Tonks brushed a blonde curl from her eyes and cursed her choice of disguise. She rarely chose hairstyles that impeded her vision, but she'd been in disguises so frequently as of late that she was running out of unique ideas. Even spells couldn't tame the hair she'd chosen. Thankfully, all she was doing was keeping post outside an old Gothic mansion on the outskirts of London.
"Are we sure this is the right place?" she whispered to Kingsley, who gave her a sharp look for violating the rules of stealth.
Tonks ignored him as she pushed on.
"Something isn't right. If the Death Eaters were planning to attack these Muggles, they'd be here by now. Our intel must have been wrong. Or there was a change of plans. There's nothing here."
From the start, she'd thought the mansion they were staking out was a bit too gaudy even for conceited purebloods, but she'd brushed that nagging thought aside because everything pointed towards their information being good. She shouldn't have ignored her instincts.
Kingsley sighed and ran a hand over his brow, feeling the same fatigue Tonks was. There was always wait time involved on Auror missions; that was something all new Aurors struggled with. This, however, was too much to be a coincidence.
Before Kingsley could reply, a silver streak came to a sudden stop in front of them and morphed into a wolf. Her heart nearly stopped in her chest. Despite never having seen it before, she knew the Patronus was Remus's. He'd been in on the meeting where Tonks and Kingsley were given their assignment, and there was no way he'd be contacting them during it unless it was an emergency.
Tonks's hand shot out to grip Kingsley's arm and steady herself without realizing what she was doing. She sucked in a breath as Remus's voice echoed in the air.
"Harry and five other students have gone to the Ministry. Kreacher says he conspired with Death Eaters. They set a trap."
The wolf dissipated, leaving Tonks gaping at a spot on the pavement. She became aware of her clenched fist wrinkling Kingsley's sleeve, but she didn't have the willpower to let go. No matter how much experience she gained, there were always moments where it felt like too much.
She'd been prepared for a fight at the Department of Mysteries eventually, but she hadn't been prepared for children to be there.
A million questions ran through her mind: How could Kreacher have conspired with Death Eaters? How had he spoken to Harry? What could have lured the kids there in the first place?
But she knew answers would have to wait. First, they had to act.
Taking a deep breath, she let go of Kingsley and pushed aside her own worries for the kids' safety. If she couldn't act with a level head, her worries were useless.
Her disguise, useless if they were confronting the Death Eaters directly, morphed into her usual features, pink hair and all.
Kingsley was already looking at her when she turned her gaze to him. His eyes glinted in the warm glow of a Muggle street light. With a sharp nod, he Disapparated, leaving Tonks to follow a second later.
They reappeared in front of the emergency Auror entrance in the Ministry, one kept secret for emergencies just like the one they were walking into. It wasn't secret enough to guarantee that none of the Death Eaters knew of it, but it did, at the very least, provide a common spot for Tonks and Kingsley to Apparate to.
Someone, Tonks realized the second she reappeared there, had told the rest of the Order about it too. Not only was Alastor Moody waiting for them, his hand tight around his walking stick, but Remus and Sirius were standing guard, as well with Sirius pacing back and forth and looking more like a caged animal than he ever had in Grimmauld Place.
"Is it just us?" Kingsley asked, his eyes scanning the group with a sense of unease that had settled in the pit of Tonks's stomach too.
"For now," Moody said with a shrug of acceptance. "There's no use waiting for more when the worst could already be happening down there."
"Then why are we still talking up here?" Sirius snapped.
His forehead was creased and his shoulders stiff as he glared at them. His wanted posters flashed through Tonks's mind.
"We need to get down there," he continued, his anger only cooling slightly. "We're wasting time up here."
No one disagreed as Sirius turned on his heel and approached the entrance, only to realize upon reaching it that he wasn't capable of opening it. Tonks pushed forward without stopping to let either of the elder Aurors do the honor. She lightly nudged Sirius out of the way and touched the tip of her wand to the brick wall, letting them recognize each other.
Much like Diagon Alley, the bricks disassembled to reveal an entrance that sloped steadily downward. Tonks suspected this entrance had been devised at the same time as that of the shopping district, leading to their similarity.
Sirius didn't say a thing as he pushed past her.
Alarms would be going off somewhere in the Ministry to alert security guards that an emergency entrance had been used, but no one mentioned that. Tonks shuttered as she imagined what had likely already happened to any employees who'd been in the building.
"What happened?" Tonks asked as they descended lower into the Ministry, with Tonks cursing the enchantments that made Apparating within the building impossible.
"We don't know much," Remus informed her, hurrying along at her side just steps behind Sirius. "Harry said something to Snape at Hogwarts that implied he thought that Sirius had been captured and taken to the Ministry. Snape contacted us to find Sirius fine and well. Kreacher admitted that Harry had been lured to the Ministry by the Death Eaters. Other than that, we don't know anything more than you do."
"Aside from the obvious," Moody said, his wooden leg clacking against the stone as they hurried. "They're in the Department of Mysteries. We already knew what those bastards were after. No use discussing their motive."
Tonks glanced over her shoulder, giving a short nod to her mentor as she set her jaw. The reality of the situation grew vivid as they got closer to the Department of Mysteries, the low lighting did little to interfere with their progress. All of them but Sirius had become familiar with the exact path they were taking over the previous months, and Sirius accepted Remus's guiding hand on his back from time without outright acknowledging it.
This time, however, they went farther than any of them had before. Sirius blasted the door to the Department of Mysteries open with little worry about the damage caused.
Once inside, they gathered in a huddle, the walls around them lined with doors that led farther inside.
"Which one are they in?" Sirius snapped, pacing back and forth in front of several of the doors.
He squinted at the marks that someone had left upon some of the doors.
"They wouldn't be in those," Remus mused. "Those must be the ones they left."
"Unless they went back inside one after they left it," Kingsley mused, approaching one of the marked doors for himself. "That could be useful if you were fleeing and wanted a known battlefield."
No one, not even Moody, argued with him as he waved his wand through the air and pressed his ear against the door, listening.
It was silent for a few seconds before Kingsley pulled back and shook his head with a furrowed brow. Tonks moved to another door without waiting for anyone else to act, vaguely aware of the others following her lead.
Pressing her ear against the door, she heard commotion inside that had few explanations other than human occupants.
"I think this is it!" she shouted louder than was necessary, pulling the others away from their respective doors.
Kingsley brushed past her to check for himself, nodding as he pulled away. His face hardened in the way it always did before a fight.
Tonks took a deep breath of her own, mentally preparing herself for what they were about to encounter.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside with the others pushing in beside her.
In a split second, she noted the veil standing in the center of the room and the steps that led to it from where they stood overlooking the strange amphitheatre. It sparked a curiosity in her that she quickly quelled as she focused on the chaos in front of them.
Lucius Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange, and other Death Eaters surrounded the teenagers they'd come to rescue. Without waiting for a command, Tonks sent a stunning spell directly at Lucius Malfoy's chest, allowing herself a moment of satisfaction as it hit its intended target.
The others quickly followed her lead in firing off spells of their own. The Death Eaters were eager to respond in kind, and it soon became impossible for Tonks to track the movements of everyone in the fight.
Her gaze, in search of a target, found the woman she refused to call an aunt. There was a surge of rage in her that she'd never encountered during combat. She'd imagined confronting Bellatrix, the woman who had been so terrible to her mother, since she'd escaped from Azkaban, and all of that festering anger surfaced as Bellatrix smirked up at her from atop a bench towards the bottom of the room. Her wand dangled loosely in her hand as if she didn't consider Tonks a serious threat.
Without waiting for her to make the first move, Tonks fired off spells, jumping from step to step as she went. Few of them met their target, but that was to be expected from someone with Bellatrix's experience. Tonks was merely satisfied with how many shield spells Bellatrix had to use and the way she had to repeatedly contort her body into strange shapes to avoid being hit.
Tonks stayed on her toes as she dodged Bellatrix's own offensive spells. It was invigorating as much as it was terrifying. Tonks didn't have any previous experience against someone of Bellatrix's calibre outside of her training. She had to admit that Bellatrix was a talented duelist, even if she was horrid in every way imaginable. Tonks relished each spell she cast and each one she dodged.
Time slowed as her senses narrowed only to Bellatrix and the magic travelling between them.
It was a stupid mistake, born out of Tonks becoming momentarily too cocky, that did her in. One second, she dodged a Leg-Locker Curse and couldn't help but smirk. The next second, she stumbled right into a well aimed Stupefy as if she'd meant to do it.
The last thing she saw was the stone floor rising towards her face before the whole world went black.