4 months ago

Walden awoke to the sound of someone banging loudly on the front door.

He was used to being roused at all times, night or day, and was therefore quick to come to his senses, but he must have dreamt the knock. No one could come here. The place – the whole property – was heavily warded, not to mention that Walden himself was Secret Keeper to its location, and the only other person who knew where the manor lay was now dead. And even when he had been alive… Well, it didn't matter. He must have dreamt it. Or maybe Caraid had let something fall again. The house elf wasn't getting any younger.

It was still day, Walden noticed idly. He hadn't been asleep for long.

He was already drifting back to sleep when the sound came again, louder this time. Bloody hell. Who in the blazes could it be? In all logic, an ill-intended person wouldn't bother to knock, right?

With a sigh, he picked up his sycamore wand from under the cushion and walked up to the door. He had been sleeping on the couch, as usual. Caraid probably hadn't heard the commotion; he was almost completely deaf. Walden opened the door wide, hoping to take whoever it was by surprise in case it was in fact a hostile visitor.

It was his brother.

His dead brother.

"What the–?" Tony couldn't be here. He was dead! Merlin's beard, Walden had received the letter from Azkaban just a fortnight ago. How had he–? "Did you…fake your own death to escape from jail?" That didn't seem possible, but nothing was making sense at the moment.

Antonin grinned at him. "It's good to see you, too." He looked exactly as Walden remembered him: tall and thin and incredibly pale, with raven black hair and mischievous brown eyes. He was clean-shaven. He looked as if he had barely aged a day since he was arrested. He certainly didn't look as though he had spent fourteen years in Azkaban. "But to answer your question, no, I didn't fake it. And it was in no way intentional. That is, I didn't kill myself. That's what they put in the letter, isn't it?"

Walden nodded wearily. "Aye." He couldn't believe it. Fourteen years locked up in that hellhole, then an official death notification, and here Tony was, looking in better shape than Walden had felt in over a decade. "What do you mean, you didn't fake it?"

"Well, I died." He looked almost apologetic. "Jeanne killed me, and then she brought me back. She turned me."

"Who?" What the hell was he going on about?

"Jeanne," his brother repeated, cocking his head to the right. When Walden frowned at the empty space beside him – Had he gone mad? Was he hallucinating? – Tony turned his head. "Come on, quit messing around," he said with mild exasperation.

A woman materialised at his side. It wasn't Apparition; most of the grounds were warded against that, just like Hogwarts. She must have been there the whole time and suddenly turned visible, somehow – although how she had walked inside the property in the first place was a mystery. She was slender and quite short, especially standing there beside Antonin, and she was as pale as he was. Her chestnut-brown hair was cut short and she wore a pair of fashionable sunglasses that hid her eyes. "I love your pyjamas, mon cher," she said with a dazzling smile and a heavy French accent.

That was when Walden realised that he was still in his underwear – he never wore anything else when he slept, or when he was around the house, for that matter. Who was there to scold him? Caraid was almost as blind as he was deaf, and they never had company. Blushing slightly, he retreated inside the house, half-closing the door, and grabbed the pair of jeans and t-shirt he'd carelessly tossed on the floor when he'd come home earlier in the afternoon.

When he opened the door again, Jeanne's smile turned into a pout. "What a shame. A body like yours, you shouldn't be hiding it under all these clothes."

Tony was shaking his head and looking as embarrassed as Walden felt. "Don't mind her. Can we come in? We need to talk, if it wasn't obvious."

"Sure," Walden said with a shrug. He turned toward the kitchen and took a few steps in that direction, then noticed they weren't following him.

"Um… Yeah, you need to invite us in. Stupid rule, that one." Once again, his brother looked apologetic.

Walden snorted. "What are you, a bloody vampire?"

Tony opened his mouth, and his upper canines elongated. You've got to be kidding me, Walden thought. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. "Come on in, both of you."

He offered them tea or coffee but they both declined, Jeanne politely, Antonin with open distaste. "I'm afraid I don't have any blood to give you," Walden said dryly. "Except my own."

It didn't seem possible, but Tony's face somehow became even paler. "No, no, we're fine! I'm sorry, it's just… Jeanne made me drink water – just stupid, plain water – because she wanted me to understand why I should never try to ingest anything but blood. Long story short, I learned my lesson," he said with a grimace. "You wouldn't believe the mess."

"We're sorry to intrude on you like this without forewarning," Jeanne said. She had removed her sunglasses, and Walden couldn't help but notice that her left eye was missing. The right eye was a limpid blue. "Antonin tells me that you're a very busy man."

Walden made a dismissive gesture. She had brought his brother back from the dead; he wasn't going to be annoyed at having his rest disturbed. "I don't understand. If you're a vampire – if you're both vampires – how can you walk in broad daylight?" It wasn't a particularly sunny day in the Highlands, granted, but vampires couldn't stand sunlight, no matter how faint; they were supposed to enclose themselves in a lightproof space during the day. That was Vampires 101.

"We're not mere vampires. We're Ancients," Jeanne told him brightly. "We are the upper-class, the élite, the chosen few. There is only a handful of us."

Walden let out a small laugh. Ancients! Had they also managed to capture a Crumple-Horned Snorkack on their way back from Azkaban? Merlin's rumpled robes, they're crazy.

Many children of wizarding descent were fed tales of the Ancients, a popular bedtime story, which claimed that vampires were created millennia ago by Death itself, who was also a vampire, but an exceptional one, with all sorts of fancy abilities. These vampires who were transformed by Death were called the Ancient Ones, and they were presumably figures of legend, Vlad Dracula being the most notable of them all. That particular tale had even made it into Muggle folklore, apparently. The second part of the story asserted that werewolves had been created in the same fashion by Death's nemesis, Famine, and that they'd been competing from time immemorial through their respective minions. It didn't help the story's credibility that those two were so-called Horsemen of the Apocalypse, if you believed in these things – which Walden didn't. It was truly preposterous. "Quit messing around, lady. It's been a long day, and I have no patience for kiddie tales."

Tony edged forward on his seat. "Wal, she's being serious. The Ancients are real. Everything is real, all the stories. How else do you explain us being vampires and walking in the sun? You're the practical one. Merlin, you're probably a direct descendant of Rowena Ravenclaw herself. Think about it." They were both fixing him intently. It wasn't helping their case, actually. Their eyes shone with their fervent desire to make him see the truth – or their version of it. They looked like religious fanatics trying to convert a primitive heathen.

Tony had a point, but there was certainly a much more rational explanation. At this point, the most logical one was that the girl, Jeanne, was another convict, who had somehow escaped her cell and embarked Tony with her. Their time in Azkaban had taken its toll on them, and now they were both stark raving mad. Occam's razor: the simplest explanation was often the correct one. Walden didn't like to think that his brother had gone insane, though, so he cautiously settled for another potential explanation. "There are potions and artefacts that can allow vampires to walk in broad daylight," he said quietly. They were known to be of dubious efficacy at best, but maybe they had found a more effective method to achieve the same effect.

"You think I'm crazy, don't you?" Tony asked flatly. "You think the Dementors loosened the few screws I had left."

"I think you're both crazy," Walden admitted.

Jeanne laughed heartily at that. "I suppose we are, mon mignon. 'All the best people are', isn't that the saying?"

"And if the Ancients are supposed to be figures of legend, who does that make you? Jeanne d'Arc?" Walden asked sarcastically. "Besides, he's hardly famous," he went on, pointing a thumb in his brother's direction.

"Why is it always her? La Pucelle d'Orléans," Jeanne said disdainfully. "Infamous is more like it, in most cases," she went on. "You do know we rarely go by our former names, don't you?"

"I don't know anything," he replied, "but the stories claim that you use aliases to disguise your true identities, yes."

"Well, I'm the Swindler – or l'Arnaqueuse, as I prefer to call myself – but I like you, pet, so I'm going to tell you my little secret," she said with a coy grin that revealed her razor-sharp canines. "My name is Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la Motte."

He had heard of her, as a matter of fact. History had always fascinated him, magical and Muggle alike, and they were often intertwined. Jeanne de la Motte was a Frenchwoman who, in the 18th century, had managed to steal a diamond necklace with the help of various colourful characters and by using several subterfuges, such as forged letters and a prostitute disguised as the then-Queen, Marie-Antoinette. The operation had been a success, but Jeanne was arrested eventually. She was sentenced to life, but escaped prison by dressing up as a boy. She had ended up in London, where she'd published her memoirs, and was presumably murdered there, thrown off her hotel room window. It was true that she had supposedly lost an eye in the fatal fall, but that didn't mean that this was the same woman. Besides, what were the odds that a vampire just happened to be nearby when she fell, and an Ancient at that? He told Jeanne exactly that.

She chuckled softly. "It doesn't work like that, mon joli. There's one amongst us who spends her time travelling the world, looking for the next likely lad or lass. Considering that there are only thirteen of us, and that we've been around for millennia, you can imagine that it's not a very rewarding job. But she never stops. She's relentless, our Queen." Jeanne smiled fondly, thinking of whomever this woman was. "Anyway. She marks down the candidate and appoints him or her a maker. There's an order, you see. We only get one each." She turned to Tony. "I was lucky. There are only two other men, you know, and they're quite ugly. But look how pretty mine is." She sounded like a proud mother discussing her favourite child. "But to go back to the point, what I mean is that we wait until they die before we turn them, to avoid suspicion. We're a secret lot, in case it wasn't yet obvious." She sighed. "But it was different with Antonin." It was odd, the way she pronounced his name, à la française. "You see, none of the Ancients are wizards or witches, not even the Bloodmother, the Original One. We are…Muggles, as you call them. Des Moldus. That's why our scout, the one I was telling you about, never searches in places meant for people with magical abilities. She has never visited any of those fancy wizarding schools of yours, for example, or the Ministry, and a prison for magicians is the last place she would stop by." Jeanne trailed off as Caraid limped into the kitchen, leaning heavily on his cane.

"The Master has company?" the old house elf asked in a reedy voice. Blimey, he really was blind. "Should I serve tea?"

"Caraid, you old bugger, you're still alive!" That was Tony. "I can't believe it! You must be older than Jeanne herself." Jeanne threw him a baleful one-eyed glare.

Caraid made no reply. Most likely, he hadn't heard. Walden crouched beside him and spoke loudly in his ear. "We have everything we need. You can go back to your room, thank you."

Caraid bowed unsteadily. "As you say, Master." For most of his life, Walden had tried to convince the elf to call him by his first name, had even commanded him once, but to no avail. His father used to say that he was too old to change his habits. The house elf retreated slowly, panting with the effort. Walden would have to do something about him, and soon. House elves didn't retire, but perhaps Walden could hire a new one, to help Caraid with his chores. But he had to deal with the present situation, first.

Walden returned his attention to Jeanne. "So how did you find Tony, then?"

"Pure coincidence – or fate, if you believe in that sort of things." Walden didn't. "I was hired to do reconnaissance in that ghastly place you call Azkaban – I like to keep busy – and there he was. The poor thing looked half-dead already. I had to ask permission, of course, since it's not the way we normally do things. It took some time, but it was eventually granted."

"Recce? In Azkaban?" Walden repeated with a frown. "Who hired you? What do they want? And how did you get inside Azkaban without…" He trailed off. That last one was pretty obvious; she could turn invisible, apparently. Although that sort of trick didn't usually fool the Dementors.

"So curious!" Jeanne laughed delightedly. "I'm afraid I cannot tell you, mon lapin. Not because I don't want to, you understand. I simply don't know. I specialise in secret dealings, and it is therefore quite legitimate that my clients give no name or reason for their…requests."

"Whoever it was, it doesn't bode well." He turned to Antonin. "What happens now? Will you come live here again? Or are you leaving with her?" He wasn't sure what their relationship was. Jeanne was certainly pretty enough to be Tony's lover, but the way she talked to him, it sounded more like they were...family. As the person who'd turned Antonin, perhaps she was considered his new mother, or something like that. Vampires were strange, and there was no reason for Walden to believe that Ancients would be any different from regular ones. "I mean, you're dead, but if they realise that you're not – not entirely – that makes you a dangerous criminal on the run."

"As a matter of fact, that's exactly why we're here," Jeanne said, looking business-like all of a sudden. "You see, fledglings are always encouraged to let go of their past life, of everyone they know, and to start afresh, as much for their own sake as for that of their loved ones, who would flee in terror at the sight of them." She gave Walden another toothy grin. "But as I've said earlier, Antonin is an exception. As a wizard, I knew that his family was likely familiar with vampires. And there's also this Voldemort business."

"What do you mean?"

"Antonin tells me that the tattoo he wore, the one your…master branded into his arm when he became his servant, was getting darker, before I turned him, and that it means Voldemort may be returning, or trying to. Has your own mark become more visible?"

"Aye, it has." And it likely meant that the Dark Lord was already back, somehow, and biding his time until he could return in full strength. How he had achieved that was another matter entirely.

"I want to fight him, see," Tony said earnestly. "If he comes back, I want to help Dumbledore, be on the good guys' side, for once. I thought maybe we could…join the Order. Together."

"I don't think that the Order of the Phoenix still exists, Tony. And even if Dumbledore reconstitutes it, I doubt he'll allow us in."

"Come on, it's Dumbledore! The man gives second chances to everyone. Third chances, even. He hired Snape at Hogwarts, didn't he? Are you telling me that you want to sit on your arse and do nothing about Voldemort? Or do you intend to serve him again?" He smirked. "Did you become a coward while I was away?"

"You're calling me a coward? Go to hell," Walden growled.

"I'm already there," Tony replied matter-of-factly.

"Boys, play nice." Jeanne had been observing their exchange with an amused smile. "I think I will leave you two to talk alone. You have much to catch up on." She stood up smoothly. "Antonin, mon enfant, don't forget what I said. You know how to reach me if need be. And if I don't see you until then, remember to be there for the meeting."

Antonin stood up and walked her to the door, and Walden heard them whisper to each other for a moment. "I know how it sounds, Wal," he said when he returned to the kitchen, eyeing Walden's cup of coffee with an air of painful yearning. "Believe me, it's as weird for me as it must be for you. Probably more, in fact." He passed a hand through his hair, something he often did when he was upset or frustrated. "Being an Ancient is not as fun as the stories make it sound. I can't eat anything. Can you imagine it, being immortal and not being able to eat?" Skinny as he was, Tony had always loved to eat. "We have to do something. We have to go to Dumbledore, explain everything. Well, as much as we can, anyway. Nobody else can know exactly what I am, that was the condition for my being allowed to come back here and let you know that I'm…alive."

"Tony, what can we tell Dumbledore that he doesn't already know? You're right about Snape, he's at Hogwarts. He would know about the mark, and he will have told Dumbledore already. What else do we know for certain? We don't know that Jeanne was hired by a partisan or a Death Eater or...or the Dark Lord himself. It could have been anyone. We have no evidence, we have nothing."

"If we wait too long, it might be too late to prevent anything dire from happening," Tony pointed out.

"If the Dark Lord returns, something dire will happen no matter what we do," Walden murmured.