Chapter Seven
On the afternoon of Samhain, All Hallow's Eve for the unDruidic, the banquet hall of Hogwarts was filled to capacity. Headmaster McGonagall directed attention to Professor Loki, who had been hunched over at the table with his face downward until called upon. A shudder shot through his body before he rose. He addressed the collected population of Hogwarts Academy.
"Students, faculty, and resident spirits…tonight is the night. This is the night the Death Eaters strike. We've spent the last few months readying ourselves for this, and there is no reason to doubt we can't handle this. So…everyone, this is the moment we've been living for. First-years through seventh, professors et al, together we WILL win. Using the Room of Requirement can be ruled out, since they used it last time and there's a lot more of them this round. They don't have any inside help. The moles they had in the school were taken care of. So it's a safe wager it'll be a direct frontal assault to draw attention while more elite squads bypass the conflict and infiltrate. Every inch of Hogwarts is a potential battleground…and a potential safehouse. I went out a few days ago and got some more supplies from a contact of mine, so we're fully prepared. Here's the plan…"
When the sun sank fully beneath the horizon, and the Unseelie Court rose to take its place of prominence, a horde of black-robed figures slunk across the Scottish landscape. As Hogwarts Castle came into view, they stopped for a moment when all the lights went out from the windows. The Death Eaters hesitated at the odd act, but a serpentine voice prodded them menacingly from behind.
"KEEP MOVING!!" Voldemort pressed his herd back into motion.
The army of Death Eaters moved again through blackness, approaching the darkened castle. They stopped once more at the foot of the path leading up to the main doors.
"Dark Lord? It's very quiet." A Death Eater whispered to his warlord.
There was no response.
"Dark Lord?"
The Death Eaters looked around, but Voldemort was nowhere to be found.
"He has a plan." Another Death Eater whispered to reassure the mob.
They kept moving up the path to the closed gates. A quick check showed they were locked.
A Death Eater leveled his wand at the lock.
"Alohamora!" He incanted very quietly. The lock burst open with a tiny boom. The Death Eaters stealthily pushed open the gates. A creak emanated from the gate, but there was no echo.
"Sh!" They said to each other as they moved inside.
"Sh!" They said as they eased the gates closed.
"Sh!" They said as they commenced their silent invasion.
"SHIT!" They said as the middle of the mob exploded in fire and loudness.
The Death Eaters' screams were drowned in a hail of bullets that erupted from every elevated corner of the courtyard. Rounds ripped through their bodies, leaving smoking carcasses piled in a pool of blood. Although still unseen, a battalion of students and faculty emerged from their hiding places amongst the plant arrangements. They were all dressed in all-encompassing black, so only their eyes could be seen. Hagrid loaded another magazine into his AK-47 and called to the invisible squadron.
"Circle around to the sides! There'll be bound to be more comin' in from other passages!"
True to Hagrid's word, on the western flank of the castle, another larger Death Eater horde had broken through the oak front stairs with no resistance. They burst inside, intent on startling any unsuspecting resident so fiercely they would be unable to act.
To their delight, they came across a large number of students standing wandless on the stairs to the first floor. The Death Eaters couldn't hide their grins as they pointed their wands at the students.
"Don't make a sound, children, and you might live to talk about it." The leading Death Eater snarled jovially.
Ron shook his head.
"Don't have to talk."
The gaze of every student fixed even more fiercely on the incoming Death Eaters. The camouflage of their black robes was quickly lost when they all burst into flames for no apparent reason. Screams echoed loudly down the halls as the students drew knives and charged the flaming horde. Blades slashed through wooden wands and across veins, leaving spell arms useless. Knuckles smashed into their faces, mixing blood and bruises with burns. The Death Eaters quickly fell to the onslaught of sharp pointies and schoolyard beatings.
On the eastern side, the advancing squad of Voldemort's boys split into smaller teams and scattered like raindrops. They slipped into any window, door, or improvised entrance that could be found or made.
The first two found McGonagall leaning against the wall across from their entrance window, holding a .45 Magnum.
"Shit!" One of them squeaked.
McGonagall sniffed the air.
"Yes…you did."
BLAM!
The Death Eater who spoke keeled over in pain when the bullet drilled into abdomen. McGonagall pointed the gun at the other invader.
"Leave now. Take your smelly friend with you."
Without a word, the Death Eaters left the way they came. Sighing, McGonagall waved her wand over the trail of blood. It faded instantly.
"Bastards."
Another two-man team snuck in through a side entrance. They didn't move then three feet until a black-enshrouded figure leapt down from the door frame and scissored its legs around a Death Eater's neck. When the assailed invader reached up to pry the suffocating limbs from his neck, the other thrust his wand at the attacker and began to incant.
He didn't more than half a syllable out before his wand was violently struck aside by the black-clad attacker's wand and he got a length of enchanted wood jammed up his nose.
He only got out a small whimper before a female voice called out, "Inflammato!"
The aftermath was sickening.
Hermione threw her body backwards and twisted, dragging the remaining Death Eater face-first into the floor. She took off her camo mask and crinkled her nose at the stench of roasting Death Eater noggin.
"Yuck." She retched.
The defending battalion on the south side of the castle heard the commotion erupting on all the other sides, and they sat ready to respond to anything that came their way.
Nothing was coming.
"Hold, all. Whoever coming on this side's waiting for us to go handle the other influxes and leave this side exposed." Argus Filch sneered with a smile, holding an M-16 with reverence and feeling powerful for the first time on his life. He looked like an even-more-aged bald Rambo, weighed down with artillery and loving it.
Several members of his squadron looked back behind them with apprehension.
"Show some patience." Filch grumbled. "They'll show themselves."
As Filch squinted off into the darkness, he never saw the lone figure totally that darted around the castle perimeter and levitated itself to a second-floor window right behind the southern squadron. Filch and his unit looked stalwartly ahead, ready for any advance.
"Any minute now." Filch said with confidence.
The lone invader wasted no time silently making his way to the D.A.D.A. professor's office. Before deciding to blow it off its hinges, the figure tested the lock.
It was open.
Arming himself with his wand and ready to advance, Voldemort threw back and hood and burst into the room.
Loki was sitting cross-legged in the chalk circle in the center of the room. His tumble of raven hair hung in his face. He didn't look up.
"Would've thought you'd leave a messier trail of death in your wake, Tommy." Loki deadpanned. Voldemort's lack of lips curled with fury. "I applaud the stealth. Sticking the pawns in firing range while you back-door it? Guess that run-in with my boy taught you something."
Voldemort's serpentine red eyes bugged. "That was your son?"
Loki looked up and smiled like The Devil. His eyes were black.
"S'right. One can only imagine what Daddy's like. I'm what you want, Tommy. The most powerful magus on the planet, and damn hard to kill. Come take your spoils." He rose to his feet and tapped a finger on his heart. "Take this, and become me."
Voldemort smiled. He'd had his wand aimed at Loki the entire time. He incanted his favorite spell.
"Avada Kadavra!"
The death-dealing green beam screamed through the air at Loki. Loki took a step to his side, and the unblockable curse soared right past him.
A silent moment of stunned silence passed between them. Loki winked at his visitor.
"That spell's unblockable without love, so don't bother blocking it."
Loki sprinted out of the circle toward Voldemort. As soon as he was outside the chalk, he turned black and crystalline. Voldemort fired the killing curse again at the advancing daemon, but his adversary merely ducked under the blast and sprang up underneath his wand. The phoenix-empowered stick went flying. A diamond-hard crystal shoulder crushed in Voldemort's elbow joint, breaking his arm. A jagged fist slammed into Voldemort's flat nose, sending him reeling back into the hall. Loki followed, teasing Voldemort with his lost wand.
"Hey Moldy V, you want darkness? THIS IS DARKNESS!!!"
Loki thrust Voldemort's own wand at him, and Voldy's vision went completely blank, enveloped in shadows. His blindness only made the hurricane of blows that pounded from one end of the floor to the other all the more painful.
"You went to such lengths to more yourself unkillable, Tommy." Loki chided as he beat Voldemort to a snakey pulp. "That means I can pound you for eternity. Albus did say there were worse things than death." A solid kick launched Voldemort off a balcony and into a team of Death Eaters advancing from the east.
Loki leapt down after him, ripping and shredding his black crystalline claws into Death Eater flesh. In the mess of gore, Voldemort slipped out from the mess and took off down the hall. Cackling like a wild beast, Loki gave chase.
Loki pursued Voldemort down hall and corridor, in and out of rooms, enjoying the chase with a sadistic glee. Voldemort stuck to his original infiltration plan, putting as many of his Death Eaters between him and his pursuer as he could. Two bloody seconds later, Loki was gaining again, coated in fresh butchery. The students and faculty doing battle stopped and gawked at the sight that dashed past them.
In his panic, Voldemort eventually cornered himself with a seething Loki advancing on him, dripping with the blood and guts of the Death Eaters. He held Voldemort's wand in a slippery grip. He aimed it at the Dark Lord's chest.
"The deepest irony of this is I'm the true pure-blood, Tommy. You're crusading against the very thing you are. Muddies. Funny how we seek to destroy the things we loathe in ourselves everywhere outside, but never within. Meet the death you deal so lightly and fear so much. Avad-"
TING
A bullet ricocheted off the back of Loki's head, lurching him forward and dropping the wand. Without so much as blinking, Loki was on a stairwell, on top of the shooter and had plunged his blood-coated hand into the gunman's abdomen. Only then did he see it was Filch.
"Argus?" The black demon said. It pulled its hand out, and white skin bleached out dark. Filch fell backwards to the floor. Loki tried to catch him, but he was too bloody to hold on.
Finally remembering Voldemort, Loki looked down. Voldemort was gone. So was his wand.
"FUCK! He's gone! Why did you shoot me, Argus?"
Even mortally wounded, Filch clutched his gun close.
"I thought you were a monster, Professor."
Loki looked at Filch's wound, and the scraps of flesh barely recognizable as human strewn throughout the floor.
"I am a monster." Loki whispered. "What I said to Voldemort applies to me as well."
Loki laid his hands on Filch's run-through belly. He hummed a low tone. Yellow energy glowed from his hands, surrounding the wound. A minute later, Loki sat Filch up.
"That should speed the healing, but keep still until I can find help."
Loki went back the ground floor to survey the ending conflict. Bullet holes and scorch marks riddled the walls, and in many places, people were crying or staring blankly, unready for the mental consequences of using the skills they'd been taught for real.
Loki said nothing. He was feeling the same way.
He found Headmaster McGonagall, who was eyeing her Magnum with curiosity. He wiped his hand somewhat clean and shook hers.
"Headmaster, it seems the curse remains intact. I'm resigning."
"Whatever for, Loki?" She asked, bewildered.
"I think I've done more damage than good."
"If it weren't for you, the Death Eaters would have been the ones inflicting damage."
"They won't try this again, if there are even any left. So I don't have any further purpose here. Besides, I'm worse than they are. I'm too much of a danger to remain after my job is complete."
"If you insist, Loki."
"Thank you, Minerva. It's been a pleasure. Argus is on the second floor stairwell. He needs some attention."
Ron and Hermione were standing around, taking stock of the aftermath on the western flank. Ron was holding his hand, which he broke punching a Death Eater square in the chin. Hermione tapped it with her wand, mending it save for the bruising.
"You really stuck your wand up his nose?" Ron asked, simultaneously disgusted and impressed.
"It was a reflex. Loki taught us pretty well. When did he show you how to use that knife?"
"Detention. I showed the rest of the boys myself." Ron said with pride.
"Glad to see if paid off." Loki congratulated as he approached. "I know you two have seen combat before, but this was rather different than your previous conflicts. Wanted to make sure you were all right before I left."
"We may have nightmares for a while, but…left?" Hermione asked.
"I'm leaving for good. I'm not in control of myself enough to be leading anyone. I'm too dangerous."
"But you helped us! If it hadn't been for you…"
"It's done now. My task is finished. I'm going to find some solitude and really face what I am now. Good-bye, Ron, Hermione. If you do see Harry, send him my regards."
"Gladly." Ron nodded.
"It's been a rough night. I tend to relax with some drinks after something like this. Just a suggestion."
Loki started out the door, not bothering to pack anything with him.
"Love is in the air…" He sang softly to himself as he departed.
Getting a sly grin, Ron turned to Hermione, extending his bruised hand
"Would you be up for the Three Broomsticks? I'll buy you a butterbeer."