Chapter 29: A valid option
It wasn't yet time to get back to the Manor – work at six in the morning tomorrow, hello – when Caradoc's head appeared in the Potters' fireplace.
That had Sirius realize that, since he was now living at the manor, no one in the Order could contact him anymore if not through letters – except for James, because James had their two-way mirror. Sirius had set up his floo connection at the flat to both accept any call from his friends and the rest of the Order and let them in with a simple check on his part, but the wards at the manor were in his grandfather's hands... And besides, the linked hearth was a bit too public for that kind of conversation. The other one was in the master suite, which wasn't any better.
It was one more thing he had to reevaluate in his commitment to the Order of the Phoenix.
Caradoc coughed a handful of ashes out – the pleasures of floo calls, some people just never got the hang of not swallowing fumes – as James crouched by the hearth.
"Everything's alright, Caradoc?"
"Not... not sure. The alarm by the Liones' house rang for half a minute, then nothing. I'm going to check it out and I wanted to know if you or Lily..."
The thirty-year-old trailed off, catching sight of the Potters' guests. Good thing it was only them, all members of the Order, or else it might have gotten slightly awkward – that was why you usually waited until you didn't have your eyes screwed shut to speak during a floo call.
"...or anyone else, I guess, would come along. Just in case. It's not like the wards were taken down or breached, but still..."
"It could be a passing wizard or witch who doesn't even know about the Liones. Didn't Moody set up that alarm? He's always making those way too sensitive, we've had to check the house three times already!"
Remus winced at Peter's complaint: they'd been the ones to go two days earlier at three in the morning, only to find a drunk young man waving his wand around and making sparks down the street, barely hidden from muggles inside an old telephone booth. Convincing him to get out and stop making a spectacle of himself had been a right chore, and Peter had made the oath never to work for the Ministry's obliviators.
Caradoc sighed.
"As I said, just in case. It might be nothing, but it might also be a Death Eater casing the place, using magic just before they realized there were wards around the house and stopping."
"Damn it... Alright, I..."
Peter was already half-up when Sirius and James stopped him:
"You're the best we have as far as healing spells go, stay here. I'll be..."
"James is right, and James' wrong, too. You and Remus stay back, so does he. I'm going with Lily, she's the one who's the best with wards. Someone has to stay home to let us back in if needed."
James threw his best friend an outraged look.
"You're taking my wife and not me?! You work early tomorrow, remember? Also, didn't you say..."
Both Lily and Sirius seemed unimpressed and absolutely not interested in hearing him out. James' wife even raised an eyebrow at him:
"Do you even know how to check if the wards are still in working order, and what to do if they aren't? Besides, if you stay here you two can use your mirrors to relay whatever is happening and call for back-up if we have to."
James didn't have an answer to that, so he decided to point at Remus instead.
"Oh, and why is he staying here too? I'm support, alright, Peter is playing mediwizard, but what about Remus?"
The werewolf cleared his throat, slightly ill at ease with the attention:
"I have to bolt, actually. Fabian and Gideon..."
James deflated a bit – right, Remus did tell them about it earlier in the evening, that the twins needed someone to play a bit of a role for their boss who might or might not spend some of his free time with a white mask on his face – and Caradoc cleared his throat again, more pointedly this time.
"So, Sirius and Lily? You remember where the house is, you can apparate there?"
Both of them nodded.
"No problem. See you in a minute."
Caradoc ended the floo call and Lily threw Sirius his leather jacket, from which he fished up his nobodyssee talisman – then she gave her husband reassuring look and words:
"Don't worry, James. I know you are the auror trainee of us two, but so is Sirius. If anything happens, he'll cover me and we'll call you for help."
"He'd better."
James glared at his best friend – who ignored him and shoved James' two-way mirror in his hands, as if to mean this was his job tonight and he'd better do it right instead of complaining.
Sirius and Lily exited the house to apparate to Bristol, right by the telephone booth and half a street away from the Liones' house, where Moody's wards wouldn't pick up on the apparitions.
They found Caradoc waiting by the local pub, looking only slightly out of place from the muggles who were finishing – starting, for some of them – the summer evening there. Nobody was paying him any mind, his own perception talisman doing its job and keeping him unremarkable to anyone who didn't know better.
"Seen anything?"
The older man shook his head.
Caradoc had turned thirty in May, with three young kids at home and a well-to-do, understanding wife who never asked what exactly her husband was up to when he disappeared in these times of civil unrest – which, actually, could be misleading considering that Reid Mulciber was Caradoc's uncle. Let him rephrase that: Caradoc was the son of an unmarried mixed couple, pureblooded Linnea Mulciber and muggle Harold Dearborn, and his parents had never gotten married mostly because her family wouldn't hear of it, and his late, Death Eater uncle was not the source of many happy memories. Also, while Caradoc had wedded the only daughter of the current Lord Crouch and their children were heirs to the House of Crouch, Clotilda's mother was also a muggleborn, and thus the entire family was very uninterested in Voldemort's propaganda.
In other words, no, there was no way Clotilda wondered about the side he'd taken here, even if she hadn't asked him for details. If anything, she understood exactly why he was doing this and would rather stay in the dark so as to have at least one parent uninvolved and able to care for the children should anything turn sour. That was, perhaps, the only conversation they'd had on the matter about two years before, and Caradoc didn't see that changing unless he came home with a grave injury one of these days.
The good thing was that the wizard was very proud of his defensive capabilities: his shield charm, dodging and other means of deflecting magical attacks were amongst the best in the Order, and there were several aurors and other duelers to contend with – on the other end, attacking and retaliating weren't his forte, but that was why he never went on any assignment alone.
A look at his two current partners, and Caradoc wasn't that worried: unless they fell into an ambush – unlikely this early after the Order had taken the Liones case into their hands, it wasn't like anyone else truly knew or cared about the family yet – Sirius would handle any potential scuffle while Lily and he kept themselves and the Liones safe. You didn't need an attack dog when you had one of those Blacks by your side – the only problem was that the other person in that tight little group of bloodthirsty duelers was on the other side, even if there wasn't yet a lot of proof to do anything legal about her.
"No screams or fire, so at least there wasn't an attack."
Lily's gaze instinctively drifted along the street and into the air above the Liones' house as they made their way over there.
"No Dark Mark either, and I don't think this would be something they'd be discreet about."
Caradoc grimaced and chased away a few dark memories on the matter. His job as an obliviator meant that he'd been dispatched to the scene for several Dark Marks floating above houses in the last few years, even if it was more of a job for aurors: someone had to go and deal with the memories of all the muggles who'd seen the unnatural skull-and-snake floating in the air. It was either smoke with toxic fume – that's the reason for the greenness, you know – or the tiredness of the late hour, sometimes the effect of alcohol and drugs if Caradoc was lucky and his current client was already a bit out of it. A good obliviator should be able to go around the actual memories, find an alternate explanation and only modify details, not wipe out everything and have people with huge chunks of missing memories all around an incident if they could help it.
At least, he wasn't the one who had to go into the marked houses to find corpses...
Sirius hummed, his attention shifting all over the street, obviously looking for anything out of place.
"The family still hasn't contacted anyone, have they?"
The Liones were a family with three kids, two of them muggleborns – and the youngest would never go back to Hogwarts to finish his schooling after he'd been killed "in an accident" earlier in the summer. His oldest sister, who had graduated already, had come back home for the funeral and found their middle sibling hiding something and unwilling to talk about it.
When Juana Liones had asked Hogwarts' headmaster if her brother had been in any kind of trouble during the year, it had been obvious that she'd been concerned with more than his life at school: she'd been fishing. One week later, and here they were, protecting the family from a possible follow-up while the eldest daughter tried to get something out of her muggle, teenaged sister.
"Not that I know of. I think Juana and her parents finally got something out of Isabel, but they kind of have to tread carefully and it's a lot to unpack, if the girl really saw her brother get murdered... It might take a while, still."
Lily stopped by the townhouse's lone first-floor window and put her fingers on the glass panels, creating ripples of magic in the wards – still there, apparently functional, but...
"It might be the one who killed the boy. I'm going to take a look at this, what about you two?"
"I should probably keep guard while you're busy, I think... Sirius?"
The young wizard nodded absently, his face turned upwards – at the first, second floor? Maybe at the roof. He probably had something in mind, as usual.
"You two deal with the wards, and when you're done, go check on them inside. I'm going to go around the rest of the house. Don't hesitate to scream for help if you need me, and, here, take this."
Sirius handed his two-way mirror to Lily first, but changed his mind – she was busy, after all, and not the one who'd be on the lookout – and eventually put it in Caradoc's hands.
"Say James' name, surname included, with the mirror at most one foot away from your face, if you need to contact him. I'm certain he's already clutching on the other one, so he'll answer right away."
And on those words, Sirius put on a pair of braided cord bracelets and wandered off – or rather, climbed up the house's facade without a warning, causing Lily to scowl as his presence registered in the runes she'd revealed on the window's glass. Caradoc threw an anxious look around – never mind Death Eaters, they didn't need the muggle police to waltz in because three strangers were hanging out around the Liones' house and acting suspiciously. Lily's meddling might stay unnoticed, but someone scaling a building in public?
The Order's go-to talismans were useful to keep people from being recognized, but they didn't make you invisible. Also, perception charms were a no-go as long as Lily was looking at the wards, because doing outright magic – not using already enchanted objects – would trigger the alarm.
Sirius, of course, had looked around the street before going on his up-and-above expedition, because he knew how to be prudently reckless. Apart from the inebriated older man who was more asleep than watching two doors down, no one was there and facing the right way to look and notice him, as long as he didn't dilly-dally and try to get everyone's attention.
...Remus and Lily would argue that was his default state, considering he thought climbing up a townhouse was a valid option, but. Remus wasn't there, and Lily was the one who'd gifted him climbing bracelets for his last birthday, saying he might as well be safe-ish if he was going to get in places he shouldn't anyway.
With the bracelets' help – having a better grip on small details of the facade did help, thanks, Lily – Sirius was up on the townhouse's roof in no time. The lack of lights up there meant fewer people could see him – but he also might have a harder time finding someone there, too.
He twirled his wand in his hand thoughtfully – no magic quite yet, Lily wasn't done with the wards and the point wasn't to get the house written up in an incident report if it wasn't on anyone's watchlist – and wandered around the flat roof, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
Nothing on the street down, nor on the street behind them. The neighboring houses didn't seem to have anyone hiding either, and anyway Sirius also had to look for something that might have been left behind, in case someone had been there but had indeed left already. Footsteps on the roofs, broken twigs by one of the few thin trees...
The things Moody and Smith said you had to look for even if you thought the scene was deserted.
Sirius looked at his watch – not quite ten in the evening, but he'd planned to be back at the manor by then and even if nothing happened... He still had work tomorrow.
He'd also said he'd take a step back from the Order of the Phoenix, what with the children, and yet here he was. The discussion on the matter, with his grandfather this morning... It wasn't like Sirius was going to leave the Order and his friends to risk their lives for something that mattered while he did nothing, but it was reasonable of Arcturus Black to ask that his grandson did allow for more time with the family. He already had a job, as it was – a job that was important to the civil war too – and between that and the Order...
If Sirius kept volunteering for more surveillance jobs, well. He wouldn't be with the kids much. And considering none of them had a valid reason to trust him or believe that he was acting on their behalf – because, once again, he wasn't their father – who knew what kind of trouble they might get up to if he left them alone too often?
And by that, he didn't mean the reckless, teenaged bullshit kids could get up to. Sirius and his friends had sneaked out of their dorm to go and help a werewolf by practicing and mastering a dangerous form of magic before they were of age, and if they'd known how, they would absolutely have used the holidays to try and battle grown adults with a penchant for torture and murder. There was no way in hell that none of the eighteen children born with his blood would try something of the kind if they could.
Sirius' eyes swept further away, to the high-and-old wall with ivy rolling down the top and bigger trees poking from behind it. A park of some kind, he believed.
A bird – it was too dark to say which kind – cawed harshly and flew away at that moment, and Sirius couldn't help but tense up. The tree where the bird had been had something odd about it.
One look back at the wall, one down the street where the Liones lived, and Sirius was biting on his lower lip. He'd never been to that park, so he couldn't quite apparate in, but technically he had a line of sight on the wall itself. If there was something there, he didn't have the time to walk through four streets and hope nothing happened in the meantime, but he could...
Sirius approached the border of the roof to check on Lily and Caradoc – they were alright, Lily waved at him just before they went to ring the doorbell, so they hadn't found anything dangerous and supposedly the house was safe – and made a decision.
He still had the climbing bracelets on, and grabbing the top of the wall by aiming outside of it was probably a better idea than to try and apparate right on the edge of it, especially with all the ivy. So, a spin, grab the wall and then lift yourself up to sit on the wall itself – right next to the tree with what looked a bit too much like eyes for it to be natural.
Easy-peasy, slick as honey.
...Moody would probably have his hide for that one, but Moody wasn't here.
Sirius suddenly apparated off the roof – and reappeared in the air by the top of the park's wall, shooting for the stones before he could fall and crash a dozen of feet down, on some unsuspecting muggle's car. His right hand stung sharply – yeah, he'd expected to get scratched with that kind of stunt, no big deal – and it was probably a better idea to lift himself up before he could get tired out or someone aimed for his fingers from the other side of the wall.
The wizard found himself crouching on the wall, staring at a plant that had no business growing in a tree. Acmella oleracea were flowering herbs, not parasitic tree plants, and while Sirius hadn't kept Herbology past his OWLs, he'd still gotten an O there. Maybe he didn't know how to breed that plant into its magical variant, but he'd read about it all the same.
The eyeball plant, "peek-a-boo", had eye-like flowers, and if you grew it just right, you could use it as actual eyes – and keep it blooming for about nine months out of twelve, which made it a favorite for localized surveillance. Now, people didn't usually bring a pot of those along, but that didn't change the fact that there was a bucket of peek-a-boo flowers cradled between two of the tree's branches, and the stems moved a bit too much for it to be the mundane variant of the plant.
One of the flowers blinked at him.
Sirius let his wand out of its holster – and ignored the twinge in his other, non-dominant hand – just in time to realize a spell was aiming right for his feet – and if he fell down the wall, well. The potential Death Eater down there might become the least of his problems.
"Merlin's...!"
No choice but to jump off – into the tree? No, he wouldn't land well, but...
The blue light crashed against the stones with a crack. A dark silhouette underneath the trees caught Sirius' attention – wand drawn, aimed at him once again, and Sirius realized he didn't have a lot of time before he either ended up splattered on the ground or cursed to kingdom come. Or both.
Catching a branch for two seconds and a half – it wouldn't have held much longer anyway – the young man sent himself spinning and used the momentum to apparate down: closer to the ground to reduce his fall, and while he was at it, right by the Death Eater's legs. Might as well sweep them off their feet and bring them down too.
The shock from hitting the ground knocked the breath out of Sirius for half a moment – and then the pain swept in.
The good thing was, the damn asshole certainly didn't expect any of this and almost fell back on his own, allowing Sirius to bring him down despite the moment of distraction from the pain. They both ended up in the grass with only half-a-grip on their respective wands.
Sirius gritted his teeth, propped himself back up on his right arm and managed to point his wand at the masked figure first.
"Stupefy!"
The man – oh, look, blond stubble – dodged, but his mask slipped slightly, letting both his jaw and half-a-blue-eye visible for a moment, before the mask readjusted itself on his face. Between that and the dried peek-a-boo pendant under the dark robes...
"Evan! How uncanny to see you here! What's the interest? The park, I know you like plants? Or maybe you were visiting the McLeods? I must say, Isobel is a bit young for you, and I think you'd object to Charlene's maternal grandmother. Is it Honoria, then?"
The Death Eater – cousin of Sirius' cousin, at that – spat something that wasn't confirmation of his identity, but hey, Sirius knew that voice anyway. He might not have realized if he hadn't seen Evan's face first, but now? It wouldn't count as proof, if no one could corroborate, but it was a step in the right direction – and who knew, maybe he'd manage to knock Evan out and drag him to the office with his murderer garb!
"Black! What the hell are you even doing here?!"
That had Sirius pause – bad idea, wand getting raised over there – and glance at his nobodyssee talisman... lying in the grass where he'd almost broken his face on the ground. Damn.
He threw back Evan's knockback jinx with a large round arm movement – nice, he'd gotten the timing right, Moody wouldn't be able to scold him for attempting that if he could master the gesture – and pushed himself on his feet for another spell, when it hit him: this was the perfect opportunity to test the kids' knowledge.
Time to ignore Evan's question and elaborate on his earlier banter – what, you'd call it taunting?
"Though, I'm disappointed, Rosier. The way I had it, you already had a girlfriend. Not bad looking, and rich at that! Of course, maybe you changed your mind because of her parents, but come on! Don't just shove yourself at the McLeod girls, you'd look desperate!"
For all Sirius knew, Evan Rosier wasn't with Diana Exeter in this world – or not yet, which was another problem he wouldn't be able to check up on, because he had no idea when they'd gotten together in Alastor's timeline – so he wasn't going to throw names for the asshole to target, but.
If this was a bust, Rosier would simply think he'd been taking shit.
If not...
"Incendio!"
By the time the jet of flames eased against Sirius' shield charm, Rosier had apparated away.