Chapter Four: Murder, Mayhem and Meetings
Ariel arrived into Diagon Alley in a swoosh of smoke only to find that the shopping promenade was nearly empty. Shops stood in unlit clusters of failure and hard times. There were fewer shoppers. Anybody who walked by her kept their heads down and their feet hurried.
She took to the first open clothing shop she could find. She half-ran into the shop not because she was fearful but because the morning September sun hung dull and cold and she needed something with sleeves immediately. She approached the counter, dug out the gold sickles she collected over the years, and dumped two handfuls of them onto a dusty counter. She looked up into the business witch who stood behind the counter and told her, with a misplaced smile, "Good morning." The owner of the shop did not return her greeting but rather continued to eye Ariel warily with a face that said what the hell do you want? Ariel flashed her a warm smile and told the shop keeper in her melodic voice, "I need a new dress. I'm going on a date tomorrow."
"Fascinating," replied the shopkeep drily. She touched a few Galleons and told Ariel, "Best I can do with this is a cheap dress."
"Chic cheap…or cheap-cheap?"
The shopkeeper eyed Ariel's body with a quick vertical glance through before she turned on her heel, disappeared into the back and returned, minutes later, brandishing a plain pale pink long-sleeved dress with an asymmetrical hem that hung above the ankle. "It's fairy-made but the bottom was torn up by feral goblins so that's why it's eighty percent off."
"Works for me," Ariel remarked.
The shopkeep rang up the total while Ariel, to the business witch's dismay, undressed right there, stuffing Snape's cloak into her bag while her ass hung out in front of the wall-sized window where she unintentionally gave the few inhabitants left in Diagon Alley a great view of her ass.
Ariel's favorite quality about herself, besides her voice, would always be her hair. Not because it was long or lovely or it held a perfect bounce but because of the color. Those long fluttery vibrant blood-red locks that draped her back. That could be seen from miles away and drew predators and prey in better than any bait.
Stepping back into Diagon Alley, her hair caught the attention of a random asshole who felt entitled to her time.
"Hey, baby," called out a janky-looking wizard into her ear as she passed by him and four other similarly dressed wizards smoking together against a brick corner. He made loud kissy noises at her and cried out obnoxiously, "I love your hair. Love to see what color your nipple hair looks like."
His friends laughed away.
"Fuck off," Ariel replied without stopping which only served to make the janky wizard's friends cackle.
With his ego bruised, the wizard stormed towards Ariel chasing her down until he managed to yank her by the wrist and force her to face him. He had his wand out, his mouth opened ready to deliver cruel retaliation, but Ariel stopped him dead.
"You might as well rip your dick off if you're going to be such a little bitch." Ariel bellowed at him.
His two friends watched in awe and horror as their friend did precisely as she said. His wand fell from her face to his own waist. A second later, blood exploded from his crotch and the wizard wailing from excoriating pain.
One of his friends charged towards her, wand raised but again, they were too slow.
"Kill yourself." Ariel snarled and the wizard's arm reversed away from her and towards himself as they produced the killing curse. The corpse collapsed mere steps from his friend's twitching, bleeding, dying body.
A deadly silence penetrated Diagon Alley as a stand-off ensued between the lone woman and the remaining Death Eaters. Ariel unhinged her jaw and bellowed out an ear-shattering roar that rattled the buildings, blowing brick and mortar asunder. Debris fell onto more death eaters and squished them out of existence in a second. When the dust settled, Ariel stood there, defiant and glaring at the rest of the witnesses, daring them to try again. None of them did. They scattered like ants. Ariel went to turn but before she could a high-pitched woman's voice yelled out, "Petificus Totalus." Her body planked and crashed into the stone ground, unable to hold her own hands out to break her fall. She landed hard. When she tried to get up, she was horrified to discover her body and her mouth were bound still.
"Well, well, well." She heard a voice say as the sound of footfalls approached her. Ariel watched in heart-juddering terror as a pair of black high-heel boots stepped in her direct vision before one boot nudged her by the shoulder and flipped her onto her back, forcing her to look. A long black-haired woman with hooded eyes towered over her, peering down at the helpless Ariel with unmistakable delight. "What do we have here? Killed five Death Eaters and you didn't even raise a wand. Don't see that every day."
She punctuated her observation by pressing her foot directly into Ariel's diaphragm, crushing the very limited amount of air Ariel could take in. She giggled deliriously when she noticed Ariel's struggle. The woman might have stomped on her lungs, for fun, had she not noticed the contents of her bag as they were strewn across the ground.
Bellatrix snatched the bag and started rummaging around. "Ha, nerd." She laughed, pulling out a copy of Potions Head Monthly to deride her. But then her hand touched the crown and her eyes bulged out of her head as she held it in her hand, looking equal parts mesmerized and baffled.
"Well, well…well." She breathed as a cruel smile stretched across her lips. "Now, this is interesting."
It started off an idle, mundane day for Lord Voldemort. Such as it happens during war. Not every day's going to be all meetings murder and mayhem. Even Voldemort had do-nothing days.
In fact, he had looked forward to this particular day for a week now. For his only plan for that day was to feed Nagini and curl up with his new favorite read: the little shit known as Draco Malfoy's diary.
He found it two minutes after Narcissa took Draco to Platform 9 3/4s tucked into an old shoebox and hadn't found the time to actually sit down and finish it. So today was going to be that day. He butchered an elf first thing for Nagini and left the kitchen for his bedroom (aka Lucius and Narcissa's old master bedroom) with his reading material in hand ready to indulge in some long-awaited reading time.
But his crackly, dried out foot barely made it past the fourth step when the unmistakably annoying voice of Bellatrix LeStrange rang up from behind him, saying, "My Lord! My Lord! Where are you, My Lord?"
He growled. "Ugggh! I'm in the kitchen." He stood where he was while Bellatrix skittered into the kitchen, looking more crazy-eyed than usual.
"My Lord! We've lost five men today."
"What?! Where?! How?!"
"It happened at Diagon Alley. There was an ambush…Rudolfo, Yemo, and the Beckles Brothers are dead."
Voldemort dropped his head. He didn't know which Death Eaters she meant specifically but any loss to the organization was at best an inconvenience and at worst a shitshow coming in slow motion. "Fucking fuck." He growled, lifted his head, and asked, "Who did this? Did you get them?"
"I got them," Bellatrix said with cruel pride. "But," her face turned from joking to serious, "she has no ID. And the ridiculous part, My Lord, she didn't even use a wand."
"…This person attacked and killed five of my followers without so much as lifting a wand?" His voice was stained with rage, confusion, and intrigue. "How can this be?"
"I swear. I wouldn't have believed it myself if I didn't see it myself…She just yelled at them and they just ripped their dicks off and Avada Kedavra'd themselves."
"She made a man…rip his penis off? Just by telling him to?"
"I swear on a pint of Veritaserum."
"Merlin's beard, who is this witch?" He half-exclaimed.
"Wait, there's more." She pulled out the crown from her robes and gave it to him. "When I went through her stuff, I found this."
He gave the crown a momentary glance before he demanded, "Where are they?"
She led him into the next room where a red-headed woman hovered remained bound and silenced hovering above the polished floor. Underneath her shadow laid the contents from her bag scattered around by Bellatrix. Garbage mostly. Magazines, forks, dead flowers, mini vials, seashells, bottle caps, driftwood, an old black robe, and an unremarkable amount of money. He turned his attention to the woman and discovered—he knew her face.
He turned his attention back to the garbage and a piece of paper being used for a bookmark caught his eye. He knelt down and pinched his long, dried out fingers around the page, pulling it out from its place. Just as he suspected, it was nothing but a moving sketch of a mermaid diving into water rendered on torn parchment paper.
But he held it for a time without speaking as long-forgotten memories flooded over him. He felt a laugh build in his chest and after a few moments of grotesque smiling, a crow-like cackle broke out of his chest.
He looked at the sketch then back at Ariel, giving her a toothy-lipless smile that made her insides clench.
She came to in frozen weightlessness with a closed-mouth gasp. Every inch of her body was tied up with invisible ropes. Even her open eyes weren't spared. The magical ropes pressed hard against her eyeballs, rewarding every twitch she made with a painful throb.
Worse, she could feel Death was nearby, standing before her. She felt their presence like a panic attack.
Hopeless, and convinced she was going to die, she wanted nothing more than to cry but found the spell used on her wouldn't let her. She was nothing more than a living statue, helpless silent, and doomed.
In her agonizing wait, she heard the woman's high-pitch laugh and the sound of footfalls coming towards her but whereas she expected the woman with the high-heeled boots instead found a chalk-white snake-faced creature in ash-black robes standing over her.
She had no idea that this creature's name was Lord Voldemort or that they were in the basement of one of his followers or that the name of the woman who delivered her to him was Bellatrix Lestrange. However, she did see the delirious glint in the snake-face man's eye and notice how he reeked of blood.
Voldemort's face was impassive, though his ice blue eyes poured over her which caused a cold sweat to run down her back as she felt the furious grip of death descend over her.
Minutes eked by as he stood there, eerily silent and still, rummaging through her belongings as if he were deciding which he wanted to take from her after he took her life from her. He disappeared from her vision to bend down and retrieve something she couldn't see before straightening his back, his eyes focused on a drawing she was fond of.
She watched his face, studying him as he studied the sketch, her heart pounding so loudly she was convinced the snake-faced creature could hear it and that's why they took so long to address her.
A second later, those cold unloving eyes changed to warm, delighted surprise. "Ariel." He said her name like it was that of an old friend. "I always hoped you were still alive."
Ariel's eyes couldn't move but if they could they would have bulged and her eyebrows would have furrowed in utter bewilderment. How did this creature know her name?
To her and Bellatrix's shock, the snake-faced man waved his arm allowing her body to gently drop to the ground while the invisible shackles fell from her limbs and lips.
When her feet touched the ground, she was unnerved to find herself speechless underneath this hideous, smiling face. Adrenaline coursed through her lungs as she demanded, "Who are you? And how do you know me?"
"My name is Lord Voldemort." He informed her patiently with the same, almost-loving smile that didn't fit his face at all. "But you knew me once as Tom. Tom Riddle."
A small, surprised wind left her throat when he introduced himself not from the insane fear of standing before the cruelest, most powerful wizard to ever live but because it finally dawned on her how they knew each other. His face disappeared, morphing into that of a little chubby-faced boy with black hair and intense eyes. "The boy from the cave," she said with a soft incredulous gasp. Voldemort nodded, looking thrilled that she remembered him. "Holy shit…it's been—"
"Decades!" Voldemort cried out with a laugh as he flung his arms open wide and stepped forward to embrace her. He folded his arms around her but she was too shocked and terrified to return to the hug. But he didn't seem to notice her stiff spine or her flared, disbelieving eyes when he drew backward, his cold dusty hands clapped onto her upper arms and peered down at her face, grinning. "Sixty years if you can believe it!"
Ariel, terrified of offending the wizard, forced out a smile and said with wide-eyed agog, "I can't believe this! You…look…so different."
"I know!" He said with a good-natured laugh. "I have definitely changed a lot since you last saw me. But then again," He gestured to her legs. "So, did you!" He took a step back and appraised her. "Wow. You haven't aged one bit! It's a good thing too. I almost didn't recognize you without the tail." Then he turned his head over his shoulder and addressed a stupefied Bellatrix, telling her with great reverence, "Bellatrix, I'm delighted to inform you that you are in the rare presence of royalty." He gave Ariel a flourish of his pale arm and announced, "This is Ariel, former siren princess, daughter of King Triton, granddaughter of King Neptune, and…" He turned his head back to Ariel and added somewhat tenderly, "A childhood hero to yours truly."