Chapter Two of 'The Library of Hades'- Skin and Blood
Chapter One.
Title: The Library of Hades (2/about 20)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Warnings: Heavy gore, angst, violence, OC character deaths.
Rating: R
Summary: Harry and Draco, fighting to be secure in their new relationship, face off against a twisted with an interest in human skin and blood, an old enemy interested in their case, and far too many people interested in their romantic lives.
Author’s Notes: This is the tenth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, following Invisible Sparks, Hero's Funeral, Rites of the Dead, Sister Healer , Working With Them, This Enchanted Life, Letters From Exile, Writ on Water, and "Evening Star." This story won’t make much sense unless you read them in order. For this story, I plan on 18 or 20 chapters, and I cannot emphasize the heavy gore warning enough.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Chapter Two-Skin and Blood
“When was the last time you saw Miss Lugar?”
Harry lost count of how many times they asked that question, up and down the stairs, all through the flats that surrounded Adriana’s, and in the streets around it, where Draco suggested they go when they were done speaking to the immediate neighbors.
The answers were the same, and although some people shrank the way that someone guilty always did when they were faced with Aurors, Harry didn’t think they were lying about the crime he and Draco were here to actually investigate. Something else, something for which they couldn’t salve their consciences, but their stories sounded real.
They had last seen Adriana when she walked home from the shops at about seven in the evening three days before. She had paused to talk about the weather-a mild, lovely day-with several of them, and had hinted to one woman that she thought her returns from her Squib correspondence course were going to be heavy this half-year. Then she had laughed and clapped her hands, and gone home smiling.
“Did she say anything about whether she expected a special surprise?” Draco was the one who asked, because Harry had opened his mouth, and then their witness, Katie Farren, began to shiver and he couldn’t make himself continue. Instead, he patted her awkwardly on the shoulder and cast a Warming Charm around her. “Did she talk as though she thought someone would visit her?”
Farren sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I really didn’t know her that well,” she murmured. “Sometimes she would complain about things. The weather, the prices, you know. But not about her personal life.”
Harry nodded. It was the same thing that so many people had said about Adriana. She kept herself to herself, and you were lucky if she referred to something personal in the most veiled terms.
It made him wonder if what the twisted had written in blood on her skin was true after all. If she had experienced a failed love affair…there were some people who would let that twist them into retreating from all human contact.
I nearly experienced that, with Lionel.
It just made Harry all the more determined to find the twisted who had killed her. Draco had brought Harry out of the shell he’d tried to shut himself up in after Lionel’s death. Perhaps someone could have brought Adriana out, too, but they would never get the chance to find out.
Harry swallowed around the burning in his throat, and noticed that Draco was looking at him. He smiled at him as reassuringly as he could and found his voice for Farren again. “Did the Aurors who came to investigate the death talk to you, too?” They had already spoken with the neighbor, Malcolm Pounce, who had found the blood creeping out from under Adriana’s door. He hadn’t touched the door or called to her; he had simply fled and firecalled the Aurors. The sensible thing, the thing the Ministry was always trying to urge them to do, but in this case, Harry would have appreciated the testimony of someone intrepid enough to intrude into her flat.
Farren nodded. “And it doesn’t make any sense,” she suddenly burst out. “Adriana was just there. Why would anyone want to kill her? She was normal. She didn’t hate anyone. She didn’t hurt anyone. But she didn’t save people, either. Why would someone care enough to kill her like that?” Farren shivered again, and Harry renewed his Warming Charm and glanced at Draco, wondering if he had any other questions he wanted to ask.
To Harry’s surprise, Draco’s eyes were narrowed. A moment later, however, he met Harry’s gaze and gave a tiny shake of his head. Whatever thought he had had fled, or wasn’t ripe to be shared yet.
“Sometimes the actions of Dark wizards like this are inexplicable,” Draco said gently. “But I promise, we will find and ask him, and we can ensure that you receive the answers. If you’d like to.”
Farren blinked, looked up, and then surprised Harry by nodding fiercely. “Yes. I want to know. Even if it doesn’t make sense. I want to know.”
Draco looked at her again, his head slowly tilting to the side as though her statements would make a different kind of sense from that angle, and then took one of the cards that he carried all the time and tried to harass Harry into carrying, too, from his pocket and held it out. “Contact me if you think of something else,” he said. “That has my Floo address. Anything, no matter how small.”
Farren nodded at him and tucked it away. “Thank you,” she said, her voice a parchment rustle. “That makes me feel better.”
Draco smiled briefly at her and said nothing, but Harry knew that was the reason Draco had done it. He couldn’t keep from meeting Draco’s eyes in approval as they turned away from Farren and resumed their stroll down the street outside of Adriana’s flat.
Draco gave him his blandest smile, absorbing, Harry was sure, but not responding to the praise in his face. “We have to see the flat now,” he said. “Are you ready?”
Harry started to answer, then saw some of the same gentleness in the way Draco was looking at him as he had handed Farren with, and bridled. “Yes, ready,” he snapped. “I’ve seen horrible things before, Draco. You don’t need to coddle me.” He wondered if he would ever have another lover who would cause him to swing between happiness and rage so fast.
If I ever have any other lover.
At the moment, Harry had to admit, it was hard to imagine that he would want one.
“This is going to be worse than those horrible things, I think,” Draco said, and turned back towards the building. Harry took a deep breath, one that he told himself had to be fresher than the air in the flat no matter what they found there, and followed.
*
Draco stood very still in the door of the flat, turning his head. Of course those first Aurors had removed Adriana’s body from the wall, so that her former business partner could give it a decent burial. She had been in a state of shock, but she had also been the only one who seemed to care about Adriana at all, as a person instead of someone motionlessly moving through other people’s lives.
Draco felt the wriggle of the thought he had encountered earlier, when Farren had said that Adriana was perfectly normal. But it wouldn’t come to his grasp yet, so he dipped it back into the dark waters of his mind and concentrated on the mess in front of him.
Only two things had been disturbed, the investigating Aurors had said, when they came here. One had been the dining room table, which was roughly shoved out into the center of the room. The notches its feet had cut in the carpet implied it had stood along the wall where the twisted had pinned Adriana’s skin. Draco shook his head, wondering why the killer had cast it away. What was it to him if blood or guts coagulated on it?
But regardless, it seemed that Adriana had opened the door to her killer. He hadn’t had to force his way in.
The rest was the blood.
The Aurors had done what they could to make the flat easy to walk in, but they simply couldn’t clean all the blood. It still layered the walls, the floor, the furniture that had apparently stood behind the twisted when he was slicing into Adriana’s body with his flaw. Draco looked at the fans and fans of it, red and shining still, easing to the ground endlessly along the same trails on the sides of the cabinets and bookshelves. It was all fresh, as the body and the things holding the body to the wall had been.
“Draco, look.”
Harry’s voice had a growl in the back of it. His hand closed on Draco’s arm, and Draco followed his gaze.
As he watched, a small waterfall of crimson inched down to the bottom of the largest bookcase, which as far as Draco could tell held mostly historical and Potions texts. A large bead of blood touched the floor-
And then vanished. Draco snapped his gaze back to the top of the trail, the top of the bookcase, and saw the bead, or at least another bead the same size and which looked exactly the same, begin to inch down.
“That’s part of the reason so much of it is fresh,” Harry said softly. “It’s renewing itself when it touches the floor.” He hesitated. “Do you think this twisted could be like Nancy, Draco? Someone who can stop the time in a certain place, but makes it so that the action just repeats, instead of being forgotten?”
“It’s worth considering,” Draco murmured, walking into the room and trying to ignore the way the carpet squished beneath him. The first investigating team’s greatest clean-up effort had been on the carpet, but some blood had sunk deep. Draco didn’t look at his own footprints; he would clean his boots when they were out of here, and until then, he didn’t want to know. “And I wish that you would call her Morningstar, Harry. That was the last name she wanted to take. It’s the one we might as well give her.”
“Nancy,” Harry flung at his back, and then spun and stalked softly away from Draco, into the bedroom of the flat. Draco didn’t think he would find anything there, since the blood splatters stopped at least a meter short of the door, but perhaps it was for the best that they spend some time apart right now.
Draco faced the wall where the body had clung, and studied the blood, and half-lidded his eyes.
The memories he reached back to were ones he hated disturbing, but on the other hand, they had taught him several useful things about dealing with his more grotesque cases. The Dark Lord had slaughtered so many people in front of Draco that he could see thestrals several dozen times over. For the moment, that meant he thought he could visualize the way that the killer and Adriana were standing when he began to flay her.
If he cut her throat…
Draco nodded. He hadn’t used a knife, but his own magic, which had probably stabbed fiercely into Adriana’s body and continued cutting down. It had worked in one long, continuous stroke if Draco could believe those pictures, slicing around the edges, preserving the shape of every finger, following the curves of the elbows and the legs…
His gorge rose. He closed his eyes and took a mental step back, the way his father had always tried to make him do no matter the thing he was thinking about, to consider this from a different perspective.
The killer had cut Adriana. The blood had sprayed. Some of the patterns made sense if the body was swinging back and forth, if she was struggling as he cut, and the blood would go on spurting out. He wasn’t just cutting into one powerful artery; it was the whole damn thing, and his power would preserve the blood, because that was what he wanted to write with.
Draco tried to imagine what went on in the mind of a twisted who developed this Dark power, and had to give up in the end. Most of them made sense when you understood the whole case, but not before then. The twisted were mad.
And that was the thing Harry didn’t understand, when he started talking about how he and Draco had Dark wandless gifts, like the twisted, and were only a few steps away from twisted themselves, and so they should spare the ones they hunted if at all possible. They were sane.
Draco had had the experience of being a twisted for a short while, under Healer Alto’s flaw, and that was not sanity.
It was broken, fractured, tugging. It was the sureness of movements threaded through with the dreamy sensation of falling. It was the exercise of magic without a wand, yes, but it was also the exercise of magic without restraint, without will.
Draco wanted to be in control of himself. What Healer Alto had done to him, even though he had come back from it, had been bad enough to require the intervention of a Mind-Healer. He did not want to experience it again.
But he could remember how it felt well enough to imagine a few things, as well, about their killer.
“Draco? Can you come in here?” Harry’s voice sounded from the bedroom, so distant for a moment that it sounded as if it was coming through a pipe. Draco blinked and shook his head, waking from the dream of his memories.
“Are you all right?” Draco asked, turning towards the bedroom himself. “I thought the twisted only worked on her out here.” With an effort, he recalled the reports in the file. No, none of them had said anything about blood in the bedroom.
“This is something else.”
And yes, there was a strangeness in Harry’s voice that didn’t come from the mental state Draco had worked himself into. He quickened his steps, and didn’t run only because of the bookshelves that crowded in every direction.
Harry needed him. He would always come.
*
Harry crouched in front of the small table beside Adriana’s bed and stared. He hadn’t managed to make himself back away even when he realized that Draco had gone silent in the main room of the flat. It was too weird, and if he continued staring, then he thought it might begin to make sense, like one of those Muggle pictures where horses and zebras hid among clouds.
But this only registered as weirder. So Harry at last called for Draco to come to him, and rose to his feet, shaking his head, as he came through the bedroom door.
“Did the file say anything about this?” he asked, gesturing towards the table. He was pretty sure it hadn’t, but he didn’t always read the whole file carefully, especially in cases like this where he got distracted by the pictures and his own desire to bring down the criminal.
“What?” Draco asked, and then got around Harry and saw the table. His voice was chopped off. Harry still didn’t look away from the sight, but knew if he had glanced at Draco he would have seen narrowed eyes and pursed lips.
“Well,” Draco said at last, in an effort at lightness that scraped and bit. “So we know that this twisted has a symbol.”
Harry nodded.
Spread over the top and legs of the table was a dark patch that looked like a drawing in soot, or, as one came nearer, in shadow. Harry had forced himself to touch it, and found that its texture was no different from the texture of the wood it covered. It certainly didn’t have the tacky stickiness of blood or the thick texture of the viscera he and Draco had seen binding the flayed body in the photographs.
Seen from too close, the picture had no form, as Harry had realized when he spent those moments crouching beside it and squinting. Seen from a distance back, it did. It looked like an unfurled scroll, though the shape was necessarily a bit distorted by the edge of the tabletop and the knobby nature of its legs. On the scroll was written a name, wrapped in the soot-shadow around the roundness of the legs, and reaching up along the underside to the tabletop.
MICHAEL.
“Good work, Harry.” Draco’s voice was quiet as he touched Harry’s shoulder. “It might not be the name of our twisted, but it’s a clue.”
Harry nodded. “It could be the name of the next victim,” he said, voice hollow as he tried not to think how many people in the wizarding world were named Michael. “Or the name of the person he’s taking vengeance for, if he is.”
“Perhaps, yes,” Draco said, and then leaned nearer and pulled out a camera from his pocket. Harry blinked at him, feeling oddly cheated.
“I didn’t know you had that,” he muttered.
“Now you do,” Draco said, which was like him, and began to photograph the symbol. Harry rolled his eyes and turned back to the drawing room. He had discovered some things, sure, but he wanted to see if there was anything else he could do for Adriana, anything that might ease her passing-though that was impossible now-or help them locate her murderer.
He walked along the bookshelves, looking at them. Books of all sorts, he thought. Potions theory, which everyone who wanted to look intelligent seemed to buy, and novels, and books of fairy tales that she might have had from the time she was a child, and a book that was thin and covered in shady green leather. Harry reached for it.
The book turned and lunged at him.
Harry ducked with a shout, automatically swinging his wand above his head to create a bubble shield. The book slammed into the shield and slid down the side. Harry stared at it, and now he could see the teeth between the pages, how they hinged together in a way that would keep the book shut and without suspicion, and the snapping void between the teeth that led down to something that pulsed and shifted.
Draco had come running from the bedroom the moment he cried out, and now another book leaped off the shelf and towards him. Harry cast from under the bubble shield, a Stunner. That book fell limp to the floor, but two more joined it, sides spread out to glide like flying squirrels.
The book in front of Harry tried to bite through the shield. Harry, staring, thought he saw the magic actually give a little under those pointed fangs, and shuddered. That meant he would have to be careful. Perhaps the thing could disrupt spells by acting like that. He didn’t know.
“I think we found his companions!” he shouted breathlessly to Draco, as he dispelled the shield and rose to battle the book.
Draco grunted. Harry caught a glimpse of leather and paper flapping around his partner’s head and had to turn away, because otherwise he would become more caught up in saving Draco than defending himself, and Draco hated that.
The book tried to fasten itself to his leg. Harry aimed his wand directly down the void between the teeth and said, “Incendio.”
The fire wrapped itself gleefully around the paper and the teeth, which seemed to be made of sharpened parchment. The book shrieked once, a reedy voice like a bird’s, and then the flames consumed it.
Draco was whispering a different spell, one that snared the books inside a dark net. Harry reckoned he could do that. Perhaps he wanted some of them alive-for what values of that word might apply here.
But Harry turned and raised his wand to the rest of the books, and at the first sight of the fire that sparked along the holly wood, the rest of the books flew off the shelves and towards him. There was a storm of green, purple, brown: leather, wood, stiffened dragonhide. Harry heard voices muttering and whispering and rustling, and thought the books were reciting their stories as they flew.
The flames caught and devoured them, though. Whatever the twisted had done to them to bring them to life, he couldn’t make them hardier than ordinary books. Harry watched melting ink and flaming paper and felt better when he glanced back at Draco, who had six of them trapped in his net like the world’s oddest butterflies.
Draco caught his eye, but nodded past him at the bookshelves. Harry turned around, wondering if he had missed some of the vicious creatures.
No. Instead, inside the bookshelves and flowing over them in the same way it had flowed over the top and legs of the table in the bedroom, was the sooty symbol of the unfolded scroll. There was another word written in it, easier to interpret this time, since there were fewer irregularities in the shelves to distort it.
And that word, in combination with the one written on the table, made Harry’s heart seem to slow.
CORNER.
*
“I remember a Michael Corner from school, yes,” Draco said, and felt his mouth draw tight in the way that it did when he was discussing something distasteful. He didn’t know anything of this Michael Corner to make Draco regard him that way, no, but Harry was panting over him, even though they had been back in the Socrates office for an hour. “That doesn’t mean that I know anything to his advantage or disadvantage.”
Harry, meanwhile, had spent most of that hour spilling ink on the parchment as he wrote down everything he remembered of Corner, and now he paced feverishly back and forth in the middle of the office, muttering. “It doesn’t matter how hard it is,” he announced suddenly, spinning around.
“Oh?” Draco kept his face neutral, but tightened his fingers on his wand. He knew exactly what consequences tended to follow when Harry made announcements like that.
“Yes,” Harry said. “He used to date Ginny, and I know they dated again when I was in Auror training. She’ll probably know where he is. I have to go talk to her.”
Draco smiled. “Of course. An excellent idea. And I will come with you.”
Harry jumped and glared at him like a scalded cat. “No. Are you mental? She won’t talk in front of you.”
“And you’re not going to her house by yourself,” Draco said, cocking his head and giving Harry a winsome smile. “So I think it would be a good idea for both of us to get over our silly prejudices, and go.”
Harry leaned in. Draco smiled at him, and couldn’t help making it more genuine this time. Harry was so intoxicating like this, entrancing, with his eyes and his mouth close to Draco’s.
“She won’t talk in front of you,” Harry repeated, as though he thought Draco didn’t understand English. “That means I go, and you stay here.”
“I know that you used to date her,” Draco said. Fuck subtlety. “I’m going with you.”
Harry blinked, then laughed. “She knows that I’m gay,” he said. “Why do you think that she’d try to seduce me?”
Draco shrugged. “I don’t know. As an insult to me, perhaps. I’m going.”
“None of the Weasleys have ever cared that much about you, Draco.”
Harry intended his voice to scathe. Draco only smiled. “Good. Then my mere presence shouldn’t shut up her mouth.”
Harry glared at him some more, but Draco had far more experience at the waiting game than Harry did. In the end, Harry threw up his hands, and they went together.
Chapter Three.
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