Chapter 5:

Assassins, Beware

Harry banished every last piece of rubble from atop his girlfriend directly at the assailant with a single wave of his wand.

None hit him, for he conjured some kind of wind dome around himself like a barrier to cushion him from the blows. They did, however drive him backwards towards the hole he had blasted into the owlery wall.

This offensive also achieved his secondary, or perhaps primary, goal of removing the hundreds of pounds of stone from his waif of a girlfriend. With everything save her cleared away Harry saw that she was alive, conscious, bloody and pissed.

She picked herself up without his help as he marched onward, drawing her wand and joining him in his pursuit of the assailant.

The would-be mugger leapt out of the hole adjacent to the staircase and entrance to the owlery and Harry leapt after him.

The sheer drop down the hill was interrupted only by a single corner of the staircase which Harry had been intent on body slamming that man into with his feet. Magic being what it was, they all feel like leaved floating in the wind instead of flesh and bone bodies. The man had cast some kind of slow falling charm on himself and Harry suspected Sue did the same for him. He didn't look back to see if she was following, opting to assume she was as he bared down on his enemy.

He never once broke eye contact as they propelled down the slope, occasionally kicking off of the rocky hillface as if they were descending a rock wall tied with ropes and safety harnesses.

Harry finally decided that he had relented in his fighting the man for long enough and began casting again.

"Glaciette." Harry hissed.

A single stalagmite of ice formed at the tip of his wand. It remained there until he banished it directly at the man's stomach. He put a bit more into the banisher than usual, hoping that with enough force it would pierce the dome of wind around the man. This thinking proved correct when it pierced his shoulder, it's trajectory being altered by the powerful wind.

The man actually tried to block it with a shield charm thinking it was a regular piercer, which Harry intentionally forewent in favor of something solid which shield charms are notoriously useless for stopping.

The man reached the ground first and turned to run, with his head turned over his shoulder to keep watch on them in case they decided to fire spells at him from behind.

This was smart on his part, because they decided to fire spells at him from behind before they even reached the ground. They continued to do so after reaching the ground and running after him.

The man proved to be an acrobat, vaulting left to avoid their duel blasting curses, then right to avoid a cutting curse by Harry that left a large cleft in the snow deep enough to tear up the earth beneath. He even managed to leap ten meters in the air with an ascendio variant, and threw a killing curse their way while in the air.

Harry and Sue had been shoulder to shoulder up until that point and only then realized the danger of being grouped like that. They spread out to avoid the killing curse and remained spread out to lessen the danger of future spells capable of taking them both out at once.

The killing curse smashed into the snow and had no noticeable effect other than blackening it. Harry would need to look into that later.

"Incendio!" Sue called out her spell.

Instead of sending a ball or stream of fire out of the tip of her wand like most people, the fire conjured itself on the man's position, exploding like grenade at his feet just as he landed. It must have interacted strangely with the whirlwind shield that was still surrounding the man to explode like that. Wind and fire magic did tend to amplify one-another, after all. Harry followed it up with another slashing curse, this time oriented horizontally instead of vertically in the hopes of removing the man's head from his shoulder. He missed entirely, as Sue's explosive fire charm sent back in the air ass over elbow, landing with a crash.

He picked himself back up in an instant, as if bouncing off of a trampoline onto his feet. Most of his mask was burnt away, revealing hateful brown eyes and black hair.

He raised his wand, aiming for Sue, and a green light once again materialized on it's tip.

Harry acted before he could encant the curse, pointing his own wand at the man and calling out the name of his favorite spell.

"Accio!" He all but screamed.

The target of his spell was not the man, nor his wand, nor his clothes nor the earth, snow and ice behind him. The target of his spell was the air itself, the volume and shape of his concentration being the sphere of space around the man previously occupied by the whirlwind shield.

The effects of his spell were immediate, as the a two square meters of space around the man became a perfect vacuum. The telltale effects of explosive decompression afflicted the man. Blood gushed out of his tear ducts and ears as he grasped pitifully at his throat, trying to suck air that wasn't there into lung that had likely collapsed from the sudden lack of air pressure. More strangely, he stuck out his tongue which seemed to be steaming, as if the saliva on it was boiling. In fact, it was boiling away, as burn marks lacerated the skin of his face.

Taking pity on the man, Harry banished the air back in all at once with a loud boom. Seeing a man's eyes imploding like eggs grasped just a little too hard was not on his list of things to experience that day. Nor seeing him drop like a marionette with its strings cut. He didn't even twitch after hitting the ground.

Harry was certain the man was dead, with his lung having been collapsed and then burst in a matter of seconds from explosive decompression followed by explosive re-compression. Sue didn't take any chances.

"Percussio! Diffindo! Bombarda! Ava…" She stopped on that last one only because Harry put his hand on her shaking arm.

There was no point in doing anymore to the corpse. It didn't so much as twitch from the piercer and cutter Sue had put into the chest cavity, and after that blasting curse it was now missing a head.

For some reason his hand was as steady as a moored ship. Not a shake of adrenaline to be seen. He felt that might be concern-worthy, but decided that like a lot of other things that had happened today, he would talk about it with a therapist later.

He approached the body suspiciously. The man's tactics had been bizarre in the extreme. He had attacked somebody then immediately fled the moment his would-be victim showed any sign of fighting back? He'd even had Harry alone, in a place cutoff from the rest of the castle with no hope of speedy backup or random interlopers.

If he had actually focused on killing Harry at the beginning he might have succeeded, and yet he fled towards the forbidden forest instead.

Then Harry realized what the man's end goal was. He hadn't been fleeing. He had been leading Harry away from the school towards the property line, where the anitportkey and antiapparition wards lay. He hadn't been trying to kill Harry, as he had aimed his killing curses at Sue, not him. He was trying to kidnap Harry.

He turned his gaze to the edge of the grounds, looking closely at the snow and the impressions therein, and smiled when he spotted what he was looking for.

"Well?" Harry asked rhetorically. "Do the three of you want to dance with me too or was the dragon and this nobody enough to convince you how I'm not to be fucked with?!"

It turned out to be the former, as three hidden figures revealed themselves from beneath invisibility cloaks of their own. Each was garbed in all black like the first assassin, with that same white symbol painted over their hooded faces. There were two men and one woman.

As one, they stepped forward to challenge him, but flinched back when a flash of red and orange erupted from behind Harry. He didn't turn back to see what it was. He didn't need to. There was only one thing it could be.

"I second his fighting words." Said Dumbledore. "By all means, enter the school grounds and cross wands with me."

They did not take him up on his challenge, instead turning in place and disapparating from the safety of the forbidden forest. They had the presence of mind to keep hold of their cloaks as they did so. Shame. Harry wanted to get one for Sue.

Regardless, with them gone Harry and Sue breathed identical sighs of relief and kneeled down to sit on the ground and recover emotionally. As they did this, Dumbledore approached the dead man. Thanks for the concern, headmaster.

"I wish you hadn't blown his head off." Dumbledore said, looking to Sue. "I would have liked to have known his identity. Among other information he could have provided."

"Or how he knew I'd be in the owlery." Harry added.

"That is no mystery." Dumbledore said, standing up. "There were many more assassins we did not see, likely all stationed around the grounds on the lookout for you. He was merely the one fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough, to have caught you relatively alone. If the rest are not already fleeing the grounds. I suspect they shall be doing so momentarily, and they will all be cloaked and impossible to track or catch."

Harry smacked himself on the forehead.

"Not so impossible as you think, sir. Quickly! I need your eyes." Harry said.

He reached behind himself to the hidden robe pocket at the crook of his back. He withdrew the Marauders Map as Dumbledore approached curiously. The old man watched as Harry unfurled the parchment and tapped it with his wand.

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good. Sue, get a quill and parchment!" Harry commanded as the map came to life.

A look of pure wonder appeared on Dumbledore's face as Harry shoved the map into his hands.

"Look for any names that shouldn't be here, call them out for us to write down. They will be on the edges of the map, fleeing the school grounds." Harry instructed the Headmaster.

Dumbledore nodded and adopted his prior serious face instead of the 'child in a candy store' expression he had at seeing the map. By now Sue had retrieved two self-inking quills and pieces of parchment. She handed Harry one set.

"I will write the odd names, you write even." She said.

His girlfriend sure was a quick witted one, wasn't she?

When Dumbledore began listing off names at lightning speed and they wrote them down quickly.

"Amable Gerda, Manvel Lavanya, Lucretia Summanus, Antonio Maryum, Roderick Ruqeya, Sandoa Kesha, Rita Ske… Rita Skeeter." Dumbledore stopped on that one, his voice growing darker.

He looked up from the map at a spot between them and the owelry. In the carnage of their fight with the assassin, they had left a trail of gouged and burnt earth. He continued to look back and forth between the map and this spot. When he drew his wand it was with bloodlust in his eyes.

There was a dark speck amongst the smoke that seemed to be flying away, but Dumbledore cast a literal net of lightning, made of pinkish bolts weaved into a fabric that had a chartreuse glow to it. Whatever that speck was it was caught.

They marched forward, following Dumbledore's lead. Harry didn't quite see what the speck was but he was beginning to suspect. When Dumbledore cast a silent charm, one Harry recognized as the same that Remus and Sirius had cast on "Scabbers" just a few months back, those suspicions proved correct.

A full grown, blonde woman now lay in the snow, twitching violently from the electrified net that was still wrapped around her.

"Good morning, Mrs Skeeter. Won't you join Miss Li, Mr Potter and myself in my office?" Dumbledore invited the woman.

Mrs? Somebody had married that bint?

She groaned in pain and twitched a bit more by way of answer.

"Delightful. I do so appreciate your cooperation." Dumbledore said before canceling the net and lifting her by her belt.

From there, he carried her away like a briefcase with physical strength Harry would never had expected from the man. Harry and Sue followed him.

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