Chapter Six of 'A Reign of Silence'- Downstairs
Chapter Five.
Title: A Reign of Silence (6/20)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, violence
Summary: After the debacle that occurred in the Head Auror’s office, Harry and Draco are hot on the trail of the blue-eyed twisted. If, of course, they can avoid the scrutiny of the Ministry, Draco’s parents, and everyone else who has a reason to be disappointed in them.
Author’s Notes: Welcome to the twelfth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, about Harry and Draco working together as Auror partners hunting down vicious Dark wizards. This follows Invisible Sparks, Hero's Funeral, Rites of the Dead, Sister Healer , Working With Them, This Enchanted Life, Letters From Exile, Writ on Water, "Evening Star,", The Library of Hades, and
"There Was Glory". Don’t try to read this story without reading those others, as it won’t make sense. This one will probably be around twenty chapters.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Six--Downstairs
They had found nothing interesting in the other rooms, even after diligently searching for secret panels and doors in the same way they had studied the library. Ernhardt had apparently removed a lot of his personal possessions soon after he set up the Potions lab. Draco used spells to analyze the age of the dust this time, and nodded in grim satisfaction when they revealed that no one had entered the chambers in several years. The most exciting thing that happened to them on the rest of the first floor was ducking a falling bit of wood that Warren incinerated before it could touch them.
Now they stood on the ground floor again, and faced the door to the cellar.
"Do you think we'll find anything new there?" Harry muttered to Draco, while Jenkins scanned down the stairs ahead of them and Warren sorted through the shards of the mirrors on the floor for clues. "Maybe he kept Morningstar in the lab and took blood from her instead, like the rest."
Draco shook his head. "Her account was different, and at the time, she really thought there was a chance you could help her. I don't think she would have lied deliberately." He took another glance at the enchanted window that showed the desert. "Which doesn't mean that Ernhardt might not have done something that confused her senses."
Harry nodded and opened his mouth to continue the conversation, but Jenkins came bounding back up the stairs and shook her head. "There are no traps on the steps themselves," she said.
Warren turned around and smiled at her a little. "And there were no traps in that kitchen in Manchester, either," she murmured.
Jenkins grinned at her. "Well, there weren't after you finished smashing your way out of the Puzzle Box."
Draco blinked. The Puzzle Box curse was an extremely sophisticated one, and it said a lot for Warren's strength of both will and magic if she had managed to destroy one from the inside. He felt a knot of tension at the back of his neck uncoil as he looked at Warren. With someone like that at his side, he might be able to bring himself to trust them further.
Jenkins caught his eye, and sniffed, as if she knew his thought processes and didn't appreciate that he hadn't trusted them already. Then she turned to Harry, of all people. "Have you had any visions since we entered the house?" she demanded.
Harry stared at her, and Draco put a hand on his arm to stop him from any outbursts he might be planning. Of course, although most of the Department had known about Harry's flaw, they hadn't encouraged him to use it. Harry seemed to remember the difference between that situation and this one in time, though, and he nodded, blinked, swallowed, and answered, "No. It's dramatic and noticeable when I do, because I suffer the pain the murdered person feels."
"And during the Larkin case, you had visions of yourself as the dying one, right?" Jenkins demanded. "So it's not limited to other people, or non-Aurors?"
Harry grimaced and nodded again. "I'll let you know if I have one about any of us."
Jenkins inclined her head and then gathered everyone in their small group with her eyes. Draco had to admit, reluctantly, that she had some qualities that made her a good leader. A pity about the temper that went along with that, of course.
"I want everyone to use their flaws as we go down these stairs," Jenkins said quietly. "Because it's true I couldn't detect any wards or traps, and I'm usually pretty good at those. But what we've found in the house so far indicates we'll find something. And it's stupid not to use gifts that could help us only because of the Ministry's prejudice against the twisted."
"Well, there's also the fear of ending up like Macgeorge," Draco said, and winced a little as Jenkins scowled at him. "But I already used my flaw on this floor. There is definitely something powerful and magical below us."
Jenkins cocked her head, interested in the words and not his tone, Draco thought. "As powerful as the hippogriff and the ghosts?"
"It felt that way," Draco said, discovering that he didn't much like it when someone other than Harry looked at him with that hungry-for-confirmation expression on their faces. Perhaps my early dreams of being Head Auror were never destined to work out. "It was hard to tell."
"Concentrate again now," Jenkins said, and took a step towards him as though she would personally force him to use his flaw if he didn't start doing so. "I want to know what we're facing."
"It doesn't work that way," Draco pointed out in a flat voice as he pulled his sleeve up and held out his arm. Jenkins didn't flinch from the Mark, which earned her a few points in Draco's mind. Warren pressed close from behind them, too. Harry was the one who put a hand on Draco's shoulder, as though to tell him he didn't have to use his flaw if he didn't want to. "I can tell something is there, and that it's powerful and violent Dark magic, but if you'd asked me which was the rotting hippogriff and which were the defensive ghosts, I wouldn't have been able to tell you."
Jenkins was excellent at condescending smiles, it appeared. "I meant level of power."
"Why wouldn't he have defenses there as powerful as all the other ones we've been facing so far?" Harry muttered, but fell silent when Draco squeezed his hand back. He didn't mind using his flaw like that, not when it would help to protect the two of them as well as their temporary partners.
Once again, Draco fell into the soft starry sea that meant he was accessing his flaw, and reached out towards the source of Dark magic beneath them. The two other pulsing black stairs he had sensed were cold now, proof enough that they had been the defenses they'd already disarmed.
But the one beneath them...
It was wide, Draco could figure out, now that he was concentrating on it and not distracted by other magic (and intent on showing Jenkins up). It spread out like a pool of water beneath them. And it waited. There was an intelligence there that hadn't been in the hippogriff or the ghosts.
Draco reported that, and Jenkins and Warren exchanged another private glance that left Harry and Draco on the outside. Harry leaned on Draco's shoulder in silent commiseration. Draco squeezed his arm and watched the stairs to the cellar thoughtfully. At least, if it was like water, it was unlikely to come up and fetch them.
But of course they would have to go down and meet it, and find out if Ernhardt had left any clues to his current location. Being an Auror was more like being a Gryffindor than Draco had ever known when he chose the career.
"Let's go," Jenkins said. "You felt nothing on the stairs?" She nodded briskly to Draco, already turning towards the cellar.
"No," Draco said. His heartbeat and his adrenaline were up, he realized, his fingers on the wand slightly sweaty. Well. At least it was better than the paralyzing shock he had felt when encountering the Dementor.
"Then let's go," Jenkins repeated, and once again she took point, Warren falling in behind Draco and Harry as if to herd them along.
Draco focused his will and his gaze ahead and did his best to forget his unfortunate comparison about Warren. Ultimately, they were all equals, and if they forgot that, then Ernhardt might be able to turn them against each other.
The stairs were quiet, wide, stone steps, infinitely easier to navigate than the twisting flights into the lab. That only made Draco's skin prickle with more sweat, his eyes aiming more ahead.
*
Harry bit his lip as he saw the flashes of dark lightning around the edges of his vision, and heard what could be gathering whispers--the potential of one of his visions, not the actual thing yet. But they were entering a place where one of them could die, and his flaw was reacting.
There was nothing yet, though, so he focused his eyes ahead of him and kept walking. He would have to make sure that he informed Draco and the others the minute he saw something definite.
"What was that?"
Draco had swirled his wand ahead of him, and a streak of light like a bright version of the dark flashes along Harry's eyesight split the air apart ahead of them. Harry could make out the steps as clearly as though they were in sunlight, and part of the cellar. It looked like an ordinary set of rooms, some with open doors, done in wood and stone.
But what made his hair stand on end was the moving shadows beneath them, surging and falling like waves.
Draco's light went out, and their Lumos Charms faded at the same moment. Jenkins made a disgusted sound, but she didn't waste time scolding Draco when, Harry thought, she could tell that this was the work of their enemy. Her wand arched sharply down, or Harry could hear the sound of it doing so, and the next moment, a pale green light like foxfire began to filter up from the steps.
The green light was less revealing than the Lumos Charms, but it still showed the edges of shadows with no visible sources. The shadows rose, and advanced. Harry wondered for a moment if Ernhardt had filled his cellar with invisible enemies.
No. These are shadows themselves, Harry thought, even as his head rang and his skin tightened with the sense that a vision was imminent. This is darkness. It can kill us all by itself.
The pain left his head; apparently that the darkness could kill had been what the vision wanted to show him. Harry took a step back and called on the best spell he knew against darkness, one that at least wouldn't get him in trouble with Warren and Jenkins for being Dark. "Expecto Patronum!"
The silver stag blazed as it sprang forth from his wand, blazed the way Harry could only remember it doing once before, when it was up against those hundreds of Dementors who had gone after Sirius. For a moment, it stood on the step in front of Harry with its head tossed back and its nostrils blowing as if it couldn't decide the direction the enemy was in; then it leaped down and speared its antlers into one of the crawling shadows.
The shadow screamed. The noise was a thin, high note that quickly trailed away into the piercing regions beyond Harry's hearing. Then the shadow ripped apart, and the stag was left dancing in front of it, hooves trampling on what looked like the last shreds.
The other shadows halted. Harry was sure they would get the courage to come forth in a moment, but for that moment, the stag guarded them, head bowed.
Then Jenkins and Warren called on their Patronuses, and a wispy leopard and a glowing wolf joined the stag. The shadows moved towards the leopard, which seemed to be the weakest one, but the stag stamped its hooves and the wolf howled, and the shadows halted again.
"Could they be related to Dementors?" Jenkins spoke while barely moving her lips. "Is that one reason they fear the Patronuses?"
"They fear creatures of light," Draco said, as flatly as if he was reading the answer off a board in Snape's class. "We have to have some way to bring more light in."
"I have the answer," Warren said, and began to chant.
The shadows surged towards her as if they recognized someone who could defeat them. The Patronuses immediately leaped into battle. The leopard's claws flew, the stag kicked and pierced, and the wolf used its teeth, so that shadows whirled and danced away from in front of them.
But it wasn't going to be enough, Harry could see now. Some of the shadows were learning how to creep past them. They were flying, or growing flaps stretching out from the sides that looked like wings, and soaring overhead, hanging from the ceiling like bats and crawling there like mice. They would creep over the protection of the Patronuses and drop down on the Aurors.
Harry turned and canted his body so that he could reach the right angle and somewhat protect Draco's back at the same time. The spell that came to mind was another of those he wasn't supposed to know, the kinds of spells that the Aurors didn't admit existed but slipped into their training anyway. Harry reckoned he should be grateful that the Ministry that would barely admit anything aloud still took the safety of their workers into such consideration as that.
"Conflagro desideratum!"
The fire leaped and looped above him, phoenix-colored for a moment, like the ward that had protected Ernhardt's lab, and then cool blue, and then blinding, blazing white. It hovered close to the shadows, and destroyed the spaces they could hide in. They halted for a moment, and Harry felt the silent agitation that seemed to serve them for making noise or protesting.
This light could only burn as long as his will held, and Harry knew that he didn't have the magical strength to keep it up for long after defeating the dark dogs. But he kept it up long enough for Warren to complete her spell.
Light filled the cellar from end to end, hanging and shining on the doors beneath them, welling up through the stairs as though a sun was rising there, and coming down from the ground floor. It was soft sunlight, natural radiance, yellow and white and all those more obscure colors that Harry sometimes thought he saw in the sun and sometimes didn't, and it lay there and shimmered.
The shadows didn't have a chance. They faded, blasted, and the walls and floor were clear again.
"I didn't know you could do that," Jenkins said to Warren, in an undertone that Harry didn't know if they were meant to hear.
"I don't do it often," Warren said shortly, and moved past them on the stairs to take the point beside her partner.
Harry watched her thoughtfully, noticing that Jenkins did the same thing. The spell hadn't seemed like a Dark one, but it wasn't one that Harry was familiar with, either; he had hunted enough vampires in his time that he would have expected to know a simple charm to produce sunlight like that.
Jenkins caught his eye, though, and gave him a nasty look that Harry mentally translated as "stop staring at my partner." He flipped her a little salute and kept walking down the stairs, content that they were safe for now.
If that's so, why is Draco looking so pale?
*
Draco shivered. The shadows had been deadly enough; he had been sure they would destroy anyone they touched, despite not having empirical proof of that.
But there was still something beneath them, something that inflicted the Mark on his arm with a harsher sting than anything since the magic of the twisted on their last case.
What we thought was the twisted. The man who had run about flaying non-famous people and using his flaw to write the truth of their lives on their bodies in their blood looked harmless compared to the combination of Ernhardt and Macgeorge.
At the moment, though, no danger was in sight, and the pain wasn't bad enough to make Draco's left arm useless. So they continued downstairs, through the sunlight of Warren's spell, and reached the floor without another attack.
Draco glanced around, studying the room for hidden doors of the type that had lurked behind the library shelves. At the moment, he saw nothing like that, and perhaps Ernhardt had not felt the need for them in the cellar, after all. There were multiple rooms here, as the open doors showed, and thick walls, but also plenty of small niches. From the scars on the floor in those, certain pedestals and tables and the like had recently stood there, but there was no other trace of them now.
"Shall we split up?" Jenkins asked, in the voice of someone who knew what the answer would be.
"We've needed all four of us to defeat every danger so far," Draco pointed out. "Even in two-partner teams, we might not be able to keep these enemies at bay. So no."
Jenkins only nodded and spun her wand for a moment through her fingers. Draco could almost feel her mind ticking out the fleeting seconds and her banked impatience at the length of time this search would take them if they went together. But she said nothing.
"It looks like there are five rooms," Harry said, making Draco jump a little. While he'd been staring at Jenkins, Harry had investigated the setup of the cellar. "Not counting this one. Does anyone have any particular preference for where we start?" He glanced at Draco.
Draco closed his eyes, but couldn't focus on any individual direction for the sensation in his Dark Mark. In the end, he opened his eyes and shrugged. "It feels like whatever else is waiting to attack is generalized all around us," he said.
"Whatever else is waiting?" Warren's voice is low. "Those shadows were not the main danger?"
"They were a danger," Draco said. "But there's still Dark magic here, and that's what my flaw reacts to."
Warren pressed her lips together after a moment and nodded. "Then I don't see that it matters where we start."
Harry was the one who led the way into the room to their immediate left, and thus saved them from standing around like idiots waiting for someone else to pick. The sunlight seemed dimmer here, but then Draco realized that Harry's wand still glowed with the Lumos Charm, which cast spinning shadows as Harry moved it around in a slow circle.
This room had thick walls of stone, and in one were brackets that looked like the kind that would have fastened to a chain. There was a cupboard in one corner, open and empty except for a few shards of glass from broken vials. Draco bent down and sniffed at the red liquid scattered on the floor there, but to his immense relief, it was cranberry juice, a common ingredient in some sleeping potions, and not blood.
There was nothing else in the room, at least to casual sight. Warren began a slow prowl along the corner while Jenkins examined the ceiling, and Harry began to cast any number of spells that would sometimes identify hidden rooms and tunnels, though the going was slow.
Draco fell back against the wall and shut his eyes again, clutching his arm. It throbbed worse than ever, but when he edged back towards the door and away from it, the sensation didn't change. It didn't seem to be located in this room, then.
Abruptly, there was a sound like an indrawn breath, and then low curses from Jenkins and Warren, in the sort of voice that said they were too frightened to make louder sounds. Draco's eyes snapped open.
In front of them stood the Dark Lord.
Draco's wand clattered to the floor before he could stop himself. He backed against the wall, and this time took no comfort in the way that the stone wall didn't move, in the way that there was no place to hide in here beyond the obvious.
The Dark Lord stood beside the cupboard, and looked slowly around the room. He looked as Draco remembered him from Malfoy Manor, the last year of the war, his red eyes shining with power, his face smooth and grey and moon-like. Around his feet coiled Nagini, lifting her head and darting her tongue out. She seemed to focus on Draco, and Draco remembered the Dark Lord's threats to feed him to her.
Warren and Jenkins had spread out near Draco, focused and trembling. In between them and the Dark Lord stood Harry.
Who raised his fists and said, "You're only a nightmare, only something this place has taken from my mind and made real. I defeated you once, and I can do it again. Expelliarmus! Mentem commuto!"
The last spell, Draco didn't know, but it made the image of the Dark Lord shatter into pieces, at the same moment as his wand flew away from his left hand. The snake lunged at Harry. Harry hissed, and she writhed away from him, and then shattered into the same small, sparkling pieces as her master.
Harry licked his lips and glanced at the rest of them. "That's what's here," he said hoarsely. "A spell or curse that reaches into your memory, finds what you most fear, and makes it real. I encountered it once in the home of a Dark wizard I was hunting." He shut his eyes and swayed on his feet for a moment.
"How did you get rid of it?" Jenkins demanded. "The spell?" She shrugged when Draco glared at her, as if she didn't believe Harry might need time to recover from seeing the apparition of his worst fear in front of him.
"The spell, yes," Harry said, nodding. "But also the refusal to believe it was real. The stubbornness is how you defeat it."
"You cast the spell that you did use to defeat him at the same time," Draco had to point out. "If it's only stubbornness, why was that spell necessary?"
Harry shrugged, unabashed. "The more realistic you can make the defeat, the more it helps. That spell helped me remember that I'd already defeated him once before, and that I'm standing here, alive, and he isn't. Obviously it isn't a one-to-one correspondence, since I wasn't the one who killed Nagini, but I think the curse was pulling on a nightmare I had of facing the two of them at once. We--" And he broke off and spun around.
Draco was in time to see the stone wall snap open and jelly-like arms shoot out to grasp Warren, tugging her into the wall. The next instant, the stone panel fell down again and covered the hole the magic had made as though nothing had happened.
Jenkins gave a ripping, snarling sound, and moved a step forwards. Her hands reached out as if to feel at the stone, but Harry blasted off a Shield Charm and got it between her and the place where Warren had been taken. Jenkins turned around, raising her wand.
"What good is your advice about stubbornness if it kills her before she can stop it?" Jenkins roared.
"We don't know that was her fear," Harry said. He was studying the stone, his lips working. Then he nodded, and Draco saw the dangerous smile forming at the corners of his eyes.
"I think I know one way to stop this," he said. "Finite Incantatem!"
And the walls vanished--to reveal a nest of tentacles that struck out at them, grabbing Draco's face in a sucker and drawing him irresistibly forwards.
Chapter Seven.
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