Disclaimer: I don't own the characters from these books. I don't make any money from this. Please don't sue me. It's all going to taxes, anyhow.
Chapter Nine: To Smell DeathThe Morrigan drifted over the great Dark, winging her way through the ether. The Dark was quiet since the wizard named Voldemort had died. The very stillness made her skin crawl and her pulse race. There was something wrong. Something she should have seen. Something she should have been looking for, but she could not remember what.
She had lost the smell, almost as she had got it. It had been in her Dream Child's room, a faint scent that teased the nose, tickled the hairs of memory, then vanished. She knew she should know it. She knew it was something that would make her rage and her mind draw black with chaos. But she could not name it. Could not place it. And it drove her mad.
Out over the dark, she cast her nets of scent. There was nothing. Not even the stench of rotting meat from dying creatures that fought out their small lives in the wild Dark. Nothing. It was as if something had scared the creatures into hiding, had driven them from the Wild Magic which sustained them, to tamer places where they would become little more than nightmares in the dreams of children all around the world.
But she knew the scent was there. It had burned the back of her throat with rage. It seared its brief presence into her mind and memory. She would find it. She would drag it from the rocks it hid under. She would conquer it, destroy it, and laugh in the wind when it was little more than dust.
But she had to find the trail first. So she searched through the Dark, flying, flying until her bones ached and her head rang with one single thought.
I will find you. I will find you. I will find you.
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The town was quiet. Tranquil in the hour before dawn, the sleepy streets were devoid of autos. The priest walked down the lane, past the dark windows and the slumbering people. There were no wards to bar him from their homes. No amulets of protection to keep him from their doors.
He smiled and stopped, turning to the first house he came upon. It was time to begin.
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The surge of Dark magic tipped the alarms in the Auror's office. Scrimgeour, having come in early to prepare his notes for his future replacement, was the first to hear them.
The flurry of owls sent from the Auror's office Owlry spooked the roosting pigeons from their nests under the eaves of the Ministry building. As he waited, Scrimgeour readied his kit, his nerve and his wits.
Death Eaters, he was willing to bet. It has to be. They had not caught all of Voldemort's followers in the aftermath of the battle at Hogwarts. There were a sufficient number of them loose to cause him all sorts of problems. It was one of the reasons he had decided to run for Minister. We can't let them go loose, or turn a blind eye to the evils which still haunt our world, it was a good line. He'd have to write it down. He had speeches coming up. The vote was still months away, but he needed all the help he could get.
But when the Auror teams arrived in the sleepy hamlet in Ireland, they found no Dark Mark painted across the sky. They found no masks, no inscribed diatribes about the Dark Lord waiting to rise again. They found no bodies of witches or wizards at all.
The new batch of trainees all lost what little food they'd had in their stomach. Scrimgeour was almost tempted to join them. The small square in front of the town church was soaked in blood. His boots squelched with the sound of intestines and…other bits of the human body as he walked over the once green grass.
There was an Unspeakable standing in front of what could only be described as an altar. The man was plain; brown hair, brown eyes, the type of person one's eyes could move over and never notice, never be able to pick out of a crowd. The Unspeakables had always given him a shiver of fear.
"What did this?" He knew his voice was gruff. But the morning light was rising fast, and the scene looked worse in the pastel light of dawn than it did in the shadow of night.
"I don't know." Rufus didn't know the Unspeakable's name. He would never know it. It was how they operated, how they moved through the wizarding world with the rest of the populace nary the wiser.
"Wizards? Death Eaters? What?"
The man shook his head. "Magic, of that I'm certain, was used." He reached out and touched the blood slick stone that had once been a memorial to the dead from one of the Muggle world wars. "But the type eludes me. No wands were used. No Dark Marks. But the people lined up and brought their children to slaughter, one by one." He pointed to the grass. Rufus followed the line to the beaten circle around the altar. "The children died first. Then the parents."
"Who could have done this?"
The man's shoulders moved. "Someone with the knowledge of old magic. Someone with the need to perform blood magic."
"An old god?"
"No. A mortal of some sort put this together."
"How do you know?"
The Unspeakable gave him a narrow look and a wry twist of the lips as an answer.
"Right," Rufus said. He cleared his throat. "Do you have any suspects?"
"Oh, many."
"Who?"
The man turned to him. "Who, Auror Scrimgeour, do you know of, has had multiple contacts with the old gods and lived to tell about it?"
Rufus stared at the man. "The rumors about Slytherin House…"
The man nodded. "It is a possibility."
"But they're children!"
"Whose parents have worshipped the old gods for centuries."
"They wouldn't do this! They fought for Hogwarts."
"Perhaps." The man's tone was flat. "But we cannot rule them out as suspects. They have the knowledge. They have the means."
"But you said no wands were used!"
"And how many of the old families have talents that can be utilized without the use of wands? The Potter family, for example," the man's eyes gleamed. "They have only one recorded family trait. Quite odd for such a long line of wizardry."
"You think," Rufus had to consciously lower his voice. "The boy can barely walk! We all saw him at the battle for Hogwarts. He would never be able to do something like this."
"Perhaps." The Unspeakable shook his head. Too late, Rufus realized how many ears had been listening in to their conversation. "I must make my report."
"You can't pin this on the Slytherins alone."
The narrow look was back. "Then who else, Auror Scrimgeour, would you like to offer as suspects?"
"The rogue Death Eaters, of course!"
A thin eyebrow arched. "Interesting suggestion. Do you believe there are still more out there?"
"Yes."
"And how do you know?"
"The raids! There have been several families that have gone missing…"
"Families that were Dark before they changed sides."
"Well, yes."
"Did it ever occur to you that they have switched sides yet again?"
Rufus could only shake his head. "You're determined this is some plot from the Slytherin House."
"It is a possibility."
"I want all possibilities in your report."
"And how," the smile was smug, "do you suppose you're going to make sure they're there?"
Rufus' right hand tightened into a fist. The Unspeakable's smug look grew. The man had the nerve to wink at Rufus before he Disapparited. The head of the Auror division was left sputtering at an altar full of the hearts of children and the eyes of their parents.
It was a long time before any of them went home that day.
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From the panic that had swallowed the Auror office, a small owl took flight from an open window. The room where it had been launched from was unused, except to store old desks and other furniture the office no longer needed.
The owl headed straight for the Wizard Daily press office. It did not come back.
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Hermione had her school books pooled around her. The morning was near over. Her mother would be calling for her to eat lunch soon. The sounds of their muggle home were as familiar to her as her heartbeat, and as strange, sometimes, as the surface of the moon.
The phone would ring. Hermione could almost forget, when she was at Hogwarts, that such things as phones even existed. Then an auto would drive by the house. Children she had gone to primary school with would flood past the house with their bikes, calling over their shoulder about the newest movie they had seen. Sometimes it seemed like Greek, that calling of the short hand language of teenagers enjoying life as they would, in the muggle world, with muggle concerns that had little impact on the rest of Hermione's magic-filled life.
She had a book open in her lap, but her attention was on the pretty sunlight filtering in through the window. She wanted…she didn't know what she wanted. The world outside seemed like a dream. No one knew, looking at her, that she had been in a battle not a month or so past. No one in the neighborhood cared that she seemed more withdrawn, quieter, and less apt to laugh and talk to the people passing by on the sidewalk.
It was frustrating, in some ways, to see the world carry on as if nothing had happened. Nothing did happen, for them, she amended to herself. To them, magic isn't real. Isn't useful. Isn't anything but a fairytale. A myth. A…a dream.
She closed her eyes and drew in a long breath through her nose. The changes happening in the wizarding world were not solely contained therein. The Gods had been spotted in the muggle world, though the news reports laughed them off as neo-pagan groups pulling a large prank. Hermione had watched the reports, read the papers and tried finding out all the information she could from every resource. None of the muggle press believed the Gods had returned. Sometimes she wasn't so sure either.
The Battle of Hogwarts seemed to be fading in her mind. The rush of blood, her help with Madam Pomfrey in the Infirmary…all of it seemed to be fading until it was like some bad dream she had had while asleep. Her parents had done their best to get her to forget as well. Their whirlwind trip to America had kept Hermione occupied for a while, but it was when they had gotten home that the nightmares had started.
She had been able to keep the dreams a secret for now. She knew it was little more than a matter of time until someone found out. In her dreams, she saw Harry die again and again. But instead of being horrified, her dream-self was happy, vindicated, proud, even. It was when she woke that she felt sick, knowing that Harry wasn't the root of their problems. That he had never been their problem. And she was sick to think that she had once thought that she could pin everything on his shoulders, and to hope for his quick death, which would mean the end to all their concerns.
"Hermione! Lunch is ready!"
She started at the sound of her mother's voice. The book fell from her lap, face down on the rug-covered floor. She let it lay where it fell, too tired and too fogged with thought to pick it up.
Down the stairs she went, and through the narrow door that fed into the sunny kitchen. "There you are," her mother beamed a smile at her. Saturday lunch was always something Hermione and her mother had shared, ever since she was little. "I've fixed omelets. Hungry?"
Hermione nodded and took a seat at the table. "It'll be just another minute. I didn't think I'd get you with the first call. You've some mail, dear."
Hermione smiled at her mother's back and pulled the stack of mail to setting. Letters from her Housemates she put aside. Letters from the Weasley's…George, she noted…she was tempted to throw right out. But the Daily Prophet, the Wizard Daily and a handful of other publications were stacked four deep at the bottom of the pile. The three-inch headline on the nearest Wizard Daily caught her eye.
There was a crash in the kitchen. Mrs. Granger jumped and spun around, spatula in hand. "Hermione?" But the kitchen was empty, save for the rumpled papers littering the table. She bent down and scanned the headlines. The spatula hit the floor with a plastic twang.
"Hermione? Hermione come back here this instant! Hermione!"
But there was no answer.
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Sasha tossed down the paper, almost taking the lighted candelabra in the center of the table with it.
"Calm now, dear." Her cousin's wavering voice said from the head of the table. "Nasty bit of news, it is. You should see the other papers."
"They're full of lies," she spat.
"Do you suppose?"
"I would think. They all say Potter's the reason this is happening." She snorted. "It's a bunch of shite."
"Young ladies do not use such language."
"Young ladies haven't had a life I've led either."
Her cousin steeped his fingers in front of his face, leaning his elbows on the dark mahogany wood. "That is true. Perhaps we should do something to correct that."
She gave him a withering look. "I will be seventeen in a few months. It is long past the time I would gain anything from a 'proper' upbringing."
"Perhaps." His eyes glittered. "But then again, a proper upbringing would have had you ignoring that Gryffindor boy and not encouraging him."
The cup of tea, which had been on its way to her mouth, fell from nerveless fingers. "Damn!" She snatched up her napkin and patted down the soaked fabric of her jumper. She blinked, her hand going still on the mess. "What did you just say?"
Herbert leaned back, a bubbly smile overtaking his face. "Come now. I'm an old man, but I'm not dotty. That young man who drew you off while we were at Diagon Alley. Only a Gryffindor would be foolish enough to do something like that in broad daylight. I should know."
"I…I…" She blinked several times. "You knew?"
"Of course."
"And you didn't say anything?"
"Of course not."
"Why not!"
"Well, you seemed like you were having such fun."
Her mouth opened and closed a number of times. "I don't understand."
His smile dimmed by inches. "I know. I'm sorry."
"What?" She was confused even more.
"Sasha, what do you want?" He leaned forward in his seat, resting his hands on the table.
"I…what do you mean? What do I want?"
"Yes. What do you want?"
"I want the last five minutes back and a cup of tea and a dry jumper!"
He rolled his eyes, flicked his wand and summoned a house elf. "There. Now I can't get you back the time without signing many forms in triplicate. Now stop stalling."
"But I don't understand."
"With life, Sasha." He kept his gaze on her, even as the house elves bustled around the table, clearing the dishes.
"What I want to do with my life?"
"Yes."
"Well I…well, I…" She looked away. "I don't know," she admitted.
"Do you wish to go into a profession?"
"I don't know."
"A sport?"
"No." That was accompanied by a wrinkle of her nose.
"Then what?"
"I want…" She stared off into the distance. "I want to learn. To know things." She shrugged. "Mother and Father…" She faltered and forged on. "Mother and Father assumed I would marry right out of Hogwarts. I'm pureblood. I have a long lineage. I'm the last of my line," the words fell in whispers. She cleared her throat and sat straight in her chair. "I guess I could do that, since that was what they wanted." But her face was beginning to burn with color. She hadn't thought of her parents in weeks. She knew what their response to Seamus would have been. She dropped her gaze to the table and tried not to fidget.
"Sasha, please look at me."
She flicked a glance to him, and then away.
"Sasha."
With a huff of a sigh, she raised her eyes. She felt like flinching inside. But the look he was giving her was calm, even and…amused. She felt her insides bristle instead.
"Sasha, do you want to get married right out of school."
She opened her mouth to answer, but found her mind blank.
"Be truthful now."
"…No. I don't."
"Then what do you want to do?"
"Learn!"
"Learn what?"
"Anything!" She frowned. "Everything. I want to go to muggle places. I want to read muggle books. I don't care if they're not what pureblood girls are supposed to do. I just…" She shrugged. "There's more to the world that magic. But I don't want to give it up. I love magic. I love being able to do magic. I don't want to be exiled." She hugged her arms close to her body.
He nodded and leaned back once more in his seat. "Our family, Sasha, is an intellectual one. As I'm sure you know."
She nodded.
"We have been lore keepers, record keepers, writers and chroniclers for generation upon generation. But that, I think, is not what you wish for your future."
She shook her head, unable to speak.
He pursed his lips, his eyes narrowing as he looked her over. "If I told you, that by some chance, Oxford had a branch of learning that incorporated both muggle and wizard knowledge, would you be interested?"
Her head snapped up, her eyes wide and staring. "There's such a thing?"
"Well, it has to be funded, you know, and no muggle enterprise would do such a thing."
"I don't understand."
His smile crinkled the skin around his eyes. "For a century, since the first great war on the continent, a group of families have come together to put forth their brightest and best for a path of learning. A path to where both magical and muggle folk can live in harmony. Together. In peace."
"But…" Sasha could only stare. "That'll get you thrown in Azkaban by the Minister! It's against all the laws we have!"
"Yes, it is."
"It's scandalous! We risk discovery by even promoting it!"
"Yes."
"When can I start?"
"After you take your NEWTs."
"That long?"
"Well…"
"Well what?"
"There are some owl courses you might be able to take."
Her eyes gleamed. She leaned forward. "Do tell," she said with a smile.
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Charlie sat on the bench provided by St. Mungo's staff with his head in his hands. Around him nurses and healers bustled from room to room, checking on their patients with set, cheerful faces, no matter the responses they got from the wounded inside.
The weeks had been a nightmare for the Weasley family. The twins were sullen for most of the time and tense for the rest. Their mother had taken to her room, crying. Their father was attempting to put up a strong front, but even Charlie could tell he was close to cracking.
Ron was in the room to Charlie's right. He had been going to see his younger brother every day for weeks. There was little change. In the early days, they had been hopeful. Ron seemed to be getting better. They had fully restored the sight to one eye. The other had been lost, the poison from the little spiders too necrotic and too long set for the healers to do any good. By some chance, Ron had been petrified with one eye almost all the way closed. It was that luck which saved him his sight.
But for the rest…The spiders had gotten into the young man's ears and punctured the drum. The healers were not sure if Ron would ever be able to walk without getting dizzy. The other bites had become infected, having left to sit too long. Great gouges of skin had had to be taken out to prevent the dead tissue from spreading. But there too, the Healers had been confident that the skin would regenerate and repair itself.
But as the days had gone by, then weeks, they had to come to terms with the fact that while Ron's body could be healed, his mind was another matter.
"Mr. Weasley?" The soft voice of a nurse turned Charlie's head.
"Yes?" He didn't know the woman. She was new to the ward. She wasn't pretty, to most standards. Her nose was a little large. Her mouth too wide. But she had kind eyes, which put Charlie at ease.
"Your brother is waking up. Would you like to see him?"
Charlie drew in a breath. Ron had been waking up for weeks, but there had been no hope of sense out of him. He would scream and rage, or simply huddle in on himself, crying. They tried to talk to him. They tried to comfort him. But nothing seemed to work.
"I don't know," he began.
"Each day is a new slate," she said. Her smile did not dim. "Why don't you try again? Even if it seems like he doesn't hear you, I'm sure he does."
Charlie bowed his head. "And maybe that's the problem." He rubbed at his eyes. He loved his family. He wanted to be proud of them. But another part of his mind was furious with them. He was furious with Ron. He was furious with his other brothers, his mother, his father. His shoulders felt full to the breaking with responsibility. He wanted to do nothing more than sleep for a week.
"Your choice, of course, Mr. Weasley." The nurse stepped back.
"Who are you, anyway? I haven't seen you here before." He raised his head to look at her.
"I'm new." She shrugged. "I have to go in now." She left without another word.
Charlie closed his eyes, the light from the hall painting the back of his eyelids a splotchy red and black. What did he want to do? What should he do? The headache that had been threatening began to beat at the base of his skull.
He rolled his head from side to side, trying to ease the tension. He opened his eyes with a sigh. He knew what he needed to do. Ron was his brother, not matter what idiocy the boy had committed. They were family and Charlie wasn't about to give up on them.
He rose with a grunt, the blood rushing to his feet, making his toes tingle and sting. He stamped them a few times, garnering him a few odd looks. He ignored them all and entered the room.
The nurse was bent over the bed, smoothing a clean-smelling paste over the still red wounds.
"What are you doing?" Charlie had never seen the medicine before.
"Something new," she answered. She made one last pass over the infected eyes and stepped back.
Charlie frowned. "You do work here, right?"
"In a sense."
The hairs on the back of his neck began to stand on end. "I think I should go get a healer…" He started to edge for the door.
"He has been a fool." The woman capped the substance in her hands. "A very great fool, but even fools deserve second chances. It is up to him," her gaze came up and speared Charlie in place. "It is up to him," she repeated, "to make the best of it."
"Make the best of it? He can't even string two words together!"
"…'s loud."
Charlie jumped at the mumble from the bed. The woman moved back into the shadows of the room. "Ron? Ron can you hear me?" He clasped the one hand that had the least amount of bites on it.
"…Charlie?" The whisper came with one eye edging open. "Why's it all blurry? What happened?"
Charlie bowed his head, his throat too tight to speak. Blinking to clear the blurriness from his vision, he twisted around, looking for the nurse.
There was no one else in the room.
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Crom Cruach drifted. With no sense of space or time, he existed in the memories he had left.
The glistening circle of his followers, naked to his gaze, were ringed around him. The first of the year's sacrifices were bleating in their cages, the sounds drowned out by the rhythmic chant coming from the men and women around him. The children's eyes were frightened. Huge and staring, they focused on the sharp implements that would take their lives. Their parents, all faithful, were ready to fulfill their promise to their God. They would take their first born, their pride, and lay it upon the altar for all the world to see. Then they would slit the narrow throats, drink the hot scalding blood of their babes and roast the flesh in the bonfires, so all could feast.
It was his most precious memory.
Other flashes, of the mighty king who had raised his name from the peat bogs and the bone rattlers mouths. Tigernmus; he had been a wonder of a mortal, tall, muscled and with eyes that flashed with rage and conviction. He'd come from over the seas, landed in the murky bogs of the God's home, sick and worthless, almost dead. The God had no mercy, but something in those bones, in those eyes, interested him. Captivated him.
Tigernmus had raised an army large enough to be feared. Crom Cruach's herd of worshippers grew by leaps and bounds. The wild night of the autumns. The prayers of the faithful, crying out for rain and crops. Crom Cruach had cared little for their wants. The other gods would mind the rain and the harvests. He was a god of power, not some minor fertility god of no standing. The world was his to take, his to shape, his to own.
Then it had all come crashing down. Tigernmus had thrown himself onto the bonfires in a haze of ecstasy. The faithful had followed, and by morning's light, his once grand following was almost all dead, having laid waste to each other, thinking that the God had wanted their deaths in some great rite that only Tigernmus had known.
Crom Cruach cursed the day he ever met the mortal born bastard.
But now, now something was tugging at his senses. The sounds of screams. The sound of weeping parents. The sounds of children crying out from mercy, for help, for an end to pain.
A great shadow rose up from the ground on the west coast of Wales. The cloud looked west, hovering at the waterline. The calls were old. He had woken too late. But the misery from the Green Isle he had once called home was almost enough to touch. Something had happened. Something, no….someone had invoked his name while putting the first born to the knife.
The God slunk back into the slag at the bottom of the cliff, anticipation humming through him. His priest was coming. They had woken. They had obeyed.
The God drew back into the ether, but kept his senses tuned to the mortal realm. Soon, soon it would be time. And then…
A great cloud of birds rose with a shriek from the shore. A host of them fell from the sky, paralyzed with fear. They drowned in the small waves lapping at the base of the cliff. Inside the rocky caves, Crom Cruach laughed.
End Chapter Nine