"Did you see what she did to Nigel?" Thomas asked. He was sweating despite the wind whipping into his face.
It felt like a nightmare.
An easy job, they'd been told. Fly down to the train; the kids they were supposed to kill had been deliberately placed in the last car. Slip in, kill them, slip out. It should have been as easy as taking gold from a bowtruckle. Given that bowtruckles had no interest in gold...
Done while disillusioned, no one should have even known they were there until the Potter kid and the Terror had been found dead.
They'd have left a message for all of Wizarding Britain. The Boy-Who-Lived was a talisman, a symbol of hope to the masses. Kill him, and people would learn that there was no hope. There was only compliance or death.
Even more so, the Hogwarts Express was considered sacred ground. Having the deaths occur there would shock people. It would remind them that their own children were not safe, and if Hogwarts, the safest place in Wizarding Britain couldn't protect their children, then no one was safe, even in their own homes.
Of course, the better Wizards might be able to protect their homes with Fidelius charms, but those were very difficult, and it was rare for Wizards to be skilled enough to cast them. Furthermore, even if they did protect their homes, there was only so long they could hide there. They'd have to come out sooner or later for food.
Copying food was well and good, but it didn't preserve the original forever. Food got old and rotten, and food preservation magic was still in its infancy.
Killing two first year students should have been a task for a single Death Eater. Instead, the Dark Lord had sent six. He'd sent others to distract the aurors at the train station too six of them should have been overkill.
Instead, the Trolley Witch had been waiting for them, and she was a nightmare. They'd managed to escape mostly unharmed, due to good shields and quick reflexes, but the Terror had lived up to her name by murdering Nigel while their backs were turned.
The Killing Curse was kinder. It killed without pain, instantly and mercifully. Thomas had never held with using the Cruciatis curse like some of his peers. No matter what the muggleborn had done, it was better to put them down mercifully than to torture them.
The world would be better without them, but no one had ever said that it was necessary to be cruel.
"Shut up," Jurgen said. "They're Wizarding kids. They'll screw up and use magic sooner or later, and then we'll have them."
They had agents in the Trace department; as soon as the owl was sent complaining about the use of magic, they'd finally be able to put this whole mess behind them.
Fortunately, the aurors couldn't apparate into places they didn't have a good mental image of, so wherever they ended up killing the kids it would take a while before the enemy reached them. Unfortunately, that also meant they couldn't simply apparate to the terror and kill her for what she'd done to Nigel.
There had been so much blood. He'd slipped under the train as he fell, and he'd still been alive at the time.
The look in the Terror's eyes hadn't been human either. She'd stared at them as though she could see straight through their disillusionment, and there hadn't been the slightest bit of shock or horror at what she was doing. She'd killed a pureblood as easily as Thomas might have killed a bug. It hadn't bothered her at all.
It was almost as though she didn't realize that pureblood were the only actual humans.
"How in the hell did they get past us?" Gerald asked. "We had people watching. I went through that whole damn train, and we didn't see anything."
"It doesn't matter. We'll get them, and then the Dark Lord will reward us, as well as Nigel's family," Jurgen said. "And we'll make them pay."
Thomas shivered. Jurgen was one of those who liked to play with his victims. His parents had come from Germany, and there were things he'd learned there that made Thomas afraid of him. It wasn't the killing; it was what came before that bothered Thomas.
Jurgen pulled out a mirror shard and he stared at it.
"The bird's been sent," he said. "It should be passing by soon."
Soon was a relative term when it came to owls. Some seemed to take their sweet time, while others seemed to appear at their location faster than should have been possible given their visible flight speed.
They spent the next thirty minutes hovering, stuck in their own thoughts. Thomas didn't dare say too much; free thought wasn't particularly valued in the Death Eaters, not unless you were a rich pureblood. Being a poorer relative meant that sometimes you had to bow and scrape.
Even though Jurgen wasn't a proper British Wizard, he'd proven himself to be cruel enough and good enough at what he did to be higher in the organization. He didn't have patience for fools.
None of the higher ups did. You never wanted to say anything that an enemy could bring up to the superiors. It was a cutthroat world, and the only benefit of joining the Death Eaters was that it meant being part of something bigger.
It meant a chance to change a world that had been going deeply, horribly wrong for most of his life.
Young wizards didn't have a chance in their world, unless they came from the best families. Older wizards had all the best jobs, and because they stayed hale and hearty until shortly before they died, that meant that they kept their jobs for decades... some for as long as a century or more.
Thomas had heard that muggles were so short lived that their whole careers were over in thirty or forty years. Young people would have a chance in a world like that, especially since muggles got sick and died all the time for practically no0 reason at all.
But in the world they lived in, it was hard to get a meaningful job, and even harder to advance, since the people above hardly ever left or died. There was a line of wizards waiting for every good job, and for every one that got it, a dozen would be forced to live like paupers, forced to scrabble by only on their magic.
It was hard enough being a poor pureblood. Now that the muggleborn thought they deserved their share of the good jobs, it was even harder. Even worse, the muggleborn were willing to work for wages that no pureblood would ever dream of accepting.
It drove wages down for everyone.
Worse, they were given benefits, like a full education at Hogwarts that most of them didn't even pay for. They lived off the backs of hard working, honest citizens, and they didn't give back.
Finding out that he wasn't the only one who had felt this way had been a relief. With the Death Eaters, he'd found a community of people who had understood the danger just as he had.
He hadn't been willing to kill people, not at first, but eventually he'd understood why it was necessary.
The muggleborn were a plague on the world, one that wouldn't stop until they'd eaten every last scrap and destroyed everything that was good and wholesome.
If the muggleborn were allowed to continue, they'd have every Wizard living in a tiny muggle house that looked exactly the same as every other muggle house. Muggles were slaves to something called a Tellyvision that hypnotized them and made them fat.
They ate crappy food and lived horrible lives, and if the muggleborn were to get their way, Wizard lives would be no better. They'd destroy everything that made the Wizarding world great.
He'd heard that some of them even lived halfway in the muggle world. A Wizard could live like a king there, if he wasn't worried about the Statute of Secrecy.
Using magic to copy things and then sell them to muggles, then use that to live high. They took money from honest, hard working Wizard shops, and gave it to stinking muggles, who by all reports didn't even have souls.
They didn't care that there were six or seven billion muggles who would love to murder every wizard man woman and child the moment they realized they still existed.
Only creatures with souls could do magic, and even among those there was a hierarchy.
Muggleborns weren't good at magic, and that was because they only had a sliver of a soul. He'd even heard rumors that they'd gotten their powers by stealing them from the children of Wizards. There had been more and more squibs born of late, which was all the proof he needed that it was true.
He wasn't entirely sure that creatures like House Elves and Goblins had full souls; if they did, why not allow them to use wands? Clearly it was because they were dangerous and could not be trusted.
They were doing God's work in stopping the muggleborn, and killing the Potter brat was part of that. Killing the Terror was just an added bonus.
Keeping something like that in a school with proper pureblooded kids wasn't just an affront to common decency, it was a constant danger. She'd started out by beating multiple boys, and now she'd killed the kid of someone Thomas knew.
Avery had offered a reward for whoever killed her, one that was half as large as the one on Potter's head.
Potter was the only thing standing between the Dark Lord and the return of Wizarding Britain to it's roots. It was a pity that he had to die. It wasn't even his fault; from all reports he was a fairly decent kid. He was a half blood, of course, which meant that he wasn't as good as a real person, but some half bloods weren't too bad.
It was the fault of Wizarding Britain, for making him a symbol and setting him against the Dark Lord. They should have known better.
The girl, though; her James wouldn't mind killing. She'd murdered Nigel, and there hadn't been a trace of a soul in her eyes, only hatred and anger.
"Here it is," Jurgen called out.
The owl flew past them, ignoring them as it shot directly toward it's target. Thomas felt a rising sense of excitement as he fell into formation.
They ducked down, flying among the trees. The canopy here was open enough to fly easily, and there was no point in flying above the trees, because they'd never see where the owl went.
This was the thing that would finally get him out of the bottom ranks. He would be recognized and that meant good things for his future. Once the Dark Lord took over, he'd be the one strutting around with all of the power, not...
There was a sudden gout of blood from in front of him.
Jurgen's body was falling to the ground, his head falling separately. Blood was fountaining from his neck as his heart beat rapidly for a few moments before death.
Thomas pulled back on his broom, and he barely managed to avoid being decapitated himself. He stopped in mid air and he squinted as he saw the thing that had killed Jurgen. It looked like spiderweb, but it seemed to be made of razor sharp metal instead of being an actual web. In the dim light it had been almost invisible, but now that blood was dripping from it, he could see it clearly.
The others had pulled up before being struck by it, although for some of them it had been close.
Now they were down to four.
"What the hell?" Samuel screamed.
Thomas held his wand up and a moment later it shone as brightly as he could make it. For a moment he was blinded by his own light, and then he saw it. Now that they were looking, they could see that the entire forest around them was draped in spider webs. All of them glistened in the setting sun.
There was nothing back the way they had come, but it almost looked like the forest in front of them was covered in thin lines of web. There wasn't space to fly over it, not without going over the canopy, and below was filled with underbrush.
Was this some diabolical trap set by Moody? If that was the case, then they should apparate away right now. They'd lost two of their members, and losing any more would be...
A blast came from among the dense underbrush, and a moment later Samuel exploded into a gout of blood and flesh and gore.
Thomas immediately brought up shields. It wouldn't do anything against the Killing Curse though, and everyone knew that the girl had enough hatred within her to cast that, so he dove down. The other two death eaters did the same, but one of them, the younger guy that he didn't know very well backed up and got tangled in wires that hadn't even been there a moment before.
The boy dropped his wand, and his body dropped, his legs kicking for a moment even as his neck snapped. His body shook convulsively, even as his face turned purple with a lack of oxygen.
Thomas lashed out with a cutting spell, and the boys body fell, but Thomas knew it was too late. The fall itself was likely to have killed him; they were thirty feet up, and this wasn't a Quidditch pitch with softening charms on the floor of the forest.
It was only Thomas and Malcolm now. As a bolt flew over his head, Thomas lashed out with the killing curse at the place in the underbrush where the bolt had come from, but there was to much underbrush. While the killing curse sliced through shields like butter, places like this weren't where it performed the best.
Instead he cast a blasting curse into the underbrush. With any luck he should be able to kill her, and then he'd pick the Potter brat off easily.
Returning without killing one of them, in a fight where four of his teammates had been killed, that would mean hours of being tortured. The Dark Lord was already convinced that he had a mole in his ranks, and coming back empty handed wouldn't do him any good.
Thomas apparated to the forest floor even as he heard screams from up above. Gerald's body came falling heavily, and as it fell beside him, Thomas realized that something had happened to Gerald's eyes. It looked like it had been stung by thousands of insects, causing his eyes to practically implode.
What kind of curse had she used to do that?
Gerald's tongue was swollen, and it looked like he had already been choking on it when he'd fallen from his broom.
The girl wasn't a girl at all. She was like the Trolley Witch; an inhuman abomination. She was the trap that Moody had set, and even if he was punished for hours, it would be better than what the girl had planned for him.
Discretion was the better part of valor.
The girl could be hiding anywhere in the forest, and the attack would come from wherever he least expected it.
Grabbing his broom, Thomas grimaced. He'd be tortured, but going back to tell the Dark Lord was the better of his two choices.
This wasn't where he was meant to die, not to some prepubescent mudblood.
Thomas gathered his will.
He felt a pricking sensation on his wand hand. Looking down, he saw a bee land on it. He tried to shake it off and gather his will again, but he felt another prick and then another.
Looking down, he saw a massive swarm rising from below. It was dark and writing, and it looked like the sea. It was only a moment until it enveloped him, and he felt a moment of panic.
He should have apparated, but instead he flew straight up toward the canopy above. If he could get over the trees then the terror wouldn't be able to see him, and he'd be able to apparate home.
Something snagged at him, and pulled him off his broom.
He was falling suddenly, and a moment later he was in the middle of the bugs. The world around him turned chaotic and dark, and he couldn't see or hear. He felt stinging on his eyes and hands, and bugs entered his mouth.
Suffocating, he didn't have the ability to focus, not enough to apparate, and especially without his wand.
Where had his wand gone, and where...
As he hit the ground, everything turned dark for a moment. He lost consciousness, but then he woke in incredible pain.
He had broken bones; he'd had them before from Quidditch, but never so many, and now he couldn't feel his waist.
There was a shadow above him. It took him a moment to realize that it was the girl. She was using a blasting spell on the bodies, one after the other. She was destroying them, but why? Everyone would know what she had done. There would be no hiding it.
There wouldn't be enough of any of them to reconstruct.
As she approached him, he realized that she wasn't a child at all. She was a demon.
There were bugs crawling all over her, including her face. As she stared down at him, they covered every part of her face except her eyes, which glittered in the dim light.
She hardly seemed to realize that he was alive at all. He tried to call out as she lifted her wand.
It didn't matter. Everything went dark.