Chapter 7

Exegesis

Between hunting down Harry and Ron for lunch, and being assigned as head of various cases, Hermione knew the Auror department nearly as well as she knew Mysteries. Nevertheless, hurrying down corridors lit only by torches at an hour when any reasonable person would be in bed was disorienting; Hermione was deeply grateful for the foul concoction that Ron had handed over, intended to sober her up.

It had worked so well that she felt the beginnings of a hangover knocking politely on the inside of her skull.

"Did what's-his-name tell you anything?" Hermione asked Harry, keeping close on his heels and pulling her bathrobe around her waist more tightly.

"Roderick? Not really; he seemed just as surprised as we were."

"What about the intended victim?"

"Just that she's alive and being held for questioning."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Didn't you think to ask any questions?"

"We were taken by surprise, and thought we ought to fetch you before anything else—you're the one who has been losing the most sleep over it."

"I suppose we'll find out soon enough, at any rate," she said. "Thanks, Harry."

"Yeah, thanks," Theo echoed, his voice breathy as he struggled to keep up.

The four of them burst into Auror headquarters in a flurry of movement, none of them wearing anything that might be passed off as appropriate work attire. A man—little more than a boy, really—was sitting by an old-fashioned rotating telephone, answering and forwarding calls in between sips of coffee from an automatically refilling cup, and a young woman whom Hermione felt she ought to recognise by her flashing blue eyes, if nothing else, sat in the waiting area shooting glares at her two guards.

Hermione's eyes slid to the back of the room, where another two heavily armed Aurors guarded a door, a tall, rail-thin man with wispy hair and a stocky blonde. One of them—the man—hurried forward, intercepting Theo and Hermione before they could advance.

"We've managed to ascertain that the man we're holding is a squib who goes by the name of Aeschylus Warwick, and the young woman he intended to kill is the werewolf known as Cecelia Grayback."

Theo whistled under his breath. "Fenrir's daughter?"

"The very same. She claims that Warwick can perform magic, but she must be lying. I just don't see how it's possible."

Hermione and Theo exchanged a glance; it was enough reassure her they were on the same page.

"Thanks, Roderick," said Theo. "I think we've got it from here."

They approached Cecelia first, shoulder-to-shoulder, wands away, as though she were a small animal they didn't want to spook.

She bared her teeth as they approached and shook off the warning hand one of the Aurors placed on her shoulder. "You've no right to keep me here."

"We only need to ask you a few questions—" Theo began in his most patient voice.

"But I haven't done anything wrong!"

"—and you'll be free to go."

Her voice was choked with rage and tears, and Hermione was able to look past the sneer on her face to see a girl who was maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, with a thin line of dried blood stretching along the base of her neck.

For a moment, she could feel the cool steel thread of a blade digging into her throat, but she shook it off and forced herself to look away from the eyes that were eerily similar to Fenrir Grayback's to look at the guards.

"If you'd like a coffee break, now would be a good time," she said. "We would like a moment alone with Miss Grayback."

"She's tried to escape twice, now," said the one on the left, but they obeyed. Hermione didn't miss the way their shoulders relaxed once they had exited her biting radius.

"Now," she said, pulling up a chair so that she was sitting directly across from her and leaning forward, "we've been looking for the man who tried to, er—who kidnapped you for quite some time, so any information about him and his methods would be helpful."

The girl shrugged. "My pack stays mostly in the Forbidden Forest—no one goes into it, so we're mostly safe, and we only hunt humans when we've changed so all the things that live there are safe. About a year ago, someone started leaving out silver traps—"

"They're illegal," Hermione said, feeling anger start to well up in the pit of her stomach; she waited until it had coiled back into the depths before continuing. "I passed a law four years ago, banning them."

Cecelia raised her eyebrows, and rolled up the right leg of her trousers to show a blood-soaked bandage. "Well, it didn't work very well, then, did it? Anyway, someone has been laying out silver traps intended to hurt us and taking away the victims—according to the Daily Prophet, they're always the ones who end up dead within a few days."

"You ought to have reported the traps," Hermione said, and Theo placed a hand on her arm. She bit back the tirade about werewolf-human relations, settling back in her seat. "Sorry, continue."

"I walked right into one and he had me. That was three days ago, but I was out for most of it—the silver was in my blood, and I didn't wake up until a few hours ago, stuffed in the boot of a car."

"That answers that question, then," Theo said. "Roderick said you told him Warwick is capable of magic? How is that possible, when he's registered as a squib."

Cecelia shrugged. "He used a body-bind curse and a levitation spell on me—and told me that I was lovely and strong and absolutely perfect."

"Leeching spells," said Hermione, closing her eyes. "It's all ritual, and based on arithmancy and location; you don't need magic for them to work, just someone's life-force to take away."

"But he couldn't have—"

"No, not Stonehenge." A wave of horror slammed into her, leaving her seasick. "That working was much too powerful, especially because the Stonehenge murderer used a Muggle."

"Two killers, then," Theo said. "We didn't even consider…"

"Hello, square one." Hermione's lips tightened into a half-smile as she looked at Cecelia. "I don't think we'll need you any longer. Is there anyone we can contact?"

She shook her head. "An owl would take too long, and we don't use the Floo network—it would be much faster to go on my own."

It struck Hermione that the girl had probably rarely left the Forbidden Forest before now, and that the distance between London and northern Scotland was further than she had ever travelled in her life. Her eyes wandered around the room, searching for someone trustworthy; Ron glanced up as her gaze rested on him, and he winked.

"If I ask someone to accompany you, will that be all right? You can go side-along, and it will be much faster."

"I'd much rather—"

Hermione gestured Ron over, and he hurried over. "My mistress calls. What beneficial and generally useful service may I provide for you this evening?"

Hermione grinned up at him, and Cecelia narrowed her eyes. "I'd like you to accompany this young lady back to her home in the Forbidden Forest. Do you think you can comply, or shall I be forced into asking one of these other strapping young lads?"

"Of course I can. Will you be requiring my keen sense of smell, or just my charming personality, to keep her entertained on the journey?"

A smile tugged at the corners of the girl's lips, but she quickly turned them downward. "I'll be quite all right on my own."

Ron shot her his best puppy eyes. "You wouldn't want to hurt my feelings, would you?"

Hermione exchanged a look with Theo, and both of them stood.

"Thank you, Miss Grayback, for your help," she said, holding out a hand to shake. "I don't think I introduced myself, but I'm Hermione Granger and this is my partner, Theodore Nott—if you ever need to contact us about anything, your owl should be able to find us."

Cecelia took the offered hand, her eyes widening until she looked more childlike than defensive. "Like, the war hero? Who passed the werewolf legislation? You're wearing pyjamas."

"One of the glories of being an Unspeakable is that you never get a full night of sleep. And now," she said, her eyes narrowing, "if you will excuse me, I have a serial killer to murder."

"I get to help, right?" Theo asked, all but bouncing in place. "Please can I be good cop? I'm always bad cop and it's losing its charm."

"You're welcome to it—I feel a hangover coming on, and being friendly isn't high on my list of priorities."

As they left Cecelia in the capable hands of Ronald Weasley, Theo nudged her and muttered, "If you would just introduce yourself at the beginning of an interview, people would automatically give you all the information they have, either out of fear or awe."

"But that would be cheating."

They broke off their conversation as the guards parted; one of them fumbled for the key and twisted the lock, and Hermione patted her bathrobe pocket for her wand. The door opened to reveal a handcuffed man with sandy hair hunched over the table—at the sight of him, something snapped, and Hermione found that it would be entirely too easy to lose control.

She sucked in a breath of air and strode across the room, slamming her fist in front of the table as she had seen Theo do dozens of times before.

"Just where do you get off," she hissed, "murdering girls for their magic?"

His head rose slowly, revealing too-pale eyes buried inside a ruddy complexion. "That wasn't a girl—that was a monster."

His words were all the confession she needed; every trace of acting left her, and, for the first time in her career, she had to genuinely fight off the urge to kill.

No one tried to stop her when she stormed out of the holding cell; every Auror in the room, including Harry, froze, and she was glad of it. She needed to hide until some of the fury had burned away and she wouldn't feel tempted to hex anyone who looked at her the wrong way.

She reached the safe Apparition point, and nearly splinched herself trying to decide between her parents and home; at the first sign of the stretched-out sensation, she settled on Grimmauld Place, and felt some of her irritation subside as all of her body parts followed her.

Nevertheless, she took great pleasure in slamming the door behind her and pounding up the stairs, making sure to throw even more weight into it as she passed the study; it was the most misery she would be able to spread for the night, even if it did mean that she was behaving like a child throwing a tantrum.

When she reached her bedroom, she touched her face, found tears, and hexed her chair until it splintered, then collapsed against the wall and sobbed into her arms.

"You do realise that you just demolished a perfectly functional and entirely innocent chair?"

"Get out of my—" She glanced up to see him standing a respectful distance outside her door, and some of the anger faded. "Oh."

"Do you mind if I come in?"

She shrugged and wiped her eyes on her sleeves. "If you want."

He did without hesitation, and lowered himself onto the floor next to her. "You're acting like a homesick first year."

"I'm acting like someone who just questioned a man who called an adolescent werewolf girl a monster, and would have used it as an excuse to kill her so he could leech her magic with a clean conscience. Like he'd done a dozen times before. Like he was doing the world a favour."

He didn't respond, just waited until she was ready to continue.

"And he'll be convicted and handed over to the Dementors and everyone will sigh with relief and go home, and what will it fix? Someday someone else will decide that the werewolves and the merfolk and the centaurs—or some other half-breed—are less than them and they'll do the same thing, and everyone will be glad that it isn't proper people, and all I can do to change it is to pass laws that don't work banning the use of silver traps and iron fishing spears.

"Every minute it's like I'm back in Mal—back in Malfoy Manor, being tortured, and I'm completely helpless and I know that no fight I put up with make any sort of difference, but giving up is even worse."

Tears began to well up again, and she blinked them away, leaning towards him until her head found his shoulder, as though it were the perfectly natural thing to do. Through his sweater, she couldn't tell that his skin was only room temperature and he didn't have a pulse; it was almost normal.

"Every time something awful happens I have to prod at it until it hurts, because I'm afraid of not caring, because that's somehow worse." She sniffled. "Sorry, it's just that Harry and Ron think I'm eternally capable, and Theo is incredibly useful but he can't seem to visit a crime scene without being ill."

So slowly that it barely registered, his hand slid around her back—careful to avoid her skin—and came to rest on her ribcage. She shuffled closer, so that she could rest her head in the hollow of his chest and closed her eyes, trying not to note the failure of his shoulders to rise and fall. It wasn't his fault, she told herself; it wouldn't be fair to be repulsed by him, not after everything.

"In my experience," he said, after a moment, "you can't be affected by everything equally. There is a line between finding the things that are wrong with the world and trying to find ways to fix them, and turning everything into a personal failure. It can't always be about your grief—that's an insult to the grieving."

She raised her head so that she could see him, and found that he was staring past her, out into the hall. When she looked past his eyes and saw the painful lines carved into his face, it occurred to her that he was trying to convince himself.

His brought his gaze back to rest on hers, and seemed to shrink back, somehow reigning himself back into his physical shell at her expression without so much as twitching. His mouth twisted, and pain shifted to bitterness. "But I suppose that grief is a luxury the living can afford."

She didn't recall crawling into bed, but it was where she woke up the next morning. She tried to roll onto her side to check the time, but it caused the thrumming in her head to begin to pound with the vigour of an ancient tribal drum—it beat a feeble moan from her chest, forcing her to pull the blankets back over her head and bury her face in her pillows.

The sobering potion she had taken the night before had bought her a couple of painless hours, but it seemed that those were over, and the cool relief that spread from the darkness of the pillow's underside was even briefer, ended by a number of sharp barks echoing in her ears.

She threw a pillow in Ron's general direction and, without looking up to see whether it hit the mark, returned to shutting out the world. Ron the Irish Setter misunderstood her intentions, and brought the pillow back to her, using a cold nose on the back of her neck to signal that he was ready to continue.

"If you want to play, you're going to have to find me something for my hangover," she mumbled, poking her head out.

Ron sat on his wagging tail and whined.

"And stop looking at me like that. It won't work."

It did, though, and within minutes she was pushing back the covers and finger-combing her hair into a semblance of order.

"Haven't you got a girlfriend you can irritate? Or does she know better than to put up with you when you're like this?"

He barely finished waiting for her to pull a t-shirt over her head, before snatching the hem of it between his teeth and pulling her towards the hallway. With a sigh, she followed him, trying to step lightly; every time she set her foot down, an arrow of pain shot through her skull.

"If Timmy fell down the well again, it will be much easier to save him if you just change back and tell me."

He let go of her in front of the study, and growled at the door. A ripple of laughter slipped out through the cracks around the door.

Hermione turned the handle, deciding that there had better be a mass murder taking place inside if Ron was ever going to earn her forgiveness; instead, she found Pansy sitting on the floor in front of Snape, telling some sort of story, which, judging by the wild and slightly rude hand gestures, probably had something to do with Theo. It took a moment for it to register that Snape's head was buried in his hands because he was laughing.

"I think your animal wants attention," Hermione said, mentally rifling through the medicine cabinet for something to cure her hangover.

"He can wait—I'm telling Professor Snape the less savoury exploits of his ex-students."

"It's such a relief to know that they've turned out so well," he added, wryly.

"Make sure you tell him about the time Theo stole a boat and serenaded the Giant Squid in the middle of a rainstorm."

"Ah, yes," she heard Pansy say as the door clicked shut. "There were tentacles everywhere."

Ron whined and scratched at the door, and Hermione glared down at him. "I'm not letting you in there to shed all over my books. Now, behave, or I'll tie you up outside for the rest of the day."

He slunk away, leaving her alone to hunt for something to relieve her headache.

It was a matter of seconds to discover that they had nothing with the rest of the (mostly expired) medicinal potions, and another five minutes to search Harry's room to find that the didn't have anything stashed away somewhere. She was too afraid of what she might find in Ron's room to look; instead she stumbled down the stairs, clutching the banister as though it were her last line to sanity and a pain-free existence, with the vague hope of finding something caffeinated.

Someone—the new love of her life—had left a half-empty pot of coffee on the counter. She stumbled towards it, and began fumbling through the cupboards for a mug, but they were all in the sink. With a shrug, she lifted the pot to her lips, not particularly minding the lukewarm temperature: it only made it easier to gulp it down.

"Hermione?"

She jerked to attention at the sound of Theo's voice, sloshing the last of the coffee down her front. It was, she thought, probably a symptom of some deep-seated psychological problem if her first reaction was to berate him for making her waste it.

"Don't drink that—it's been sitting out since we got back from the Auror department—you don't even like coffee!"

"These are extenuating circumstances," she said, feeling better already. "I told you that making me go out last night was a bad idea."

He laughed. "But it was fun while it lasted, wasn't it?"

"So not worth the pain." She turned to face him, feeling her eyebrows shoot up at his wardrobe choice. "Aren't those Harry's boxers?"

His face broke into a smile reminiscent of a beam of sunshine: so bright it was painful to look at directly. "Yes."

"You do realise that this makes you his drunken rebound shag?"

Defying all physical and biological laws, the smile grew wider. "Which is almost the same thing as stealing him from the Weasley tart? Yes and yes."

Hermione shook her head. "And this is a good idea, because…"

"He'll constantly compare me to his ex, and I'll always come out on top?" Theo said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"I didn't realise he… well, you know."

"Liked men? You mean, you didn't hear the rumour circling round the Ministry a couple years ago?"

"About him and Blaise Zabini?"

"No, Terry Boot—but, wait. There was one about Zabini, too?"

She rolled her eyes. "It doesn't matter; neither of them were true."

"I wouldn't be so sure. Zabini went through a phase…"

Hermione didn't want to know. She tried to communicate this clearly by crinkling up her face into a ball of disgust, and Theo seemed to take the hint.

"Anyway, my point is that he was far too good for it to be a first."

"Theo! Please stop—I'm really happier without—I've known him since he was eleven!"

Harry chose the moment of her disgust to burst in bearing plastic bags filled with food. "I've brought lunch," he said, apparently oblivious to the fact that Hermione was in the throes of irritation.

Her irritation only increased at the realisation that she had slept in far longer than she had intended.

"Do you want any?" he asked her. "I've got soup, things to make sandwiches with, er…"

As he rooted through his purchases, trying to find other uses for them, Hermione leaned over and plucked something out of one of the bags.

"Kibbles? Remind me why we're encouraging him?"

Harry looked sheepish. "I always wanted a dog."

"So buy a shiatsu, or some other dog too small to turn the handle and get into my room."

Feeling cross for reasons other than her gradually fading headache, she stormed out of the room and up the stairs. She passed Pansy and Ron—still in dog form—halfway up, and felt a stab of relief that she could retreat to her study without having to put up with inane chatter and high-pitched giggles.

It was lucky for Snape that he knew how to keep quiet, or she would have tossed him out into the general house to fend for himself days ago.

But when she flung the door open and found him staring out of the window, forehead against the glass, elbows propped up on the windowsill, some of her annoyance vanished, and she wanted nothing more than to quietly retreat and leave him to his thoughts.

It was too late; he turned when he heard her enter and held her pinned with his gaze—at first with the full force his sorrow, and, then, as it it closed over, with her desire to see back in.

"You've had an owl," he said, after a moment. "You were still asleep when it came, so I just left the letter on your desk."

In that moment, she couldn't have cared less about it, even if it could lead her to the Stonehenge killer—which was highly doubtful. Something was sweeping over her, a cross between epiphany and abject terror, and she let it, unable to move until it finished rushing past her, leaving a trembling ache in her stomach.

Fortunately, his eyes had focussed on something just past her left ear, and he didn't seem to have noticed. She pulled her hair off her shoulders and let it fall down her back, suddenly self-conscious, and shook herself into motion.

"I just wanted to check something," she said, walking behind the desk and pulling up the laptop. It created a physical barrier that she reinforced by feigning keystrokes until she could think of something to look up.

A few minutes reassured her that the Muggle press hadn't caught wind of last night's almost murder, and another half-second told her that they were still reporting on Stonehenge. Most recent was a chronology of Jennifer Bartleby's career, beginning with her early childhood and running until the night of December twenty-first, which shoved a wrench into her theory that the woman might be living in self-imposed exile from the Wizarding world; at least the facts would be easy enough to check.

A Bath newspaper had published an article on ritual sacrifice and druidism, which looked as though it had been written using the first three results the most convenient search engine provided, tabloids looked to be making up stories about a royal conspiracy, and Hermione became increasingly convinced that lazy researchers deserved to be condemned to a special hell.

She signed and rested her chin on the top of her laptop screen, feeling pathetic.

"I'm out of ideas—I hope you don't mind being undead, because unless we can find who did this and which spell they used, you may be stuck here for a very long time."

Something crossed his features, and she couldn't tell if it was dread or longing.

"Everyone claims that they were asleep in bed at the time of the murder—which is only sensible, and, incidentally, practically impossible to check up on—and the only connections that can be drawn are circumstantial. I don't think that a group of people who like to dress up in robes a few times a year and spend a lot of time romanticising nature killed a man who had absolutely nothing to do with them, I really don't see why Lucius Malfoy would want to draw attention to himself for something that doesn't seem to have had a purpose, and the serial killer didn't do it—which only makes sense, because it didn't fit, which we ought to have seen before.

"Right now, I want nothing more than to receive a signed confession and suicide note from the murderer via owl, and find from the Daily Prophet that they've flung themselves from the nearest rocky cliff with crashing waves below it."

A grin twitched at the corner of his lips, and her scowl deepened. "You're discussing motives again."

"Yes," she said, closing her laptop with a violent click, "but only because there are no clues."

"There must be some."

"Some very well hidden ones." She unlocked the desk drawer and shuffled through the mass of folders before finding what she was looking for. "I've made copies of all of the photographs from the crime scene, if you'd like to look."

He nodded, and joined her behind the desk as she spread them out in front of her, pointing to them as she spoke.

"We haven't received the translation of the runes yet—but they aren't like anything I've ever encountered before, and the same applies to the rest of the department. This photograph shows them most clearly."

"That's rather gruesome, isn't it? I can see why you're not as repulsed by me as you ought to be."

She let out a bark of laughter. "It was much worse in person. Anyway, there's no use hunting for footprints, because, as you can see, there are none, possibly because the rain washed them away, and possibly because our culprit was careful to erase them."

"What about these?"

"Theo's, the clumsy git. They aren't there in the other photographs." She shifted to a close-up of the victim's face. "The slice on the neck is very fine and clean, with no magical residue according to the autopsy, suggesting that an ordinary razor was used. The bruising around the neck tells us that he was strangled first, and there was damage to the skull, suggesting that he was also hit over the head with a blunt weapon, probably round-ish and about eight inches in diameter."

"Like a beater bat?" Snape asked.

"Yes," she said, slowly. "Exactly like."

"Of course, there are probably as many beater bats in existence across Wizarding Britain as there are razors," he pointed out. "So not terribly helpful."

"But not something I would have thought of."

"These markings," Snape said, tracing the outline of the body in the first photograph. "The reason you didn't recognise them is because they aren't runes at all—I think they might be Ogham."

"Celtic writing? It certainly fits with the location…"

"And the Neo-druids," he pointed out.

"It does rather nudge us in that direction, doesn't it?" She cleared aside the photographs, leaving the one in which the markings were visible on top, and opened her laptop again, running a search on 'Ogham'. It was a moment's work to enlarge the photograph until she could see the symbols without having to squint.

Snape shifted so that he was directly behind her and tugged the picture from her hands, holding it directly above the chart she had found. A shiver ran through her that had nothing to do with the excitement of a breakthrough, but she pushed it away, and scrolled down the page until she found two symbols identical to the ones on the body.

"And Ogham it is," she said, grinning up at him. "Birch and…" She paused to read the translation of the other. "Birch and Alder—Elder? No, that's something different."

"Elder's in the photograph, too. Look closely, by his waist."

"So it is—alternating with Willow." She paused to scribble the symbols on a scrap of paper, alongside their accompanying meaning. "According to the chart, Birch is 'new beginnings', Alder is 'communication with spirits'—those two are fairly self explanatory—Willow is 'equilibrium'—"

"The murder," he said. "A life for a life—the killer knew, at least, to keep the balance."

"And Elder—'timelessness'. Eternal life?"

"The other meaning is 'the end'—this is a very poor translation, you know."

"I can double-check it on another site," she replied, "but unless you have an involved scholarly knowledge of Ogham that you can recite off-hand, it's the best we've got."

She ran another search and scribbled down alternate meanings where she could find them, and Snape continued to study the photograph.

"What's this one, in the centre of his chest?"

"Elder, isn't it?" she said, squinting.

"The lines are at a different angle, though—I think it might be yew."

"Which, incidentally, means resurrection, according to this chart. Makes perfect sense, I suppose—and isn't it typically the wand of Dark Lords?"

"You mean, when they aren't running round killing people for the Elder Wand?" There was more than a touch of bitterness in his voice; she thought it more than justified. "To the best of my knowledge, yes."

She tried to hold back the inevitable leap of logic, and failed. "I suppose it's possible that yew takes on a double meaning, then? Resurrection of the Dark Lord of your choice?"

"It appears to have failed; the nearest they got was me."

"Unless someone else was raised, alongside the five of you? We can't ignore the possibility that there are pseudo-zombies running around that we don't know about."

"I find myself rather hoping that the Dark Lord is decomposing on the forest floor somewhere."

She grinned up at him. "I can't blame you. Which reminds me…"

Pushing back her chair, she stood to face him. "Give me your hand."

The amusement dropped from his face, replaced by something illegible. "I'd really rather you—"

"Nonsense. Do you want to be trapped in a festering heap of flesh? I think not."

He crossed his hands under his arms and scowled.

"It takes much less out of me this way. Unless you'd rather wait until you're falling to bits and it takes three people to revive you? If I don't do it, Pansy will, and, in case you haven't noticed, you've shifted into the realm of hero in Harry's book—do you want to owe him that?"

She didn't miss his slight wince. "And owing you is preferable?"

"At least you'll know I'm doing it for sensible reasons, rather than simply because I worship the ground you walk on."

"For all your claims to sense, I don't think you have a practical bone in your body," he muttered, but held out his hand.

This time, it was easier—or perhaps she was just getting used to it. The tug was fainter, still pulling at her navel, but she didn't feel as though she had been squeezed through the wringer so much as lightly rinsed; when she glanced up at Snape, it seemed that his hair had more of a sheen than she recalled, his complexion a touch more colour.

She forced her gaze away, onto the desk, before the knot in her stomach could transform into a crushing weight. Trying to ignore the fact that this did nothing to stop the onslaught, she tidied away the photographs and closed her laptop.

"Besides," she said lightly, "I owe you. You've managed to do more on this case in half an hour than Theo and I combined."

Her eyes fell on the letter that Snape had left on the desk for her. To still her fidgeting, she tore open the envelope and pulled out a scrap of parchment with scrambling fingers that pulled and folded the edges; it contained a single line that left her momentarily bewildered.

This revelation was less heated and panicked, more like a cool slipping together of details she had observed without being conscious of them, things that she ought to have been aware of before now.

"Theo," she shouted, running for the stairs. "Theo, I've got it!"