Chapter Forty-six:
The Time Turner
Edmond Lestrange had been waiting all afternoon for Dumbledore to leave his chambers at Hogwarts. Now that the old man was gone, he quickly slipped inside and went snuck quickly into his bedroom to look around.
I hope the damn thing is in here, he thought as he fiddled with gadgets and gizmos, trying to figure out the purpose of some of them as he went. Then he found the item Hermione had described to him and quickly pocketed it.
"Waste no time in using it," Hermione had said. "Don't wait to bring it to me, just turn it forward and go. Get the information we'll need, and return the time turner to where you find it. It must be returned to him so it can be given to me at the proper time. That's important."
With a little apprehension because he was about to go through time, Edmond flipped the dials and screwed his eyes shut tight as the room began to spin. Time went past faster and faster, until he absolutely had to look, to see what was happening around him.
Dumbledore came and went in the room many times, but he did not seem to notice the young man standing in the middle. That, at least, was a good thing. As he watched, there finally came a day when the old man moved out of the room and it was taken over by none other than Minerva McGonagall, obviously sometime far into the future considering she was at least thirty.
When he reached the time he'd set on the object, he was quite embarrassed to arrive just as the much older woman was exiting her bathroom in search of something to wear. He blushed furiously as she squealed and raised her wand.
"Lestrange?" she gasped instead of hexing him. She looked at the time turner in his hand and asked, "What do you think you're doing? You've got to have come from at least fifty years ago, by the look of you."
Then, remembering her state of dress, she turned and slid a robe around herself and moved to the dresser to brush her hair. Edmond finally shook off his slight shock and followed behind so that she could see him in her mirror.
"Sorry, Nerve, you weren't meant to see me," he explained. "This was Dumbledore's room when I started. And he was not meant to see me, either."
"Very well, then what, may I ask, are you doing here?"
"I need to find out which objects were turned into Horcruxes over the last fifty years by Voldemort."
Minerva jumped at the sound of his name, then frowned. "But that was all settled last year," she said in confusion. "Dumbledore ended it all. Surely there can be no need to change it now."
"No, no," he said. "You must understand, it was Dumbledore who did it all. It was Dumbledore who started everything, and he must be stopped before it all begins—before he forces Tom to become a Dark Lord at all."
Minerva laughed at this. "Why would Albus do that?" she scoffed. "He is a very good wizard. He saved us all."
"Because he set everything up so that he could," Edmond insisted. "He did it all to make himself look good, don't you see?"
"Nonsense," she said. "But why should I listen to you, anyway? You're just a Death Eater. Who knows what sort of agenda you're playing at."
"He's gotten to you, too, then?" Edmond asked with a defeated frown. "And you won't simply list off the Horcruxes for me?"
"Why would I do that?" she wanted to know. "You're the enemy in a war that doesn't exist anymore. Go home, Edmond."
"I won't go until I've got what I came for," he insisted. "And I am not an enemy because for me that war doesn't even exist to begin with. I'm hoping to stop it here and now. Will you not help to save thousands of lives? I always believed you to be smarter than that."
"Very well, then, I shall tell you," she said. "But when I've done, you must leave straightaway. I'll not have some Death Eater hanging about my bedroom."
"Thanks, Nerve," he said.
Minerva sat at her desk and wrote down the seven Horcruxes for him. She folded the paper in half and set it into his hand. "Good luck, Edmond," she said. "I hope you succeed. Though if you do, none of this will have happened at all. Time is such a strange thing, is it not?"
And with that, Lestrange grinned wryly and was gone.
)0(
"Granger? Are you here?"
"Yes, of course," Hermione answered.
"I've just had the strangest conversation," he told her. "Don't worry, I only spoke to one person in the future, and she told me only what I needed to know. I put the time turner back precisely how I found it and came back here."
"Excellent," said Hermione. "Who was it you talked to?"
"A student who graduated last year," he explained. "Her name is Minerva, though I cannot be sure if her last name remained the same. She made me a list of all the known Horcruxes and what happened to each."
"Then let us get to work on that," Hermione said as he handed her the parchment. "Maybe if we destroy some of the items before he can use them, it may be enough to make a difference. I just hope none of them are as difficult to find as the cloak seems to be"