Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Chapter 13

Being back at Grimmauld Place brought back memories that I had worked so hard to suppress since Sirius died. It wasn't that I didn't want to remember all of the good times that we had together, but it was just hard to think about it without wanting to start crying again because all of that was finished. After we all settled down in the house, I made it a point of walking around to get reacquainted with the house that I wished I could have lived in years ago with my godfather.

Seeing the rooms as empty as they were gave me a better understanding as to why Sirius had been so miserable when he was alone here. It wasn't a warm and inviting house to be forced to stay in and I sincerely understood why he wanted to get out of it every chance he could. Without people running about in it like they did when the Order took base here made the house almost appear sad.

I didn't wander too long and quickly found my way over to the sitting room. While I was there, I listened to the others that were speaking in the tapestry room. I couldn't make out exactly what they were saying at this distance, but it was comforting enough to know that they were there.

That was when a sudden surge of pain shot throughout my head and made me collapse onto the floor. The room around me felt like it faded into blackness as my hands shot up to my head in attempt to hold my head together so it wouldn't explode.

"You let them escape again!" a scream erupted as the scene began to develop from behind my eyelids.

On the floor, I saw a man that was writhing in pain and appeared to be shaking from fright as he refused to meet my eyes. There were others in the room, but my only focus was on him and the fury that seemed to take over my body.

"Draco!" the voice came out of me in a voice that was hardly recognizable. "Get over here and take care of this for me."

There was a motion in the room and a scared looking blonde boy walked into sight with his wand pointed at the horrified man on the ground. Through the sudden fury, my mind went into panic when I saw Draco step into this madness, but it quickly went away when another surge of anger flew through me.

"Do you want me to take this out on you as well?" the voice seethed from within me.

Draco swallowed in apparent fear in front of me and fixed his stance as he looked down at the man on the floor that stared up at him as if he were begging him to spare him. With a cry from Draco, a red spark flew from his wand and the man on the floor began to scream out in agony as he twitched from the torture that was being inflicted on him.

"Emily!" someone shouted from what seemed like miles away.

"Come, Nagini," the voice ordered.

My shoulders began to shake as everything around me fell into darkness once more and I realized that I was on the floor of the sitting room at Grimmauld Place. The hard ground beneath me told me that I had fallen onto the ground and I realized from the ringing in my ears that I had been screaming. Through the silence, I could only figure out that someone there was calling my name and attempting to get me back to my composure.

"Emily?" someone said, now in a whisper.

It took me only a moment to realize that it was Neville that was calling my name as I slowly began to unfold from the fetal-like position that I had taken on just a moment ago. When I began to sit up, I realized that I was shaking more than I ever had before and had a sickening feeling that I could vomit at any moment. While attempting to repress this sick feeling that I was having, I looked around and found Neville kneeling right beside me looking pale and afraid as he looked down at me.

"Are you okay?" he asked shakily.

He noticed my heavy shaking and pulled me in toward him and I clung onto him as if he was my only hope for regaining my sanity. Part of me wanted to cry, but I wouldn't allow myself to do that at this point. It wouldn't solve anything and would only make Neville more upset than he already was.

"You're here," Neville said. "Everything's going to be fine."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that he was more wrong than he had ever been. I knew that he was only trying to help me, but I couldn't help but think about how worse the situation had gotten in such a short amount of time.

"D-Draco is with him," I stammered as I pulled away and looked at him. "I saw him there – they were making him torture people because we got away."

Neville stayed silent, as though he was attempting to comprehend what I was saying. From the other room, I could hear Hermione speaking quickly and in a tone that I interpreted as panic. There wasn't a doubt in my mind that she was freaking out on Harry for not being able to block Voldemort's thoughts from his head. Other than that, I could clearly hear footsteps that were moving quickly toward the room that Neville and I were in. Seconds later, I saw Ron's panicked expression looking in on us.

"Are you okay?" Ron said as he stepped closer to Neville and me.

"Just fine," I lied breathlessly. "I assume that Harry saw it too?"

"Yeah, Hermione is giving him an earful now," Ron said as he glanced back in the direction that they were.

I began to stand up as I heard an additional two pairs of footsteps coming in my direction. Just as we both straightened ourselves out, Harry came into the room and was followed by Hermione, who was looking more worried than ever. She looked at me and appeared as though she was about to start on me, but I just held up my hand.

"Save the lecture, Hermione," I said with a glare.

"I wasn't – " she started.

"We need to be careful to stay out of sight from now on," I said. "If this happens again, he'll probably start killing off the people that we know."

"We'll just have to stay in the house for a while before we start looking around for Horcruxes," Harry said. "He's bound to have people on the lookout for us right now and we just need to let things settle down before we risk anything else."

Everyone agreed with this, but I could tell that Hermione still wanted to say something to me, but there wasn't a chance that I would allow her to. She didn't know what this was like and it was extraordinarily irritating that she could make this seem like it was something that was something so easy to ignore.

Rather than continue talking, everyone decided to find a place to lie down for the night. We were all beyond exhausted and were all too ready to fall into a temporary state of unconsciousness where we could forget our troubles – no matter how short that time may be.

The rest of the group fell asleep before Harry and me. I didn't actually see Harry's eyes open, but I could just tell that he couldn't have fallen asleep that easily, despite the fact that we were seriously in need of some sleep. Flashes of Draco torturing those people and Voldemort's fury kept going through my mind and made it impossible for me to settle down enough to fall asleep.

"How long do you think we can hide here before they find us?" Harry whispered from a few feet away.

I turned over and looked at him through the darkness. Harry was laying on a sleeping bag on the ground, just like me, while the others lay on the three couches that were in the room. The sound of their light breathing was the only other noise that went through the room.

"I don't know," I whispered back. "I couldn't imagine that they won't eventually find us here…it isn't like Snape hasn't told the others about this place by now."

We were silent for a moment and I tried to consider the idea that Snape might not mention this place out of decency. That thought quickly fled my mind when flashes of him watching Dumbledore falling from the Astronomy Tower resurfaced in my mind. They were bound to find us here eventually if we stayed long enough. That sorry excuse for a human being would find the first chance to sell us out to his master.

"I'm sorry," Harry said to me.

"For what?" I asked.

"I just know that it's hard for you because of Snape – " he said.

"Please don't," I cut him off. "We have other things to worry about. I'm fine – trust me…I'm just tired…"

The last thing I wanted to discuss right now was my feelings about Severus Snape. It was enough that they all looked at me like I was some kind of wounded animal, but I had no interest in continuously hearing pity from the voice of my brother. I did, however, want to talk about the state that Draco was in with Voldemort using him as a slave, but I seriously doubted that Harry had the same opinion of him. For all I knew, he gathered that he was just acting as a loyal servant to Voldemort, but I could tell the difference. Draco could be an annoying prick, but he was not torturing those people because he wanted to.

When I woke up the next morning, I found that Harry was no longer in his sleeping bag. Everyone else looked like they were fast asleep and I decided to slip out of my bag as well and find out where Harry had gone. I quickly found that he was not downstairs, so I went up to the only room upstairs that I could imagine he would be in. When I approached the door to Sirius's room, I quickly remembered that I'd never actually set foot in there. If it weren't for the rustling of paper that I heard on the other side of the door, I probably wouldn't have even put my hand on the doorknob.

When I stepped in, I was surprised to see the room look as though a tornado had gone through it and tossed everything around into a disastrous mess. Next to a pile of paper and parchment, I saw Harry flipping through the various envelopes as if he was searching for something specific.

"What happened in here?" I asked.

He jumped when he heard my voice and looked surprised that someone had come into the room without him being aware of it. I made a mental note to remind him that he should probably stay aware of his surroundings considering the predicament we were in.

"It was like this when I got here," he murmured as he gripped onto a piece of parchment in his left hand.

"What is that?" I asked and pointed to what he was holding.

He was quiet for a minute as he looked down at it and unfolded it. The bottom part of the parchment was obviously ripped off and I began to assume that Harry must have been searching for the remaining piece of it.

"It's a letter to Sirius from our mother," he said as he scanned it.

"W-what?" I stammered and stepped over to look at it from over his shoulder.

In very neat handwriting, I saw this:

Dear Padfoot,

Thank you, thank you, for Harry and Emily's birthday presents! Your gifts were their favorite by far. One year old and they're already zooming along on toy broomsticks; they looked so pleased with themselves – though I find that Emily finds it more amusing to watch Harry crash into the furniture! I'm enclosing a picture so you can see. You know it only rises about two feet off the ground but he nearly killed the cat and he smashed a horrible vase Petunia sent me for Christmas (no complaints there); Emily laughed so much that she fell right off of her broomstick. Of course James thought it was so funny, says they're going to be great Quidditch players but we've had to pack away all the ornaments and make sure we don't take our eyes off them when they get going.

We had a very quiet birthday tea, just us and old Bathilda who has always been sweet to us and who dotes on Harry. We were so sorry you couldn't come, but the Order's got to come first, and Harry and Emily are not old enough to know that it's their birthday anyway! James is getting a bit frustrated shut up here, he tries not to show it but I can tell – also Dumbledore's still got his Invisibility Cloak, so no chance of little excursions. If you could visit, it would cheer him up so much. Wormy was here last weekend. I thought he seemed down, but that was probably the next about the McKinnons; I cried all evening when I heard.

Bathilda drops in most days, she's a fascinating old thing with the most amazing stories about Dumbledore. I'm not sure he'd be pleased if he knew! I don't know how much to believe, actually because it seems incredible that Dumbledore

I finished reading and then felt the urge to turn over the entire room to find the rest of the letter. No wonder Harry seemed so intent on finding the missing portion of the letter.

"That Dumbledore what?" I asked in annoyance.

"Exactly," Harry said with understanding. "That's what I've been trying to find out. The only thing I've found is this…"

He held up a small picture where I saw what our mother was referencing in the beginning of her letter. In it, I could clearly make out a small Harry chasing a terrified black cat around on his broom where a small redheaded girl sat laughing and clapping her hands as she watched them in the background. I smiled for a moment as I looked at how happy and normal our lives could have been if our parents had raised us. Everything would have been so different.

"I've looked through nearly everything here trying to find it, but there's nothing," Harry said. "But what's confusing me more than anything is that someone must have been in here before us."

"What do you think they were looking for?" I asked as I knelt beside him and flipped through old letters lying on Sirius's bedroom floor.

"It was probably the Death Eaters," Harry said. "I'm sure they searched the place before we found it."

I nodded and realized that it should have been obvious to me that someone had already searched the house for valuables before we got here. The Death Eaters were bound to know that no one was going to come back here once Sirius had died and seized the opportunity to take anything out of the house that they found worthwhile.

As Harry reread the letter that our mother wrote, I took in the room around me. Despite the clear indications that the room had been ransacked, I noticed that the posters on the walls that appeared to be untouched by the people that invaded the house. From where I was sitting, I could see various posters that showed off that Sirius had been in the Gryffindor House, which I'm sure irritated his entire family. Aside from that, there were pictures of him and his friends scattered around the wall space and the occasional pictures of unknown women. The younger pictures of him seemed so different than the Sirius I remember. It wasn't that he was never happy around me, but it was obvious that he was more carefree in the days of his youth before he lost the majority of his friends. I wish I could have known Sirius before he was taken to Azkaban and back when he was the man in these pictures.

When I heard movement and voices downstairs, I remembered that we weren't the only two people in the house. From the tone of our friends' voices, I could tell that there was some panic in where we had gone. To put their minds as ease and to allow my brother a few more moments in our godfather's room, I left the room and down the stairs to find them.

"Emily – there you are," Neville said from the hall when he saw me coming down the stairs. "Hermione thought something might have happened."

"No," I said. "Harry and I were just looking around upstairs…we're fine."

Hermione and Ron came into the hall as I got to the bottom of the stairs and looked more relieved than ever to see me.

"We woke up and you two were gone," Ron said as his eyes shifted over to Hermione. "We thought you might have left us."

"Why would we do that?" I asked.

"I…I don't know," Hermione shrugged.

Ron and Hermione shared a look that told me that she did actually know why she would think that. It's not exactly a mystery that Harry and I would have preferred them to stay at home where they were safe, but I thought they would know us well enough to know that we wouldn't abandon them at a time like this.

"What's Harry doing up there?" Hermione spoke again.

"He's just looking around Sirius' room," I told her.

"For what?" Ron asked.

"Well, he found this letter that our mother wrote to him and there's part of it missing," I said.

Without finishing what I was saying, they both started going up the stairs past me and made their way to Sirius' room. Neville just shrugged when I looked at him and then followed shortly behind them. Not feeling the need to stay down here when everyone else was going to interrogate Harry, I decided to follow them.

I stood just outside of the room with Neville as Harry filled them in on what he found in the letter and what he heard about Dumbledore at the wedding the day before. While he did, I noticed the room that was just on the other side of the hall.

Do Not Enter Without the Express Permission of Regulus Arcturus Black

When I saw the name, something clicked in my head and I stepped over toward the room and stared at it for a minute before I considered the possibility of this name. I had heard Sirius' brother's name before, but I had never seen the full name written out like that.

"Emily, what is it?" Neville asked me.

I turned around and saw everyone's head turn toward me when they heard Neville address me. My friend stepped over toward me and looked at the name and I hesitated to speak up to the others for a moment.

"Regulus Arcturus Black," I said to them.

"Yeah, that was his brother," Harry said.

"No, I knew that," I said to him. "But the initials – R.A.B."

Harry's mouth fell open and he stood up and walked over to look at the sign on the door as if he had to see it for himself. Ron and Hermione followed behind him slowly as they observed the sign for themselves.

"Isn't that what was on that fake locket?" Neville asked.

"Yeah, that was it," Hermione said. "You don't think it was him, do you?"

"It would make sense," I said. "Regulus was a former Death Eater that left when things got too serious. Do you think he could have known about the Horcruxes?"

"He might have," Harry said. "He was a Death Eater for long enough to put it into consideration…"

"And you think he might have tried to stop it all?" Ron asked.

"He obviously didn't agree with what was happening," I said. "Otherwise he wouldn't have just left – that's not something that happens very often. It's a big risk to just abandon Vo—You-Know-Who."

A look from Ron and Neville made me refrain from saying Voldemort's name. It was completely ridiculous that they were so afraid of a name, but I figured that there was no point in making them uncomfortable right now.

"It adds up, but there's no way that we can be certain that it was him that took the real locket," Harry said. "We never knew him and it's not like we can just go asking around."

He had a good point. Though it was the best lead that we've had since we found the fake Horcrux, there really wasn't any way that we could be certain that Regulus stole the real locket from the cave. I was about to say something else when I noticed a look on Harry's face that I could only describe as realization.

"What is it?" I asked.

"The locket – I remember seeing it here," Harry said quickly as he suddenly reached for the doorknob on Regulus' door. He quickly got it open and walked quickly and knowingly through the room. He stopped as if something else occurred to him and then immediately left the room and ran down the stairs.

"What is going on?" Neville asked as he watched my brother frantically walk ahead of us.

"No idea," I shrugged as we all moved behind him. "I'm just going with it."

We followed him into the kitchen where Harry immediately went to a cupboard that I knew Kreacher used to stay in when Sirius was here. When he opened it, I saw a variety of random trinkets that Kreacher must have stashed away. Harry immediately began tossing things around in there until he had looked at every object.

"It had to be here," Harry said. "He took it – I saw him do it."

"You saw him take the locket?" I asked. "When?"

"We were cleaning the house," Harry explained quickly. "We figured that it was just broken because it wouldn't open and Kreacher took it from us when we said that we didn't have any use for it. We figured it was just another stupid piece of memorabilia that he wanted to keep."

"Who is Kreacher?" Neville asked as he tried to keep up with the conversation.

"He was Sirius' house elf," Hermione explained.

"Then he must know where it is now!" I said. "Kreacher!"

There was a sudden pop in the room and an ancient looking house elf appeared in front of us. It was clear from the look on his face that he wanted to be anywhere else but surrounded by the people that were in this house. He had a complete look of disgust on his face when he saw that Hermione and Ron were in his presence, and I remembered how low his opinion was of them.

"Master and Mistress," he greeted us unenthusiastically.

He looked curiously at Neville, but appeared as if he didn't care enough to ask who he was. More than anything, he looked eager to exit the house as soon as he could.

"Hi, Kreacher," I said in an attempt to be nice. "We were wondering if you could answer a question for us…?"

"We were wondering what happened to that locket that you took from us?" Harry said.

For a moment, Kreacher looked into the distance as if he was trying to remember what exactly it was that we were talking about.

"Are you referring to Master Regulus's locket?" Kreacher asked.

"That's the one," I said. "Do you still have it somewhere?"

"No, I do not," he said as he looked at me.

I looked down at the ground and put my hands to my head. There goes our last hope in finding the locket. If he didn't have the locket anymore, then who did? Everyone else in the group shifted around in aggravation at the thought of losing our only lead to a Horcrux.

"Where is it now?" Harry asked, not willing to give up.

Kreacher went quiet and looked around nervously.

"It was stolen," he answered slowly.

"By who?" Hermione asked.

"I don't answer to Mudbloods," Kreacher spat.

"Don't you dare call her that ever again," I said. "That's an order."

Kreacher looked at me with irritation. For a moment, I felt weird about ordering him around. Something about him being forced to obey my every command felt incredibly wrong even though this was a perfectly reasonable order.

"Yes, Mistress," he said as glared at me.

"Right," I said while feeling slightly uncomfortable with that title. "So do you know who stole the locket?"

"…Yes," Kreacher answered without looking at any of us.

"And who was it?" Harry urged him on.

"Mundugus Flecher," he said with disgust. "He stole all of Kreacher's possessions – HE STOLE THEM! THE PICTURES AND THE LOCKET – EVERYTHING – I SAW HIM DO IT!"

Kreacher suddenly collapsed to the ground and started sobbing. Part of me had always felt sorry for Kreacher, but now I pitied him more than anything. Even though I knew that he was far too loyal to some of the worst people, I knew that it wasn't his fault. I let him have a cry for a moment before I asked him my next question.

"Kreacher…?" I started. "You said that you knew it was Master Regulus' locket – how did you know it was his?"

Harry looked uneasily at me as Kreacher's cries began to calm down. As he began to calm more, he looked over at me as he wiped his tears away.

"M-master Regulus found it," he said quietly.

"Where did he find it, Kreacher?" Harry asked.

For a long moment, Kreacher stayed quiet as we all eagerly stared at him. We didn't pressure him to answer, but every second he remained silent seemed like it lasted an eternity.

"A cave," he finally answered.

Thanks for reading! The next chapter should be up soon!