How had it all gone wrong?

She'd followed the trail as far as she could; looking through auror reports, talking to muggle authorities, looking through muggle paperwork and correlating everything with all the little tidbits that the girl had dropped over the past year as reported by some of the pureblood kids to their parents.

The girl was obviously from the east Coast of the United States, at least by her accent. Yet a friend of hers in the MACUSA couldn't find any records of a Taylor Hebert in muggle educational rolls.

The girl had claimed to be from a dangerous city; the most dangerous cities in the United States were Chicago, Las Angeles, Oakland, New Orleans, New York and Cleveland. They were big cities with big problems. There were rural areas that had problems as well, but nothing about the girl screamed rural.

It was a big country, though, and information was sometimes hard to come by, so it was possible that she had grown up tucked away in some slum with poor records.

However, Rita had been looking into the muggleborn deaths at the beginning of the year, hoping to come up with a story to counter the Ministry muggleborn propaganda. It wasn't because she liked the muggleborn; in her opinion they tended to be a little loud, crass and rude.

However, the opportunity to give the Ministry a black eye for constantly squashing her stories was irresistible. All she'd have to do was wait until her editor was indisposed; once the story was out there was nothing that she could do.

The missing Millie Scrivener had been the key.

No one in the Ministry had even tried that hard to find her; another dead muggleborn wasn't interesting when there were Death Eaters to hunt. The girl had been lost in the paperwork, even though aurors had been to her house to look for magical artifacts to preserve the Statute of Secrecy.

Rita had gone looking through the abandoned house, and what she'd seen had been quite illuminating.

There were pictures of the girl everywhere...pictures that precisely matched Taylor Hebert's current bodies.

Furthermore, the muggles had their primitive versions of Wizarding pictures; Rita had worked with videotapes in the past when working on crimes involving muggles. It had admittedly taken her an hour to figure out how to get the tape in the machine and to get the damned thing to actually work, but she'd eventually managed it, and it had gotten a lot easier after that.

The Millie Scrivener in the tapes was completely different that Taylor Hebert. She moved like an actual child, and her face and expressions were bright and happy. She looked a little naive, younger than her actual age even, and the family had looked happy.

There was none of the... strangeness inherent in Taylor Hebert; the girl's body language was normal, not like an insect ready to pounce. Her expressions were open instead of closed off and guarded.

The girl in the pictures could never have killed six Death Eaters in battle; in point of fact she hadn't. She and her family had been murdered by three Death Eaters. Considering the evidence of what had happened to the others, it hadn't been pretty either.

Rita had interviewed some of the children of people who had withdrawn their children from school. As far as she was concerned, they were the smart ones. The school had already been attacked several times, and was becoming more and more of a death trap by the day.

She... couldn't quite remember some of the times she'd gone to the houses of some of the more pureblood children. It was a little confusing.

Even more confusing was why she hadn't been to the ceremony where they were giving the monster child the Order of Merlin. Ordinarily she would have been there in the front row, screaming out questions.

Instead, something had held her back, had made her excuse herself. She'd found things getting a little blurry, and then she'd found herself being restrained by the aurors.

She hadn't done the things they accused her of; attacking the girl? Deep down she was afraid of the girl.

Clearly the girl wasn't a girl at all.

Taylor Hebert's name was in the book, so there had to have been a Taylor Hebert alive at some point. Undoubtedly she was in a shallow grave under a bush somewhere.

The Hogwarts staff had gone to where she was supposed to have lived, and they'd found a child there. They'd assumed that she was Taylor Hebert when in fact she was actually Millie Scrivener, or at least the girl's form.

Was the girl an adult witch polyjuiced into a little girl? It didn't seem likely; those potions only lasted so long and had to be periodically reapplied. No one ever said the girl was always drinking or eating anything.

A ghost, perhaps, possessing the girl and reanimating her body.

Rita had read about inferi, corpses animated by dark magic. They tended to have cloudy white eyes, though. They had no will or mind of their own either, which was a bigger impediment.

Zombies existed, although they tended to be no more intelligent than inferi, and their use tended to be limited to Africa and Haiti.

It was possible that she was a demon or revenant, though, using the girl's body as a vessel for whatever nefarious plans she had. Magicozoologists were finding new monsters all the time; perhaps she was some kind of monster who stole the skins of their victims and wore them like protective camouflage.

Rita could feel the revulsion rise within her every time she was around the girl. Her entire being screamed danger, and she could tel that killing was as easy or maybe even easier for the girl than for some of the Death eaters she was fighting.

The girl was better at it anyhow.

Somehow the girl had convinced everyone that Rita was some kind of terrorist. How she'd done it, Rita didn't know. It had undoubtedly been done with dark magic, likely with a lot of castings of unforgivables.

Rita had been at home, stewing over her repeated attempts to get anyone to listen, when she'd awoken in front of the crowd.

Now she was here, in a dark cell. She was in complete darkness, unable to see her hands in front of her face. Even as a beetle, when her vision was more blurry but much clearer at night she couldn't see anything.

There were no significant shifts in the movements of the air; it remained completely dead and still. As a beetle, she was able to find the slightest crack and slip through; it had been incredibly useful in her career as a reporter.

Here, though, there was not the slightest crack in the room. The air in the room was sweet and pure, if a little cold; presumably it was being replaced magically. There were other bugs in here, but they all seemed sluggish, likely from the cold and from not having anything to eat other than each other.

Rita had heard stories about places on the bottom levels of the Ministry; secret cells where Wizards went to never been seen again, experimented on by agents of the Department of Mysteries. Those stories had never seemed credible to her; it would be difficult to make a wizard completely disappear without someone noticing. It wasn't like Wizards were muggles, after all.

There were so many muggles that it wasn't surprising that they disappeared and no one noticed.

She'd heard that almost twenty times the Wizarding population disappeared in muggle Britain every year, and the muggles weren't all that interested in finding them. Wizards on the other hand, all knew each other. They had all gone to school together, had married into each others' families, and worked together. They had bonds, the kind that muggles apparently didn't have.

It was probably the lack of a soul that made the muggles so unconcerned.

Rita considered her options.

Her only chance was to escape and clear her name. She didn't have her wand, but she could still transform, which meant that her best chance was whenever they transported her for interrogation.

She froze as she felt a sudden presence in the room with her. There hadn't been any light or movement of air, but she had a sudden, unspeakable certainty that not only was she not alone, something terrible was in the room with her.

It was the same, gut wrenching sense of horror that she felt every time she was in the room with the girl, but now magnified. There was no way the girl could be in the room with her, but she was.

"Taylor?" she asked, her voice almost breaking.

"Why?" the voice that spoke sounded like the flapping of wings. It was breathy, and it didn't sound remotely human.

""Dear?" Rita asked cautiously.

"What do you know about Taylor Hebert?"

"Nothing!" Rita said.

"LIE!"

With that, the buzzing noises increased; not merely in the room with her, but in the walls. As a beetle, she had to be careful; there were many things that would love to eat her; everything from rats in the walls, to frogs, birds, spiders and centipedes.

She'd developed a horror of spiders and centipedes after a couple of dangerous encounters, and now she was hearing the sounds they made through the wall They were scratching at the walls as though they were anxious to get in, to wrap her up in their webs, paralyze her and devour her from the inside out.

She found herself shaking much more than the cold warranted.

Was this actually Taylor Hebert, or was it another entity of her species? Could she get it's help, or would she risk alienating Taylor?

"I dug around a little," she said. "Found out that she wasn't who she said she was. She's in the body of Millie Scrivener, the missing girl."

"How do you know she is not the girl?" the voice asked. It had a detached tone, as though it was trying to decide what to do with her. Rita had an uneasy feeling that she wasn't going to like whatever decision came.

She'd asked herself that question; it made sense that Taylor Hebert had been the one killed and Millie Scrivener had simply stepped into her place. Most reporters would have stopped at that. She'd known that it wasn't true, however.

"It doesn't make sense," Rita said, "There's nothing in her background that would give her the kinds of skills that she has. I've heard some of the aurors talking about the military maneuvers she's running the kids at the school through. She's creating her own army, right in the middle of the Ministry, and using Ministry funds to do it. Even You-Know-Who wasn't this blatant about it!"

"That's not an answer," the voice said.

It sounded like it was moving behind her. Rita swung around and swept the air with her hands. In her mind she imagined the gleam of a knife in the darkness... or maybe a claw or a fang. But she had to do something.

"I've got evidence," she said. Suddenly, a solution came to her. "It's hidden. If I die, it'll be found and all of the girl's secrets will be out in the open."

This wasn't some other entity. This was Taylor herself, finally revealing her true form. What sort of monster was she in the dark?

Rita's mind went over a thousand possibilities, each worse than the last. Was the girl something so terrible that it would give boggarts nightmares?

The tiniest voice spoke near her ear, air moving like an insects wing. It sent chills up her spine.

"Where is the evidence?"

"I'll never tell," Rita said defiantly, even though she flinched and her hand waved through where the voice had been. She was afraid to move for fear her hand would touch something horrendous, but it was an involuntary reflex. "You'll have to get me out of here."

"You won't be in this cell after today," the voice said. There was certainty in the voice that sent a chill down her spine.

Did she mean to kill her?

"I've got people who will release it for me!" she said desperately. "If I'm not released."

"You think they'll do anything for a Death Eater?" the voice said. It was moving around her, faster and faster. "Someone who would support the murder of children, the destruction of their very souls?"

"I didn't!" Rita said.

She hadn't.

She'd suspected what the Ministry was doing, but a lot of people had. She couldn't be blamed for trying to stop them; they'd have thrown her in Azkaban. She'd known that Umbridge was utterly vindictive.

The only reason she'd been more willing to push the current administration was that Bones was more likely to follow the letter of the law. It meant that she knew exactly how far she could push, and it meant that she could get away with a great deal. Someone like Umbridge was bad for business.

"You killed her," she said, the sudden epiphany striking her like a bolt of lightning.

Umbridge had been eaten to the bones by something; no one had ever seen anything like it. No one had been seen anywhere near her office, and while it was officially being blamed on the Death eaters, there was some doubts among the aurors.

Who would have wanted Umbridge dead more than anyone?

She'd been doing Voldemort's bidding, so there had been no reason for him to kill her. The most likely killer would have been a werewolf, a member of the Muggleborn Underground, or Taylor Hebert.

"I can help you!" she said quickly. "Whatever news stories you want. You need someone to give your people what they need... a voice."

"You kept your papers in the hidden compartment in the upper left handed drawer on your desk in your apartment," the voice said. "Along with a letter from your editor saying he wouldn't publish that kind of trash."

A sudden chill.

How had she known? Had she known all along?

Those papers had been her only leverage, the only reason that Hebert had to keep her alive at all.

"A new world is beginning," the voice said. It's tone was unemotional, clinical even. "Some people aren't going to be a good fit. It's too bad. I actually thought your beetle form was quite beautiful."

Rita was suddenly blinded by light in front of her. Instinctively she changed into her beetle form and started trying to fly toward the light.

The last thing she saw was a beam of light flying toward her; a moment later she knew no more.

A button fell onto the ground where she'd been flying. It wasn't particularly well done; McGonagall would have called it somewhat crude. The second year students had been taught the spell at the beginning of the year, after all.

An invisible hand picked her up.

"Thanks for making it easy, Rita."

"None of them are likely to be Death Eaters, ma'am," Auror McGowan said. "Most of them were foreign reporters who had been visiting for the past couple of days. Doubtlessly the Death Eaters reached them during this period."

"See what you can get from them," Amelia snapped.

It was frustrating; Voldemort hadn't risked any resources in this attack, and he'd disrupted the ceremony, making Great Britain look like it couldn't protect its own. Doubtlessly by tomorrow newspapers all over the Wizarding World would be screaming about this attack.

It was going to cause political problems internationally. There was already mounting pressure internationally from forces concerned that Britain's inability to clean its own mess was going to threaten the Statute of Secrecy.

It was about the only thing that would unify the quarreling countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and America. A country which could not maintain the secret would soon find itself no longer a country at all.

Worrying about Voldemort was bad enough without having to worry about an invasion from other countries. Amelia had an uncomfortable feeling that Dumbledore was leaning toward military intervention.

He'd been in the States for the past week, for reasons neither she nor anyone else knew. She'd heard rumors that he had agents in other countries as well, perhaps hoping to raise an army to destroy Voldemort when the Ministry fell.

It didn't show much confidence in her administration, which bothered Amelia more than she would like. She was doing a good job; contacting the Hebert girl had been an excellent decision, even if the ceremony today hadn't been the success they'd hoped it would be.

The Imperius Protocols had been revolutionary; if Amelia was still in the Ministry when the girl graduated, she planned to pressure her to join the aurors. She'd revolutionize that service as well.

There were aurors who worried that the girl was unnatural.

That was obvious. She wasn't any normal child; it was clear to anyone who spent more than five minutes with her.

Amelia didn't care.

She'd heard rumors that Merlin himself had been reincarnated at least once; if he was able to do it, why not someone else?

Even if the girl was some sort of spirit, as long as she was on the side of the Ministry, Amelia didn't plan on asking too many questions. The Ministry needed her help too much to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"I'm sorry," the girl said, stepping out of the bathroom. "I hope I didn't keep you waiting very long."

"Two minutes," Amelia said. "Rather quick for a girl."

"Well, I don't spend a lot of time primping and posing in front of the mirror," Hebert said. She rubbed a button on the collar of her shirt, as though to reassure herself it was still there.

"Well," Amelia said. "It's better to focus on the important things."

Rita Skeeter went missing five minutes later, while Taylor Hebert was in the process of being transported back to Hogwarts.

All in all, the day was a wash. Voldemort didn't lose any forces, but they proved that the girl's new security suggestions worked. They still had further to go, but the government was coming together. It was only a matter of time before things finally began to swing their way.