Harry's fingers felt numb as he grabbed his wand.
"Expecto Patronum," he said weakly.
Silvery light whispered from his wand, but he knew it wouldn't be enough. The silvery glow flickered weakly against the approaching darkness.
"Think happy thoughts," he said to Ron and Hermione. It wouldn't be enough, but he had to do something.
Steven was on the ground checking on Amethyst, who'd reverted to her normal form. She was moaning something about not being good enough.
"Expecto patronum, expecto patronum, EXPECTO PATRONUM," Harry shouted.
Hermione dropped to the ground next to him. Ron fell shortly afterwards. The wall of death flowing toward them never stopped.
They reached the aurors and Snape and some of them broke off from the crowd. They surrounded the men and the girl. They hesitated for a moment, as though deciding which of them was going to do the honors. A moment later five of them lifted the men and the girl into the air. They began pulling their hoods back.
Harry's fear redoubled itself as some of other dementors reached the limits of his spell. It stopped them, but only just, and they tried to move around it.
Beside him, he could feel Steven standing suddenly.
"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Steven shouted.
The dementors holding the aurors hesitated, turning to look at Steven even as the wind stopped. Everything was suddenly, unnaturally silent.
"You've hurt too many people," Steven said. "I'm not going to let you hurt anybody else."
There was something odd happening; Steven's stomach was glowing inside his shirt, a glow that grew brighter and brighter as Steven pulled out his wand.
"EXPECTO PATRONUM!" Steven shouted.
Blazing light erupted from his wand, blinding Harry for a moment before it coalesced into something else.
It was large and white and it glowed in the darkness. It looked back at them, and for a moment Harry felt himself trembling a little.
"Lion," Steven whispered next to Harry.
The glowing white lion roared, and when it did, the dementors blew away, knocked back by its power.
It roared again at the dementors holding the aurors, and they too vanished, dropping the men. They were gone as though they'd never existed, blasted away by a creature unlike anything Harry had ever seen before.
Harry stared, flabbergasted. This wasn't anything like the corporeal patronuses Lupin had described. This was something entirely different.
"Lion, Lion, Lion!" Steven shouted. He ran forward to hug the creature, and there were tears in his eyes.
Harry doubted any wizard in the world had ever hugged his own Patronus, but Steven didn't seem to care.
Amethyst woke beside him.
"Lion?" she asked, staring at Steven and the creature he was now holding.
Hermione woke next, followed by Ron.
"What happened," she asked. Looking up, she saw Steven. "Is that Lion? I thought he was dead...and pink."
The aurors were already starting to stir.
Harry walked over to them and stunned all of them again, taking particular pleasure in stunning Snape. It wouldn't last long, but they needed to get Black out of the area, or he'd be Kissed the moment the Ministry could find a dementor.
"We need to get him out of here," he said to Steven, nodding toward Black.
There was no telling how long whatever tranquilizers Peridot had used would last., but they had to do something.
Steven nodded and grabbed the unconscious man, slinging him across the lion's back.
"You guys want a ride?" he asked.
Harry hesitated. The patronus didn't look fully tamed; there was a certain wildness about its expression that he didn't like.
Still, with Hermione taking Steven's hand and pulling up onto the creatures back, he didn't want to look like he was afraid.
He allowed himself to be pulled up onto the creature's back. It didn't seem like there would be enough room, but Steven slipped impossibly into the creature's mane so that half of his body vanished inside.
Ron pulled up last, helped on by Harry.
Peridot woke, and stared at them.
Amethyst changed into an owl and flew over to her, whispering in her ear. It looked like they were arguing quietly.
"Take us home, Lion," Steven said.
Before Harry could see how the argument ended, the lion was moving.
It was strange feeling muscled bunch under him that couldn't actually be muscle, even though his experience with the gems suggested that that was all they were.
The lion roared again, and suddenly a portal appeared before them.
They passed through it, and unlike apportation, which felt like being squeezed through a small tube, or floo travel, which was strange in its own way, this was painless.
A moment later they were inside a large cavern.
It was lit by gently glowing crystals carefully set in various places, and there were huge piles of junk set everywhere.
Steven slid out of the lion's mane and he carefully pulled Black from the creature's back.
Harry slid off the creature and helped Hermione and Ron down. He turned and found the creature staring at him, its face only inches away from his own.
Steven was crying again, and he embraced the creature.
He held it until it finally vanished.
Sirius woke, his body aching in places it had never ached before.
He hadn't been Kissed yet, which was an unexpected blessing, but he didn't know where he was, and he couldn't move. It took him a moment to realize that he was tied to a chair.
A small creature with lime green skin was standing before him, shining some sort of Muggle light in his eyes. She was blonde, and he struggled to remember if he could recognize her species. It had been at least fifteen years since his classes in Hogwarts and he had no idea. She certainly wasn't a goblin or any kind of creature he recognized.
The light in his eyes contrasted with the darkness beyond so that he could see nothing outside the circle of light.
"He's awake," she said. She looked off to the side and said "I told you I didn't use too many tranquilizers. Wizards are tougher than ordinary humans."
Tranquiliers? From what Sirius recalled, too many tranquilizers could kill.
"Where am I?" he asked. His throat was dry and his lips were cracked. His time in Azkaban had made him used to physical deprivations, but he was thirstier than he could remember being. It might be a side effect of whatever Muggle chemicals were flowing through his body.
There was a strange taste in his mouth, one he couldn't identify.
"We're asking the questions here!" the small woman said. She leaned forward, "And if you don't answer them truthfully, we've got ways to make you talk."
There was a sound of whispering to the side, and the woman said, "And then we'll give you to Snape."
He shuddered involuntarily. Snape had no reason to love him and every reason to hate him, and from every report he wasn't kind even to the people that he liked.
"What do you want to know?"
"Why did you betray the Potters?"
"I didn't," he said wearily. "I loved them."
"You were their secret keeper," the woman said. "And Voldemort found them."
"Everybody thought I was the keeper," Sirius said. He laughed bitterly. "I always thought I was cleverer than everybody else, so I thought switching places with Peter was the perfect trick on everybody."
"You admitted to the crime," the woman said, her eyes squinting suspiciously. "Why would you say you'd killed them if you didn't?"
"I DID kill them," Sirius insisted. "The moment I suggested Peter as the secret keeper, I was signing their death warrants."
A purple woman stepped into view. "So why didn't you run?"
She too was of no species he'd ever seen. However, in his explorations of Hogwarts he'd heard rumors of a purple woman.
"I deserved Azkaban. My friends were dead, and it was my fault."
"You escaped, though," the woman said, glancing off to the side. There more whispering, although Sirius couldn't make out what was being said.
"Why now?"
"I saw a picture in the paper of a family on holiday. There was a rat in the picture, missing a toe. I knew it was Peter, and I knew I had to escape."
"Is that enough?" the purple woman asked.
The whispering must have been affirmative, because a moment later the purple woman reached up at shut off the lamp.
Sirius blinked, suddenly blinded as his eyes struggled to regain their nightsight.
As his vision returned he realized that he was in a cavern somewhere, and that there was a distressing amount of junk gathered in huge piles scattered everywhere.
"I told you I could be scary," the small green woman was saying proudly to the purple woman. The purple woman was rolling her eyes.
Stepping into his field of vision was a young boy, smaller and thinner than he could ever recall being in his marauder days. He was the spitting image of his father.
Sirius had only seen him from a distance, but he'd have known him anywhere.
He blinked. "Harry?"
"It's OK," Harry said. "Let him go."
Sirus felt hands working the ropes around his wrists. He slowly pulled them around to his front and rubbed them.
Harry pulled out a vial. "I'm sorry we had to use this, but we had to be sure."
Veritaserum. It had to be.
"Lupin gave it to us," Harry said. "We tested it on ourselves just in case he was trying to trick us."
Harry looked suddenly embarrassed, and Sirius wondered what secret's he'd been forced to reveal until the sip of veritaserum he'd taken had worn off.
How many secrets could a boy his age possibly have? From what Sirius had heard he wasn't a prankster like his father had been, and he wasn't involved in anything deep and dark.
"Veritaserum doesn't always work," Sirius forced himself to say. "There are tricks of the mind you can use to defeat it."
"Do you know those tricks?"
"No," Sirius said. "But if I did, I could be lying."
"You wouldn't tell us about it if you were lying."
Sirius stared at the boy and wondered if he'd ever been this naive. If the boy had already known about occlumency then he'd have been suspicious. During the war, Sirius had learned more than he wanted about how to gain people's trust.
There was something in the boy's expression; dawning hope, fear...this was a boy who had been hurt over and over and didn't trust that things could ever be better. He still wasn't so lost as to have given up hope.
He could only hope that he didn't betray this boy's trust.