"Dolph! Get over here! It's Siri's turn, and you've got to see it!"
Sirius kept his wand steadily pointing at Edgar Bones, bound and helpless and terrified. Sirius had notified the Order about both of the night's objectives. Moody and Dumbledore made the understandable, gut-wrenching call to prioritize Bartemius Crouch and leave the Boneses to their own defense. That said, Sirius did not understand why the target, Edgar Bones, was actually here. Dumbledore must have told him what was coming, for the man's elderly parents who owned the house were both absent. Was Bones expected and allowed to die tonight, a sacrifice to prevent Voldemort from realizing there was a spy? Or was Dumbledore expecting Sirius to work miracles to save the man? Or was Bones merely a brave fool who refused to flee? Had he simply left it until too late? If Bones was planning to stay, why alone, and why hadn't Dumbledore reinforced the wards more than this?
A tall Death Eater walked up beside Bella and rested a hand on her waist. Rodolphus looked at Sirius. "Well, what'll it be? We have plenty of time."
"Isn't he the one that always chooses Transmogrifian?" another Death Eater drawled in a deep voice with a trace Eastern European accent. Antonin Dolohov or Igor Karkaroff, one of the two. Sirius had trouble keeping them straight. One of them was here, the other was with Voldemort's group, trying to ambush Crouch.
"No! Not always, although it is his favorite. Come on, Siri, you're so creative! Show Karkaroff!"
Fuck. It was bad enough they were making him execute the man. Far worse to have to torture him to death. Sirius cast the Cruciatus, stalling for time.
"Boring."
"Natrium Morticai." And then, silently, Imperio. Take this curse and do not feel your own suffering; it is the only gift I can give. Bones's face turned blessedly blank.
"What is that one?" It was Edwin Mulciber, Felix's father and the last member of their team, who answered Karkaroff.
To hell with it. No one was coming to rescue him from this nightmare anytime soon. He knew that, and he had to accept it. Bella wanted Sirius to get creative, so he would. He would be as horrible as he could imagine. Sectumsempra, he cast, again nonverbally as he was unwilling to spread the curse around more than he had to. There were two surprised shouts of "Merlin!" as blood burst forth from Bones's body.
Bella gasped and cackled. "I love it!"
He slashed his wand down, and a whip of flame burst out of it to wrap around Bones's knee. He twisted his wand, and the lasso of fire tightened and sizzled through the flesh and bone, severing the wizard's lower leg while leaving the wound cauterized. He levitated the leg wandlessly and transfigured it into a half-dozen roses, which he wafted over to Bella. "For you." She giggled and took the bouquet eagerly. He severed the other leg too but left it where it lay.
Next came the Entrails Expelling curse. Sirius studied the arrangement of the viscera and carefully transfigured the mess into a cornucopia overflowing with fruit. Edgar Bones died as he worked, and nobody but him noticed the subtle moment.
It felt different from killing muggles, even Ivan. Worse. And he hated himself for thinking that way. Yes, he was now desecrating a corpse, but the act of murder itself should have been no different. The fact that it was made him feel the worst kind of hypocrite, a blood supremacist that denied it. A blood supremacist who killed other blood supremacists, blood traitors, and muggles alike. Just a simple murderer, then. Nothing special. Nothing principled. He resolutely took the rising feeling of self-loathing and buried it beneath an occlumency shield. He could not afford to feel that way right now. He could not afford to feel anything right now. He had to keep calm until this awful night was over, and he was back in his safe room at the Averys.
Completely dispassionate, he used the fire whip again to sever the head. He transfigured it into a stone sculpture of a manticore gnawing on the protruding neck bones. Finally, he prodded the pool of blood to crawl up the wall and used it to draw a crimson, stylized Dark Mark on the plaster.
"It's beautiful," Bella breathed.
"Thank you, dear Bellatrix. Adumbratio Locomotor." The painted snake opened its mouth and silently hissed at them all.
"Avada Kedavra." The killing curse came from no where, aimed straight at Bella's head. She shrieked and ducked under it. Rodolphus shouted and raised a thick shield, looking around for the aurors that must be attacking. Yet there were none. Instead, it was the two Death Eaters with raised wands pointing at Bella.
"What do you think you're doing?" Rodolphus snarled at them.
"Avada Kedavra. Avada Kedavra. Avada Kedavra..." Both Karkaroff and Mulciber Sr. kept casting killing curses at Bella. The Lestranges yelped and dodged left. Sirius dodged right. The killing curses kept following Bellatrix. Watching the Death Eaters, both of whom had been enjoying the show of Edgar's execution just moments ago, he thought he knew what was going on. It was the Imperious curse he had placed on Felix Mulciber three weeks ago. He had placed one, simple, long term command, just as Felix had instructed. Identify Death Eaters who share your perverted tastes, who cannot resist the Imperious curse, and force them to attack Bellatrix Lestrange. It had seemed poetic justice at the time, using the worst of the worst against each other in a way that was unlikely to be traced back to him. He hadn't planned on being in the same room with Bella when the attack happened, of course, but then, this might might well be the first time these two Death Eaters had been in the same room as Bellatrix since they were cursed. Or at least, the first time they had known they were in the same room. Sirius had just positively identified his cousin for them, after all. Although hadn't he seen Edwin Mulciber at an Inner Circle meeting? Maybe Felix had included a trigger somehow...
"Stupefy! Impedimenta!" Rodolphus roared. "Sirius, snap out of it and help us subdue them!"
"Reducto!" Bella screamed before Sirius could even think to raise his wand. Both Death Eaters exploded, painting the walls and the three of them in shredded flesh.
"Fucking Merlin's arse, Bella! Why did you do that!?" Rodolphus cried, wiping red ooze from his eyes.
"They were traitors attacking me! Swift death is too good for them!"
"They were probably cursed, woman!"
"Then they should have resisted!"
"Not everyone is so willful as you!"
"I think we should get out of here," Sirius interjected.
Rodolphus scowled and nodded. He summoned the splintered remnants of the two hapless Death Eaters' wands. "Sirius, cast the Dark Mark and collect as much of the remains as you can. When we get back to headquarters, I'll do the talking. This is going to be bad."
It was only as they left and Sirius frantically reshuffled his thoughts behind his Occlumency shields that he realized he had tonight, with his Imperious curse, turned Felix Mulciber into a patricide. He buried that thought deep.
He watched silently that evening as Voldemort, already angered for the failure of his own mission to corner Bartemius Crouch, tortured Bella for almost an hour for the unsanctioned killing of a fellow Death Eater. It seemed the Dark Lord knew her limits intimately; she awoke with her mind intact and groveled before him when he was finished. Then Voldemort tortured Dolohov for recruiting Karkaroff, someone self-serving enough to attack a fellow Death Eater. Then he tortured Rodolphus for suggesting both Karkaroff and Edwin Mulciber could have been placed under an Imperious curse by either the Order or an auror sometime recently and sent back to cause havoc. Then he tortured Sirius because he was there. Then the Dark Lord tortured Dolohov again, because he had been second-in-command of the attack against Crouch, and Lord Voldemort certainly couldn't take the blame for the failure himself. Sirius was glad Felix Mulciber wasn't here to take the punishment on behalf of his slain father.
It was a long night. Sirius, still covered in blood and too tired to magic it off, returned from headquarters around the same time as Richard and Elaine returned from helping the obliviators. Richard turned a striking green and immediately emptied his stomach into a bush at the sight of him. Elaine took one look at him, flicked her wand to scrape off most of the dried blood, if not the sticky chunks of human meat, and pointed him to the bathroom. Sirius went upstairs to clean up, followed Richard's example by vomiting into the sink, and contemplated the morality of drowning himself in the bathtub.
Sirius slept through most of the day after the Bones-Mulciber-Karkaroff killing. Or if he did not sleep, he at least did not get out of bed. If he were not in a Death Eater household, he would have transformed into Padfoot to curl up under the covers and hide from his oppressive emotions. Or perhaps he wouldn't, since even his human nose kept detecting the faint traces of blood and death on his person he had been unable to scrub clean. Regardless, he didn't. He could not give Voldemort the gift of a disciple who was an unregistered animagus. Plus, he would probably be killed if he were found to be holding back a secret of that magnitude.
He finally got up when the heat of the Dark Mark dragged him to another meeting of the Inner Circle in the late afternoon. Apparently, Karkaroff had been leading Voldemort's recruitment and diplomatic efforts in Eastern Europe. His most obvious replacement was Antonin Dolohov, which would require a major restructuring of several Death Eater cells and would probably make Sirius' assignment to Bellatrix' team permanent. Luckily, in Sirius' opinion, there was a major problem with this option, the same reason Dolohov had recruited Karkaroff in the first place: many purebloods of the East had cut ties with Dolohov when several major European magical governments and the International Confederation of Wizards took up the British Ministry's warrant for his arrest and extradition. If there was one thing magical governments disliked since the fall of Grindelwald, it was people sticking their noses across political borders, risking expansion of a local conflict into something regional or global.
After some back and forth, Dolohov agreed to cultivate another old contact, Ivan Poliakoff whom Karkaroff had also used. Until he was successful and Poliakoff was Marked, major plans for Eastern Europe would be on hold.
After the meeting, Sirius did not return to the Averys'. Instead, he apparated to the Lake District, within walking distance of the Casterligg stone circle. He knew the place because Uncle Alphard had occasionally taken him and Regulus on picnics there when they were young, and to other stone age sites around the British Isles. Uncle Alphard was eccentric in a different way from most Blacks. He was reserved and academic, interested in deep magical history, and an apologist for Professor Binns who had died in his N.E.W.T. year. Whenever he took his nephews somewhere, Alphard spend most of the outing checking for signs of ancient magical activity, though he rarely if ever found anything. He did discover multiple notice-me-not charms on three stones at Casterligg, though he determined they were originally placed only three hundred years ago, within a generation of the implementation of the Statute of Secrecy. He published an article about it, "Early Instance of Muggle-Baiting in the Era of Secrecy." He renewed the old charms whilst on a picnic when Sirius was eight.
Sirius walked over lank brown grass through a harsh winter wind to reach the circle. He sat on one of the stones, back to the pitch-black Derwentwater, facing the nearby craggy hills. The hills were snow-blanketed, their gray peaks the only feature of the landscape visible at a distance through the dim twilight. The sky was further darkened by clouds and spitting sleet. After about five minutes of stillness, he took out his cigarettes. His hands were cold and clumsy. He smoked two in a row before pulling out his watch and opening it. Moody was there. "Hey. I'm alone. Outside in the Lake District. It's nice."
"Doesn't look it." A fat globule of slush had just fallen right in the center of the portrait. Sirius wiped it away. "Are you alright?"
"Yeah. Were you listening to the meeting?"
"Yes. We'll be watching Dolohov and Poliakoff closely, keeping that stalled as best we can."
"Okay. Edwin Mulciber's dead, too, not just Karkaroff. I killed them. Well, I'm responsible anyway. Technically, Bella killed them. And I killed Edgar Bones."
"You did that?" Moody asked, clearly startled. Sounded like the portrait had seen the bloody room; Sirius wondered if Edgar Bones had had one of the Moody portrait series.
A lump came to his throat, for the first time since the murder. "Yes. I did that. I'm sorry."
"Ah, kid. I won't ask any more. I'm glad you came out here, though. We have something new to talk about that absolutely cannot be overheard. As of this morning, Dumbledore's got a prophesy you need to know about, at least part of it."
"A prophesy."
"It predicts the fall of the Dark Lord."
Wild. If Fate was going to intervene, why not sooner, before Voldemort's war had destroyed so much? "Okay."
"...Did you hear me?"
"Yeah."
"Right. Well... the first part is what you need to hear. 'The sign of death is risen. He will ravage the ravenous; His food is the six-part soul.' It goes on from there to make it clearer that the prophesy relates to You-Know-Who. Long story short, Albus Dumbledore thinks the line about the six-part soul means You-Know-Who made more than one horcrux. There's still four more horcruxes hidden somewhere that we'll have to destroy before the bastard can be buggered for good."
As if the stone he was sitting on had truly slipped into Faerie as the muggles believed, Sirius felt time around him stop. There was no wind. There was no sleet. There was no stone; rather, he felt as if he were standing on the rocky peak that was in front of him, looking down, down, down at his own dark, endless path. The path led not back to his body but onward, through a strange, threatening wilderness into an utterly black abyss.
It wasn't the horror of what Voldemort had done that affected him. The horcruxes were a crime against nature, yes, and a heinous corruption of magical gifts that should not have been so used. But their creation was in the past. What Sirius saw was the impossibility of what he and everyone else at Hogwarts had innocently hoped for, one way or another: a swift end to this wretched war. There would be no momentous duel between the Dark Lord and Albus Dumbledore as had ended the Global Wizarding War. Such a confrontation now would be meaningless, futile... and it always would be. Sirius couldn't go casting horcrux-detection spells on every random object he came across in a Death Eater household. He had stumbled on the first horcrux by chance. Even if he, Dumbledore, Moody, even the whole Order of the Phoenix were now to search for the others in earnest, they did not know what to look for, or where to look, unless the prophesy said anything else useful. That seemed unlikely or Moody would have said so up front.
No, the only way out was through. If the Dark Lord was immortal, the end of the war would come through the annihilation of his army, down to the last Death Eater.
"Kid?" Sirius blinked and looked back down. "Did you get all that?"
"Yeah."
"And you're sure you're alright?"
"Oh, I'm fucked just like everyone else."
Portrait Moody sighed. "I hear you. Listen, Dumbledore and myself are working on it, and I'll get you any leads they come up with. In the meantime, you cannot risk yourself. We need your eyes and ears like never before. Do whatever you need to do, and stay safe."
"There will be more like Edgar Bones."
"Aye, there will. But there will be even more if you get yourself killed and can't help us end him."
"I understand."
Sirius closed the watch and set it down on the rock next to him. For the first time in ages, he transformed. The young, tired, shivering, dark-haired wizard was replaced by a huge, shaggy black dog. Padfoot curled up on the stone, chin resting on his watch. It would only be for a short while, until he went back to the Averys. He just didn't want to be human right now.
Author's note: Poor Sirius, poor Bones. If it wasn't clear, this chapter and the Dumbledore-Moody scene in the previous one happened concurrently. The muggle event Sirius targeted this time was a march by public sector employees on strike for higher pay in the "Winter of Discontent" 1978-1979. Apologies to any readers who might have actually been involved in those strikes. The timeline of Order deaths is moved around again, as both Bones and Fenwick (mentioned last chapter) died later canonically. And yes, I made the Imperious curse transitive; this is supported in canon, since Draco Imperioused Rosmerta who then Imperioused Katie Bell.
Apparently there's some legend about the stones of Casterligg being impossible to count.
Next update might be delayed by a week or two. I'm not yet satisfied with the lay of the next few chapters and might end up doing major rewrites for awhile. I'm also starting a new job, so... yeah. Thank you for the reviews, as always :)