone missing anyway.

After she explained the web to a thoroughly disturbed Charlie, she wondered how much of this Dumbledore knew while alive. Surely, he forced Vernon to keep her so she wouldn't end up in the same place Riddle was raised. Surely, if he'd dug for information about those Sacred Heart deaths five years ago like he claimed he had, he'd found out Nadine was missing. He'd have known who Katie's dad was. He'd have known who bought the orphanage after Wool died. Why hadn't he shared any of it with her?

She contemplated silently and her brain refused to sleep. She pulled out a prophet article that Charlie nabbed on their way back to read and rummaged through her belongings to find her journals from the year before. She dumped out her bag and a fragment of the mirror Sirius gave her fell from the bottom onto the floor. For the shortest of moments she thought she saw a blue eye staring back and picked it up to see what she thought was a partial outline of Dumbledore's face in the minimal light coming through the high window. She frowned and moved the shard from side to side, but he was gone.

Her bones ached for her friends, just few more days, she bargained. There was one more place she needed to go before they left London.