Two people could eat a meal comfortably in Chris's kitchen, but if all four chairs in the dining set were used, it would be tight. He had shrunk three of them and moved them to the living room, then enlarged the table as much as he could while leaving space to walk around it and for Hermione to sit in the last chair. Now he sat tailor-fashion on top of the table with the spell's accoutrements spread around him: two parchments that would each write an inventory as he took things from the pouch; Treasure Island; an impossibly thin pair of gloves he said were made of frog hair, although Hermione wasn't sure if he was serious or pulling her leg; and scraps of the mokeskin he was sewing with a golden needle and niffler sinew.
"How many times have you done this?" Hermione asked to distract herself from what was coming.
"I think this'll make six. Maybe seven."
"How did you learn? All of this, I mean?"
Chris shrugged. "Werewolves are thieves."
"That's such a ridiculous stereotype! It's lycanthropy, not kleptomania!"
With a chuckle, Chris said, "I appreciate the sentiment, Professor Granger, but I am a thief."
"You're a Magical Item Recovery Agent."
"You know what a M.I.R.A. does, right? If you're a Muggle and Great-Grandma Squib's heirloom necklace goes missing, you're not going 'oh no, it's been recovered!'"
"Not every werewolf's a thief, though."
"No, but everyone's gotta eat. Half the jobs out there are illegal for werewolves and the other half, hardly anyone wants to hire us for. So we're either working for the goblins, or working for the other goblins, or we're doing one of the three B's: begging, busking, or burglary. I've done all three. This is the one I'm best at."
"None of Greyback's other kids took it as far as you did, though, did they? Roma said Latromancers are rare."
"Yeah, I'm the only one who went all in with Nic. Fenrir and I used to butt heads about it all the time." He bumped his fists together to emphasize. "'Christavious, if you can do all this, you can do anything you want!' No, Fen, I can't, not if the Ministry won't let me. Thing is, if everything's off limits, nothing is. If it's all illegal, I might as well do what makes me the most money. For me, it's this." He knotted the niffler sinew and gave it a sharp tug to break it, then threaded a cord of leather from the same niffler through the holes near the pouch opening.
"Is it ready?" Hermione asked.
He jumped off the table and put the pouch on it, open. "Almost. I hate this part." He took a deep breath and held it, then pricked his finger with the golden needle, squeezed up a drop of blood, and smeared it on the inside of the pouch. The entire inner surface glowed crimson, red light spilling out like liquid, then faded to look normal again. He cast a first aid spell on himself, let his held breath out, and shook his hand.
"You didn't tell me this was blood magic," Hermione said, her eyebrows knitting.
"Seriously? Hey, Professor, hardcore thievery might involve some Dark Arts."
"You don't have to be an ass about it."
"Yeah, I kinda do when someone says stupid shit like that," Chris said. "Look, if you want to bottle out, I won't hold it against you. I can just toss this pouch by the door with the others and one of my mates will nick it when they need one."
Truthfully, Hermione did want to bottle out. But all those missing people posters, all those families missing a loved one. They couldn't all be Greyback's, but if she could bring closure to even one of them, she had to. "No, let's do it."
"OK, get comfortable." Hermione pulled her chair closer to the table as Chris put on the gloves. "Yeah, that wasn't just a figure of speech. I have no idea how much might be in here; this could take a while. You need to be comfortable."
Of course, once Chris said that, it was impossible for Hermione to find a comfortable seat on the hard wooden chair. She tried a few positions, then stood and cast a Cushioning Charm. Finally, she got situated in a position she could hold indefinitely.
"I'll need a hair," Chris said, plucking one out of his own head and laying it in the middle of the book. Hermione pulled one out and gave it to him, and he did the same with it. "Give me your hands."
She held them out, and he rested them on the table, then put the new Thief's Pouch in them and positioned her fingers to cradle it, her thumbs hooked over the edge to hold it open.
When he was satisfied, he said, "OK, when I do this, you're going to feel the weight of whatever's inside. If there's a lot, that might hurt, but it's nothing I can't fix when we're done. After that, you'll feel the imprint from that book, and I don't know what that'll do. Thing is, if you let go of that bag, anything still inside will be gone forever. My arm is going to be in that bag. I use that; I don't want it gone forever. If you absolutely cannot hold on any longer, you tell me so I can get out before you let go. I swear by Merlin and Morgan both that I will believe you and I won't make you wait, but I'm putting a lot of trust in you."
Hermione nodded. "I understand."
Chris picked up his wand and took a deep breath. "Tell me when you're ready."
Hermione closed her eyes and took a couple deep breaths of her own, then opened her eyes again. "I'm ready."
Chris waved his wand over the bag three times and muttered something, then put the wand in his back pocket. The bag glowed crimson like it had when he finished it, but instead of fading, the light continued to grow until Hermione had to squint against it. Chris put the book into the bag, and the light faded to nothing. The bag shifted as it took on weight. It was enough to be uncomfortable, but it didn't hurt. That was followed by a deep cold, a cold that seemed to cut through Hermione's fingers and sink into the bone.
Then the pain started.
It felt as though her hands were being crushed in upon themselves, her fingers forced shorter as her palm collapsed sideway, her thumbs dragged up her wrists. She gasped; when her mouth opened, a scream ripped out of it, then a second before they turned into sobs.
"Can you hold this?" Chris shouted over her. She nodded tightly. "I need to hear it. Can you hold this?"
"Yes, but please hurry!" she forced out.
Chris plunged his arm into the bag up to the bicep. "OK, I got a ring here." He pulled it out and dropped it on the table, then put his arm back in. "Got some papers. More papers. Even more papers. Got some notebooks." He pulled each item out and put it on the table, then went back in for more. "Got something solid this time. It's—"
As his hand cleared the bag, he cursed and was out the kitchen door before Hermione realized he was moving. "Don't let go!" he shouted from the living room.
Hermione heard a Bubble-Head Charm incantation, but barely registered it. She was too busy staring at the flask Chris had dropped when he cursed. Blood was splattered all over the outside. It had been fresh when put into the Thief's Pouch and hadn't aged inside, so it was still wet. A droplet slid across the curved silver surface, hung from the edge of the flask for a second, then dripped onto the table. Another made its way across, and the pain in Hermione's hands was forgotten, lost in a desperate urge to lick that up.
"Sorry. I should have seen that coming," Chris said, coming back in and putting his hand back into the bag. "Got a locket here."
He put the locket on the table and followed it with a signet ring that was also coated with blood. Hermione wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn't tear them away as a third drop of blood made its way across the flask and hung from its side, dangling without quite enough mass to fall. She kept staring as Chris pulled more things out: jewelry, knickknacks, knives, then gold coins.
"OK, I'm down to pocket change," he said, putting a handful of Sickles on the table. He followed it with a handful of Knuts and put his hand in one more time. "And that's the book. We're done." He put the copy of Treasure Island on the table. "You can let go."
What would she do once her hands were free? Hermione didn't dare find out. Her tongue moved across her lips, but she couldn't pull her eyes away from the blood.
"Professor Granger, I need you to let go of that now," Chris said in a voice of carefully measured calm. "I can't do it for you."
When she didn't move, he stepped behind her shoulder to see what she was staring at, then pulled out his wand and vanished the blood. Awareness of the pain in her hands came back to Hermione. She jerked them away from the bag, and it collapsed into a pile of ash. She pulled her hands to her chest, tucking her fingers in to protect them, and doubled over as a wave of sobs washed over her, racking her body.
Chris knelt beside her chair. "Can I see your hands?" She let him take one and examine it, then the other. "It's all right. They're not hurt. They're just cold." He took the gloves off and stuffed them in his pocket, then wrapped his hands around hers to warm her fingers.
"It felt like… It felt like…" Like I was transforming. "It felt like what the Dementors did to him."
He popped the Bubble-Head Charm and pulled her into a hug. "I'm sorry. But it's over now. You're safe." He repeated those two sentences, it's over and you're safe, until her sobs subsided and she felt well enough to sit up. "All right?" he asked, letting her go.
"Yeah, I think so." She put her hands on the table and pushed herself up, then her eyes fell on the silver flask and she froze. With the blood off, she could clearly see an engraving of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement's seal and an inscription:
"For 40 years of loyal service,
presented to
Alastor Moody."
"OK, I think we need to relocate," Chris said, taking her by the shoulders and steering her into the living room.
"I'm sorry," she said as he sat her on the couch.
"Not your fault. Apparently, we've got a cursed flask in there."
"It's not cursed. It belonged to someone I knew, Professor Moody. We knew he was killed in the war, but they never found a body—" She gasped and pressed her fist to her mouth. If Greyback had found him, that last year when he was thanophilic…
Chris summoned a bottle of butterbeer from the kitchen and opened it, then warmed it with a spell. "Here, drink this," he said, handing it to her. "It'll help calm you down and warm you up."
She took a swallow. "What now?"
He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her. "Well, whenever you're ready, we can divide the stuff up. No rush; I'm not going anywhere tonight."
"I can do it now."
After confirming she was sure, Chris summoned the two inventory sheets from the kitchen and gave one to her. Their last names were written in the upper corner, with "0%" below each.
Chris looked over the list. "When stuff comes out of a Thief's Pouch like this, it comes in order of importance. The stuff at the top of the list was most important to Fenrir; stuff at the bottom, least important. You said there was one thing in particular you wanted. What was it?"
What was it? That seemed like a million years ago now. "It was a contract he wanted You-Know-Who to sign."
"OK, there's one Oborot parchment on here." Chris summoned it from the kitchen and looked it over, letting out a low whistle. "Goblin-written. That's got to be it. That's yours."
He handed it to her. Her last name appeared beside it on the inventory list, and the percentage under her name in the corner increased. She looked it over, but the print was so tiny and written in such complex legal language that she couldn't make heads or tails of it.
"I'm taking the letters and his journals," Chris said, summoning them.
"Wait, journals?" Hermione asked. They vanished into Chris's own Thief's Pouch before she could move. "Wait, I'd like—"
"No." Chris put a finger up. "You signed a contract. I get to choose my half. I told you up front I'm taking anything that might incriminate someone, and Fenrir Greyback's diary sounds like a prime candidate for that. They're mine."
She'd been sitting right next to the perfect primary source, and she hadn't even realized it. "Please, is there any way I could get a copy of those? Even a partial. You could redact them. I wouldn't mind."
Chris chewed on his lip. "I'll think about it."
"What about a trade?" Hermione summoned her bag from the kitchen counter and piled the books from Azkaban onto her lap. "You said you wanted to nick that copy of Treasure Island. There were seven Muggle books in Greyback's cell in Azkaban, and they all have marginalia in them. I'll give you copies of these if you give me copies of those journals with any reasonable redactions."
"Let me see one."
"You've already seen one." There was something about the way he shifted his weight that she didn't like. She dumped the books back into her bag and tucked the bag into her bra.
"Wow!" He leaned back on his hands. "Professor Granger, you fight dirty."
"And you don't?"
"I'm not criticizing. I'm just saying. You fight dirty."
"Do we have a deal?"
"I'd feel better about it if I knew you had a safe place to keep them. Completely unrelated, it'd be a real shame if one of those Thief's Pouches by the door disappeared tonight."
"That would be a real shame. Can I use your loo?"
Chris laughed and pointed at the living room door. "Straight across the hall."
Hermione went to the hall, grabbed a pouch off the table by the front door, and walked into the guest bathroom. She tucked the pouch into her bag and waited a minute, then flushed and ran the sink for half a minute before returning to the living room and sitting down on the couch again. "Where were we?"
"Journals," Chris said. "I wasn't originally planning to read my dad's diary, but I'll see what I can do for you."
"Thank you." Hermione hadn't thought of it in those terms. She considered apologizing, but Chris silently turned back to the inventory sheet, so she did the same. The entry 'journal in three volumes' now had 'Corbin' written beside it. Listed above that were five letters, four written in 1997 and the fifth…
"One of the letters is from 1959," Hermione said. "That was too early to incriminate anyone. Can I have that one?"
"Let me look." Chris took out a parchment folded into a packet with the impression of a ring pressed into it. He unfolded it and wrinkled his forehead. "Huh. It's in Greek. I mean, I knew Fenrir spoke Greek, but…" He shrugged and handed it to her. "It's no good to the Hunters, so you can have it."
On the inventory, the ink for "Corbin" beside this letter stretched out into a line, then sprang back into "Granger". Hermione didn't know Greek, but she had learned the alphabet in her Ancient Runes class, and sounded out the signature. 'Clio.' Clio? In 1959?
"You didn't pocket the ring that was in this, did you?" she asked.
"Dude," Chris said in a voice that sounded sincerely hurt. "If there was a ring, it'd be on the inventory. Things don't stay together over 40-plus years."
"Was it that ring that came out first, separate from the other jewelry?"
Chris summoned the ring and held it up to the parchment. "Nah, it's too big.—Ooh, that thing's old school."
"What do you mean?"
"Take a look. It's an old-fashioned wedding ring."
Hermione took the ring. It was nicked, dinged, and frosted with fine scratches, but it looked like a normal gold wedding ring. An inscription inside read: 'As this ring, so my love. F L'
"Is this Fenrir's?" she asked.
"Nah, can't be."
"No, I think it is. I know he was married. F L, that's Fenrir plus Lucia."
"Yeah, I also know he was married once. That's why I know it can't be his. It's old school."
"What do you mean by 'old school'?" Bewilderment crossed his face, and she added, "Keep in mind I'm Muggleborn."
"People used to enchant wedding rings to show each spouse's feelings towards the other. Personally, that sounds like a huge mindjob, but whatever. Point is, that is not how those rings look decades after a bad break-up."
"Maybe it wasn't a bad break-up."
"Then where is she? I can tell she's not dead, because it's still in one piece. So where's she been for the last 30-some years?"
Hermione held the ring out to him. "If you didn't know where this had come from, what would you tell me about it?"
"Well, first I'd tell you I usually charge for appraisals. But just this once." He took it and pulled a loupe from his Thief's Pouch to examine it. "Like I said, it's an old-fashioned wedding ring, enchanted. The wedding was probably between 1950 and 1970-ish, because these fall out of style during a war. They crumble when the spouse dies, and sometimes you don't want to know that so definitely. 10K gold, so probably a working-class couple. From the size, this is the man's ring. He's dead and has been for a long time. I'm talking decades, not years."
"How can you tell that?"
"It's the hazy finish that gives it that weird luster. That happens when someone has an unrealistic view of their spouse. With newlyweds they almost glow, but this haze happens when the spouse only has memories, and that's all they've had for a long time. Details get lost, and both good and bad points get exaggerated. If you told me this belonged to Nona Ashland's husband, I'd believe it." He paused and looked aside, then shook his head. "Nah, not even Fenrir had the guts to steal that."
"Can I have it?" Hermione asked.
"No fur off my tail." He tossed it to her, and her name appeared beside it on the inventory. "That brings us to the stuff he took from his victims."
The flask had belonged to Mad-Eye Moody, but Hermione didn't know his family, or if he even had one. The signet ring probably had a family crest, but who should it go to within that family? "I didn't really think ahead to how to return those to the right people."
"Yeah, I kind of got that impression," Chris said.
"Could Roma find them?"
"If she did, they wouldn't be thrilled about a werewolf showing up with this stuff. How about this? We agree to turn those over to law enforcement. I can bag them up and drop them on Marolt's desk first thing tomorrow morning. Wreck his whole day. It won't ding either of our percentages, and the next of kin gets a nice, formal visit from a Ministry Official to give them their closure."
Hermione nodded. "I'll agree to that."
"OK. Then the money we split however brings us to 50/50."
"I don't want the money."
"Then donate it somewhere. We gotta make the contract happy. Deal?"
"Let me look it over one more time." She read over the inventory carefully to make sure she hadn't missed anything, and her eyebrows knit together. "Does something about this list seem odd to you?"
"Yeah, I was just noticing something, too," Chris said. "What are you seeing?"
"You said things came out of the pouch in order of importance. If Greyback was just holding on to these things because he couldn't sell them, shouldn't they have come out after the money, not before?"
"Yeah, they should have. And I was just noticing that some of this, he could have sold." Chris gestured for Hermione to follow him into the kitchen. "The flask, that signet ring, that stuff I understand. That would have been hot. But this locket." Putting on the frog's hair gloves again, he picked up the silver locket, opened it and looked inside, then flipped it to the back. "The only thing with this is the photo inside. He could have taken that out."
Hermione picked up a plain ring, probably another wedding ring, although it didn't have the luster of the first. "This is the same way. It has a couple of initials engraved in it, but they're not shallow. They could be removed."
Chris nodded, looking over the table. "Half this stuff, he could have sold. He must have been hanging on to it on purpose." He sighed. "I guess he was taking trophies."
The look on Greyback's face when he gave Hermione her scars came back to her, the way his eyes glazed over. She pulled her bag out of her bra and took out the Mental Notebook. "I don't think that's it," she said, turning to Scabior's interview. Everyone knew what was wrong with him. He ate people. But I knew he didn't like it. He didn't want to be that way; he just couldn't control himself. And he hated that.
Hermione held the notebook to her chest, and her tongue moved across her lips as she remembered that desperate desire to lick the blood off Moody's flask. Fenrir's imprint on the book, that memory of what he felt in Azkaban. "These weren't trophies. He didn't sell them because he was ashamed of how he got them."