The Trio Who Returned, Chapter 09
by Technomad
When Harry awoke, he was pleasantly surprised to find that Kreacher had succeeded. Mundungus Fletcher was tied to one of the pillars of the basement, very unhappy and very vocal about it. He was even less happy when he saw the Trio's coffins opening, and them rising up, gaunt, pale and red-eyed.
"Oh, Merlin! You're…you're vampires! You're going to drink me blood!" Terrified, Fletcher began thrashing, trying to get free of the ropes Kreacher had apparently conjured up to hold him. "Help! HELP ME! HELP! I was kidnapped by a mad house-elf an' given to vampires! Help me, anybody! Please!"
Harry smiled, and his two friends smiled as well. For some strange reason, probably the fangs they were showing, Mundungus found that less than reassuring. His eyes rolled up in his head and he fainted dead away. Harry's nose told him that the thief's bladder had cut loose.
"Clean that up, Kreacher," Harry ordered, pointing his finger. Kreacher nodded; he hadn't taken his eyes off Fletcher since he had brought the unconscious wizard in and bound him with magical ropes. A snap of Kreacher's fingers, and Mundungus Fletcher was cleaner than he'd been in a long time. Harry leaned down and twisted Fletcher's earlobe, and Fletcher came back to consciousness, clearly wishing he hadn't.
"What do yer want wiv me?" Fletcher whined, in an agony of fear. "Ain't yer goin' to drink me blood?"
"No, Fletcher," purred Hermione. She smiled mockingly at the terrified thief. "We have standards, after all." She laughed, a sound like icy goblets shattering. "Rapists, muggers…but not you. No self-respecting nosferatu would want you!"
"We wouldn't want to taste your blood," sneered Ron. "It might make us sick. You wouldn't want that, would you, now?" From Fletcher's expression, he would…but he looked at all three of them, and made the wisest decision he had made in a long time by keeping his lips zipped.
"We just want to know what happened to something Kreacher said you took from this house," Harry explained. He squatted down, staring into the terrified Mundungus' eyes, exerting his hypnotic powers to calm the man down enough to talk. "We're looking for an ornate silver locket, with the letter 'S' on it. Show him the drawing you made, Kreacher!"
Mundungus Fletcher looked carefully at Kreacher's picture. "Yeah. Yeah, I took this. Didn't think you lot wanted it! You tried throwin' it out, but that barmy house-elf nicked it an' I took it from him! Didn't mean any harm…"
Harry reached out and took Mundungus by the ear. "Listen, you sticky-fingered little wretch, and listen real good, because I'm only going to say this once! Don't ever 'nick' anything from this house again, as long as you live? Do we understand each other?" Mundungus stared at Harry, petrified by fear. Harry slapped him hard across the head. "I said, do we understand each other?"
"Yes!"
"I can't hear you…" Harry carolled.
"YES!"
"You forgot something…"
"YES SIR!"
"That's better!" Harry beamed approval, like a proud teacher who had just got the class numbskull to understand a simple concept. "That wasn't so hard, now was it?"
"No sir!"
"Now, about this locket. You say you did take it. Where did you put it? Did you sell it, and if so, to whom?"
"Didn't sell it! Didn't get a chance, did I?" Tears and snot dribbled down Mundungus' face. "Never got a chance to profit off all me hard work, did I?"
"Aww, poor baby," Hermione purred, producing a hanky to wipe Mundungus' goo off him. "Kind of sucks, being a hardworking thief! Nobody ever lets you have a little dishonest gain!"
"Nasty old Aurors, people like us…if I didn't know better, I'd think you'd do better getting an honest job and going straight!" Ron said mockingly. "But, back to our point: What happened to that damned locket?"
"She took it! She said she was goin' to run me in for sellin' magical trinkets without a license, but she'd just take that locket and call it square!" Mundungus looked around at the trio, anger and indignation overriding his terror. "What's the bleedin' point of bein' honest, when respectable Ministry officials goes around takin' bribes an' shakin' folks down?"
"Which official was this? This is important to us! You want to get rid of the Dark Lord, don't you?" At the mention of the Dark Lord, Mundungus' eyes went wide as saucers. "We need this thing to help us get rid of the Dark Lord!"
"That bastard! Why weren't you sayin' so the first place?" Mundungus swelled with indignation. "It was that fat little woman in pink from the Ministry! The one with the kitten fetish!"
"You mean…Dolores Umbridge?" Harry, Ron and Hermione looked at each other, hardly daring to believe their luck.
"You know 'er, then?"
"Oh, do we ever! I could just kiss you!" For some reason, Hermione's exclamation didn't seem to reassure their captive thief. His eyes rolled up and he fainted again."
OOO
Some time later, after a refreshing snack (some alley-bashers had thought that Ron, "reeling drunk," was an easy target; they'd never make that mistake again, or any other) the Trio forgathered in the main parlour of Grimmauld Place to figure out how to get at Dolores Umbridge.
"She doesn't go to work at night," Ron said. He was their ranking expert on the Ministry and its workings, from years listening to his dad talk about his job. "Almost nobody does. Even the Unspeakables in the Department of Mysteries shut down tight after sundown."
"So just waiting for her in her office is right out," mused Hermione. "Having her find us in there, unconscious and helpless, is not the way we want to go."
"True, that." All three vampires looked rueful. For the most part, their new status was an unmixed advantage…but it did have its drawbacks. So far, they had played to their strengths. Luckily, wizards were an irreligious lot, so nobody had tried fending them off with holy objects. And British cooking, equally luckily for them, did not run to garlic, to put it very mildly. But sunlight was a deadly peril no matter what.
"We need to lure her somewhere." Hermione muttered, looking abstracted, as she usually did when she was deep in thought. "Someplace where she's isolated, and would come at night."
"We need to find out more about her habits," Harry concluded. "And I know just who we can put on the job, don't I just?" All three friends smiled evilly.
OOO
When they released him and spoke to him about it, Mundungus Fletcher expressed pathetic eagerness to help. "Anything I can do, guv'nor! Anything! I promise it! You can trust me!"
The three friends looked at each other, rolling their eyes, before Hermione stepped forward, fixing Mundungus with her hypnotic stare. "Just to make sure, Dung," she purred, as she leaned down and fastened her teeth in his neck. When she stepped back, there were two little rivulets of blood running down each side of her chin, and Mundungus Fletcher was staring at her with outright worship in his eyes.
"You'll tell your Hermione everything, won't you, Dungy?"
"Oh, yes, mistress, everything! May I go now?" When she nodded regally, he turned on the spot and Disapparated.
"This is marginally better than dealing with that can of worms that Wormtail used for a mind," Hermione remarked, "but not by much." The three went back downstairs, since daylight was coming on. As they walked by, they noticed that Kreacher was giving Lord Voldemort some water, and that he had been cleaned up some. The soi-disant Dark Lord hung in his bonds, his eyes glazed over.
"Keep him alive, Kreacher," Harry directed. "Eventually, I want him to die, but he has to suffer a lot more, first." Harry smiled at the thought. "He's got a lot of paying back to do, doesn't he, just?"
"Oh, yes, mighty master!" Kreacher gave Harry a beaming smile. "He hurt poor Kreacher, and drove Master Regulus to his death! Poor Master Regulus had Kreacher take him out to the nasty island in the cave, and when Regulus had drunk all the potion, he took the locket, gave it to Kreacher, and told Kreacher to destroy it!" The elf's face twisted with remembered pain and grief, and he began to sob. "Kreacher failed, Kreacher tried, but poor Kreacher could not figure out how to destroy that locket! And poor Mistress, never knowing where her boy had gone…"
The Trio looked at each other, slightly rueful expressions on their faces. "There's times when I think I've gone completely evil," Hermione muttered, "but then I find out new things about Voldemort, and I realise that even if I am evil, there are things I could never do. I'd never, never abuse a loyal elf the way he did!"
"We may be evil," Harry said, "but sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, and set a thief to catch a thief. Compared with what Voldemort did, and what he would have done, and would still do if he somehow won free and got his mind back, we're fairly harmless."
Ron looked up at the cellar's windows. Off in the east, the sky was visibly light. "Dawn's coming, friends. Let's head for our slumbers, and worry about whether we're evil or not later. There'll be time for abstract philosophy after we destroy the last Horcrux and put Him out of our misery."
None of them could argue with that, and they all headed for their coffins.
END Chapter 09