Disclaimer: Harry Potter, his friends, enemies, and world, are not mine, and I make no claim to them. Thanks to Evan Mayerle for beta-ing this chapter.
Chapter 17 The Orphanage
That night, Hermione ran into a snag in setting up the schedule.
"Harry, it would be easier setting up a search plan if I knew where to start from. Do we know where the stationery store was?"
"Just the name of the store, and Vauxhall Road, London."
"Then, I think we should schedule an excursion to Vauxhall Road tomorrow. It's Sunday, so we're not meeting at Neville's."
"So how do we get there? Drive? Apparate?"
"The car's at Headquarters, so if we floo there, we can take the car to Vauxhall Road and see how lucky we are."
So the next morning five Weasleys, Harry, and Hermione found themselves driving through London. Ron and Ginny came because they were friends, and Harry wasn't going to push friends away if he didn't need to. Charlie was there as "protection" and a chance to get out again (he was still annoyed about Harry's move to keep Ginny out of the Chamber the previous day), and Molly came because she wasn't going to let Ginny run around London unsupervised. The car's interior had to be magically expanded to fit all the people comfortably.
Harry navigated and got Hermione to the right street. It ran for about fifteen blocks, and the variety store wasn't there any more. It was a mix of small shops with areas of larger, non-retail businesses. Most of the time they couldn't figure out what the stores did.
They decided to ask, and stopped in one of the areas of small shops that had a few open. Charlie hit the jackpot in a tobacconists store. The old proprietor remembered the store in question, and described where it was, just a block away. The fellow couldn't remember where the orphanage was, though. He was sure it was torn down decades ago.
They walked to the place where the variety store stood, and looked around. Unfortunately, it didn't help. There was no indication of where the orphanage was. But at least they had a place to start.
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The next day was Monday, and the group met as usual at Neville's place. Hermione handed out the schedules for the orphanage search. People involved, who weren't staying at the Burrow, would floo there, and then Apparate to an alley near the location of the store where Riddle got the diary. They would then follow their route describing the buildings to the invisible Dobby, and he would tell if there were any missed buildings. She had each route about a mile or two long, so it wouldn't take excessive amounts of time finish. That night was her and Remus. The next was Harry and Bill. Wednesday was Ron and Charlie, and Thursday was Neville and Tonks, who had the night off. Then she would re-assess the procedure, and come up with new areas to search.
After the morning workout and magical practice session, they had lunch and discussed the state of affairs. They didn't expect anything from Mad-Eye and Bill at least for a few days. Bill was back at work, so that would limit his availability. Harry was going to Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes in the hope of helping George with the preparations they were working on. Luna was going to Department of Mysteries to talk to Mr. Croaker, she didn't want to say why. She invited Hermione along with the hope it would be less stressful than their trip to the government building. Ron and Ginny were going to go with Harry, and Neville was going to stay at his place.
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"Yes, may I help you?" the receptionist at the Ministry of Magic didn't seem interested in helping anyone.
"Yes please," Luna answered. "I'd like to speak with Mr. Algie Croaker please."
"Concerning?"
"A private matter."
"Sorry. Private matters can be handled after hours."
"Let me rephrase that. An unspeakable matter."
That got the receptionist's attention. "What sort of unspeakable matter?"
"If I could talk about it, it wouldn't be unspeakable, would it? May we please see him?"
"I'll have to summon him. You can't just walk around the Department of Mysteries, you know."
"Well. . . ."
Before Luna could say any more, Hermione pulled her away, saying, "Very good, we'll just wait over here then."
"That was rude," Luna said.
"I'm sorry, but I don't think it would have slowed things down if you told her what I think you were going to tell her. Let's just wait for Mr. Croaker."
It wasn't Mr. Croaker who showed up, but a Mr. Whitehaven. He led them into an office and asked what they wanted with Mr. Croaker.
"I want to see my mother's notes on what she was working on before she died."
Both Hermione and Mr. Whitehaven looked at her with puzzled expressions.
"She was a spell crafter for the Department of Mysteries and she was working on a spell and theoretically something went wrong and she was killed by it. But recently a wizard said that the type of spell she was doing couldn't cause the damage that killed her, and I want to know if she was really killed by the spell or if something else killed her."
"Miss Lovegood, we are not in the habit. . . ."
"You are the only ones who can give me a clue if she was killed by the spell or something else!"
Hermione asked, quietly, hoping to calm the blond girl down, "Luna? Does this have anything to do with you-know-what?"
"It may Hermione. She said she was researching tracking charms."
Mr. Whitehaven asked, "And that's important because?"
"Hermione will figure it out. Now, are you going to help me, or do I have to go over your head."
"By all means, go over my head. There are very few people in the Ministry who can overrule me."
"Then good day, sir."
As they walked to the elevator, Hermione asked, "Who do we know that's over his head?"
"The man you talked with just last week. The Minister of Magic."
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"I hope you're satisfied, young lady!" Mr. Whitehaven was not happy. "Do you know how much time we had to devote to finding these papers, analyzing them to make sure that they didn't contain any secrets, and making duplicates! Take the notes and get out of here."
"Thank you very much. I appreciate your hard work," Luna answered. She collected the folder she had been given and walked out with Hermione.
"I don't believe that just happened."
"Well, if my mother was telling me the truth then I thought we had a very small chance of disappearing and never being found again for sticking our noses in Things Wizards Were Not Meant To Know. However, I don't remember my mother ever lying, except that "where do fairies come from" thing, so I was reasonably certain that she was really researching tracking charms."
"But why is all this important?"
Luna didn't say anything more until they were back at the Burrow. Hermione repeated the question and Luna answered, "Have you read anything about tracking charms recently?"
Hermione thought for a moment, and said, "Ravenclaw's necklace!"
Luna nodded. "If she was trying to recover the spell to find it, she may have run against one of Voldemort's traps. You saw Dumbledore's hand? That's how her whole body became right before she died. It was awful." For a moment Hermione saw in Luna's eyes the frightened nine year old who had watched her mother die. Then the moment passed.
"So if she found the spell, you think it would be in her notes?"
"I hope so. Then all we'd have to do is follow the tracking spell to where Voldemort hid it."
"Let's get to these notes," Hermione said, with a determined look on her face.
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The next night Harry and Bill were walking through London, not too far from Vauxhall Road. Along with the running commentary on the buildings they were passing ("White brick building on right side, one door, says B. Jonas on it,") Harry was asking Bill about the job he and Mad-Eye were going to do.
"We think we've got it figured out. We'll need to do it this weekend, when there's no one around the site we have picked out. There may be fireworks involved."
"What do you mean? Real fireworks?"
"No. But there's probably a lot of magic in those items, and I expect they will release with a bang. Right side, gray two story, sign on window says "Clyde Burke, Clipping Agency."
"Mr. Weezey. What about the other building?"
"There's another building between this one and the white brick one?"
"Yes, looks like three stories tall, with pitched roof. Is in need of new paint. The windows are dirty, too."
"Harry, we have our orphanage!"
"Let's go get everyone else."
"You want to do it now?"
"No time like the present."
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The group consisted of the six friends, Charlie, Bill, and Remus. They gathered on the sidewalk near where Dobby said the door was. After a little debate, Dobby was going to pop in, take a quick look around the door, and pop out.
He did, and despite all the horrible things that could have happened, none of them did. The hall was empty. He popped back into the building with a rope, tied it on some furniture, opened the door, and tossed the other end out. To the group outside, suddenly a rope appeared on the ground. They took hold, and followed it inside. Once past the door they could see the building, too.
"Follow me," Harry said, "I think I remember the way to his room. The room was on the second floor. At the top of the steps on the first floor Harry looked around. The stairs to the second floor was down the hall. He led the group past numerous doors to the next stairway. When Harry put his foot on the first step the doors opened. From each room Inferi appeared. There were many coming out of the rooms between them and the stairs down. The group started petrifying them.
"They're children!" cried Hermione.
"Yes, You-Know-Who doesn't spare the innocent!" Remus replied. "Cast!"
The pile of bodies build up, and they kept coming, climbing over the petrified ones. Bill stopped casting Petrificus Totalus and started doing casting something else.
"Let's get upstairs, I think I've got the steps warded against them for awhile. It's not permanent, but it should be long enough."
Harry turned, and almost tripped over Dobby, who was cowering behind him.
"Dobby, go back to the Burrow. You did well."
With a few "thank you"s, he disappeared.
They reached the second level, and looked around.
"This looks similar to the last floor," Ron remarked.
"If I remember right, it's one of the ones towards the middle. How about we lock the doors as we come up to them?"
Nobody could think of an objection, and they cast Colloportus on the doors that they came up to.
"I think it's this one," Harry said as they reached a door in the center of the building.
"Wait, Harry," Remus interrupted. "Let's lock the rest of the doors." After they accomplished that, they returned to the one that Harry though was the door to Riddle's room. Bill checked for magic, and could not find any on the door.
"The floor, however, seems to be fireproofed," he said. "I wonder why?"
Harry reached out, and pulled the door open. It opened to a small room with a window, a metal framed bed, a small rug, and a wardrobe. Other than that, it was empty.
"This looks like the room. But maybe they all do. Might as well check the wardrobe." He reached out and opened it. The inside of the wardrobe was huge. It had been magically expanded into a large room. In the magic room was a man-shaped fire. It stood over two meters tall, and turned to look at Harry through the door. It started walking towards him. He backed away.
"Fire monster, dead ahead!" he called, as he moved away. The creature bent over, and stepped out of the wardrobe. They could feel the heat pouring off it.
"Out!" Remus called. "We're too packed together. Into the hall!"
The group moved into the hall and noticed they were surrounded. At either end of the hall there was another of the fire monsters.
Besides the one in the room, the one between them and the steps was closest, so Bill aimed his wand and yelled, "Aguamenti!" Soon everyone was spraying water on either the one down the hall or the one that had come out of the bedroom. It wasn't doing anything except filling the hall with steam.
"Creo Terrum!" Luna yelled, and a jet of sand flew out of her wand and hit the creature. That seemed to slow him down. Others soon followed her lead, and with the help of a lot of sand, the creatures were soon smothered.
"That's so sad," Luna said after they had doused the red hot sand piles with water.
"What are you talking about?" Hermione asked.
"Those were the last three Heliopaths that the Minister of Magic said survived the war. Voldemort must have imprisoned them here, and forced them to be guards. I'm just sorry I had to help make them extinct."
"I'm not sorry that we're not dead," Hermione answered.
"No, that would stop us from defeating Voldemort. Well, let's see what they were guarding. She walked over the now cool pile of sand and glass, and entered Riddle's old room.
"Luna, wait for everyone!" Harry yelled, and he caught up with her. Once in, they went into the wardrobe. The room was bare, except for a pedestal with a black metal box in it, surrounded by a glass globe.
"Bill," Harry asked. "What do you think?"
Bill cast a number of detection spells over the globe and around the pedestal. "The globe is filled with poisonous gas. There's all sorts of spells around it so you can't spell the globe off. The gas is enchanted, and will go through a bubble-head charm, and probably most others that would protect you in this case."
"Couldn't we push it off from outside the wardrobe?" Ron asked.
"If we had a long enough pole."
"Why don't you just conjure one up?"
Bill conjured a broom, and stood back and swung it at the globe. Several people gasped when he did that. As soon as the broom touched the globe, it disappeared. Bill looked at his empty hands.
"It's designed to disenchant anything that touches it. If we transfigured something, it would revert when it touched it."
Luna asked, "Can you conjure a rope long enough to reach the other room?"
"Sure, but it won't do any good. As soon as it touched the globe it would disappear."
"What if it didn't touch the globe?" she asked as she went into the bed room and picked up the rug. Bringing it back to the pedestal, she tossed it over the globe. "Rope, please," she asked.
Bill conjured a rope, and they quickly tied it to the globe, with the rug acting as an insulator. They put a conjured pulley in the ceiling, and threaded the rope through it, then retreated to the bed room.
Harry opened the window in the bedroom. Remus conjured a fan in the window to blow air out. The group exited the room, and closed the door as much as they could, then Charlie pulled the rope.
"Is there any way to tell how long this will take to clear the air?"
"No," Bill said, "but if you stay back, I can try detecting it from the doorway."
The first time he cast the detection spell the results showed poison in the air. They spent some time setting up a hook to tie the rope to. Once they had finished that, and Charlie no longer had to hold the rope, Bill cast his charm again. This time there was no poison detected.
He opened the door slowly, and kept casting the spell. He slowly made his way into the wardrobe again, casting all the way. Once inside, he started casting other spells around the box. Satisfied, he picked it up, and opened it.
Inside lay the golden cup of Helga Hufflepuff.
"Now, how do we get out past the Infiri?" Ron asked.
"Through the window," Luna answered.
"How? Fly?"
"No. We just conjure a rope ladder and climb down."
"How about I just Apparate?" Hermione said.
"Go ahead. We'll meet you on the sidewalk," Bill answered.
Ron, Neville, Hermione, Charlie, and Remus Apparated down. Voldemort must have felt that no one could Apparate in to the Fidelius protected building, so Apparating out didn't enter his thinking. Harry went down the rope because he wasn't going to leave anyone behind. Luna followed him, then Ginny, then Bill. They made it to the ground without incident. They got into Hermione's car, drove back to Headquarters, and floo-ed back to the Burrow. Neville, Remus, Luna, and Bill floo-ed home from there.
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The a few days later, after their training session, Luna and Hermione spread out the papers they had been working on for several days.
"Maybe we should contact Professor Vector?" Hermione was saying. "We're just going in circles on this."
Remus came over. "What are you working on? Maybe I can help. I wasn't half bad in Arithmancy."
Hermione gave a sigh, and said, "These are the notes from Luna's mother's last job. She was working on variations of tracking charms. We think that she was searching for Ravenclaw's necklace. She may even have found it, but was killed by a wasting curse similar to what destroyed Dumbledore's hand."
Luna took up the story, "From what we can tell, she didn't write down the last spells she tried, but we've guessed several. We were quite excited yesterday when we got a response from one, but it appears my mother put a tracking charm on my necklace. See." She held the wand in her hand and spoke the fractured Latin that magical people seem to use to "find my flying love." The wand spun and pointed at Luna, who was wearing her butterbeer cork necklace. She took it off, put it on the table and cast the spell again. The wand spun and pointed at the necklace.
"Maybe the necklace is Ravenclaw's," Neville said who had listened to the conversation.
"No, my mother. . . ." Luna began, but then took her wand and cast the Horcrux detection spell. The necklace glowed green, showing it to be a Horcrux. Remus reached out for the necklace.
"May I," he asked. Luna nodded. He picked it up. The necklace consisted of a delicate looking, but tarnished chain with a small clasp at the back. In the middle were seven butterbeer corks, the chain going right through them. Remus took a knife, and cut one of the corks so it could be removed from the necklace. Under it was a gleaming red gem. He removed the rest of the corks, and they too hid large rubies.
"Luna, I'm sorry but we have to destroy this."
She just nodded, eyes wide. She got up from the table and made her way to the fireplace. She floo-ed away.
Harry said, "I'm going to her house to make sure she's OK." He floo-ed away after her.
Coming out of the fireplace, and almost falling, he looked around. Luna was sitting on the couch, tears streaking her face. Harry went over and sat next to her. She leaned against him, and he put his arm around her.
"He killed my mother. All this time, I thought it was a spell accident, but it wasn't. It was some sort of trap designed to hurt people. He likes to hurt people. Are you sure your plan will work?"
"I'm pretty sure. No one's come up with a better one."
She nodded, and just stayed leaning against him. After a while, she thanked him for being a friend, and asked to be alone to take a nap. Harry went back to the Burrow.
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The group assembled in a quarry in the vicinity of Newcastle. They stared at four guillotine like contraptions.
"So, how does this work, exactly?" Harry asked Bill.
"We've been working on weakening the spells that make the objects unbreakable. If you break the object, the magic is released. When we give the signal, the weights will drop on the objects, and if we've been successful against their protection, boom."
"Why are they spread out like that?"
"So if one explodes before the others, it isn't close enough to damage the frames of the others, and they still smash the Horcruxes with their weights."
Mad-Eye Moody had been inspecting the Horcrux destroying devices, then Apparated over to the group. Bill looked at Mad-Eye, who nodded back.
Bill deadpanned, "After a final check by my beautiful assistant, I can safely say, Finite Incantatem!"
As he spoke the words they could see the weights travelling down the wooden frame. They had over ten meters to drop, and they seemed to take forever to gain any speed. But suddenly the first one hit and there was an explosion. The rest exploded in rapid succession. As the smoke cleared they could see the mangled remains of the anti-Horcrux devices. They searched the area, and found a bit of gold from one of the Horcruxes, but that was it.
Harry looked at the wreckage of the one that destroyed the locket. He took out his wand, and murmured, "Accio rubies." Something small flew towards him, and he grabbed it out of the air. He then helped with the cleanup, destroying the remains of the guillotines.