Chapter Eight: A Ladder
"I don't understand…"
"Neither did we at first." The Redferns have a wonderful knack of speaking in whispers exactly the way they did normally. They can be sarcastic or merry or anything, only hard to hear. I know for a fact that Fred and George can too, but it seemed to be unnerving Charlie a bit -or maybe that was something else…
"But then they started conjuring Dark Marks all over and painting these…" Sam gestured out the window at the pub on the corner. The glass front windows were smashed and something had been drawn, graffiti-style, with what looked a lot like Muggle spray-paint but might have been a particularly focused paint charm. The sounds of smashing glass and screams were echoing around the place. Every so often a black robe or a fleeing inhabitant would run past the Redferns' shop. The counter, behind which we were huddled, had mirrors on display above, and it was through those the triplets had been watching the nightmare outside. They were hiding fairly well, and thanks to some good warding, noone had broken their window and gotten in yet, but some painting showed through. Sam indicated the half showing through their window in the biggest mirror as she spoke. "It isn't the symbol of Austria, that much I know, and the head's off…"
"It's a decapitated phoenix," Charlie explained with a horrible steely note in his voice. Mel and Ken gasped. "They're attacking the shops of people who stand against You-Know-Who."
"Which is every odd shop down Knockturn," Ken explained. Charlie looked startled.
"You don't know the area…against the Ministry isn't always against the side of right," Mel smiled sheepishly. "Lots of the tradesmen are loyal to Dumbledore, even if not to Fudge-it -I mean, Fudge."
"Personally, I hate the ol' bastard," Ken remarked candidly, with a nervous grin.
"Keeps sending Aurors around the doors of the shop. Noone can sell a thing, and forget buying, so business is down the loo…" Sam growled.
"But we'd give the shop to the Headmaster if he needed it!"
"And the Dark Lord can 'ave the loo!" Ken joked, keeping up the brave façade fairly well, I thought. I could tell the Redferns were terrified. After all, so was I. But I knew a little of what to do…
"Have you an upstairs grate and some Floo powder?" I asked, still whispering. "The garret, perhaps? Where the street can't hear?"
"Of course! We use it for smutty love letters. People pay us to send them untraceably."
"Okay." They are a funny lot, even in the worst of times. "Ken and Sam, keep on with the shielding charms on your front window."
"Do you know another besides 'impervius'?" Charlie didn't need to think.
"Try 'incupricata.' It'll make them all shiny for awhile, but it should dent instead of break."
"Where th' hell are the Ministry?" Sam wondered aloud, her eyes narrowed in a manner that answered the question. The Ministry did not like Knockturn Alley, and it was no secret. The illegal trades that had flourished for so long, and the ineffective laws against many things some wizards considered their right, well, it had all bred a kind of scoff-law attitude over the ages, particularly during Fudge's tenure in office. It's very easy for a bad Minister who can't catch You-Know-Who to distract the public by pointing at fellows like Dung Fletcher or declaring a war on crime. Uncle Gard has a splendid joke about a kind of American Muggle guy, like a Minister, who declared a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on terrorism, and was working on a war on homosexuality when eight o'clock came and he had to stop and go eat dinner with family. There's a grain of truth in it, I'm not sure where, but that kind of mess certainly applies here, too. Fudge would declare the Enemy of Us All to be cockroaches if he thought it'd hold attention for long enough.
And if he wanted new taxes, he always had 'Knockturn Alley cleanup projects' to blame them on. Ministers had been using 'cleanups' as political giftwrap for decades. Just enough wizards were ignorant enough and frightened enough of Knockturn Alley to buy into that kind of rot.
Security had been jumped-up of late, but only to the point of slowing down business for the respectable trades there. That security was nowhere to be seen now, which meant it was more or less political posturing. Clearly, if Fudge couldn't bring Knockturn under his own control, he was not about to stop the Death Eaters from throwing a modern-day Kristallnacht. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had purposely looked away -or even aided the attack somehow. Anything was possible, given what the twins and Ginny had been telling me of late. And anyone who kept Dolores Umbridge in their employ was obviously a hand short of half-past two. In short, the Ministry were not going to help at all, not if Sam had the right of it.
Something else occurred to me just then.
"Mel, can you get a clear shot with a wand at my shop?"
"Of course."
"How about past it? Across the street?"
"Oh, you mean at-"
"Yes. Can you hit it?"
"Of course."
"Good. I want you to hit the front of that shop with the biggest, tackiest after-Christmas sale ad for yours that you can possibly manage." Charlie gave me a funny smile as I grinned. "The boys will know what we mean. After all…it's October."
"Then you two go owl or Floo or something…get us some help here!" Ken was beginning to look tense. "They're getting closer!"
"We will. Come on, Jess." In moments, we were halfway up the Redferns' spiral staircase. I could see flashes of light below through the grating of the steel steps, both from outside and from the triplets' warding spells. There was a bright glare of red for a split-second and the walls shook. The steps bucked beneath our feet and I felt a strong hand on my waist. I looked to my left and discovered I was even with Charlie's shirt buttons.
"Hold on," he muttered, hanging tightly to the center pole of the staircase with his right hand. His left, I realized, was holding just as tightly onto me. That thrice-damned camisole under that stupid slinky transparent excuse for a shirt was sliding ever-so-steadily upward, and a very inconvenient tingle was heading even faster up my spine. I caught hold of the center pole just a split-second before the steps started to fold on us. Charlie glanced down at me and I yelled something incoherent -not sure if I was saying 'run' or 'go' or 'damn,' but he headed up and I went with him and we jumped up onto the second floor just before the steps were gone. They had somehow spun down below us, like a screw, leaving only a bare pole with grooves in it. As we jumped, the stairs made a terrible screeching sound. I felt a horrible pain in my elbow as it hit the floorboards.
In retrospect, I think that elbows are the most painful place to land when falling. Your whole arm feels like it's been hexed with something illegal and no matter what you use to make it feel better, your arm aches for a day and a half afterward. It's awful.
And it makes you very irritable.
"What the hell, Sam?"
"It's a collapsible staircase, remember?"
"The spells from outside must've knocked it loose!"
The Redferns' is an odd place, really, speaking architecturally. The second and third floors have a kind of big central hole cut out, with railings, and normally a spiral staircase off to the left connects the three. That way, people on the top floors can see all that goes on below, which is neat, and the skylight lights up the whole place on summer afternoons. But it's also a real beast when the collapsible staircase –well, collapses.
"How do we get to the garret, then?"
"I know." Charlie pointed his wand at the edge of the ceiling above us and cast a spell I had never so much as heard of before. Vines shot out and upward with a flash of blue light, then tangled and twined into an odd, but unmistakable ladder.
"Brilliant!"
"Your new boy's got mad skills, Jessie."
I don't know what bothered me more, the phrase 'mad skills,' or the reference to Charlie as my 'new boy.' There was never an old boy. And he was certainly not mine. Was he? No, one date did not possession constitute…crap, I was thinking in Fudgian. And the awful American slang was pretty bad, too.
"Jessie, can you climb that if I hold it still?"
"Sure."
I didn't know if I could climb the damn thing. My experience with ladders of any kind was limited to Trelawney's classroom and fixing the roof. But there were Death Eaters outside and the walls were shaking and it was all quite scary as the hexes lit the shop like a disco –well, actually, that bit was a little neat, but otherwise it was terrifying. So I thought nothing of how my tail end looked in those harlot jeans my idiot friends had all but sprayed onto my body, ignored my fear, and headed up the ropy, viny thing Charlie had conjured up.
The garret wasn't far away, only about ten feet above the second floor, and I'm about five and a half or six, so with a jump I had roughly four feet of climb and then I got within reach of the railing and could tug myself up from there. That hurt my elbow, too, but soon I was on the third floor.
"You need some help?" I called. We were yelling to be heard as the noise from outside grew deafening.
"There isn't time! Have you got the Floo powder?" I found a jar next to the grate.
"Yeah!"
"Okay! You want to get ahold of Kingsley Shacklebolt!"
"Okay!"
And what happened next kind of goes without saying. Mr. Shacklebolt just happened to be giving a dinner party at his flat for his old classmates, all of whom were, of course, Aurors, being classmates from wherever Aurors learn to be Aurors and all –you get it, and they basically rescued the lot of us. I think it was ten Death Eaters arrested, and only three of the Knockturn Alley shopkeepers had injuries. I also think that Auror school or whatever must be a lot more fun than regular school, because they were all awake and still having the party at a little after three in the morning. Perhaps poker was involved.
The damage to the shops was quickly reversed, interestingly enough, with the aid of my twin best friends. Fred and George had been testing a new prank, shaped like an Easter egg, and designed after those Muggle balls of paint that can be fired from guns, only far more elaborate. One tosses the egg gently at any building, and it completely cleans and revamps the exterior, including the paint job, which it changes 'dramatically yet appropriately 9 times out of 10.' They had tested one on my shop, and the brick walls with cement edgework had been white painted lumber with forest green. It lasted for five minutes before I noticed and threatened them with cold cereal for dinner if they didn't fix it, but the Eggs were supposed to be more or less permanent if one liked the results.
The Spring Cleaning Easter Eggs worked beautifully, on eighteen out of the twenty affected shops. A bookstore specializing in occult texts, rare manuscripts and kinky pornography was suddenly fluorescent pink with silver glitter trim and a mirror ball. The pub next door liked this scheme and would happily have swapped, as they got a splendidly unfortunate black-on-white cow pattern for their exterior, but the Eggs always have that element of mischievous chance. One is either doing an entire spring cleaning, or turning one's house into a hideous discotheque. I only wish they'd come up with them sooner and loosed a box in Umbridge's office. Take that, schmaltzy kitten plates.
And the good news was, the boys were so pleased at the chance to really road-test the Easter Eggs, they completely missed the fact that their big brother and best (girl) friend had been together at three in the morning. It was pointless to go to bed, so I started breakfast while Charlie and the twins finished Egg-ing the Knockturn shops. (Altogether, I suspect they accomplished more than about ten Ministry cleanup projects ever could. The Eggs tend to do happy colors, as opposed to the pervading gloom Knockturn used to have.) I was making ordinary eggs both scrambled for Fred and poached like George likes, stripy bacon, and cinnamon rolls with nuts on when the three Weasleys came trooping in.
"That was bloody brilliant on Nooke's, you know. Can you pick which Egg does what?"
"Well, we can."
"But where would the joke be if we did?" Fred stopped mid-grin and sniffed. "Oh, to have had five sisters who cook instead of six brothers with rotting Quidditch socks of a morning…"
"Oi! Ginny cooks," Charlie defended.
"Yes, but we can actually eat Jessie's…merciful mother of Merlin, you're making-"
"Get away from the icing or you'll be eating it through your left nostril. Set the table, what?"
"'How fierce the mama tigress, thus we find the sister raven.'" Fred picked up a stack of slightly chipped plates while George began setting out mismatched silverware.
"Did you just quote bad poetry at me, Gred Weasley?"
"You know I'm Forge, Jessie."
"Are not. You're Fred."
"How does she do that?" Charlie inquired.
"Sodded if I know," Gred –I mean, Forge –dammit…George observed. "If our own Mum didn't mix us up, I'd assume it was a female thing."
"By the way," Charlie seemed to recall something. "Those Redfern triplets…"
"Yes?"
"Ken, Sam and Mel?" Charlie asked, a little accusingly.
"Kendra, Samantha and Melanie," I explained mildly. "They're good friends of mine."
"I just rather expected…well…"
"Guys?"
"They keep threatening to go on the cover of Witch Weekly with her for a story on girl tradesmen with masculine nicknames-"
"But we suspect it's a joke…"
"Well…and their hair's all different colors." Charlie looked confused.
"Oh, yeah. They trade 'em around a bit," I explained.
"…What?"
"They're…y'know, like that Tonks girl, the Auror? They switch their haircolors around and sometimes they do whole different faces. Helps with their job."
"But then how is it you tell them apart? Must be tricky enough with these two, if those three switch…"
"It's nothing to do with faces." I smiled over my shoulder, then turned around with a pan in one hand and a spatula in the other. I find men listen better when you've got food in your hands. "Let me guess. Scrambled for Gred, poached for Forge…Charlie?"
"I've never been able to decide on a preference."
"Really?"
Fred shook his head in disapproval and George let out a sigh:
"Something terribly indecisive about a fellow what can't tell how he likes his eggs."
"Drives Mum mental."
"How can eggs…?"
"Every year on birthdays she makes breakfast just how the one likes it,"
"Which is a blessing, we only have to endure eggs with kippers once annually,"
"Which is still too much,"
"But Charlie's never been able to lock it in."
"Every year she up and tries something different."
"And he likes them all."
"If he were as un-picky about women as about eggs, we'd have nephews of our own to corrupt, 'stead of waiting on Percy and What's-her-head,"
"And Bill's French one –the human pastry."
"Human pastry?" Charlie looked confused. "But Fleur's really not-"
"We mean pastry as in sweet and edible, not coated in icing and served on a plate-"
"Not that Bill'd object-"
"Guys, there is a lady present. Or have you forgot?"
I felt three things at that moment. One was my own upper teeth biting hard into my lower lip. Thank the deities I had turned back around, away from the table. Another was a weird little girly tingle I blamed on hormones and novelty after being 'one of the guys' since…well, ever.
And the third was the burner against the side of my hand. I am a bit clumsy anyway, and being startled doesn't help matters much. At least none of the guys noticed it. Fred and George were too busy first commenting on how much Charlie sounded like their dad, then accusing him of fancying their triplet, and generally forgetting completely the fact that I can, in fact, hear. If it didn't occasionally come in handy, I'd cut them a new spring for that little tendency. 'And it's not hard to understand,' I thought.. 'The table's a good five feet from the stove and partly around a corner…
'Wait a minute. Charlie defended me. Wow. Maybe I shouldn't be so okay with the boys forgetting I'm there. They don't do it often, only when he's there…wow. Charlie defended me. A lady present…and he meant me…'
This and other similarly idiotic thoughts were what both prevented the fairly large burn on my hand from hurting as I finished the eggs and let me forget that Fred and George tend to notice huge swelling welts when they appear, as do many sensible humans. So, like a dizzy-headed, crush-befuddled fourth-year idiot, I started bringing hot dishes in.
"Jessie!"
"Your hand!"
"What'd you do?"
"Oh. I –uh, must've burned it worse'n I thought. Stupid pan has a wonky handle…"
"Let me." Charlie turned my mistreated paw over, supporting the wrist with one of his very strong, very warm, disturbingly trembly-up-the-spine-inducing hands, and looked at the burn.
Words cannot describe the gut-flutteries which ensued from this. After all, Charlie knows a lot about burns. And for all he's got so many scars and such a dangerous career and all, he's really very gentle and meticulous sometimes…okay, he was looking at my hand, careful and concerned, like Granddad looks at a broken watch or something, only…well…kind of more so, like Granddad would look at a broken watch he really really cared about, or…
Oh, sod it. The hot guy was taking care of me. I was a nervous wreck and altogether inappropriately fascinated at the same time. You try it and see what you get. Gut-flutteries. Right little mess I was in.
"Fred, would you get us the burn salve?"
"Sure. Where is it?" Charlie looked at me. I managed to get out:
"Back of the fridge someplace. One of the shelves, some kind of plasticware…"
"And George, I need some gauze, or really clean handkerchiefs, and tape if you can find it."
"Be right back. Jess, you keep the medical kit in the upstairs closet, right?"
"…Yeah."
And just like that, we were as alone as we could possibly be. Fred was halfway in the fridge, doing the rummage thing, and George was thumping up the stairs. Charlie leaned a little closer, and not just to look at my hand.
"This is rather a rotten burn, Miss Tickes. Does it hurt?"
"Not that badly. I just sort of brushed it…"
"I'll have it better in no time." Charlie promised, laying a gentle kiss on my palm an inch or two from the swelling mark, then whispered: "Not much of a goodnight kiss, is it? Permission herewith filed to remedy said ineffectuality?"
Merciful gods and goddesses playing chess with pet cats! Charlie made bureaucratese sound sexy! The gut-flutteries were going absolutely bonkers and my cheeks were red as –well, dashed red, and I couldn't think of a damn thing to say and it was all so sweet and awkward and…
And I really didn't have to say anything at all, in the end. He didn't exactly wait for an answer like a bureaucrat, if you take my meaning.
And yes, it was wonderful.
And no, we did not get caught.
-Well, not then, anyway.
And that was how my first date with Charlie Weasley turned out.