April 13, 1998

The village had two or three streets, the buildings were all old and has elegant vines growing up the sides to emphasize their age and many houses in the distance for wizarding families and small flats at the top floors of the shop buildings, some had outside staircases to climb upwards. It was quite beautiful in a way, but I knew the outward appearance of peace could hide a nasty underbelly.

I kept the hood of my cloak up and watched the people around me. There were so few of them, but they had more confidence and did not seem to feel the sort of danger those in the first hamlet I had seen. But there were looks of caution and unstated nerves in the way some of the women looked over their shoulders as they went through the market, aided by their House Elves who carried bags or purchases, some sending the bought items away home with a snap of their fingers. It was all an odious display of wealth, power and class authority that I had to bite my tongue to avoid making judgmental expressions.

It was safer to keep my head down and mouth shut.

I stopped at a few of the stalls, trying to listen to whispered conversations nearby and gain some idea about what I could be looking for here.

There was talk of the rising price of eggs, some garble about the state of things these days, how one's husband had been promoted now that his boss had been arrested for forging a family tree that was uttered with such pride, I could have hexed the woman.

"I've not seen the Malfoys in a while."

I paused, some memory of Lucius Malfoy prowling the Ministry during the early days of my employment came to mind before he was arrested for being a Death Eater. Lucinda mentioning the family had a son a few years younger than me and her gossip about Narcissa Malfoy in the aftermath of her husband's arrest.

The women changed the topic quickly and I sensed an edge of danger they were dancing around.

The manor might be worth a look, it was a direction to go anyway. I could see the lines of it over the rooftops of the little village.

I smiled politely at the shopkeeper and moved quietly along towards the dark, looming manor house towards the other end of the village.

The Malfoy's were very supportive of blood status and the supposed purity of magical blood – even after their public fall down when Voldemort appeared in the Ministry and Lucius Malfoy was arrested in the Department of Mysteries. If something had gone sideways at the house, it was too interesting to not look into.

The line of houses and shops became more sparse along the road as I walked. The magelights were further apart until they became small lanterns on the fence posts along the pathway as the house grew bigger.

And then it disappeared entirely under enchantment.

Ah, they would allow the house to be seen, but not sought out by strangers. Clever. I would be able to work with that maybe.

The air around me grew cold and something creaked and clacked next to my ear before settling on my shoulder.

The fingers came down on my shoulder one by one in a tapping motion.

Slowly.

I could hear the bones clicking and rubbing together as they came down.

Something inside me froze and I stayed still as if I were under a spell.

This thing had never touched me before.

I could feel it behind me. A cold, dead presence that sent a chill up my spine and the hair on the back of my neck prickled in a silent terror. I did not feel as if I were in danger, I just understood that this was truly beyond the pale.

It leaned down over my shoulder, the beak of the bird skull brushed against my cheek.

Why couldn't I move away?

"Vindicta salus spiritus..."

The words sent a wave of horror through me as the words were whispered in my ear. Its voice was a high whisper, cold and precise in its words that I did not understand.

"So, you can talk?" The words left my heavy tongue in a whisper, the sass of the statement lost beyond my own mind – coming out to the world as more a shock than a mockery of this thing's silence.

Its fingers were digging into my skin like the talons of a bird, despite the bones being clearly human.

The turrets and pointy bits that made the manor look old and marked it as a wizard family's dwelling that lay over the iron and stone fence appeared once more in my vision. It was clearer to me now than it had been on the walk up, no longer shrouded in fog and mist. The manor was ostentatious in the way Thornell was not, Thornell was pretty but it had something older and more modest about it. Putting more value on the property itself over making it as a wizard's place. Discrete and subtle by comparison.

"Justita est salus..."

This was wrong.

The charms around the gate and the property were tingling on my skin and I wondered why I could even see the house at all. Charms like this were supposed to hide one's home from view, but I could see the house as I stood on the property line. I had no spellcraft to allow me to see through illusion, I had no great magical abilities to render such spells mute, nor had I done any kind of spellwork to break down the charms. Either the Malfoys were away from the house, or-

The creature was letting me see through the enchantment on the house.

I had never heard of anything, or force, that could attach itself to a person and grant them the ability to see through illusions. I needed to find out what this thing was.

Before I could dwell on this idea and the implicit terror of such a thing, something moved out of the corner of my eye. I drew my wand, not managing to escape the grip of the creature, only to find a horribly large bird staring at me.

A peacock.

The peacock was a multicolored snob of a creature, it examined me for a moment before turning away to go back to wherever it came from.

There was a shout of rage coming from the woods nearby. I broke free from the monster's grip (or was allowed too) moving away from the creature and losing site of the manor house beyond the gate by doing so, diving into the bushes off the path and wincing as the branches grabbed and pulled at my cloak.

I listened, hearing only the sounded of a duel and someone cursing and screaming at someone over the noise. I took a deep breath and put an invisibility charm over myself, if I stayed still, I would not be seen. If I moved, I would be visible as a suspicious motion blur.

Part of me wanted to stay where I was, but I was here with a purpose in mind and I needed answers – this creature wanted something to do with the house and I needed to understand what I could be walking into. It had disappeared from the path where I had been standing before and I wondered where it could have gone for a moment before deciding that it would come back when it wanted to like cats did.

The loud crash from the forest caught my attention, focusing it like an arrow as a grimy man was flung onto the pathway. He had a ragged, hard look to his thin frame, the arm of his shirt torn off to reveal skin marked by a spellburn and carrying a large, bloody cut through his shoulder that darkened the path below with blood.

A second man emerged from the woods, this one was younger and vicious looking for his crooked nose and a missing tooth as a jet of violet light shot out of his wand towards the man on the ground. The downed man avoided it with a quick roll out of the way before being hit by a second spell that sent him flying into the gated entrance to the Malfoy's property.

Deciding the Snatcher who was being beaten by his fellow would be easier to bully information out of informed my choices.

I lined up my wand as the man surged forward to finish the job, clipping the advancing man in the head with a stunning spell. I winced as he fell into the dirt. That was a hard hit and a harder fall, but he would recover after a longer period of dizziness.

I stood up and left the bush, allowing the invisibility charm to fall off my skin and my wand moved forward to take advantage of someone else's work under the hope this man would have either information I could force from him or a conscience that would catch up with him.

The skinny figure before me was sallow and sick looking but there was a glimmer of resilient fight in his brown eyes as he glared up at me, holding onto consciousness out of sheer spite. I gnashed my teeth as my nerves took hold of me.

"Do it then!"

He seemed familiar in his beaten down state, all scraggly blond hair and defiant expression. There was something pulling at my memories. A dark room in the Department of Mysteries. The chained man alone with only his desperate expression and the ferocity in his eyes when he punched me in the face.

I knew his name; it danced on the tip of my tongue.

"Lionel?"

He staggered slightly, trying to find his footing as he tried to get back to his feet, his hand moving back towards the gate to try and use it to steady himself, only for his hand to slide down before he could find his footing. He only really had the energy to look up at me with a tired sort of curiosity as he took me in.

"You're the changeling from the Department of Mysteries."

I reached into my bag for a healing potion only to be met with Lionel holding up his hand in refusal before his wand flew into his hand with a smacking noise and beginning to glow a soft white light from the tip of his wand. Lionel's open wound from the fight began to heal, the skin stitching closed as I watched in awe.

"That was amazing!"

"Basic healing studies." He paused. "I thought you were another Snatcher."

"I thought you were a Snatcher."

Lionel laughed dryly. "No. I've been hunting them. Unfortunately, one got a jump on me."

Lionel finally managed to fully stagger to his feet and looked me over. "So, what the devil happened to you?"

Life.

"Not much." I shrugged, trying to look nonchalant as the creature peered at me from the shadow of a massive, stone wall that was wrapped tightly around a manor house. "Just got tired of sitting around and waiting for the world to change."

"Me too, kid." Lionel looked me over. I knew I looked a mess, but Lionel had a curse burn on his arm that was starting to darken. He needed some degree of medical attention that neither of us could provide. "What do I call you? I can't keep calling you Changling."

I paused, "Call me Annie."

I refused to go by Constance even as an alias.

"Fine." Lionel gave me a tired, paternal sort of smile before double-checking his spellburn. "I need a professional to look at this – and new shirt."

There was a slight noise from the Snatcher at our feet which brought me back to my original purpose in coming here.

"So, do you know what happened to the Malfoys?"

Lionel looked at me smugly, "Well, the Malfoys were in cahoots with the Death Eaters."

I nodded, following along and wanting him to continue.

"That bird came to roost a couple of weeks ago, apparently, they made a call that they caught Potter."

I froze. "What?"

"Yeah," Lionel took a drink of water from the bottle and heaved a satisfied sigh before speaking again. "Idiots called their boss and Potter escaped before he could arrive. No one has seen the Malfoys since – I assume they're dead or being kept very close until they have had all of the use wrung out of them."

"I see..."

The Malfoys were long gone and the Manor was empty. They were most likely not trusted by Voldemort anymore – would it be worth investigating the house if I could? How would I get through the charms and wards on the property?

"Is there any way inside the house?"

Lionel looked at me, fingering at the tear in his shirt and the wound beneath at his shoulder, his mouth a tight suspicious line.

"Maybe. What are you looking for?"

"Information," I said slowly, letting my mind work in full for a moment with no distractions or horrors before me. "How do you know all of these things about the Malfoys?"

"I've been watching the place. Some Snatchers moved in a couple of weeks ago and I got one of them to tell me what happened."

I did not like the implication of Lionel's tone, but I was in a different world now. Might made right in some ways and desperation created new avenues of human interaction. This was a sad effort at charitable understanding, but what I chose to do in these conditions would have to be things that I lived with in the future. What happened in the shadows would define my own view of myself as a person – I would have to live with myself far longer than anyone else would.

Lionel nudged one of the downed Snatchers with his foot, a casual, disrespectful sort of action. The stunned man barely moved; it was like nudging a rock at the beach.

"There's no point going in there. They allied themselves with a monster and paid the price of their purity politics."

For a moment, I wondered how far I could take this alliance. Lionel winced as he checked the burned skin of his arm and I was not sure I could leave him in that state. It was not the sort of thing I could live with.

"Where can I find them?"

"Why do you want to do that?"

I struggled to find a good answer – once that was not just me blurting out that it was what the thing that followed me seemed to want. No, I'm not convinced you can see the thing and you don't want too. What a conversation that would be.

"I'm looking for someone, I heard they may have been here." I hoped the half-truth was convincing enough to earn some help or cooperation.

"I don't, but we do have a source of information. Duncan here," Lionel gave the Snatcher another nudge by putting his shoe on his face, "has been in the manor since the Malfoys left." Lionel's wand moved forward, pointing downwards. "Rennervate!"

It was the casualness of Lionel that was unsettling. A kind of cruelty that was leaned and not inherent to the person who weaponized it. That way he smiled and leaned closer to this pitiful man in his ragged clothes while wearing the air of both judge and executioner.

"I've not seen the Malfoys in a while," Lionel started slowly as he moved his wand slowly over the stunned man. The threat unspoken and open-ended. "You've been here an age, how about you tell me why that's the case?"

The man gave some incomprehensible, half paralytic groan of pain.

I felt a cold chill fall over me at the scene before me.

"Lionel, you don't have to-"

"I do. He knows things, now I owe you twice over."

He did not like the idea of a debt. I would have to wipe the slate clean entirely before we parted ways.

"Tell me where the Malfoy's have gone." Lionel said slowly and I found the tip of his wand alight with an uncast spell. "Or I'll yank it out of your mind."

"This isn't a fair fight." I was not sure why I spoke, this was Lionel's business, but we had teamed up now and his moral downfall would drag me down too.

Lionel turned towards me slowly, the ferocity in his eyes reminded me of a predator. "Are you playing Good Enforcer now?"

I shook my head quickly.

"How about you come give it a try?" Lionel stepped back and motioned me forward as he moved down the path to keep watch. "No, I insist!" As he came up to me, he whispered harshly in my ear, "You see if you can get them to talk with kind platitudes."

I had no expectations that this was a mission of kindness or human compassion, I had none for Snatchers who had brought in too many Seeds for paltry sums of money. I thought about the ones Tavish had killed to protect the two girls he had brought to Thornell... What the Snatchers were going to do to Joy Horner when they caught her and why Tavish killed at one of the men (that he admitted too). And I steeled myself.

I did not know this man. I did not know this Snatcher's crimes, but leaving him a husk under Lionel would be a disservice to justice to come later. A day in court, even on a minor sentence, would hopefully bring peace to any victims he had left in his wake.

I looked down at the man and took a deep breath, ignoring the encouraging, but cold stare from the creature in the woods just out of my sight.

There was a place I had built in the process of learning legilimency, I had to build a refuge in my own mind for Occlumency, a shelter for the truth of my thoughts so I could lie with impunity, but legilimency required me to be upfront with what I wanted. Did I want to break down walls and risk the mental wellbeing of my target, or did I not want him to remember the invasion at all? Both cases required a part of my mind to retreat to the shelter I had built and the rest to be pushed forward, outward, to my target. I had done this before. I practiced on Percy, Harrow had disoriented me enough to where I could not keep a hold, but I could do this.

The man looked into my eyes, he was full of fear and I felt my mind fly forward.

His mind was a white mess of impulsive thoughts I could not discern all overlaid with fear and confidence in that her was going to earn more money before the month was out, even as there were less Muggle-borns to find in the world. Money was money and new enemies of the state were being created every day to line his pockets with new opportunities.

I sent an image forward, a flock of shrieking crows that made the frail defenses of his mind shiver and fail long enough for me to go past. I called out for particular information – trying to call the events of the Manor house forward so I would not have to stay here for too long.

I heard the screams of a girl, the high, insane laughter of a woman wielding a torture curse that send pain down my spine at the mere memory of Yaxley doing the same to me in the Ministry. There were the feint echos of a name from somewhere beneath my feet.

"HERMIONE!"

Duncan the Snatcher had made himself scarce during the torture of the girl. He had no stomach for Bellatrix's fickle moods.

Then came the image of a broken chandelier in a large foyer, shattered glass all over the floor, pieces in all directions. The sound of screams turned my head to a pale figure clad in black as four figures writhed on the floor. A dark-haired woman I recognized as Bellatrix Lestrange from a wanted poster begged for the forgiveness of her Master. A blonde woman who it took me a few moments too long to recognize as Narcissa Malfoy lay still on the floor next her son while her husband chorused with Bellatrix for forgiveness before breaking out into screams once more.

Voldemort had been here.

They disappeared, the guilty party following behind their dark master as they all disappeared in a rush of apparition. The Snatchers moved out into the open afterwards, they had been at the site for some time as guards while using it as a kind of base as foot soldiers for Voldemort's cause despite the money they received from the Ministry for handing in Seeds. I saw images of the Manor being overrun and raided, taken hold of by people Narcissa Malfoy tolerated as an occasional necessity and order from those in the circle of Death Eaters her husband coveting with – I could imagine this was an attempt to shame and belittle the Malfoys, to remind them how quickly they had fallen in the greater favor of their master.

I removed myself from the Snatcher's mind and knew I would find nothing else here, this trail had gone cold days or weeks ago and I had learned very little new information for my efforts. I needed a new avenue.

I adjusted my grip on my wand and pointed it at the Snatcher who was still laying prone on the ground. He did not need to follow either Lionel or I, he needed to forget everything that happened to him tonight.

'Obliviate!'

The fear and confusion left the Snatcher's eyes and I eased him back to sleep with a barely whispered spell. It was as Lionel said, but seeing it from a poor witness' eyes gave the situation more clarity. I was on the trail of something - Hermione was a very unusual name and I did not imagine there were two running around wizarding Britain in Death Eater proximity. If Hermione had been here, Harry Potter and Percy's brother Ron had not been far away - Percy had described the three as inseparable.

I turned back to Lionel, who was nursing his spellburn with a tired look in his eyes. I could see the burn moving slightly like flames on a campfire.

"Let me look at that."

Lionel shook his head, wincing and trying to hide it poorly. "No, I need to go to someplace called the Undercroft to get this looked at."

"I've been there."

"Good! I've got some people to see and I think they would like to meet you."

I nodded slowly. There was an implication here I could not place. Something in the undercurrent of low tenor of his voice and a quiet sort of threat and resignation behind it. Lionel motioned for me to follow, and I did so with very little resignation. I had no other leads before me, just the angered stare I could feel from the trees.

Lionel staggered and cursed under his breath. I grabbed his good arm and put it over my shoulder to side-along apparate him to the Diagon Alley entrance, we could find a way into the Undercroft from there.

I ignored the pull at my mind from the creature.

It wanted me to leave Lionel, to follow it further, but I could not abandon him. It would be wrong. This need to leave Lionel to his fate was gripping my mind and twisting it into an instinct of survival and pursuit of knowledge, a sense of vengeance turned to callousness and some part of me almost obeyed, but the rest of me refused with a twist of internal violence so powerful I felt my guts twist and my mind warp itself to a grip a hold of who I was and resolutely refuse.

I was not that kind of monster.

I looked down the street, pushing away this invasion that continued to prod and poke at my mind. I would resist. I needed too!

The sensation faded for a moment and I heaved a sigh of relief. I pulled Lionel a little further down the road, away from the looming presence of the manor house behind us. I needed a little bit more light to focus on both of our bodies to make sure neither of us was splinched.

We made it to the edge of the hamlet as the magelights began to come on. I glanced around to make sure there were no surprises only to feel a cold chill fall over my body.

Before me in the middle of the street was the creature. It stood in the middle of the darkening street, looming with its over six-foot frame of draped moss cloak and slightly stooped posture as its antlers reached for the heavens above. The shape and figure only becoming clearer when the magelights on the main road began to turn on to chase back the darkness. It glared at me; the vulture skull head tilted slightly down as it observed me. I could see its finger bone hands peeking out from the cloak. The magelights from above cast it in an ominous shadow as its moss cloak seemed to grow bigger and the black feathers rose upward as if caught by the wind until they faded to shadow.

The creature looked at me, surveyed me, and I could feel its displeasure at my defiance.

"Hold tight, Lionel."

I could feel Lionel nod and give a noise of acknowledgement as he grabbed me tighter before the rush of apparition shoved us both into a tube and away from this terrible little town.

Oo0Oo0

Author's Note: I like to bring back people we only got a glimpse of in previous chapters who seemed like one-off characters once in a while.

And yes, the monster allows Audrey to see through illusions (only if it wants too).