author's note happy Fourth of July

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Alastor said nothing. He went back to his bedroom silently and went to sleep just as he had planned. His expression was blank, and his mind was a white sheet of paper, vacant and unwandering. This time of year, even the swamp wasn't so hot, so he had a dreamless, fitness sleep. It was as if he lay in his bed, dead until dawn came. He awoke long before the house began to stir, but he stayed in his slender bed, a thin sheet-like paper covering his abdomen.

His arms limp at his sides, he stared blankly at the ceiling, thinking of absolutely nothing until he heard the sounds of sizzling and the smell of coffee coming from the kitchen, and only then did he get up. He very slowly and methodically put on his clothing, every sock feeling like an eternity, and then he went out and joined the adults at the table. Adelaide, as expected, was absent. He partook in no small talk, and mostly he was left alone since no one else was speaking much, the tension and pain still hovering in the air, like a ghost left haunting them from the night before.

They might have attributed his silence to grief, shock, or anything of the sort. If they were, they weren't aware of the actual source of it. It was safe to say no one suspected a thing, silent and meek as he was. The atmosphere was rigid and mournful, but its mechanics were much the same as what they had been any other month.

After breakfast, the Cormiers immediately took their things and prepared to leave. They tried to say goodbye to Adelaide, but she had locked her door from the inside and gave no indication of having heard their farewells.

At the door, the Guills informed them that next month they would host some sort of funeral ceremony for Ren, and Harry only vaguely wondered what kind of rites they had and whether they would involve voodoo, too. But he didn't have space in his head to dwell on something like that.

It was strange: he had no room in his head and was simultaneously thinking of nothing - it was as if his skull had been packed with cotton, forbidding anything from moving inside it. The bleak day, uncuttable silence, and his numb soul made the trek back home easier and shorter than it ever had been. Just as they arrived, Harry thought he noticed Mrs. Cormier sneaking at him, at his blank face, but she didn't say anything until they returned.

They ate a quick, tense lunch in which she asked him if he was alright. He gave a curt, polite reply and then excused himself to his room. He didn't stop to wonder whether he was worrying the Cormiers with his strange demeanor and only locked himself in the darkness, sat on his makeshift bed, and pulled the black orb out of his pillow cover.

His fingers momentarily grazed his broken wand - it had been months since he had actually used it, and it now stayed in his room as an abandoned relic, a reminder of a life that he now knew was lost. He thought maybe he had always known that it was lost, that he would never be able to recover from whatever it was that had happened to him. Whatever this was, whatever this all meant, if there was even a meaning behind it.

Even if he had been able to go back home, he would've never been the same, anyway: there was too much darkness within him, now, too much otherness. But even those very thoughts stung him like his head was rejecting truly thinking about anything or reminiscing over his past life. After all, what was the point in any of it? His reality was now limited to the darkness of his little alcove and Carmelita's harassment.

He closed his eyes against the darkness and spun the orb around in his palms. Now more than ever, it seemed to pulse with dark life, like a bleeding heart, a shriveling little charcoal of something that might've once been a fire. He had initially thought it alien, unholy, something to be avoided, which sucked all the goodness out of the room.

Now, however, it felt like it belonged to him more than anything did, more than anything ever had. He lay down with it in his palms and clutched it to his chest, feeling as if its dark matter, together with the blackness of the room, were seeping into him. Not Harry, not anymore. Harry had lived at Hogwarts, and Harry had had hopes of getting back home - he had never been touched, he had never been killed.

He thought of Fawkes, bursting into flame and remerging from the ashes as bright and glorious as ever. Harry felt similar, but he had been consumed by the fire, taken down screaming, emerging from charred and blackened ashes. Before he knew it, the darkness had spiraled him into a deep, comatose-like sleep. It was unlike the black sleep that he had had back at the swamp, but he was aware of the same kind of void that he had been in before.

But the void was swept into a pool, and he was left lying on some nameless, wall-less and floor-less space, a space where there was nothing except for him. Him and someone else. He was keenly aware of someone else's presence in the dream, and, sure enough, when he turned around, he saw a man standing behind him. Not only did he visit him, he actually bumped his nose with him. He jumped back in surprise, taking some distance. "Ah!" He exclaimed, stepping back as the man righted his posture.

They had only bumped noses because he had been leaning over Harry as if trying to breathe down his neck. Harry eyed him for a second, scrutinizing him - the man in the mirror was even taller than he had thought. He was smiling at him playfully, expectant.

Harry swallowed his shock at his appearance - after all, it was only a dream - and decided to ask him the one question that had haunted him. "Who are you?" He asked him, trying not to sound too childish in front of the hellish creature's presence, the weird staff thing he held in his hand adding even more height to him. "Hello, sir!" The man said, taking a deep bow but never breaking eye contact with Harry. It seemed to him that he was almost teasing him.

His red, bulging eyes seemed to expand and contract at the bloody iris as if they were trying to hypnotize him. Jesus, this was a weird dream. Once the man erected himself, he continued with surprising cordiality and an accent… well, an accent not unlike those Harry heard day in and day out on the radio. "I am a demon," he said quite simply as if that answered anything that Harry needed to know.

Harry's eyes skipped to the staff the man was holding and noticed a tiny microphone on it. He was about to open his mouth to ask the question again before the man - the demon, actually, the broadcast demon? In any case, the demon began circling him, looking him up and down with nostalgia in his red eyes.

It was hard to read what he was thinking or doing, anyhow. "My, I really haven't seen you in a long time! Haha, this makes me very excited!" He clapped his hand as if savoring the moment, circling back in front of Harry and getting so close to him that Harry thought he might be able to smell his fetid breath. He wasn't, though - this was a dream, after all.

It was odd that his subconscious would paint the demon like this since Harry had always expected the man to… shriek, spitfire, or something. "Wait…" Harry said, pausing at the man's words, "excuse me, have we met?" He asked. God, did he want to know the answer? Who was this guy? Harry was even shocked at his own cordiality towards the demon as if he was mimicking the man's respectful manner.

He even admired it a little. "I can say yes or no. Anyways, I'm leaving now. I have done what I wanted to do," he said as if anything he was doing made any kind of sense. He began walking away as Harry watched him, petrified.

Before he left into the blackness of the void they were in, he turned back and looked at Harry meaningfully. Or, at least, Harry thought it was meaningful. "Take a good grasp of your life. I believe it will become more and more brilliant," he said, smiling through his serrated yellow teeth. "Brilliant?" Harry asked, now even more perplexed. There was nothing brilliant to be had in his life, not locked out of the wizarding world as he was. He was easily the most powerless creature on the earth right now. "So…" the man drawled, and before Harry knew what was happening, the man tapped his weird staff against the non-floor, and a red hole like a whirlpool materialized beneath Harry's feet.

He had a split second of confusion before realizing he was falling, and even when he did fall, it was as if it were in slow motion. Through the hole that the demon had made in the ground, he poked his head to look at Harry, whose limbs were stretching out in all directions on impulse, trying to hold onto something. "Goodbye, Alastor! And we will meet again soon!" The demon told him with a smile as the boy tumbled into the void. Alastor sat up violently in his bed, the feeling of free-falling carrying into his consciousness. He gasped and looked around him, checking to see whether the demon was still there, somehow, in the darkness of the room that didn't differ so much from the void he had been in.

But this was reality, he could feel it, and there was no one in the room with him. "A dream," he told himself, breathing heavily. "I was dreaming," he said as if to confirm that it hadn't been real. He almost felt like smiling. He lit a candle in his close quarters and held his knees to his chest as he thought over the whole thing.

Unfortunately, he didn't get much of a chance because with wakefulness came the same kind of brain fog he had had before, and all that he could think of was how close he now felt to the man in the mirror, who didn't seem evil at all, he just seemed… in control. In a way that Alastor had never managed to be.

He suddenly smelled something amazing coming from the kitchen, and like a man still in a dream, he stood up and went to where Mrs. Cormier was cooking. "Oh, you're up," she said, still giving him that careful smile that she had had since they had left the swamp, and she had realized he was acting off. Alastor nodded but didn't say much else.

When she thought she had confirmed that he was still acting strangely, she didn't keep her eyes off him as she diced the ingredients to whatever it was she was making. Guidry was nowhere in sight, and Alastor would never again pick up one of the books Guidry had given him to 'get back home' ever again, so he sat at the kitchen table, looking at the burning fire with hollow eyes.

He thought back to everything he had learned through those books, and though he had acquired quite a bit of knowledge about voodoo through them (unfortunately not how Guidry did his little shadow trick, however), he couldn't help but remember them with a wave of nausea and resentment.

And that was when he decided he would break his silence. "You know, I'm makin' jambalaya," Mrs. Cormier informed him with a sweet, tentative smile. "My own mama's recipe," she said. It was a weak attempt at severing the tension between them, and Alastor could see right through it - Mrs. Cormier had never been one to have small talk, and she had never felt the need to.

But now, she was evidently uncomfortable with the terse silence that settled over them, and she walked him through the recipe in order to fill it up, despite the fact that Alastor was barely even listening to her.

She talked about how special the recipe was to her, how it had been carried in her family for generations, how she wanted to make it special for him, and yet he couldn't allow himself to connect with anything she said lest he should feel something, and he couldn't reveal what he knew, what he wanted to know just yet. He would wait for Guidry for that.

In his numb brain, he still wasn't exactly sure what it is he would do. Maybe he would show what a mistake it had been to let him pore over those voodoo manuals, the grimoires, all the things that would allow him to take power over them if he so wished. And though he didn't know what he would do just yet, he had a feeling he would once it came down to it when he felt the moment was exactly right. And so he just sat there as the kitchen filled up with sweet fragrances.

Once it was almost done, Guidry arrived, and with one inspective look at the kitchen, he could tell that something was wrong. Still, he kept it to himself. They were a few shrimp in, Mrs. Cormier still talking nervously, both of them sneaking looks at Alastor as if he were a ticking time bomb, Guidry suspicious to no end. Alastor wasn't completely silent - he nodded and agreed and answered whenever he was asked a direct question, but there was no denying that he was completely withdrawn from the conversation.

That was until his sixth bite when he suddenly let his fork clatter onto the plate, the food suddenly tasting like a sweet poison. "So, how long have you two known?" He asked, looking not at their faces but the steaming food before him. The Cormiers stopped mid-chew and shared a look. "Whatcha talking about, Ally, dear?" "I'm talking about," he said, suddenly standing from his chair and knocking it over.

He clapped his hands as the chair clattered to the floor with a bang, and all the candles together with the burning fire were suddenly snuffed, "your incessant lying to me," he said, his voice sounding strange in the darkness as if it were being spoken through a metal compartment. It didn't sound like the voice of the Harry that had arrived at the Cormiers' all those months ago.

It didn't belong to Harry at all. "Alastor…" Guidry warned, his face barely visible in the darkness, "light everything back," he commanded, but his voice was weak with guilt and even with a little fear. "Right away," Alastor whispered, his tone playful, and snapped his fingers. But none of the candles went back on, only the fire, which soared outside of its containment with a deafening roar, lighting the room red as if they had just arrived at hell. Mrs. Cormier let out a little scream. "Ally, please, let us explain," she begged, standing from her own chair and nearing him.

He stepped away. "Explain away," Alastor offered, looking her dead in the eye, his face not all that serious, which worried them more than if it had been. "We… we-" Mrs. Cormier began, but she clearly had no real reason in mind. "We knew it'd make you break," Guidry explained. "Just like you breakin' right now, kid. Now, stop with the light show and talk to us with some gotdamned respect," he growled, and now Alastor could tell he really was angry: he felt the shadows begin to close in on him from the darkest corners of the room, where the deafening fire's flames did not reach.

But Guidry didn't know how closely acquainted Alastor was with the shadows, and even as they crawled up his shins, he knew better than to be afraid of them. "Your little parlor tricks won't work on me, Guidry," he said, his tone still polite through it all. And though the words were laced with venom, he dulled the fire down and, one by one turned the candles back on. "You will tell me the truth. The whole truth, right now."

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Alastor retired to watch the flames dance around in the fireplace, controlled, his hands holding one another behind him as he stood with his straight back to the Cormiers, who had told him they would come clean. Before however, Guidry had insisted that Mrs. Cormier make some tea - her nerves had been too rattled. Alastor would've felt guilty if he hadn't been so focused on not allowing his rage to unload on them once again. It was crazy to think of how tiresome he had been, how much anger he had within him that longed to be unleashed.

It wasn't just crazy - it was frightening. But he was determined not to think of things, not to make any judgments before he heard the Cormiers' full story. If he still felt they were lying to him, he would leave the house that very day, if only to refrain himself from doling out some sort of punishment.

He hadn't known that he harbored that kind of thirst for vengeance and control, let alone that he could feel it towards the Cormiers. And though he had felt powerful and was still sizzling with the memory of what he had done, the predominant feeling was that of loneliness. He was completely and utterly alone.

It had never been clearer to him than it was at that very moment. The Cormiers settled down behind him, Guidry in his usual stool, Mrs. Cormier in a chair she had brought from the table, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea. Alastor's own cup was sitting steaming, untouched on the floor.

There was silence, Alastor not even bothering or daring (depending on how you looked at it) to face them. The silence was suddenly broken by Guidry, who lost no time making excuses and jumped right into the explanation, which Alastor was eternally grateful for. He didn't know what he would've done if they had started asking for his forgiveness or if Mrs. Cormier had started crying. Thankfully, she was a strong woman, and she only looked deeply saddened. Not even afraid.

That was how much she loved him. "Molly and I's just like you," Guidry began, "we also stuck outside our own time." Alastor turned around, shocked. But when he looked at the Cormiers, they weren't even staring at him. Rather, they looked completely lost in thought, lost in memory. "We was born in 1796 and 98. Also, Louisiana, but farther from here, someplace that probably don't even exist no more, covered up by buildings or some shitty little town like this one.

Back then, though, it was a full swamp. We lived in a community that practiced voodoo-like. These crackers practice christianity or whatchamacallit, and we ain't ever even hear 'bout it being wrong 'til we… arrived here. Voodoo back then… there wasn't nothing written down like nowadays - maybe a few herbal notes, somethin' like that, but the rules, the rites, all that existed only in our heads. Any case, Molly and I was together before we was sixteen, and that was two or three years before the white men came to kill us all," Guidry sucked in a breath, and it seemed that at that moment, he decided to roll a cigarette before continuing. "T'this day we don't know exactly why they came, or why they ain't even try to talk t'us before starting their murders. But the white man always finds a reason for that violence, even when there is none.

We spoked with the spirits, asked for their guidance, we rolled out bones, and made our teas, and the forecast was always the same: certain death for everyone in our community. Molly… she was… she was pregnant already, at that time.

Our community was prepared t'fight - take down every last one of those that'd take our lives from us, but Molly and I… we were desperate to keep our child alive. We felt our lives were only beginning, and we couldn't accept our fates, the fates the very skies had designed for us," at that, Guidry shook his head and put the last finishing touches to his cigarette. "That was our gravest mistake.

When your time comes, you accept it. Ain't no use fightin' it less you wanna be cursed and live like you ain't livin' at all. "So we went to the wisest woman in our community, real sage, that woman was. 'T first she wasn't gonna help us, wouldn't give the time a'day, but Molly and I was set on what we wanted to do, and she finally agreed… she ain't…" Guidry held his hand to his head, rubbing it, the cigarette smoke looking like it was billowing out of his ears. "She let us know what we were gonna do," Mrs. Cormier finally spoke up, her face dark, her hands gripping her cup of tea far too hard. "She could've-" "She warned us, Guidry, you know she did. We was just foolish enough to lie to ourselves into believing it wouldn't happen," Mrs. Cormier interrupted, her words tinged with regret and pain.

Harry already felt queasy thinking of what had happened next. "What happened?" Harry asked after a small silence, the tension being too much for him to bear. He thought he might know because of the lack of children around them. "She told us she could transport us, take us to another place, another time, where we wouldn't be persecuted…" Guidry tsked at that, bitter, but he continued. "She told us we would die violent deaths, but we knew if we stayed, that would happen, too - she said we would only have each other, and that that'd be fine… she said we wouldn't be able to have children… Molly and me… we thought-" "We shoulda known what she meant," Mrs. Cormier choked out. Guidry shook his head, but he didn't contradict her. "She told us Molly and me would forever be cursed, that we'd… scorch the earth we stood on. We didn't get what she meant then, I think we do now.

This site is marked - it ain't a coincidence that every time someone gets lost in time, they end up here. It's like a magnet for magic, voodoo, whatever you want to call it. Any case, we did everything we had to, and the ritual wasn't all that pretty, neither. No one in our community woulda done anything like that: we left our families, everything behind, everything for… for us," Guidry said, and his words had a conclusive tone to them despite the fact that not all of Harry's questions had been answered. "What happened to your baby?" He asked softly, not knowing what answer would come. Both Cormiers were horribly silent, and it was Molly that spoke up.

"We thought we was safe. When we arrived to this town, everything was… normal. I was already seven months, I think, but then the ninth month…" she trailed off, and instead of her usual, kind, and glittering eyes, it was like there were only sockets, her light and life sucked right out of her. "I gave… birth to… to that thing. It wasn't no baby, Alastor, of that I can assure you. But I still loved it," she said, and together with the terrible darkness of her tone and expression, there came the breaking sound of pure and utter grief, pain. "I loved it," she repeated with so much shame. Alastor couldn't believe she was actually talking about her own baby. "What do you mean it wasn't a baby?"

Alastor asked, almost afraid to pose the question. Mrs. Cormier paused, put down her cup, and began wringing her hands as if trying to clean some phantom dirt she had accumulated on them. She choked on her words when she tried to answer, so Guidry continued for her. "It had the shape of a baby, I s'pose. But bigger - nearly killed Molly trying t'get it out of her. It was… burnt, charred, like.

It was a stillborn, but it didn't look human, not at all." Alastor shuddered, just thinking of what it would be like to expect a bouncing baby and geting whatever abomination they had seen. He couldn't even imagine what it had been like for Mrs. Cormier, seeing the thing that she was supposed to love - that she did love - dead, burned, and inhuman. "It drove me crazy," Mrs. Cormier whispered, continuing.

In the dark spots of her eyes, the flames flickered, and though at any other moment Alastor would've questioned how a woman like Mrs. Cormier, who seemed so strong, could ever go crazy, he saw it in her eyes, how dark what had happened to her was, how she had been unable to stop it from completely enveloping her.

He knew what that could be like. "I couldn't take the loss. I was outta my mind," she said, shaking her head. "So I did the unspeakable." "Molly, you don't have to tell him about-" Guidry began, dread in his voice. "He asked for the whole truth, Guidry," she snapped, suddenly angry. "He wants the truth, so he gon' get it," she gave a deep, shaking sigh and continued. "My papa, you see, was a great voodoo practitioner. Better'n me and Guidry combined.

He used to tell me secrets, stories about unspeakable practices, shunned in our community, barely even spoken of." Alastor wanted to ask her why she hadn't gone to her father for a solution when she wanted to leave their community, but the answer came to him plainly: shame.

She was ashamed. He wondered if she had even said goodbye to him - whether they had said goodbye to anyone. "With what my papa had taught me never to do, I took my baby out as far outta town as I could, right around where the Guills live, right in the swamp, the limit of where we can go here. And I buried my child so that the earth would restore him to me," and with that, she looked up at the ceiling as if pleading with someone or begging for forgiveness.

Alastor sucked in a breath as he realized what Mrs. Cormier had tried to do. "I left our baby there, in the dirt, and I did what I had to to make him come back to us… all those terrible things just to get back a baby we ain't ever really had," she paused, and Alastor's heart was thrumming, aching to hear whether it had worked or whether that thing had stayed buried. "It came back crawling to us," she said, and Alastor had to strain to hear her despite the silence, for her voice was barely a whisper in the closing darkness.

He realized, too, that shadows had pooled around them in the strangest way. He looked over at Guidry's dark expression and reckoned that he had unwittingly summoned them. "It didn't even have the shape of a baby no more. It was a creature with claws, no eyes, no teeth, no nothing, moaning and crying like no child would ever do. It had never lived to begin with, and it was only moving because… because I had cursed it.

I cursed my child," she choked out a sob, and Guidry held a hand to her shoulder. Horrified, Alastor pursed his lips. "She warned us - the sage," Mrs. Cormier said between cries, "she told us we would be cursed, that we could have no children. 'Nd she was right. Guidry had to… had to… behead the thing. And it was a mercy," she was now crying so hard she couldn't go on for a few seconds, and though Alastor could see that she was trying to calm herself down, she evidently couldn't keep her emotions in check, and she had probably never told the story so fully before.

He felt ashamed at having forced them to tell him the truth, and yet now that he knew, he felt closer to them than ever, just when he was beginning to shut himself off from the world. His anger and indignation at having been lied to seemed to fade into the distance. Before they said anything specific about him, he felt himself forgiving them, or at the very least understanding where they had come from.

Still, he couldn't dwell much on anything because the image of their deformed, decapitated baby was far too present in his mind. Standing there, seeing Mrs. Cormier with that dark look on her face and Guidry's hands on her shoulders, he could plainly envision the grieving couple that he hadn't realized he had been dealing with. "When you came here… I was selfish," Mrs. Cormier let out with a breath, "I was afraid you'd leave once you found out you couldn't return to your time. Guidry was, too. We should've told you, and Guidry once even suggested we should after spirits know how many books you had studied. But I told him no. I wanted to keep you. I see you… I see you as a son, Alastor," she told him, looking at him through her teary eyes. "I was afraid - I am afraid of the curse, whether it's gon' do something to you.

I've been selfish. I can't explain how sorry I am, Alastor." Alastor moved towards her and took her hand in his before kneeling at her side. "I understand you," he told her, his dulled heart throbbing at the sight of her so distraught. "I… I forgive you. I just don't understand why I can't go back." "Moving anyplace in time is… dangerous.

Not just to you, but to everyone," Guidry said, "No one knows how to go to a specific place and time. Even the sage sent us someplace randomly. And even if we did know how to do that, we don't know the consequences. Traveling in time has terrible prices to pay. Just look at what… look at what happened to us," he said softly. Alastor shut his eyes. There would be no going back home. In some ways, it was almost a relief. But that meant his future was here, with the Cormiers - that wasn't bad, after all. They had taken him in as a son, and even if what he was going through had anything to do with their curse or not, he had always craved a family, a true family.

But the problem wasn't with them. It was with Carmelita - hell, it was with the whole town. The town the Cormiers couldn't leave. "I'm so sorry, my boy," Mrs. Cormier told him, stroking his cheek. Alastor opened his eyes to look at her. "That's alright, mum." Mrs. Cormier flung her arms around him, and they stayed like that, clinging to one another, trying not to let the other hear their crying.

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They were all exhausted and went to bed shaken, their heads seeming to spin with everything that had happened. And yet they were all simultaneously relieved. The truth was out there - at least the Cormiers' truth. But Alastor knew now that he would never tell them about the man in the mirror, about the darkness and violence gathering in his heart.

They would only blame themselves for it, and regardless of whether that was right or not (something that he himself would never be able to know for sure), he didn't want that burden on them.

They had had enough shame and guilt to last them a lifetime. Alastor went to his small bedroom, ready to collapse, but there was one more thing he wanted to do before resting, something that had been prodding at him since Mrs. Cormier had told him what she had tried to do with her dead child. He lit the candle in his room with a snap of his fingers and looked over to the pile of books at the corner of the little alcove.

There had been no material regarding time travel in any of them, and he suspected that the Cormiers knew very little about it, as little as he did, so they weren't keeping that information from him. Still, he had asked Guidry if he could save some books handy for 'research purposes.

The books had nothing to do with time travel, but in Alastor's endless perusals, he had found some interesting things that he wanted to study more of even though they wouldn't help get him back home. He knelt by the neat stack of books and fished around for the one he wanted, leafing through a few before finding what he was seeking. He opened a particularly old volume, the pages browner and orange than yellow, and after quickly flipping through the old thing, he found it.

The resurrection ritual. He looked around him as if cameras were around his room - he had a feeling that Guidry had never meant for something as dark as that to end up in Harry's hands, but he had probably been running out of material to entertain him with. It was possible that Guidry hadn't actually looked through all the mountains of content he owned.

Alastor realized that he hadn't asked them a few questions that interested him, but there would be time for that at another moment when they had recovered from revealing their dark and traumatic past. Alastor narrowed his eyes and held the book up nearly to his nose as he examined what the book said about the resurrection ritual.

From what he could tell (which was questionable since the writing was borderline illegible), it was essentially what Mrs. Cormier had done but with a lot more details. It was incredibly meticulous, down to the kind of soil that was perfect for the burial.

And though there was so much power involved with the proper carrying out of the ritual, power that he was sure Mrs. Cormier had, that Alastor had to wonder whether the spell hadn't actually worked. Mrs. Cormier had successfully given her baby the life it would've had if it hadn't been stillborn. The knowledge that there could be a way to bring back the dead successfully made his blood run cold. But he had no need for it, in any case. Still, it wouldn't leave his mind.

He finished reading everything the book said about the ritual, down the only real consequence he could find. It took some time to decipher, but he ended up with one sentence. 'He who attempts to bring life from the earth must give life back. Alastor's eyes lingered on that line.

Did that mean that to successfully complete the ritual, one would have to sacrifice oneself, or would any other life suffice? He was beginning to think that had been the problem with Mrs. Cormier's ritual. He couldn't see her sacrificing another human being. With all the black magic and creepy voodoo still swimming in his head, Alastor snuffed out the candle and went to sleep, a disquiet rumbling deep within him.