21 Blood of the Covenant

Pansy

Every morning, the first thing Pansy did was check her Vipers’ journal. After two weeks at home, school felt very far away, and the end of term a very long time ago; the long and empty days at home stretched out until Pansy felt like she was suffocating. Seeing her journal’s crystal gently lit helped a little. Made her feel, while she had it out and open on her desk, a little less alone.

Today, though, it was dark. Pansy sighed and flipped through it though she knew what was in it by heart. A conversation with Harry about the Soothsayer’s new offices and the instant success of their decision to print a few letters to the editor, locked in place so she could reference it later. Justin’s page was likewise crammed with handwriting, which Pansy had preserved in the journal not for factual references but so she could retrace the words and kindle an echo of the warmth Justin’s very presence carried.

Daphne’s page was blank and had been for several days. If memory served—which Pansy knew it did—their last exchange had consisted of Daphne asking whether Pansy and Justin were officially an item or not, Pansy deflecting with an inquiry about Daphne’s search for an overseas spouse, and an unspoken mutual agreement to leave those two subjects alone. And then there was the page where she could exchange notes directly with Draco: the last thing he’d written appeared at nearly two in the morning on the same night as the Yule gathering at the Malfoys’, nothing more than a curt warning that she might want to learn more about what had happened, if she could. The words had long since faded but Pansy had stared at them long enough that a ghostly afterimage of the note now hung over the page as she stared, motionless.

Still in a frigid stalemate with her parents—Pansy refusing to bend on the subject of the Death Eaters, and her mother refusing to accept that Pansy might not want to join a movement much more violent than Pansy had been raised to expect—she had stayed home. Had even been relieved. What little Draco had told her about the guest list promised an evening of boorish conversation with the kinds of wizards that made Pansy want to start hurling castration hexes.

After, though—when her parents came home, Father quiet and Mother pacing about as if she’d overdosed on mood-boosting potion, and when Draco’s curt note appeared, hinting by its very brevity at an oath that bound him to silence—afterwards Pansy regretted not fighting harder to attend. If she had been there she may have had some idea what happened. Because, clearly, something had.

Subsequent notes to Draco had gone unanswered. Today Pansy turned for the first time to Theo’s page. Wondered again what he might be able to tell her that Draco couldn’t. If nothing else, she might be able to determine that Draco and not Theo was under oath, which would suggest the oath had been pressed on Draco by his parents and not at the event itself—and that would mean that Pansy had a hope of learning more from sources whose parents didn’t try so hard to shield them.

Have a good Yule? she wrote, and activated the journal so that the words would appear in Theo’s. Unsubtle, perhaps, but the nice thing about Theo was that she only had to put up the barest of pretenses, both of them knowing well how to speak indirectly and both of them aware of the subtext.

She cast tempus. Nearly nine. Mother and Father should be about done with breakfast by now. Once they were, Mother would leave, just in case the Aurors made yet another surprise visit to the house today—word around the Ministry hinted at more home searches on the horizon, and the Parkinsons would have been a target even if they weren’t suspected of harboring a fugitive—and Father would retreat to his study. At that point Pansy would be free to sneak downstairs for her own breakfast and avoid both of them in the process.

Another thirty minutes, Pansy decided, and got up to dress for the day while she waited.

But halfway down the stairs, she found herself caught by Father’s voice, echoing from the hall off the first-story landing: “Pansy, would you come in here a moment?”

It was not a question, despite the phrasing. Pansy paused, fought momentarily with herself, and irritatedly made her way down the hall instead of to the kitchen: ignoring him would be senseless antagonism.

“Yes, Father?” she said in the door of his study, one shade shy of insolent.

Father looked up at her from a scroll on his desk. “Come in and have a seat.”

Now that sounded like an order. Pansy took as much time as she dared following it, sauntering over to the desk and draping herself over the uncomfortable chair Father kept in front of it as though it were one of the squashy, welcoming armchairs in the Slytherin commons. Father said nothing, so she cocked an eyebrow at him and waited: two could play that game and Pansy had patience to burn.

He sighed, irritatedly. I win, Pansy thought. “Have you any plans this afternoon?”

“No.” Pansy’s other eyebrow joined the first in climbing up her forehead. What an atypical question. And the look on Father’s face… her stomach turned over, uneasy.

“You will be joining me at an evening gathering,” he said flatly. “Dress for moderate formality and be prepared to leave at four.”

Pansy… didn’t trust this. “Will Mother be attending?”

“We’ll meet her there.”

Translation: it was a Death Eater thing. Pansy felt cold all over. She barely registered herself murmuring assent and only noticed, once she was safely back in her room, that she’d forgotten about breakfast entirely.

Not that it mattered. She no longer had even the slightest appetite.

The glowing crystal in her journal drew her attention. Pansy flexed her hands a few times, to steady them, and opened it to a note from Theo: It was a holiday to remember, that’s for sure.

Good memories, one hopes, Pansy replied, gratified to see that her script came out as smooth as ever.

Time will tell.

And Theo would not, clearly. My parents were vague on the subject.

There was a long pause.

I’ve found myself being unexpectedly vague as well faded into view all at once, followed by, more slowly, Haven’t you found that some things are difficult to speak of, in the aftermath?

I suppose. Difficult to put into words?

You could say that.

Pansy frowned at the page. So an oath, and not just one forced on Draco… but also not an explicit oath, either. Theo implied that he’d been surprised at his own inability to talk about whatever happened. What kind of magic created a geas like that with those present none the wiser?

Nothing minor. Nothing good.

I’m to join my family for an unspecified event this afternoon, she said in a change of subject Theo couldn’t possibly fail to notice. Formal wear and all.

Oh, formal wear, how exciting. Wear your extra-pointy shoes.

I always do, she wrote, but I’ll pick out a special pair today. He would understand that his warning had been heard and heeded.

A few minutes went by with no answer. Theo had said all he planned to, it seemed. Pansy set the journal aside and went to her wardrobe instead. Moderately formal… she had plenty of robes that qualified. And then there was the warning to wear pointy shoes. Translation: to be careful and go prepared for a tense situation.

Not that she would have treated it as a casual, inconsequential tea with friends anyway.

Pansy dithered around a bit, but found herself unable to seriously concentrate on anything, and whiled away the time before Father told her to meet downstairs making small talk with a few Vipers through the journal, catching up on her correspondence, and halfheartedly looking around for Astrych. Mother had never loved having him in the house, and for the last few months in particular Astrych had been spending a lot more time outside than usual; he was probably out in their garden or (yet again) finding a way through their wards. Pansy wondered sometimes what Muggles thought when they glimpsed a wild fox in their stony, greenless London, but trusted Astrych was clever enough not to let them close. On days like this she did miss him, admittedly. She couldn’t talk to him like Harry did Eriss but he was better company than her own mind.

Astrych would at least have stopped her from agonizing for two hours over what to wear. Pansy hated feeling indecisive but without even a pretense of distraction she couldn’t keep herself from second-third-and-fourth-guessing every idea she had for clothes for tonight. A dozen robes and twice as many sets of shoes and jewelry had been flung around her room by the time she settled on a winter formal robe, fine well-tailored wool dyed a deep burgundy. Silver was a more traditional winter shade but blues and whites washed her out: Mother had raised Pansy to be painfully aware of what shades complemented her skin tone and which did not.

The bell sleeves at least provided excellent concealment for a wand holster on the inside of her right arm, and, after a moment’s hesitation, a knife that she strapped inside the left one. It was a gift from Theo a few years ago and would temporarily leave anyone who got cut with it dizzy and wobbly. Pansy had no real idea how to use a knife, but then, neither did most other people, and she was sure she could at least aim the pointy bit in the right direction. Her journal went into one of the robe’s expanded pockets, along with a bag containing some galleons and emergency cosmetics and other odds and ends. A few delicate gold pieces of jewelry and a pair of glossy black heels rounded out the outfit and with that Pansy found herself pacing back and forth in her room waiting for it to be time to leave. Her heels clicked rhythmically back and forth, clocklike. Randomly Pansy remembered a scare-story one of her nursemaids told her when she was small, about a wizard who tried to stop time and found himself trapped inside a pocket watch, slowly going mad. The tick-tock sounds her nursemaid had made as part of the story sounded exactly like Pansy’s shoes did now. She wished she could remember how the story ended.

When her real-life (and uncursed) clock told her she had fifteen minutes until Father’s deadline, Pansy took a deep breath, checked her hair and makeup one last time, and set off downstairs with as much purpose as she could muster.

Early though she was, Father already waited by the floo, dressed… slightly better than what Pansy would consider moderately formal, though there wasn’t an absolute and universal standard for such things. Formal dinners called for a robe, high-collared and long-sleeved, but people could and did get creative with the definitions of things like collar and sleeve and also, on occasion, fabric; Pansy’s burgundy robe was pleated so that she almost looked to be wearing trousers cut very wide as she walked and had a silhouette Hermione told her Muggles would describe as militaristic, with high shoulders and a fitted waist. Father had gone rigidly traditional instead. Slate grey wool, plainly cut, minimally embroidered with geometric patterns that echoed the magical fashion world’s response to the geomancy craze in the 1950s. Nothing about it was remotely daring or interesting. For Pansy’s whole life he’d let Mother design and pick his robes, and while this one showed every sign of Mother’s eye for fine materials and tailoring, it was, by her standards, unforgivably plain and boring.

Pansy forced her attention back to the present, where it very much did not want to be, and said, with an edge to her voice, “May I know just where it is we’re going yet?”

“Quiet.” Father strode over to her so quickly and jerkily that Pansy froze up until he put his hands on her shoulders and held her firmly, looking her in the eye. “You will curb your tongue tonight, do you understand? I know you and your mother have had your differences of late, but there are some things that require us to present a united front, and this is one of them. There is much at stake.”

“I will be,” said Pansy, with every ounce of contemptuous poise she had ever, over the years, used as armor against the snubs and digs of witches both prettier and more magically talented than she, “the image of propriety.”

“See that you are.” Father released her and turned to the floo without another word. His hands, Pansy noted, were not wholly steady as he reached for the floo powder and cast it into the flames. “Malfoy Manor!”

Oh, thought Pansy. Oh Merlin.

Her hands wanted to shake, too, but she didn’t let them.

Draco and Pansy had grown up together. Maybe they hadn’t been friends by first year, but they’d seen each other bloody-kneed, throwing a screaming tantrum over dinner, through all the awkwardnesses of childhood; Pansy’s parents probably still secretly hoped she’d marry him someday, as Mother and Narcissa had sometimes joked, years ago. All of which meant the Malfoys’ floo receiving room was as familiar to Pansy as the one in her own home. The comfort of familiarity was almost enough to outweigh the undeniable air of menace that sank into her skin like aerosolized potion as soon as she stepped out of the fire.

Part of the problem was Narcissa. There were pinches at the corners of her eyes that Pansy couldn’t remember seeing before this year. Her smile and words of greeting were flawless but rote, routine, too practiced, especially for a family friend who usually found a much more intimate and sincere welcome at this house.

The floo roared again. Pansy had stepped aside as soon as she came through with an ingrained instinct that Harry and Hermione had yet to develop; she turned now, orienting her body to politely include both the new arrival as well as Father and Narcissa, only to pause when it was Mother coming out of the floo from Merlin knew what hiding spot or safe house.

“Lovely afternoon,” Mother commented idly. “Hello, Narcissa, it’s such a pleasure.”

“Likewise.” Narcissa went to Mother, and they kissed the air by one another’s cheeks; that was the more intimate greeting, but it was worse, wrong, Pansy knew both of these witches well enough to tell that in this moment they were all artifice.

Mother and Father kissed one another’s cheeks properly, and then Mother turned at last to Pansy with a smile like a rictus. “Pansy, darling, you look wonderful. One of Eleanora Fawley’s collection?”

“I like the color,” Pansy said, smoothing a hand down her robe, which had indeed come from Celesta’s relative’s fashion studio.

“It suits you.”

“It does indeed,” said Narcissa with a smile that might have been the first honest expression from her since Pansy got here. “If you’ll follow me? The elves have arranged tea in the sunroom.”

If nothing else, tea in the Malfoys’ sunroom was always something to wholeheartedly enjoy. Lucius had commissioned the all-glass room for Narcissa on their five-year wedding anniversary (Pansy had it in confidence from Draco that the actual occasion had been their celebration of Lucius’ name officially being cleared after the first war) and, no matter the time of year, its perfectly comfortable temperature and commanding views of the sky and the rolling Wiltshire hills were an amazing conversation.

Pansy tried to pay attention to the conversation, carried mostly by Mother and Narcissa, that went on over their Earl Grey and scones. It was difficult. A new artist in Dublin trying exciting things with three-dimensional paint sculptures. Seasonal trends in flower arrangements. Things Pansy might have found interesting, if not for the much more pressing situation known as an ongoing covert war, and specifically, the as-yet-unrevealed purpose for today’s little meeting. Mother’s presence was telling: a fugitive from the law, a Death Eater as much as Father or Lucius and one of few witches able to claim such, and here she was complimenting Narcissa’s upholstery over tea like any other society lady. It might look like a normal social function but it wasn’t. It was wrong, wrong, wrong.

“—other guest,” Narcissa said, and Pansy snapped back into the present, mental bells ringing a cacophonic alarm. There was nothing for a fifth person in the tea service. Of course, the elves could always bring an extra teacup and saucer and whatnot, but that was unlike Narcissa, who usually planned these things down to the second. Also, Narcissa’s wand hand twitched when she said guest.

“Oh?” said Pansy, pitching her voice light, airy, cheerful. There is nothing wrong here. “Will Draco be joining us?”

“Unfortunately he is otherwise engaged this evening.” Narcissa did a trick that Pansy recognized—looking directly at the bridge of Pansy’s nose so as to give the appearance of eye contact without actually fully meeting her gaze. It was what one did with a suspected unfriendly legilimens or perhaps if one wished to avoid guilt. Or, Pansy thought, convey a warning?

“A pity. I’d hoped to see him.” Pansy sipped her tea, for dramatic effect. “May I ask who’ll be joining us, then?”

“Just an old associate of ours,” said Father with a smile Pansy could only label as strained.

Narcissa did the tinkling, delicate laugh she used for company. Not friends. Not dinners Pansy could remember, her parents and Draco’s around the same table after two glasses of wine apiece. Wrong wrong wrong. “A friend of the family, one might say.”

“I’m sure it will be diverting,” said Pansy, for lack of a better response.

Mother smiled at her, and it was not a strained expression at all, no, it was equal parts sincere and manic, half the mother Pansy knew and half the new person that had, since her time in Azkaban’s dementor-aura-soaked walls, been looking out of Mother’s eyes. “It will be, Pansy dear. You’ll see.”

Right. Okay. If Pansy got any more nervous she was going to start vibrating in place.

She reached for her napkin, intending to dab nonexistent crumbs from her lips and thus avoid a moment of awkward stillness, but halfway through picking up the napkin she froze in place: her fingers had encountered a scrap of parchment tucked beneath it that had certainly not been there when Pansy laid the napkin in her lap thirty minutes ago.

Years of carefully maintaining her mask in public held. Pansy’s expression didn’t flicker. After less than a second’s pause she turned her reach for the napkin into a casual wipe of her fingers against its fabric, and in the same motion pinched the parchment scrap between two fingers and slipped it out, to be held low against her thigh on the left side: at a four-person square table no one would be able to see her hand. “May I be excused?” she said in a perfectly even, normal voice. “I’d like to refresh my charms.”

“Yes, of course,” Narcissa said with a smile and another failure to look Pansy in the eye. A crumb had fallen on her robe and she hadn’t noticed. “You know where it is.”

Pansy did know where the loo was. She had spent more time in this house as a child than any other place save her own home. She did not, however, have any need to touch up glamour or cosmetic charms, or to actually use the loo, refresh my charms generally being the polite way witches referred to a retreat to the loo for any purpose during a social gathering. Once she got there and shut and locked the door behind her, Pansy tugged the parchment out from where she’d concealed it in the folds of her robe. Perfectly regular, anonymous script, the kind you only got from a Dicta-Quill, marched across it in even lines, words cramped small to fit on such limited space.

They are going to demand that you accept the Mark. The Dark Lord is prepared to take steps to persuade you should you resist. If you do not wish to accept it, you must run now. The Malfoys can find you anywhere on their property: I can buy you thirty minutes in which they will be otherwise occupied. You will need to be outside their wards and protected from familial blood magic tracking by that time if you're to have a chance.

Beware to whom you run. Contact one of your fellows with matching basilisk rings for assistance with the magic if you must but make it quick. It would be inadvisable to request any magical or financial assistance from any adult witches or wizards: kidnapping charges may not stick but would carry consequences far beyond the threat of legal sanction.

Signed,

A friend

Pansy stared at the note, and then looked up at her expression in the mirror. She was pale. Twin red spots burned high on her cheeks. Rage, or shame, she couldn't tell.

Would her parents really... Pansy thought of Mother's recent, renewed zeal for the Dark Lord's cause, and Father's quieter, more pragmatic but no less powerful loyalty to his liege. Yes. They would, if only because they thought it would protect her. And kidnapping charges—Pansy was the sole heir of an old, noble House, and if her parents kicked up a fuss about her running away, which they absolutely would, kidnapping would be the least of the charges they could level at anyone who helped. It could be the makings of a blood feud. And she knew there were still old laws on the books about line theft, however rarely anyone enforced those today.

What would the Dark Lord do to persuade her to take the Mark? Pansy shied away from thinking about it. She could imagine, too easily, one or both of her parents under the cruciatus. Theo or Draco, even—her friendships were hardly secret. And that was just the people within the Dark Lord’s easy reach. He could, with some effort, get his hands on Daphne. Hermione. Justin.

One couldn’t take the Mark unwillingly, but consent could be coerced.

Fuck it, and fuck them. Pansy wasn't going to let anyone she cared about be used against her. Wasn’t going to let herself be reduced to a pawn in the Dark Lord’s game.

Where could she run? Her thoughts skittered along with frantic speed. No way could she drag the Blacks into this shitshow, as the note said, and she absolutely wasn't going to run to someone like Dumbledore who would demand an unpleasant price for their help. She looked again at the note, which had wrinkled and creased from the force of her grip on it. Any adult witches or wizards.

It said nothing, she noted, about Muggles.

Mind made up, she dug in her pocket for the small bag of witch's essentials that she carried everywhere. A few small vials of shelf-stable potions waited within. The healing ones had been brewed recently enough to still work; ever since the poisoning incident all the Vipers had been extra-careful to make sure they had fresh potions on hand.

With a healing potion and a blood replacer lined up on the edge of the sink, she quickly rolled up her left sleeve to above the elbow, briskly opened the front of her robes, and yanked down the neckline of the slip she wore beneath them as far as it would go.

In memory, she heard Theo's voice: Veins are better than arteries, the flow is easier to control. There are more blood vessels on the inside of your forearm but also more nerve endings. The outside surface is better if you only need a bit of blood. Inside is better if you need a lot quickly, but be ready with bandages, and be very careful not to cut too deeply. Pain can make anyone’s hands shake.

Pansy wasn't nearly as good with runes as Harry or Theo or Hermione, but she paid attention in the class and to her friends' interest in the subject. Runic magic cared less about skill or power with a wand and more about willpower. So, while she didn't know all the theory cold, she did know a way to use runes to make herself untraceable even should someone use the blood of her kin to look.

Another thing of Harry's that she lacked was any particular pain tolerance. Pansy bit her lip hard with the effort of staying silent as a cutting charm parted her skin (always across, said Theo in her memory, never along your arm, if you cut parallel to your veins it will be much harder to heal—) and blood and pain bloomed in its wake.

Haste made her clumsy. Pansy nearly dropped her wand setting it down, and the first rune she drew, smack in the middle of her sternum, came out so wobbly she had to wipe it away and start over. Fear compounded with every thundering beat of her heart but she made herself go slow and take her time drawing runes across her collarbones and chest in blood. There were mirrors charmed to show an inverted reflection, so any writing held up to them, like runes, could be viewed normally: this was not one of them, and Pansy lost precious seconds having to imagine them backwards as she drew.

Finally it was done. It took her two tries to cast a charm that would dry the blood immediately. The anti-tracking spell wouldn't last as long this way but she couldn't afford to wait for it to air dry. It also, she noted dimly, dried and clotted the blood in the cut on her arm, which had the effect of stoppering it almost immediately. She knocked the potions back one after the other and started redoing her robe before they'd even fully taken effect.

One more spell, an area-of-effect variation on scourgify, made sure no trace of her blood or hair was left anywhere in the room except on her body, and then Pansy could slip her wand away, do one last check in case she'd forgotten anything, and then—bloody fuck, her shoes. How was she supposed to go traipsing through the fucking woods in December in four-inch-tall heels?

She'd been in the bathroom way too long. Fuck the shoes. Pansy would have to figure it out on the way. She left the loo and turned not back towards the sunroom but down a smaller side hall that led to, among other things, the little room where she and Draco had endured music lessons together when they were small. It was on the ground floor and had a west-facing window. She'd need visual cover to delay any nonmagical pursuit—surely by now Mother suspected something was wrong—and the woods came closest to the house roughly northwest.

Portraits watched her go with, at most, idle indifference. Pansy was so lucky this happened in Malfoy Manor, a place she knew well, and a place where she was known, too, by elves and portraits and the knob on the music room door, which liked to refuse entry to anyone who couldn't sing a perfect B flat on cue, but had been thoroughly cowed by a screaming match with an eight-year-old Pansy and to this day opened meekly at her slightest touch.

In her memories she wasn't sure if the western window in here opened. Pansy's heart climbed to her throat when she saw that it didn't. She got out her wand again. Cast twice in succession: "Pulvo, ventus!" The first spell reduced the glass window to, essentially, dust; the second whipped up a decently strong gust of wind to blow all of said dust outside. Pansy didn't need to deal with inhaling any of that shite on top of everything else right now.

Her spell hadn't been perfect, chunks of glass weren't pulverized all the way, but the tinkling they made as they hit the floor was nowhere near as loud as the crash of the whole windowpane would've been. Pansy called that a win, shoved a piano bench under the window, and, awkwardly, climbed through.

Immediately she knew her shoe problem was worse than she'd thought. Two inches of snow was more than enough to make the ground slippery and treacherous; she took two steps into the garden that bordered the house and put her foot down in a hidden divot in the frozen soil, rolling her ankle so badly she almost cried out. Fuck. Fuck this so much. She ripped off her shoe and whispered "Ferula," through gritted teeth, and if the bandages that spiraled around her foot and ankle were lumpier and less evenly spaced than Hermione might have managed, who fucking cared, they held her joint in place.

The other shoe went the way of the first and Pansy jammed both into her expanded pocket. Both bare feet in the snow now, she cast a warming charm that would keep the chill at bay, but her warming charms never lasted more than an hour at best and once she left the property she couldn't cast another.

Was this worth potential frostbite? Pansy decided yes, it was. "Fuck you," she whispered over her shoulder at the house, clinging to rage because the alternative was to think about any of this, and bolted for the tree line.

Cold air rasped in and out of her lungs. Pansy was breathing too short and sharp, panic and doubt hammering at the gates of her mind. She occluded and kept both at bay. Mentally reviewed the property. There was a Muggle road vaguely south or southwest of the house, she and Draco had gone to see if they could peer at Muggle horseless carriages (what she now knew were automobiles or cars) from the ward line. (It hadn't worked, too many trees shielding the road from the property. Lucius had been furious with them for trying.)

So that was one problem solved, but then Pansy had to worry about the Trace. She wasn't of age yet, not until February. She only had until the edge of the Malfoys' wards to do any wanded spells and her wandless magic was limited at best, which shortened her list of options severely.

Her thirty minutes had to be almost up by now. Pansy added a charm to numb her feet—the one she usually didn't cast while wearing heels—and ran faster. Tried not to imagine Daphne or Theo in her place, fleet-footed and athletic in a way Pansy couldn't match, let alone Harry, whose years of quidditch put him well ahead of most others their age for physical conditioning. Pansy was fit enough and knew it but this headlong rush wasn't her strength.

The woods reared up before her. Pansy could keep running through them only because this wasn’t truly wild forest; the Malfoy elves knew some forestry and they had a green mage out every few years to check up on things, but it was still a managed woodland. And an old one too. Tall trees, thick canopy. All of which meant undergrowth was minimal and Pansy could, ignoring the pain and numbness sinking into her feet through her charms, keep sprinting. Frigid winter air felt like knives as it scraped in and out of her lungs.

Merlin, she hoped this wasn’t a trick. Hoped the note-sender was right and the Malfoys were busy and that whatever was keeping them busy needed their elves too. Hoped Astrych would be okay. Hoped she wasn’t about to get murdered by some Muggle predator.

Where the bloody fuck was the ward line? Pansy wasn’t sure she could run much farther, and surely—

A crack of apparition startled her so badly she tripped and lurched sideways into a tree. Snow tumbled down on her head and shoulders. Her first, mad thought was for her hair. Pansy clawed her way upright, wand out, cornered.

Her eyes met Narcissa’s. “Quickly,” Narcissa hissed, grabbing Pansy’s arm and dragging her along.

Pansy fought, for for the second it took her to realize they were going away from the house, not towards it, and also that Narcissa’s grip was absurdly strong. “What—where—”

“I couldn’t warn you. But if you will run anyway—” Narcissa looked around. Her eyes had something of the cornered animal in them too, listening to the distant baying of hounds. “Lucius will be coherent in minutes, no more. You’re almost out of time.”

What happened? Pansy wanted to ask, and How are you up already if he’s still out, and also why are you doing this and will you be okay because Draco would lose his mind if his mother got killed as a traitor to the Dark Lord. No words came. It was all she could do to breathe and stop shaking.

Narcissa dragged her to a sudden halt. Pansy blinked down at her feet, which were turning blue, and then up, registering the low stone wall that marked the Malfoys’ wards, more for symbolic reasons than to pose an actual, physical barrier. It came only up to her hips.

“Here.” Narcissa fumbled in a pocket, pulled something out, pressed it into Pansy’s hands. Every movement harsh, hurried. “It’s all I can do. Go. Go. Do not run to the Blacks. Trust in your occlumency. Do not use magic. It won’t be the Ministry who follows your Trace first, do you understand?”

“Yes,” Pansy choked out, and opened her mouth to say thank you, but Narcissa was already gone again.

Getting over the fence was the work of a moment. Wards grasped and pulled at Pansy but they weren’t keyed to keep people in, really, or at least not to keep her in, she was known to the magic of this place, familiar, trusted. They ran curious fingers over her skin and then she was through and beyond them in a wood that felt… not much different, really, from the one she’d just left. A little weedier. Thinner, scrubbier trees. Thicker undergrowth. Younger forest, but still forest, with the occasional distant twitter of winter birds and the particular quiet that comes of snow absorbing sounds as soon as they were made.

Pansy chanced a look back. No sign of the fence she’d clambered over, even though she hadn’t gone more than ten paces from it. The spot where her footprints started in the snow was blurry, hard to look at. If she groped around a bit she thought she could find the wards and the Malfoy lands again. It wasn’t too late. She could go back. Plead illness, beg Father’s help. He’d cover, she knew he would, he just wanted her to be safe even if she didn’t like how he defined safety—Pansy hovered there for a long second, fear choking her, rooting her feet to the ground. But her heart pulled a different way.

Resolutely, Pansy turned her back on the Malfoys and started jogging towards the Muggle road.

Ethan

The worst part of this, Ethan thought, was that he’d have to tell Andi she was right about her evil bastard of a cousin.

Months of sitting on Sirius Black had turned up nothing more nefarious than illegally buying Muggle alcohol for him and his indolent, complacent little friends to drink at home or out at this or that club. And of course that enchanted motorcycle of his, which broke more laws than some Death Eaters but also only broke laws that Ethan didn’t care much about. Especially since Black only used the bloody thing to go for joyrides with his boyfriend and not for Muggle-baiting or Statute-breaking or anything else that would be of interest to the Order.

Originally Ethan suggested watching him ‘til Imbolc because he’d been sure they’d turn up something. But no. Hours and hours went by doing nothing more than this: sitting at a cafe in disguise, or wandering down some Muggle street under Alastor’s invisibility cloak, while Black shopped or joked or partied or, in today’s case, sat down for dinner on the patio of a newish restaurant in the Holyhead magical quarter.

Ethan was bored. Lucille, he knew, was bored too, bored nearly witless, though she hated Black for reasons to do with her youngest brother, a story she kept close to the chest and Ethan hadn’t pried into. Black and all his friends were a hateful little bunch, content to fritter their time away while the world crumbled down around them, so sure that their privilege would protect them come what may, so uncaring of anyone who didn’t have gold or an old name or a noble title or powerful friends to hide behind—but Ethan didn’t think Black was the type to hurt a child.

Involuntarily his eyes ticked to the other Black at the table. The fake one, the adoptee, the cuckoo child. Listening while Black senior animatedly told a story; Ian, the boyfriend, kept laughing and interjecting, but Harry Black just sat there with the kind of smile that could hide anything behind its slick facade. He’d probably smiled just like that when he framed Ethan for Dark magic and got him sent to—Ethan twitched and shivered away from the memories.

To Azkaban.

Ethan tore his eyes away from the group. Polyjuice changed your body, your appearance, but it didn’t make you miraculously a better actor: if he sat here and stared furiously at the Blacks in particular then one of them would eventually notice.

He sipped his tea and made a face. It had gone tepid. Soon he’d have to order another, or a plate of food or something, to excuse his still being here. The sun had gone down, it was getting rapidly dark, and Ethan did not relish the prospect of leaving the bounds of the restaurant’s environmental charms; their patio was warm and comfortable but as soon as he left he’d be dealing with the full force of the late December chill again. This whole evening had been a waste of time and unpleasant to boot. Bad tea, boring food, absolutely nothing of interest to—

Maybe he’d spoken too soon. Ethan didn’t let himself stiffen but his attention focused as Harry Black put a journal on the table. Of course, most leather journals looked pretty much the same, there were only so many ways you could bind paper into a book form and leather was a common material for bindings in the magical world, but still—

Black flipped through it and then grew very still. His head jerked up and he said something to the others; Ethan had no chance of overhearing from this distance, even with magic, and their table was sure to be warded anyway, but he only needed a line of sight to pick up on the tension and urgency. Sirius sat up straight in response to whatever Black junior said. Levity drained from his face: Ethan remembered that Sirius Black had been an Auror trainee back in the day, that Death Eaters had run from him, that he was not to be fucked with lightly.

They had a quick exchange punctuated by sharp gestures and frowns. Sirius threw some galleons on the table and then all at once the three of them were rising, swirling winter cloaks ‘round their shoulders, the notebook vanishing into Harry Black’s pocket, and oh, Ethan knew that movement, the wrist-roll of someone checking whether a forearm wand holster was secure and your wand stored safely inside ready to pop out.

Across the street, Lucille, who’d been playing the role of old witch feeding stray kneazles tonight, had likewise sat up straighter, waiting for Ethan to meet her gaze with a question on a borrowed wrinkled face.

Ethan looked at the Blacks and Ian again. They were halfway to the back door; typically Black left his motorcycle out back when they came to establishments like this. In seconds they’d be gone. He gave Lucille the nod and hurried after his targets.

One of the waiters tried to stop him. Ethan gritted his teeth, muttered a quick “confundo,” silently tipped a floating serving tray full of food over so that it spilled all over the floor, and in the confusion elbowed his way behind the counter. The Blacks hadn’t had any trouble. Probably they’d bribed whoever worked here to let them through. Typical. Ethan didn’t have their fancy gold or signet rings: Ethan had to explode a bag of flour in the kitchen to distract everyone while he shoved by.

He peeked through the door into the courtyard behind the building just in time to see the motorcycle rising off the ground in silence, three people piled onto it in a way that was spatially improbable. Bloody hell. Ethan got his wand through just in time to fire off a charm people used on their pets sometimes, one that would activate as a tracking charm only once it got a certain distance away from the caster; it was passive and good at sneaking past wards, and if they apparated or took a portkey, then they’d absolutely be outside its—

—range. Ethan sagged against the doorjamb as the motorcycle and its riders vanished from thin air about ten feet off the ground. The crack of apparition-with-passengers and the wash of mental information that instantly followed it momentarily whited out his vision. He bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood, turned around, and started forcing his way back through the restaurant.

Most of the chaos had been calmed now. “Hey!” someone said, pointing at Ethan, “you’re the—”

“Stupefy!” Ethan moved as the curse left his wand, hurdled a table in a way that his borrowed older limbs did not like, and tipped over a table in his wake as he sprinted out the front door.

Lucille was ready, across the street. “Beacon,” Ethan said, “now,” and held still exactly as long as required for the tracking spell to settle onto his clothes. Then he spun on his heel and tore himself away through space in pursuit of the rapidly fraying charm that he’d cast on Sirius Black’s motorcycle.

Ready as he was for an ambush or a fight, Ethan stopped, disoriented, when he found himself on a benign Muggle street. Nothing much going on, quiet yards, darkened houses—but there was the motorcycle, parked in between two Muggle cars, innocuous as anything. Ethan went over to it. Knelt and studied the runes on the muffler.

Interesting.

A series of quiet cracks sounded behind him. Lucille would’ve gone back to Ethan’s house, gotten one of the pre-charmed tracking beacons, and followed him, and the others would apparate in on her trail if they could follow. Violet’s system and a clever one. Ethan risked a quick glance over his shoulder at them. Four total, wearing hoods pulled low and bright red cloth tied across their faces.

“What’re you—” said Sturge’s voice from behind one of the red masks.

“Hang on,” said Ethan, “just a second… okay, done.” He rose. “This house. Come on.”

One of the others—Violet, he thought—cast a quick ward-detector and grinned. Ethan followed suit. Wards indeed, very good ones too but meant for subtlety seeing as this was a Muggle street, not enough to keep determined casters out and, it would seem, already weakened tonight by the passage of others who had damaged the wards enough to slip through without bringing the whole ward net down. “C’mon,” Ethan said, and did the same, pulling his way through.

Shouts and spellfire split the night. There was the noise he’d been expecting. A fight. Ethan reached back to help yank Lucille through the wards. Looked at the house again just in time to see a figure in a Death Eater’s stark white mask come flying out of a window in a rain of shattered glass. The bastard shouted, rolled the landing, and dove back through the window with his wand out, no hesitation.

Muggle street. Quiet house. Death Eaters. Ethan didn’t need any more information: he conjured a red mask for himself, jerked his head, and ran for the front door with his people on his heels. Savage excitement and sick fear went to war in his stomach. He hoped they weren’t too late. He hoped he’d get to see the Blacks both down or dead by the end of the night.

Things got quiet before Ethan reached the porch. He slowed, gestured for his people to do the same. Were they too late? His hand tightened on his wand. No. They couldn’t be. Whoever lived here needed help.

Ethan changed tack sharply and cut around the side of the house towards the window the one Death Eater had crashed through, feet silent in the mulch of the garden beds. At the edge of the frame he slowed and eased just enough of his face past the edge to see inside.

The room was dark, air thick with dust and smoke, showing clear signs of a fierce fight. But, in the manner of lots of fights where one side was dramatically outnumbered, it clearly hadn’t lasted very long, and Ethan could see why: against three Death Eaters, Sirius Black, and Ian Meecham, no normal couple, surprised on a quiet evening, stood a chance.

Sound popped and warbled strangely. Some kind of ward, Ethan thought, gone wrong with all the magic thrown around. He couldn’t make out words but he could clearly see a figure in Death Eater robes and mask slumped on the floor, trying to move, and two others in the same uniform, wands out and aimed halfheartedly at a sofa upended on the far side of the room. And there was Black helping Meecham up from the floor and spelling bandages around his boyfriend’s ankle. Black snapped something at one of the Death Eaters. The masked bastard gestured sharply with his empty hand. Dissension in the ranks maybe. Ethan could guess what happened. Someone went for the fireplace, trying to escape. Death Eater blew it up before they could get there. Victim took cover behind a sofa instead—a faint trace of ward shimmered in the air around it—and sniped back well enough to do some damage. Good on them.

And then—Ethan’s throat caught—the ward around the sofa strengthened visibly.

Someone was still alive in there.

Why the stalemate? Maybe Black got fussy about his boyfriend, called things off? Meecham was hurt, that much was obvious, he wasn’t really known for combat prowess—

Ethan had seen enough. Someone in there needed help, Black and Meecham were up to their eyes in this, and Harry Black might be off doing Merlin knew what but two out of three of them wasn’t bad. He jerked a hand over his shoulder so his team would line up to scramble through the window after him.

What an unexpected payoff. Ethan’s last thought before he vaulted through the frame was Guess I won’t have to tell Andi she was right after all.

EARLIER

Harry

“Oi!” Sirius bellowed up the stairs. “Are you coming?”

“Yes! Just a minute!” Harry shouted back, reaching for a robe with one hand and cloak with the other. Last minute dinner plans had not been on his agenda today, but with the kids all out of the house and his friends variously busy or not answering their journals, going out with Sirius and Ian was a more pleasant prospect than yet another evening shut inside. Even if it meant he had to set aside his work for Gatlin with no warning and scramble to dress while thinking back over anything he might’ve left undone. Hermione was taking a group of the Vipers on a tour of bookstores in Muggle London, an event which had taken almost a week to coordinate so everyone who wanted to could go; Graham, Dylan, and Veronica were all there, though Rio had opted out in favor of seeing his relatives. That was the kids taken care of. No pressing correspondence, he’d looked over a few things Vanessa sent him in preparation for the Imbolc Wizengamot session, and there were a few things to go over from Riasmoore but they could wait until morning.

Harry stuffed his feet into boots. “Eriss, do you want to come?”

“Are we going on the flying machine?”

“Yes.”

Eriss waved her head back and forth uncertainly before slipping down off the enchanted stone she liked to nap on in the winters. “Only if I can stay warm inside your skin-coverings.”

“Of course you can.” Harry scooped her up and let her start working her way underneath his robe and undershirt while he left.

Halfway down the first-story corridor he skidded to a halt, cloak yet unfastened, and backtracked. “Rio?”

“Hi,” said Rio, looking miserably up from the drawing room sofa.

Harry frowned at him. “Thought you were at the Honeywells’ tonight. What’s wrong?”

“Fever. Took a potion. Didn’t help.”

“Which potion?” Harry cast a quick diagnostic. Not too high a fever, but not negligible either.

“Protean’s Pyretic Draught.”

Surprising. Protean’s was a good brew; Harry hadn’t been able to improve on it, really, and not for lack of trying. Rio must really be sick. “Alright. Need anything? Company?”

Rio shook his head. “Got a book. The quiet helps.”

“Call for help if you need it, alright?” Harry said. “Kreacher’s authorized to do so, and we have Healer Taleb on retainer, he’s bound to confidentiality. And you can write me, I have my journal with me.”

“I will.”

Harry nodded, but as soon as he was out in the hall he summoned Kreacher and said lowly, “Keep an eye on Rio for me? I’m not sure he’ll actually call a healer, even if he really needs one.”

“Kreacher will watch,” the elf promised with the gravitas of a knight swearing to guard his monarch’s infant child. Harry suppressed a smirk, thanked him, and finally managed to meet up with Sirius downstairs.

“You took your time. Everything alright?”

Harry tilted his hand in a so-so gesture. “Rio’s sick, staying home. Kreacher’ll watch him.”

“Aw, poor kid.” Sirius glanced up at the ceiling as if he could beam sympathy upstairs to Rio with his eyes alone. “We could bring him back some takeout from that place with the curry he liked?”

“Sure.” Going into Muggle London was always a jarring experience but after Dickon mentioned Darcy and Amit often going to Indian restaurants on the Muggle side, Rio had wanted to try for himself, and already had a favorite. Harry debated with himself internally and added, “We could just eat there ourselves, really.”

“Oh no, we have plans.” Sirius grinned. “Reservations and whatnot. C’mon, let’s go, we’re taking the bike and meeting Ian there.”

Of course they were taking the bike. Harry wandlessly bound warmth into every stitch of clothing he had on as he followed Sirius into the garage. There were some environmental and weather-mitigating spells on the bike, but not enough to really blunt the winter cold, and on top of that, Sirius had been experimenting with making it go way faster than even a flying motorcycle should reasonably ever go.

“Hang on tight,” Sirius said once they were on, “we’ll be there in forty-five minutes or so—”

“Wait—how long?” said Harry, or tried to: Sirius gunned the silenced engine and wind tore the words away. Harry squeezed his eyes closed and grimly hung on to the passenger seat’s handles. Thank Merlin Sirius had adapted it so Harry could hold on without having to wrap his arms around Sirius for balance; that had just been one discomfort too many, and not one Harry could tolerate for very long. Certainly not an hour. Eriss was going to be furious.

Sirius let the engine snarl to full noisy life after a few minutes of steeply climbing into the air. Harry counted backwards from one hundred in French and then Arabic, and only when his heart rate had come back down to a normal level did he peel one eye open and look down, and—

What the fuck had Sirius been doing to this thing? The ground was blurred beneath them, blurred and warped as if seen through a fish-eye lens—Harry blinked hard, but no, it wasn’t his eyes, that seemed to be—

If Sirius had figured out a localized spatial distortion field enchantment, and not shared it, Harry was going to kill him.

He passed their forty-five-minute-long flight alternately doing occlumency exercises and thinking about what kind of spatial warping spell Sirius had gotten to work on the motorcycle. When he’d been a kid he’d been on long car rides with the Dursleys, but those memories were dim and distant, and Harry preferred not to think about them anyway. He’d gotten so used to the instantaneous, if physically jarring, methods of magical travel that this flight felt like it took an eternity.

Finally Sirius angled them downwards and Harry shook himself out of a fitful meditation. He didn’t recognize the town below them. Sirius cut the engine sound and brought them in for a landing, and as they slowed, Harry squinted at the buildings around the cobbled square he thought Sirius was aiming for. Nothing stood out as familiar. Where—

The wheels touched the ground and Sirius turned off the bike with a flourish. “We’re here!”

“And here is where exactly?” Harry said. Merlin, his legs were stiff. Climbing off the bike was a bloody relief. He stretched and glanced around the weedy, walled-in little courtyard they’d used as a landing site.

Sirius looked up at him with a roguish grin from the controls for the bike’s anti-tamper enchantments. “Holyhead, obviously.”

“If you figured out a spatial distortion enchantment and didn’t tell me, I am going to kill you,” Harry threatened. Angry, wordless hissing came from inside his collar, though Sirius probably couldn’t hear it, not without Parseltongue.

“No you won’t.” Sirius elbowed him: that grin had only gotten larger and more insufferable. “‘Cause then I’d be too dead to tell you about it.”

“I would learn necromancy specifically to bring your soul back and force it to answer my questions.” Harry was losing interest in the threats, though. He’d never been to Holyhead’s magical street. “How do we…”

“This way.” Sirius beckoned Harry to follow him through a door into a restaurant’s back rooms. A witch in a tall hat took his hands and kissed his cheek; Harry caught the glint of gold passing from Sirius’ palm to hers in the midst of the gesture and grinned to himself while Sirius and his friend made small talk. It was just like Sirius to befriend some random restauranteur so that she’d let him park his illegally enchanted motorcycle out back of her establishment.

But to Harry’s surprise, they didn’t sit down once they were ushered out onto the patio. “Sirius, do you want to explain, or—”

Sirius was nearly bouncing with excitement now. “It’s a surprise!”

“A… surprise. Okay.” Did he know how Harry felt about surprises? Maybe not. Either way Harry curbed his reflexive wary recoil from the idea. This was Sirius: whatever surprise he had in mind would be… at least well-intentioned. Harry would go along with it but he’d also make Sirius the first one to go through any doors involved in this ‘surprise.’ Eriss, picking up on his unease, tightened around his torso and shoulder.

Sirius set off along the street at a brisk pace. It was early evening, and this far west, there was little light pollution to speak of compared to London; the stars were out along with a decent number of people on foot. The stores they passed were brightly-lit, cheerful, and welcoming, smaller and less wealthy-looking than the ones in Diagon but still, to Harry’s eye, getting by alright. No one really seemed to recognize or pay attention to him and Sirius, which was a relief.

“Here we go,” said Sirius, steering Harry towards a particular door so quickly Harry didn’t have time to take in the words on the sign overhead. He reached for the doorknob and Harry neatly got there first, turned, and opened the door for Sirius with a flourish and a smirk.

“After you.”

“You are so paranoid,” said Sirius with enormous affection, and turned around to walk backwards through the doorframe, arms spread wide. “See? Nothing—hey!”

Harry let out a short, surprised laugh: as soon as Sirius had set foot inside a swarm of mistletoe-sprigs descended on him from nowhere, whirling around him making high-pitched bell-ringing sounds and leaving little puffs of green sparkles wherever they touched his skin or robes.

“Gerroff!” Sirius spun his arms in a windmill. “Bloody little—”

Someone tugged Sirius farther into the store, and Harry followed, with caution. None of the mistletoe came for him. “Hi, Harry,” said Ian from Sirius’ far side, “figured you’d make him go through first—give us one second—”

“Seriously? Do you have to snog me to get them to go away? That’s—”

“I cannot believe either of you is considered mature enough to apparate,” said Harry, still grinning.

Sirius dipped Ian dramatically backwards, until Harry was worried they’d both topple to the floor, and kissed him soundly, which Harry didn’t particularly want to watch. He stepped aside and let his eyes wander around the store only to pause as surprise and another, warmer feeling spread through his chest.

It was a small shop, lined with jewelry cases along the left-hand side and three small curtained booths, currently open and vacant, along the right. They featured padded adjustable chairs and reminded Harry of an odd combination of a Muggle hair salon and dentist’s office. Across the back wall, above and behind a display counter, were painted the words Delyth’s Piercings and Tattoos.

Harry slid a sideways look at Sirius and Ian. Nope, they were still working on the mistletoe problem. Alright then. He went to the display counter and glanced down; it was full of earrings and nose rings and other jewelry whose intended purpose Harry could only guess. A door behind the counter stood closed and presumably led to a back room. There were sconces for witchlight on the walls, only half-lit. Harry began to suspect this place wasn’t actually, technically, open.

Hopefully they hadn’t just broken in.

“Finally,” Sirius said. Harry glanced back; they’d broken apart, the mistletoe, placated, fleeing back up to the rafters. “You’re an arse.”

“I know,” said Ian with a smirk.

“You are both terrible,” said Harry. “Why are we here, exactly? I hope the surprise wasn’t the mistletoe.”

“It was a surprise for me,” Sirius said petulantly, “but no, it’s not. DELYTH!” Harry winced at the sudden shout. “Oi, Delyth, we’re here, come out of hiding, you old—”

The door behind the counter banged open. “And just who are you calling old, Sirius Black? You were a fifth year when I just in second! Hello, you must be Harry!”

Harry blinked once at the speaker, a short, freckled witch sporting curly hair dyed lurid blue. “I am, yes. Sirius, she’s right, you look older.”

“Betrayed!” Sirius gasped theatrically. “Abandoned! Cruelly—”

Ian elbowed him in the stomach. “Really?”

“We were in school together,” said, presumably, Delyth, as if it were only her and Harry in the whole store, “and I promise you, he has not grown up one iota.”

Harry put on a charming smile. “He’s grown on me. Like moss.” A sense of question and threat came to him from the familiar bond; he pushed calm back at Eriss.

“You are so mean to me,” said Sirius. “And when I brought you here for an ear piercing.”

Even though Harry had concluded as much, he still found himself wrong-footed.

Sirius paused. “If, er, you still want one. I just… remembered you saying—”

“Yes. I—yeah, it’s a—good surprise,” Harry said quickly.

“Surprise? They just sprang this on you?” said Delyth. She frowned. “No, wait, that makes perfect sense. I won’t be offended if you don’t want to go through with it, but—”

“I do, really,” Harry assured her, finding his feet again with a rueful smile. “I was expecting a dinner reservation, is all.”

“Righto!” Delyth cracked her knuckles, which was… not reassuring. “What kind of piercing did you have in mind, then?”

Ten minutes later, they walked out with Harry sporting small emerald stud earrings and Sirius and Ian excitedly having a conversation about terrible tattoos they’d seen on people that Harry didn’t entirely bother to follow. A faint sense of heat and pressure in his earlobes was the only sensation left from the piercing, pain dulled by a topically applied poultice, the recipe for which Delyth had told him about in detail while she worked, but Harry kept returning his attention to the feeling like poking at the space left by a missing tooth.

Blaise would laugh, he thought, when he saw this, and probably have a whole litany of advice and opinions—which reminded Harry of whatever issues Blaise had going on lately, and momentarily soured his mood. He inhaled sharply and banished those thoughts again. Tonight was not the place for worry: he’d promised Sirius to come out and enjoy himself and it was a promise Harry meant to keep.

It turned out they did have dinner reservations at the restaurant they’d used to land the bike. The sign out front proclaimed its name to be Cosmic, which Harry hadn’t had a chance to register earlier, and that it had only been around a few years. “How do you know the owner?” he asked once they’d been seated.

“That would be me, actually,” Ian said with a grin. “One of Indy’s mums knew my da when they were all kids together. She’s like my cousin.”

“Your cousin is attractive,” Sirius informed him, and then twitched: Harry suspected Ian had kicked him under the table.

“You’re taken, and she likes quiet types anyway.”

“Fine, fine,” Sirius said, dramatic as always.

They ordered food and a wine Sirius selected; Harry enjoyed the former and sipped at the latter, being as unsettled by the loose uninhibited feeling of tipsiness as he had been the first time he ever had alcohol. He knew nothing about wines, but the label on the bottle was one he’d heard Draco talking about one time, when he and Justin and Blaise got into an argument about wine that lasted three hours until everyone else got sick of it and threatened to kick them out of the Knights’ Room if they didn’t stop. Harry imagined the three of them plus Sirius rehashing that argument and had to hold in a laugh. Sirius had opinions about expensive alcohol.

“Harry?”

“Hm?” Harry said, focusing on the conversation and the hand Sirius was waving at him.

“You looked away with the faeries for a minute there,” Ian said. “Alright?”

Harry brushed off their concern. “Just thinking.”

“At least someone in your family knows how to do that,” said Ian solemnly.

“Oi! What is this, pick on Sirius night?”

They devolved into bickering again, and then another story from Sirius. Harry considered the last few bites of his meal and let the chatter wash over him. He was glad he’d agreed to come out tonight. Various stressors still prodded at him insistently from inside, but for right now they could be ignored, their chorus silenced.

Sudden pressure against Harry’s sense of his magic alerted him to a new note in his journal, sent directly to him. Harry glanced at Sirius to make sure he was distracted and eased the journal out of his expanded pocket. A little fine-tuning of the spells on it had made sure that he would know if someone wrote to him directly even if he couldn’t visually see the crystal embedded in its cover light up. It was probably just Graham asking when they’d be home, but—

It was Rio, not Graham, and at the sight of his ward’s rushed, panicky handwriting, Harry sat up straighter.

Emilia just wrote, there’s people in masks at their house, Amanda told her to hide she’s in a closet somwhere

Harry she’s scared I think its death eaters

she says there’s a fight

Another cribbed sentence appeared:

she heard a scream Harry can you help her

Harry summoned a quill from his pocket and dashed off a response. Use the floo, notify the DMLE. We’re going. “Sirius,” he said, voice sharp, and Sirius, who was no fool, cut off his story instantly to look at Harry with a frown. “There’s been an attack on the Honeywell house. Emilia wrote Rio.”

“Fuck,” Sirius said, groping in a pocket. He scattered a handful of coins across the table as he rose. “We’re going, right? Floo?”

“I am.” Harry left no room for argument. “And no, we’re not in their ward system.”

“I’m coming too,” said Ian.

Sirius opened his mouth.

“Don’t argue, I’ve a Mastery in Defense!”

“Alright, alright—c’mon!”

Sirius led the way back inside at a near run. The staff knew their faces and jumped out of the way; someone held a door open and Harry didn’t wait around long enough to thank them. He felt Eriss winding around under his clothes, working into a position from which she could drop from his body on short notice if she needed.

In the little courtyard Sirius had already gotten the motorcycle running. “Really?” Harry snapped. “There’s no way we can all—”

“I can’t side-along you both to somewhere none of us has ever been!” Sirius jerked his hand. “Just—”

Ian piled on behind him. Harry’s whole body recoiled from the thin sliver of space left for him to sit on but he was the smallest and lightest and he’d just have to tolerate hanging onto Ian instead of the passenger handles for the ride.

He wondered how long the ride would be.

He wondered if they’d get there in time.

However much Harry might like Ian, the older wizard was not on the short list of people whose touch didn’t make Harry’s skin crawl. Harry’s and Ian’s calves were wedged next to each other into the footrests; Harry had no choice but to wrap his arms around Ian from behind, knotting his hands together in a miserable death grip where they were pinned between Ian’s stomach and Sirius’ back. Breathe, Harry told himself sternly.

Wrestling past the instinctive reaction distracted him until a few seconds after they’d taken off. Only then did Harry’s brain put a few pieces together and he opened his mouth to ask how they were going to get to the Honeywells’ house in time.

“Hold on!” said Sirius’ wind-torn voice, and Harry thought Oh no.

The motorcycle shuddered under them. Harry squinted as the world twisted around them like he was seeing it all through a fish-eye lens, a hundred times worse than the trip to Holyhead in the first place. His body told him they weren’t moving very quickly but his eyes, when he forced himself to look down, insisted they were hurtling through the air at a terrifying speed. The wind should have torn them away. The cold should have numbed his hands by now. How long had they been flying? Harry breathed in and out and concentrated on the leather and metal under his legs instead of the compounding anxiety brought on by prolonged contact with another person. Surely no more than five minutes. Ten, maybe. Ten minutes could be a lifetime under the right circumstances. This fucking felt like a lifetime.

Harry didn’t feel them descend. Didn’t notice the ground getting closer. He only realized they’d landed when a jarring thud rocked his body and a return of normal sound and airflow told him the bike’s enchantments were down.

He threw himself off the backseat so abruptly he nearly fell over in the snow.

Neither Sirius nor Ian paid attention, already running up the sidewalk.

Harry followed them and bullied himself back under control. Looked around. Plain suburban street. Not Petunia’s kind of suburban though. Little one- and two-story houses. Neat gardens. Hedges and stone walls. Very English. Very old. He’d known the Honeywells lived in a Muggle area. Seeing it for himself was still different.

“Wards?” he heard Ian say. Harry shook his head, hard, and rejoined Ian and Sirius at the edge of a property that his eyes wanted to skip over, that his mind found unrelentingly banal.

“Yeah, just—got it.” Sirius had his wand out, twisting it in midair, face screwed up with concentration.

Ian likewise started casting but not at the house, at the street. Harry recognized a few typical Muggle-repelling charms and an alert ward. He popped his wand out to do the same, and grimaced, realizing the Trace wouldn’t be masked here, not in such a Muggle area. There’d be no covert wand use like he could get away with in Holyhead or Diagon or behind a property that had been steeped in wards for generations. Anything he cast—anything cast around him—would be registered.

“Harry,” Sirius hissed, still concentrating fiercely, “do not cast anything illegal tonight, okay?”

Harry thought that if anything he should be giving Sirius that warning, but before he could say as much, the wards submitted to allow them entry with a faint crackle, and their view changed. What had looked like dull brown house became a bright and cheerful blue, mundane garden plots and small weedy lawn vanished in favor of carefully maintained raised soil beds full of magical plants, and witchlights gleamed on the house’s eaves, though their glow didn’t pass the boundaries of the property.

They heard nothing.

Sirius frowned and opened his mouth.

Harry elbowed him and pointed: one of the glass panels in the front door had shattered.

Sirius shifted into his dog form with uncanny fluidity. Nose low to the ground, fur bristling along his shoulders and spine, he trotted up towards the house, tail held stiffly behind him. Harry and Ian followed with their wands out and ready.

On the porch, Sirius transformed back. He held up four fingers and then pointed at the door.

Ready, Ian mouthed.

Sirius jabbed his wand. The door flew off its hinges with a bang and the three of them surged through a small entryway into a sitting room that had probably been nice before curses blew it all to pieces.

Three figures turned to them. Long black cloaks. Death Eater masks.

“Fuck off, Black, if yeh know what’s good for yeh,” one of them snarled. Harry’s grip on his wand tightened. They were known. That was bad.

“No.” Sirius’ voice was hard and his stance implacable. “You had better leave before the Aurors get here.”

The tallest Death Eater snorted. “Yeah, right.”

That was worse. Harry glanced around. The Death Eaters had been arrayed facing a sofa upturned by the fireplace and scarred with the effects of multiple curses. What was—

“Sirius?” came a voice from behind the sofa.

Harry knew that voice. “Amanda?”

One of the Death Eaters made a disgusted noise. “Oh, for—”

“Leave,” said Sirius, “now. You won’t get another chance.”

Harry saw the instant they decided to cast. He dove to the side, rolled and popped back up close to the wall, and ran along it in a crouch while Sirius and Ian engaged the Death Eaters in a blistering, furious duel. The banging and shouting of curse fire and incantations followed him into the tiny pocket of sheltered space behind the sofa.

At once he saw why they hadn’t just taken the floo away. A spell had destroyed the hearthstones at its base, where the floo network enchantments anchored. Intentional, for sure. Amanda huddled behind the sofa, one hand pressed to Dickon’s bloodied chest. The other, bloody and trembling, held a wand that she pointed at Harry as soon as she saw him. “Prove yourself.”

“Compassion is a choice just as much with kin of the blood as of the heart.” Harry shrugged at Amanda’s clear surprise. “It was a striking thing to say, alright? Good enough?”

“Yes. They—” Amanda switched to aiming her wand at the sofa; Harry concentrated, and noticed a faint visual shimmer denoting a ward of some kind, hastily erected and painfully maintained. Her eyes were desperate. “Emilia. You have to—they were looking for her, they wanted us but especially her. I can’t—please.”

Harry looked closer. Saw the curse eating its way into her legs, and the faltering, wheezing irregularity of Dickon’s breath. “Okay. Stay here.”

Whatever else she might have said was lost as Harry reentered the fray. Ian had transfigured a table into stone and was using it as a battering ram to slam one of the Death Eaters against a wall. Not the most effective tactic but at least his target was too off-balance to cast, for now. The other two were busy dueling Sirius, who held them off from a spot partially covered by a grandfather clock that seemed to have taken umbrage to this invasion and, while Harry watched, swung its pendulum to intercept a curse.

A shout and another spell followed Harry towards the one door he could see. The first was unintelligible. The second clipped his side and brought pain with it. Harry slammed through the door, shut it, slapped it with three different locking spells, and only then looked down. Fuck. His robe had torn where the curse hit, and the loose threads were already busily burying themselves into Harry’s skin. A patch of fabric the size of his palm was already gone and growing. He knew this curse. Knew it didn’t have a good counter.

Harry slashed his wand down the robe’s front, tearing it open, and in one motion shrugged free. The threads in his side yanked painfully. Three, two, one, he thought, and on zero ripped the cursed fabric out of himself.

It hurt. Harry clamped his mouth shut around a pained sound and threw the fabric aside. It was unwearable now. “Episkey,” he muttered, and gingerly twisted his torso. The pain didn’t seem to go too deep. He doubted the threads could’ve gotten past the surface layer of skin, fat, and oblique muscle in the few seconds they had. Some fragments had probably torn off and lodged inside. A healer’d need to get those out later but alone they couldn’t do much damage and Harry had bigger problems.

This was a two-story house. Where would Emilia have gone to hide? Her room, probably. If she’d had time to get there and the sense to get away from the living room. “Eriss. Can you scent them?”

“One adult male, one young female. Yes. Forward.”

Eriss’ directions led him to the stairs. “The male scent moves around but it is freshest here.”

A search, then. Leading upstairs. She’d gotten to her room. Harry silenced his shoes and took the stairs two at a time.

There was another Death Eater in the upstairs hall. Harry hesitated, unsure, but a louder bang and an outraged scream from below killed any caution he had left, and he pushed at Eriss through their bond. Felt the recoil as she launched herself from his torso to the floor. Heard, a split second later, a cry of pain, and moved before it had even begun to die out. Found her victim on the floor, crying and clutching his calf. Harry thought expelliarmus and then, for good measure, petrificus totalus, which served him better than stupefy in this instance as it would leave this idiot awake to regret his mistakes. "Eriss, keep watch," he hissed.

A basic panic ward still hung over the bedroom door. Activated by intent. Probably built into every doorframe in this house. Smart. The Death Eater had gotten this one mostly broken. Whoever he was, he knew what he was doing. Harry bashed the door the rest of the way open with one spell. Stepped into a child's bedroom, silver in the ambient moonlight, and, other than the sound of the fight in the living room, silent.

Rio had said closet. Harry went over to said closet, cautiously: he knew what he had been capable of at Emilia's age, and she might have had a comfortable and loved childhood, but that was no reason to be careless. "Emilia? Can you hear me? It's Harry. Rio's friend."

No answer.

Alohomora. Harry stood to the side but the kid didn't throw anything as the door opened. He poked his head around it. Saw a terrified Emilia, face wet with tears and mucus, huddled in the closet clutching the journal Harry had spelled for her and Rio. "Hey. Hey. Emilia."

She didn't move. And she was bleeding from the shoulder. Shock? Fuck. Harry imagined Rio’s grief if he lost all of the family he’d only just found. Mentally cursed himself: the Black library portkey could get them both out and bring him back, if he’d been wearing it, which he hadn’t outside Hogwarts, thinking it unnecessary. And now, if he wanted to get Emilia out—Harry yanked off the ring he had worn on his right hand since the day Theo gave it to him. Weighed his last-ditch escape against Rio’s grief for a split second. The grief won. This portkey couldn’t take both Harry and Sirius and Harry would not leave Sirius behind. He pressed it into Emilia's palm. Curled her fingers around it so Harry wasn't touching it at all.

"Emilia, I need you to repeat after me," Harry said, "needing out now."

She didn't seem to hear him. Didn't react at all. Another particularly bad crash from the living room sent Harry's heart rate spiking. No time. No time for this.

He would just have to hope this went unnoticed in the chaos of spells no doubt picked up by his Trace tonight. "Imperio."

The curse took hold. Easier than Harry had expected but then she was a child terrified into mindlessness. Her mouth moved at his will. Words slipping free in a monotone. As the last syllable sounded, the portkey came to life and tore her away through space to Nott Manor.

Harry let the imperius fall. Dashed back out of the room, heart pounding and stomach roiling with adrenaline and fear but his mind crystal-clear and steady. He glanced towards the staircase; it had been less than two minutes. There were no more noises— “Amplius auri,” he cast, and braced for an onslaught that didn’t come. Instead all his enhanced hearing picked up was voices, tense and angry, but no sound of spellfire, one of them Sirius’ though some kind of interference kept him from understanding the content.

A truce of some kind? Sirius and Ian seemed fine anyway. And Harry wanted answers.

Brusquely Harry knelt and tore the mask away from the face of the wizard Eriss bit. No one Harry knew. "What were you lot here to do tonight?" he demanded, twisting the body-bind to allow the guy to talk.

"Fuck off, Black!"

Harry narrowed his eyes. "Wrong answer." In for a penny... He sealed the body-bind over the man's face and said, low, "Crucio."

The only thing that moved was his victim's eyes, wide and rolling, pupils dilated. Lying there unable to move or scream or anything would make the pain worse: helplessness, Harry knew well, was its own form of torture.

After ten seconds Harry lifted the curse and gave his victim his voice back. "Last chance. If I like your answer I'll even give you an antivenin for the neurotoxin in your system."

Still he hesitated.

"Your Lord's not here right now," Harry said in a furious hiss. Who knew how long the odd lull downstairs would last—he didn't have time— "I am. Who scares you more?"

He saw surrender in the unknown Death Eater's eyes. "The kids," he gasped, "we was t' take the kids—the girl and your fosterling—"

Rio? They'd wanted Rio? Harry's blood ran fast and cold. "Why?"

"You—you wouldn't want 'em hurt—"

Harry did not like the picture he was forming.

A renewed crash and shouting from downstairs made him flinch. What the fuck? That sounded much louder. Harry’s time was up, but—

He jabbed his wand harder into his captive’s chest. "How did you know to come here? Who told Him?"

"Dunno—I don't, I swear!" the man babbled when Harry's wand twitched. "I don't know, that's all we was told, I swear to Merlin—"

"I believe you," said Harry, and he did. He was cold all the way through now.

Once more he cast petrificus totalus at its full strength. By now the neurotoxin in Eriss' venom would be nearing the man's brain, heart, vital organs. In minutes he'd be dead. Harry rose and looked down into terrified, pleading eyes and said, "Eriss, bite him again. Just to be sure."

Voldemort couldn’t learn that Harry knew why the Honeywells had been targeted.

He picked up the pace. Thundered down the stairs, not even caring if anyone heard him coming. Through the bond he felt Eriss follow. Harry tore down the spells that he’d cast to keep the door shut and crashed back into the fight.

It was worse. Much worse. More people, more debris. Harry couldn’t see a fucking thing.

Homenum revelio! Sense and information slapped into his mind. He ended the spell in less than a second: lots of moving bodies confused it, made the feedback impossible to parse, but he’d felt at least seven people total. “Sirius!” he shouted.

“Here!”

Oh thank Merlin.

Eriss reached him just as someone turned, saw Harry, and flung a spell. Harry parried it with ease and they began to duel. This one didn’t have a Death Eater mask. Just a red cloth tied across their face, plus a robe and hooded cloak, fairly typical wizarding wear. They were reasonably good. Fast. No Dark Arts but they weren’t playing either.

A bombarda went wild across the room. Harry took advantage of the noise and his opponent’s distraction to slip an impedimenta through the gap. The spell knocked them back like a ragdoll into a cabinet full of china; a spell had smashed its doors open but not touched the crockery, which now crashed down on the red-masked figure in a rain of painful ceramic shards.

Harry cast a disillusionment on himself. It was sloppy but in this chaos it’d be enough. He ducked sideways and looked behind the sofa.

Amanda had collapsed forward over Dickon’s body. Neither of them moved, not to Harry’s eyes. He gripped the back of the sofa with one hand, tightly. “Pulsate revelio duo.”

Nothing. Gone, the both of them.

Fuck.

At least Emilia got out. And now Harry had no obligations stopping him from doing what everything in him screamed to do, which was to grab Sirius and run.

“Eriss, guide me!”

Her head popped out of his collar. “Towards the windows,” she said, scenting furiously, which wasn’t a very specific direction but was good enough for Harry, who started flinging reductor hexes like a rampaging troll threw rocks while he bolted across the room.

Another spell caught him. A jinx this time. Boils popped up on Harry’s wand hand. Fucker. He cast a wide-area oil charm the twins invented a year or two back. Startled shouts and swearing told him anyone standing on the hardwood had found their balance suddenly compromised. It bought enough time for Harry to reach the exterior wall of the room. Both windows were in shattered pieces by now. Dust and spell-light and debris and smoke from a fumos charm choked the air but with a bit of fresh breeze it cleared enough for Harry to spot what Eriss had scented through the confusion: Sirius in a corner with an injured Ian, both of them sheltering behind Ian’s stone table while Sirius fired hexes around the edge of it.

“Emilia’s out safe,” Harry said without preamble as he crouched in their tiny shelter. “Dickon and Amanda’re dead. We have to go.”

“Fuck. Yep. Can you—” Sirius gestured at Ian.

Harry readied his wand and made sure Ian was paying attention. There was no blood but clearly a lot of pain and it seemed like the left half of Ian’s body wasn’t working right. A couple different curses could have an effect like that and none of them was good news. “Don’t fight me,” Harry said. “Mobilicorpus.”

Either Ian was too out of it to resist or knew how to relax into charms like this, because Harry controlled the spell with ease, folding Ian’s limbs in to minimize his target profile. When it was done and he was ready to move, he gave Sirius a nod.

Sirius tapped the table with his wand. It exploded outwards into shards of stone. Several people screamed. A silvery shield charm came to life at the end of Sirius’ wand. He held it up as cover while Harry dashed for the open window and hurdled through it with Ian’s contained form floating through behind him.

Naturally Harry landed face-first in a Plimpery Crane Bush. It trembled in terror and its tiny spines jabbed into any exposed skin they found. Harry thrashed his way free. His trousers and undershirt, both thin cotton, were torn to shreds and bloodied by the time he got his feet back on the garden path.

He’d run ten feet when Sirius caught up. “Faster,” Sirius snapped, and Harry obeyed, ignoring the stabbing ache deep in his side, the sharper pains of Plimpery Crane spines still stuck in his skin, the cold temptation to turn back, now that Sirius was safe, and take out some of his anger on the people who’d killed Rio’s family.

None of that mattered. None of that could be allowed to matter.

They cleared the ward boundary. Sirius turned to Harry, holding out a hand. “C’mon—”

“You can’t side-along two people!”

“You gotta get out, Harry—Ian’s too hurt to apparate—”

“I’m not leaving you,” Harry hissed, shoving Sirius furiously towards the motorcycle. “Come on!”

He was prepared to put up a fight about it and Sirius must have seen as much, because he gave in almost immediately and ran to get the motorcycle’s engine and enchantments active. Harry followed with Ian.

“Put me in the middle again,” Ian said, words slurred. “Don’ think I can hang on.”

Harry did so. He tried to be careful, but they were in a hurry and his control over mobilicorpus was only so good. Ian made a sound of pain as Harry got his legs into position.

“They’re out here!” someone yelled from the house.

They were out of time.

Harry cast a sticking charm to hold Sirius and Ian’s robes together, back to front, to help Ian stay on, and jumped aboard the motorcycle himself. “GO!”

The motorcycle shot into the sky. If Harry had thought their speed was bad earlier, it was nothing to now—

“What the—” he heard Sirius say, just before the motorcycle dropped ten feet with a sickening lurch. Harry knotted both fists in Ian’s robes. Fuck he missed his broom. It stabilized, but he looked down and could tell they’d slowed.

Sirius swore. A tremor and then a second, worse tremble wracked the motorcycle’s chassis.

“Sirius!” Harry called.

“I know! Just—” Sirius did something complicated out of sight.

The bizarre lensing of their view of the world vanished. Returning to normal linear vision while still moving turned out to be more disorienting than doing so when they landed. Harry was nearly sick over the side. He blinked a few times. Tuned out Eriss’ furious, panicked hissing inside his robes. His ears filled with a deafening buzzing sound.

It took a long three seconds for Harry to realize that it wasn’t just his ears playing tricks on him: the motorcycle’s engine had come back to full, snarling, noisy life. They rocketed along at its usual speed, which was fast but no better than a decent broom could manage at this altitude, and the roaring engine filled the empty sky around them.

“Muffler failed!” Sirius shouted, his voice wind-torn and nearly drowned out by the bike. “Something’s wrong with the encha—”

Harry saw a flicker of motion at the corner of his eye and threw his body sideways with such force that the motorcycle and all three people on it tipped sideways. The motorcycle slewed around in a half-controlled turn and the spell Harry had seen coming shot wide over their heads.

Sirius wrenched the bike back under control. Gunned the throttle. They leapt forward. Harry freed his wand hand from its grip and twisted to look behind them. “Six, on brooms!” he yelled, though Merlin only knew if Sirius could hear, and cast a shield charm.

Distantly he heard Sirius shout and Ian try to respond, but their words were unintelligible, lost to wind and the engine and adrenaline. Harry’s shield shuddered under a barrage of hexes. Nothing that felt too serious but they were a thousand feet or more in the air and going faster than the lights on the motorway far below. Up here an impedimenta could be deadly.

The motorcycle dipped again, this time a little more smoothly. Harry risked a glance forward. Sirius looked to be piloting it downward with intention. His shoulders had a tense hunch.

Another spell ricocheted off Harry’s shield, which faltered. He banished and recast it. Thought fast. Apparating with an injured passenger was idiotic but not as risky as apparating while in midair. If they stopped long enough for Sirius to risk taking Ian out and come back for Harry the pursuit would catch up. And as much as Harry wanted a chance to go at these fuckers, one against six in midair was terrible odds, especially if the one was laboring under a Trace.

Could Harry apparate? He’d done… something like it as a kid, once, he dimly remembered just appearing on the school roof that one time. Accidental apparition. But that wasn’t the same as doing it on purpose, under pressure, in midair, while injured.

None of which explained what Sirius had in mind. Getting on the ground wouldn’t solve the problem of only being able to apparate with one passenger at a time. Maybe he meant to call the Knight Bus? Hope witnesses would dissuade these non-Death-Eater wannabe heroes? Harry had his doubts as to the latter point, but it could—

The world flipped.

For a dizzying moment Harry didn’t know what happened. Mind frozen, limbs numb. Unresponsive. Until an adrenaline spike tore the shock to shreds and he put together that he was falling, they were all falling, spells were raining down around them and he twisted his head left and saw the flaming wreckage of the motorcycle cartwheeling away towards the horizon, sans passengers.

“Eriss!” he shouted. Barely heard himself over the air rushing past him. Felt a responding vise-like pressure around his chest. She was fine. Sirius. Ian. Where were they?

Wand still in his hand, thank Merlin. Homenum revelio. One heartbeat, end the spell. To the left. Harry groped for dim memories of videos of Muggle skydivers. How much time? Not long. Seconds. Ground coming up fast. He spread his arms and legs out. Tugged with his magic. His fall slowed a fraction. Too much power—Harry stopped trying.

He looked down. Ground closer. Bad. Looked up. Circling brooms. Pursuit watching. No help there.

Flying was just falling controlled. Harry knew how to move in the air. Knew how to keep his head against heights.

Harry shut his eyes.

When he opened them again he had a plan.

Small arm and leg movements turned him. Harry squinted. Saw Ian and Sirius, both limp and tumbling. Falling without resistance. Bad sign. Not far away. Below him, a bit. Harry tucked his arms back and leaned towards them. Miscalculated a little, yawed too far. Overcorrected. More or less crashed into Sirius head on. They flailed. Force of will and some wandless magic stabilized them again. Harry got a hold on Sirius’ collar and his heart would’ve stopped if it wasn’t pounding faster than a war drum. Sirius’ eyes were closed. Lips blue. Face mottled with burns. Marks of a curse discoloring his skin.

No. No. Harry was not losing him. Would not lose him.

He readied his wand. Looked for Ian.

Their eyes met across the ten or so feet between them. Ian reached out the arm still under his control. Mouth open in a scream Harry couldn’t hear. Harry could get to him. Could maneuver himself and Sirius through the air. Take them both.

And in so doing, risk Sirius.

Harry took Sirius’ wrists in his hands. Called up every last scrap of magic he had. Every ounce of will he’d ever summoned. Thought: This is not how we die.

Twisted sideways into nothingness with Sirius pulled along behind.

The last thing Harry saw was Ian’s terrified, furious face and the ground rushing up fast below.