The friends were silent for but a moment as Blaise's words sunk in before Tracey shrieked and threw herself into her boyfriend's arms.

"Blaise, you're a genius!" she cried, kissing him soundly before crushing him to her in the tightest hug she could manage. Blaise let out an 'oomph' of surprise at her uncharacteristically outward display of affection, but he accepted the embrace with a soft chuckle.

"Hardly a genius, love," he said as he pulled back to look at her. "After all, it was you and Draco who did all the hard stuff – finding out your mother's name, contacting your grandparents, and all that."

"You still did all that research into the legal side of it," Tracey insisted. "You and Hermione – if you hadn't done that, you wouldn't have known that the blood status falsification would nullify the contract."

"I'm pretty sure any sort of falsification that blatant would nullify a contract," Hermione said with a snort.

"Why did you never mention your father had remarried, Trace?" Harry wondered, tilting his head slightly in her direction. Tracey shrugged.

"I'd never really thought it was important, to be honest," she said. "I was never completely sure that Carina wasn't really my mother, but I was forbidden to ask questions that would have told me the truth, and that was that. It's always been in the back of my mind, sure, but I never thought it would turn out to be so important."

"Family is always important, Tracey," Harry said softly. Tracey could see the slight flash of pain in his green eyes and winced sympathetically – Harry had had his father taken from him when he was barely a toddler, and it hadn't even been a year since he'd lost his mother as well. Draco had lost both of his birth parents plus his adopted mother, Hermione's mother was dead while her father was alive thanks only to a miracle, Blaise's father was long gone…everyone in the room was acutely aware of the importance of family.

"Thank you, all of you," Tracey said quietly as she folded up the letter from her grandparents and carefully tucked it away. "I owe all of you so much."

"You don't owe us anything," Hermione insisted. "You're our friend – it was the least we could do to help you, and now you have a chance to get to know family you didn't even know you had." She smirked mischievously and added, "And besides, as much as I like you, I wasn't about to let you have Draco."

"I'll ignore the fact that you just talked about me like I was a broomstick or a textbook for the time being," Draco quipped. Hermione chuckled.

"You know I don't think of you as a possession, love, but you are mine," she said, leaning over to give him a kiss.

"So what's next?" Harry asked once Draco and Hermione had returned to the real world. "We found the loophole, but what do we do now?"

"I don't think we can really do much until the summer holidays," Tracey replied with a slight frown. "I would love to have tried the ring ceremony again before the year ended, because seeing it happen for real will be incredibly satisfying, but I don't think it will work until the contract is dissolved completely – we found the loophole, yes, but the bond is technically still there. In the meantime, we need to figure out how we're going to confront my father." Nobody missed the slight lowering of her voice, the darkening of her tone that accompanied her final statement.

"Do you think we'll have any issues getting him to comply?" Draco asked, looking slightly worried.

"When was that contract written, Tracey?" Blaise asked suddenly. Tracey cocked her head, clearly confused.

"Does it matter?" she asked.

"It might – if it was drawn up before your mother found out about her heritage, then the fact that the contract doesn't actually involve two pureblooded children is an honest mistake. If it was drawn up after that time, however, then your father knowingly lied to Lucius Malfoy's face to procure the agreement."

"I don't think that fact alone would be enough in terms of legal trouble, though," Hermione argued. "Lucius Malfoy would have prosecuted your father for all he was worth for such a thing, but we aren't Lucius Malfoy – we need something else to back it up."

"We still don't know the exact circumstances surrounding the dissolving of your parents' marriage," Harry pointed out. "Your father's first marriage, I mean. Blaise, Draco, didn't one of you mention something about Wizarding marriages being exceptionally difficult to break?"

"I did," Draco acknowledged. "Wizarding marriages are usually for life, especially if the couple includes the traditional bonding spells in their ceremony – those spells aren't meant to be broken. Tracey, your father is such a traditionalist that I'm sure your parents had such a thing in their wedding, and yet he would have had to break them somehow in order to marry Carina."

"The question is, how?" Hermione asked, quickly catching on.

"Exactly," Draco said. "How did he break that union, and so quickly? Like we said before, the time lapse between the end of his first marriage and the start of his second one was less than six months, but there seems to have been no legal or magical objection to that second marriage, since the Ministry documents were all in order."

"Unless there was something there we didn't see," Tracey said, her eyes wide.

"How the hell did your father end up remarried so quickly, anyway?" Harry asked. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what your grandparents said in their letter, it sounded like your parents really did love each other right up until your mother discovered and revealed her heritage. How, then, did your father end up with Carina so quickly? Most people don't just jump the gun and marry someone they hardly know."

"Unless there's a marriage contract involved, or an affair," Draco continued, "but in this case, it doesn't sound like either. Mr. Davis' parents would have questioned him if he suddenly asked for a marriage contract in his twenties, especially when he was already married and probably wouldn't have wanted to admit that his first wife wasn't the pureblood they thought she was, and people who care about their spouses don't cheat."

"Maybe they went to Hogwarts together?" Hermione suggested. "Acquaintances, former classmates, that sort of thing?"

"I don't think how Carina came into the equation is the important part," Blaise said quickly. "It's odd, yes, but I think how Marianne was taken out of the picture is far more suspicious."

"What are you thinking, Blaise?" Tracey asked.

"I can only come up with two conclusions, and neither of them is good," Blaise cautioned. Tracey motioned for him to go on.

"I'm already decidedly not happy with him at the moment," she said bluntly. "Tell me what you're thinking."

"The Ministry documents are indeed all in order," Blaise began. "That means that nothing objected, legally or magically, when the second marriage took place; therefore, the bond involved in the first marriage somehow ceased to exist. I can only think of two ways that might have happened: either your father bribed someone to destroy that bond with some form of Dark magic, or…well, your grandparents did say that Marianne died suddenly very shortly after she told her husband the truth. Does that not seem odd to you?"

"You think my father killed my mother?" Tracey asked, surprisingly looking more angry than upset.

"It's entirely possible," Blaise said. "If a spouse dies, all of those bonds dissolve naturally. Kill off the first wife – there are plenty of ways to kill someone in the Wizarding world and make it look like an accident – the bonds break, and he's free to remarry a 'proper' pureblood with no one the wiser."

"That's our angle," Draco said immediately.

"But we have no proof!" Hermione repeated. "As awful as that sounds, everything we've come up with is purely circumstantial."

"But it might actually be enough, Lotte," Draco insisted. "Listen, if either of those scenarios is true, it'll mean a lengthy stay in Azkaban for Mr. Davis. What we have is purely circumstantial at the moment, yes, but it also lines up far too well to be mere coincidence. If we can get Mr. Davis to talk, we might just get what we need."

"Are you suggesting blackmail?" Hermione asked. "You could get into just as much trouble!"

"Says the girl who kept a reporter imprisoned in a jar," Draco replied with a snort. "Trust us, Lotte – if anyone knows how to operate in situations like these, it's us Slytherins. True, Mr. Davis was a Slytherin as well, but we have the element of surprise and a dangerous amount of information on our side. Only one of us is going to win this game, and it's not going to be him."

"It's not you I don't trust, Dragon," Hermione reminded him.

"I don't blame you in the slightest, Hermione, but you honestly have nothing to worry about," Tracey said darkly. "That man has pushed me down again and again – not anymore. As soon as school ends, we're going to go to my house, and we're going to sort this out. Then we're all going back to Grimmauld Place – or somewhere else, if you prefer – and we're going to celebrate, because we are going to come out on top here. My father has ruined my life for the last time."

The days passed quickly, as they tended to do when end-of-year exams were close, and the friends found themselves busy as they began wrapping things up while still concentrating on large piles of homework. In addition to their own hefty workloads, they all pitched in wherever they could to help Ginny study for her upcoming O.W.L.s – the redhead was calm for the most part, but the amount of material she had to know was staggering, and those who had gone through the exams already knew how beneficial a fresh perspective could be. D.A. meetings had largely ended for the year – they kept finding the Room of Requirement already occupied, though they still had no idea who was using the space, and they were all so busy with revision anyway that there wasn't time. They did, however, make time for a celebratory lunch at The Dragon and the Unicorn, the little café Harry and Ginny had discovered the previous year, when Hermione, Tracey, and Blaise passed their Apparition tests during the final Hogsmeade weekend of the year. As Harry and Draco weren't yet seventeen when the course ended, they would have to wait and take their tests sometime over the summer, but they had both done very well in the lessons and felt confident that they would pass as well when the time came.

Not everything was as fun as passing Apparition tests, though – though the trio had all made noticeable progress, Occlumency lessons were still difficult, and the time alone with Snape was incredibly awkward. Harry, Draco, and Hermione were well aware of how deeply Snape had cared for Lily Potter, and though he'd never given them any indication of how much her death had affected him, the memory Draco had accidentally seen during their first session still hung over them like a stifling blanket. Draco also really wished he had a valid excuse to end his tutoring sessions with Nott – Pansy still kept finding reasons to interrupt them, for one thing, and for another, Nott really didn't need the additional help anymore – but for as much as he disliked his roommate, he would have felt bad stopping the sessions so close to the exams. At least Nott asked intelligent questions, which made their time together a little more bearable, and of course the extra practice was always good.

Near the end of May, Harry received another summons from Dumbledore, and in spite of their hectic schedules, they knew they couldn't ignore it. They still had so little information about the Horcruxes, and they were about to go into the summer holidays and wouldn't be able to speak with the headmaster as easily as they could now.

"May I first offer my congratulations," Dumbledore said as Harry and Draco entered his office alone that evening. Ginny, of course, was studying for O.W.L.s, and Hermione had offered to help her review for Transfiguration – Harry and Draco would fill them in later. The boys looked at one another, not quite sure what Dumbledore meant. Their headmaster seemed to understand their confusion, because he smiled amusedly and added, "I heard that you found a way out of your marriage contract, Mr. Black."

"Oh – yes, we did," Draco said quickly. "Thank you, sir. But I think the congratulations belong to Tracey, really – she not only got out of an arranged marriage, but she also learned the truth about her family."

"Nonsense," Dumbledore said. "Miss Davis' newfound knowledge is wonderful, of course, but you're now free as well. I hope you and Miss Granger will be very happy together." Harry nearly choked on his tea, and Draco blushed a brilliant shade of red they all were surprised his fair skin tone could produce.

"Er…thank you, sir," he muttered, wrapping his fingers around his teacup in an attempt to move the focus elsewhere. Dumbledore chuckled.

"Love will win us this war, Mr. Black – don't forget that," he said. "And now, let us discuss what we came here to discuss." He turned to reach for his Pensieve, and Harry gasped.

"Professor! What happened to your hand?" For Dumbledore's hand was blackened and burned, the already frail appendage looking quite horrifyingly dead.

"Ah – now that, Harry, is a rather thrilling tale," Dumbledore said with a nod. "Unfortunately, we haven't the time to do it justice tonight, as we really do have other, far more important things to discuss, but I can tell you that we are down a Horcrux."

"You destroyed one of them?" Harry asked, nearly dropping his tea in his excitement. "How? Which one?" Beside him, Draco managed to set his own cup down with far more finesse than his brother had done, but he still focused on the headmaster with rapt attention.

"The 'how' will have to wait for another time – part of that thrilling tale, you know – but as for which one, it was the Gaunt ring, the one we saw Marvolo, and later Morfin, wearing in the memories," Dumbledore explained. "As we also know from those memories, Voldemort stole the ring from his uncle the same night he killed his father and paternal grandparents, making said object the most likely candidate for a Horcrux if he'd chosen to create one that evening. I took a trip to the old Gaunt shack, which is, of course, now abandoned, and found the ring hidden in a box under a loose floorboard in the kitchen."

"And your hand?" Harry pressed. Dumbledore sighed.

"Merely the product of an old man's foolishness," he said gently. "Now, if you will, I have two more memories I would like to share with you this evening, this first one belonging to a house-elf called Hokey."

Like most of the other memories they'd seen, their glimpse of Hokey's encounter with a young Voldemort wasn't very long, but it gave them a lot of valuable information. After completing his seven years at Hogwarts, Tom Riddle took on the position of assistant at Borgin and Burkes, a shop in Knockturn Alley that sold all sorts of Dark artifacts. While seeing to the many house calls necessary to keep both his bosses and their clients happy, Riddle made the acquaintance of Hepzibah Smith, a witch with the biggest collection of junk Harry or Draco had ever seen – her living room was cluttered with all sorts of boxes, chests, trunks, cabinets, and containers, the smallest of pathways barely allowing for any sort of movement. It seemed that Riddle had visited Hepzibah on many occasions before, as the large witch was eagerly anticipating his arrival when they entered the memory, and she instantly sent Hokey scurrying away for tea. After a few minutes of idle chitchat, Hepzibah ordered the little elf to fetch her two "greatest treasures". She showed them to Riddle individually, and neither teen missed the greedy gleam in his eyes as he examined them: the first was a small golden cup, a handle on either side and a badger worked into the metal, and the second was a large locket engraved with an ornate S.

The second memory was one of Dumbledore's own, and he told them it took place roughly ten years after the first. When they arrived in the memory, they found themselves standing in the headmaster's office, where they found Voldemort and Dumbledore deep in conversation. The difference between the Voldemort they'd just seen and the one in front of them was deeply unsettling – the Voldemort in Hokey's memory had been a little older, a little thinner than his Hogwarts days, but still undeniably handsome; this Voldemort, however, had permanently bloodshot eyes, oddly distorted features, and skin as white as the snow falling outside the office window. Harry and Draco listened intently as the two elder wizards conversed – Voldemort, it seemed, was determined to obtain the Defense Against the Dark Arts post at Hogwarts, but Dumbledore adamantly refused, insisting that Voldemort's main goal in returning to the castle was something other than teaching. After a heated exchange, Voldemort stormed out of the office, and the memory ended.

"Excuse my language, Professor, but what the hell was wrong with Riddle in that last memory?" Harry asked bluntly, still looking thoroughly disturbed.

"That, Harry, is what murder will do to a person," Dumbledore replied quietly. "It is all speculation, of course, but if my timeline is correct, Voldemort had created at least three Horcruxes by the time that conversation took place, and he'd murdered countless other people as well – in short, he'd mutilated his soul in a way that no one else has ever done before. You cannot commit such an inhuman act as physically severing your soul that many times without it beginning to reflect on the outside as well, I think." Both boys shuddered.

"What does that mean for his current appearance?" Draco wondered, not really sure if he actually wanted to know the answer. "Does he look even worse now?"

"We can only imagine," Dumbledore answered. "In a perfect world, we would never know, but I'm afraid we don't have that option. Now, what did we learn from these memories?"

"Voldemort took a job at Borgin and Burkes so he could track down important magical objects," Harry said at once. "He was probably hoping to find something somewhat interesting to add to his 'potential Horcrux' list, and he hit the jackpot with Hepzibah Smith – those two treasures of hers once belonged to the founders, didn't they?"

"Very good," Dumbledore said with a smile. "Yes, the badger cup belonged to Helga Hufflepuff, while the engraved locket was Salazar Slytherin's."

"And he would've especially wanted that locket, since he knew thanks to his uncle that it had once been in his family," Draco added. "So I'm guessing he stole both the cup and the locket from Hepzibah Smith?"

"Again, we are merely dealing in the realm of speculation, but I think it's safe to say that is what happened," Dumbledore said. "Hepzibah Smith was dead a mere two days after this encounter, and Voldemort resigned from his post at Borgin and Burkes and vanished without a trace not long after that. Just as he'd modified his uncle Morfin's memories, he altered Hokey's memory so that she was convicted of her mistress's death."

"No!" Harry cried, looking outraged. He'd had relatively few encounters with house-elves compared to other magical creatures during his tenure at Hogwarts, but they were sweet little things, if not a little odd, and by and large hardly capable of even contemplating murder, never mind committing it. He knew Hermione would be furious when she learned of Hokey's fate – while Hermione had accepted long ago that house-elves enjoyed the hard work that they did, she definitely didn't condone the harsh manner in which many wizards treated their house-elves, and Hokey's situation definitely qualified.

"Yes," Dumbledore said. "You know that Voldemort has no compassion for even his Death Eaters – did you really think he would feel differently about a mere house-elf? No, he saw Hokey as nothing more than a means to an end, just like his uncle, and he took advantage accordingly. The point is, he got what he was after, and by the time anyone in poor Hepzibah's family realized that either piece was missing, Voldemort was long gone, along with any suspicion that he could be the thief."

"What did you think he was really after when he came back to Hogwarts?" Draco asked.

"Another very important question, and another to which I can't give a definite answer," Dumbledore replied with a sigh. "I suspect that Voldemort was after another artifact belonging to the founders – he had, after all, already obtained heirlooms from two of them. However, that theory runs into quite the snag when we realize that the only remaining artifact belonging to Gryffindor is currently here in this office, and the only known important possession of Ravenclaw's has been lost for centuries."

"Which is what?" Harry asked.

"A diadem – a tiara, if you will. It was supposedly very beautiful and gave the wearer enhanced wisdom, but it hasn't been seen by anyone since Ravenclaw's daughter stole it from her, and that was almost a thousand years ago."

"Is that what they'd fought about, when Ravenclaw sent that man to find her daughter when she was on her deathbed?" Draco asked, recalling a conversation he'd had with Hermione about that very topic.

"Yes. They'd always had a rather tenuous relationship, but Helena's stealing the diadem was the last straw, and the two did not see each other for quite some time. Rowena's sending the young man after her daughter was a last plea for reconciliation."

"Which they never achieved, because her daughter was murdered by that same man before either of them could return," Draco finished.

"Are there any stories with happy endings in the Wizarding world?" Harry muttered, looking appalled. Dumbledore chuckled.

"Of course, my boy – although after this discussion, it doesn't quite seem that way, does it?" He touched his long fingers together and rested his chin on the tips, his eyes twinkling behind his half-moon glasses.

"So we're still at a loss as to what the other Horcruxes might be," Harry said after a moment. "But we can safely guess that the cup and the locket are two of them, which leaves four more, if we're going with the 'seven parts' theory – six Horcruxes, plus the bit in Voldemort."

"Two, Harry," Dumbledore said.

"Sorry?"

"Two unknown Horcruxes, not four – don't forget that we've already taken care of the diary and the ring."

"Ah, right."

"Well, that's not terrible…if we overlook the fact that we also have to find and destroy them all," Draco said slowly.

"Well, aren't we just a right little ray of sunshine," Harry muttered.

"Oh, shut up," Draco grumbled back. "We've made progress, but we can't deny what's left is still damn difficult."

"Nobody said you had to remind us of that fact…"

Dumbledore could only chuckle to himself as the boys bickered – biological or otherwise, there was nothing quite like siblings.

A/N: Couldn't resist throwing in that last little argument, especially not when it was my sister's birthday yesterday...lol. Sorry that the chapter was a bit later than usual today, I had a rather lengthy to-do list - plus writing filler chapters like this is always harder.

Thank you for the follows/faves/reviews, & for reading! It's about to get crazy, so get ready.

JKR owns all things Potter, I just play. Please R&R, & enjoy! :)