Author's Note: So…no reviews from the last chapter, although I am glad to welcome guillermina as a follower to this story. This second chapter was really hard to write, but I hope for more reviews and followers. Enjoy the update!

Chapter Two: The Unbreakable Spell

The explosion launched Harry off his feet. Albus' hand was ripped from his, and Harry landed hard on his back on the concrete platform. Pain radiated through his body. Something cracked. Since he had suffered his first broken arm in his second year at Hogwarts (in addition to a few other fractures since reaching adulthood), Harry was familiar with the painful sensation of the initial break followed by the rush of adrenaline.

Harry rolled onto his side. His ears rang with the tinny sound of minor hearing loss following an explosion, and his vision was clouded by the thick gray smoke enveloping the platform. Harry groaned from the aching in his head; other than the splitting, pounding pain in his head and the tear-jerking agony of his broken bone, Harry thought about his children, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione. There was a stink of something not right about the train's explosion, something Dark.

"Albus! James! Ginny!" Harry knew his mouth was moving, but he couldn't hear his own voice. The ringing in his ears, that was all he heard at the moment. Harry rolled onto his left side and put his left hand under his body to stand up and gain his bearings. There were lights flashing back and forth through the thick smoke shrouding Platform 9 ¾. "Ginny! James! Albus!" The lights looked like spells being cast, and that could not be a good sign at all.

Harry staggered forth into the smoke. He felt as unsteady on his feet as he had the previous Christmas, when George (one of Ron and Ginny's older brothers) had magically slipped half a bottle of Firewhisky into a glass of Harry's egg nog. Harry was still piecing together the events of that night with Ginny's help. He had to find Ginny. Harry reached into his pocket for his wand, his most reliable and consistent weapon in the magical world.

"Ginny! Ginny, where… where are you? Albus!"

Suddenly, someone grabbed Harry's shoulder. He whirled around, ready to employ his favorite defensive charm, the Expelliarmus Charm, but he lowered his wand before casting the charm. Ron leaned on the shoulders of Hermione and Ginny. Ron looked as though he had fallen unconscious, and Ginny's and Hermione's faces were covered with soot. They were sweating from the strain of carrying Ron's body.

"Hermione! Ginny!" Harry opened his arms wide to embrace the two of them. The ringing in his ears started to subside.

"Thank Merlin, we found you, Harry!" Ginny hugged her husband a few seconds longer than Hermione and brushed her lips against his right cheek.

"Ron, is he…"

"He got hit with a spell…I'm not sure what, but it looked like a Memory Charm. It's working like a Stunning Charm though," Hermione responded.

A man bellowed from within the smoke, and there was another explosion that rocked the station. Screams and more exchanges of lights followed the explosion. Hermione and Ginny cowered. "Where are Hugo and Rose?"

"We had to place a Concealment Charm over them. We tried to send them back through the portal to King's Cross but the portal's shut! Everything's gone crazy…" Hermione sniffled. "We can't get Ron to wake up but he has a pulse. He's not dead."

"Harry, where are James? And Albus? Weren't they on the train?" Ginny asked. Her petite face scrunched with worry.

"James was, but not Albus. Not yet." A stray spell cut through the smoke and blasted out a chunk of wall behind Harry. The three of them cowered and searched through the smoke for the wizard who had cast it. There was no sign of him or her. There was no way to tell friend from foe. "We have to…we have to find them!"

The three friends crouched to stay lower than the thickest part of the smoke and avoid any spells. "We can't carry Ron! It's impossible in all this smoke!" Ginny yelled.

"We can't leave him behind! We just can't!" Hermione yelled back.

"I don't want to leave him behind either, but right now, he's just deadweight. We need to find James and Albus, and find a way out of here. And we need to help whoever else we can help, too," Harry whispered. He guessed that they were away from the protection of the back of the train platform. The closer they were to other people, the less risk he wanted to take that someone might hear them.

Hermione lowered Ron from her shoulder, took off her wedding ring, and tapped it with her wand. "Portus," she whispered. It glowed bright blue. She touched Ron's limp left hand to the ring and he disappeared in a swirl of color and light. "There. I sent him directly to St. Mungo's."

A fireball, as wide around as the three of them, sailed over Harry, Hermione, and Ginny's heads. They heard the earth-shaking explosion when the fireball struck the wall of the platform. Debris flew from the wall and landed all around them in massive, rock-sized chunks. The fireball seemed to eat away the remaining smoke, providing a clear view of the train docked at the platform.

The explosion from the front of the train had created a hole along the right side of the train's front two carriages and engine. Scarlet stained scarlet as the shimmering blood of Hogwarts students painted grim lines along the broken walls of the train carriage. There were more than a few dead people lying among the rubble on the platform from the explosion. Smoke still billowed from the train. Harry's jaw dropped.

"No…"

"Oh God, the children!" Ginny started to run toward the second carriage of the train, followed closely by Hermione and Harry.

A brilliant blue light struck Hermione and slammed her against the side of the third carriage. Ginny stopped in her tracks, as another beam of light struck Harry's right side. It felt like the time a basilisk fang had embedded in his arm in his second year at Hogwarts, only it was in his entire right side. Harry fell to the ground, clutching his side in pain. He was still aware enough to see a blinding red light envelop Ginny and lift her from the ground.

"Ginny! Hermione! No!" Harry grunted. In his fourth year at Hogwarts, a demented Death Eater had tested Harry with two of the three Unforgivable Curses—the Imperius Curse, which allowed the caster to control the mind of the spell's subject, and the Cruciatus Curse, which inflicted immeasurable amounts of agonizing pain on the subject of the spell. Harry had easily thrown off the Imperius Curse, but the Cruciatus Curse was the worst pain he thought he would ever feel. He was wrong.

"Where do you think you are going, Missus Potter?"

Suddenly his head nearly split open along the lightning-bolt scar on Harry's forehead. It was a relic from the attempt on his life by Lord Voldemort, when Harry was just a one-year old baby. Lord Voldemort's killing curse (the Avada Kedavra, the third of the Unforgivable Curses) rebounded upon him and ripped him from his body. Although Harry had survived because his mother sacrificed herself to keep him alive, Voldemort had killed both his parents. Whenever Harry's scar hurt, he knew Voldemort felt murderous.

But Voldemort was dead. He had been dead for sixteen years.

He lifted his wand in his hand. Suddenly it flew from his grasp. "You won't need that today, Mister Potter." The voice was cold but deep, like a baritone singer's voice. Harry thought the voice was familiar. He looked around for the source of the voice, even as his body was ripped by agonizing pain.

Five shrouded figures emerged from the smoke. Then there were more than five. One stood out from the rest, leading the advancing pack. He was taller and slimmer than the others, from the look of his robes. "I think we should reunite the happy couple."

He waved his wand, and the red light vanished from around Ginny's body. She collapsed only a few inches from Harry. Harry crawled over to her, lifted her head, and cradled her body in his arms. She wasn't breathing, and there were hundreds of cuts covering her body. "What did you do?!"

The tallest of the figures stepped closer to Harry and Ginny. "Magic that even you do not understand, Mister Potter; even with your high-ranking Ministry position and all your knowledge of the Dark Arts that entails." He gestured with his wand hand at Hermione and Ginny. "You have always been so foolish, Mister Potter. You're always trying to protect others. Haven't you failed today?"

"Leave them alone! If you want to destroy me…"

"I will do as I please, Mister Potter. I thought you might enjoy the knowledge that your children are dead. Your best friends, whatever that is to you, are dead. And your exceedingly plain, blood traitor wife is dead. And now, you shall join them. Now that there is no one left to die for you."

There was a brilliantly green light that rushed at Harry. A woman screamed, "Harry!"