Chapter One of 'The Library of Hades'- One for the Books
Title: The Library of Hades
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.
The Library of Hades
Chapter One-One for the Books
“You fucked on your holiday, didn’t you?”
Macgeorge spoke with a twist to her voice that Harry thought was supposed to make the words worse. But since he was more proud of what they had done than otherwise, he sent back a dazzling smile and bent over his report a second time. He still had to make his proper contribution to the Morningstar case, for which Draco had done all the paperwork while Harry was lying in bed trying to recover.
“How clever of you to notice,” he muttered. His fingers did tremble, beneath the desk, but he didn’t think Macgeorge could see them. Draco had told him how much of a united front they had to present, so Harry would do that and hope for the best. “I shouldn’t think that more than, oh, twenty other people in the Ministry have been so clever.”
There was silence. Harry didn’t look up, because that would give the stare he could feel too much power. He continued to sort through his memories instead, and finally found the right words to describe what it had been like to feel the barriers of time Occluding his memories on the Morningstar case break. He wrote them down with a flourish and signed the report, then set it aside for Draco to countersign when he arrived later that day.
Silence, still. Harry finally sneaked a peek under his lashes and saw Macgeorge standing in front of her desk, staring down sightlessly at her paperweight, a glass globe with a mummified hand tucked inside it. She stroked the glass, then sighed, sat down, and began to work.
Harry blinked. Then he shrugged and began to countersign some of the reports that Draco had written; Draco hadn’t waited even for that before he dragged Harry off on their holiday.
And what a holiday.
Harry suppressed the shiver of memory, desire, recollection, that coursed through his body, and settled himself with a secret smile. He had worried that he wouldn’t want to be apart from Draco when they returned to work, that he would have trouble concentrating, but now the thought of what might wait at home as a reward that evening gave him both joy and drive.
This is the way it should be, all the time.
This is the way that I never thought it could be, after Lionel.
*
Draco walked through the corridors of the Ministry with his head up and his face impersonal. It was the best solution to the covert glares and whispers that he felt following him. Some of them would come from rumors that he was dating Harry, and some of them would come from his past, and some of them would come from the fact that it was Harry he was dating.
None of them had any validity unless Draco wanted them to have, he had decided. He had broken with his family and suffered seven years without their protection and their money. He had proven himself in the Auror program against the people who wanted him to fail, among them the Aurors who had taught him. It had left him scraped bare, down to the granite, but the nice thing about granite was how slowly it weathered. And if he had considerably fewer favors than he had possessed before this unorthodox holiday he and Harry had taken last week, well. That meant he could sever more ties.
And weave new ones.
“Auror Malfoy.”
Okazes spoke like a branch breaking, sometimes, as dry and as powdery. Draco turned towards him and nodded. “Sir,” he said. It was the best way to talk to someone like Okazes, who hated Harry and would find a fault of respect in his partner if he could.
Okazes just stared at Draco for a time, and then turned his back and snorted. “Come with me to my office,” he said. “We have much to discuss.”
Draco followed him, and the stares increased to the point where the skin between his shoulder blades itched and the whispers rose to the level of audibility. He ignored them. Perhaps he could do nothing about the reactions of those more powerful than him, such as Okazes, but he still believed what he had told Harry in the Forest of Dean: their status as Aurors chasing the worst of Dark wizards meant they could get away with more.
If only Okazes believes the same thing.
Okazes’s office was always smaller than Draco thought it should be for someone of his status, second-in-command to the Head Auror, and with more worn furniture. This time, however, Okazes didn’t give him long to think about that. He sat down behind his desk, staring at Draco, and launched straight into his complaint. “I have heard rumors that you are dating Harry Potter.”
Always “Harry,” never “Auror,” Draco thought, and took a moment to pick his seat, although there were only two chairs before Okazes’s desk, both covered in the same tattered red cloth. “You can set your mind at rest, sir,” he said. “For once, the office gossips are not wrong. We are dating.”
Okazes stared at him. Draco stared back, and amused himself with imagining how the other Socrates Aurors would react to the balance scale of the man’s eyes. Harry would squirm and flush, because that was how he handled anyone staring at him, even Draco. Macgeorge would sit there like a statue, and Rudie would quiver with irritation, and Warren and Jenkins would watch each other and take their cue from each other. That was one thing Draco envied the senior pair of Socrates Aurors, how perfectly they reacted as a team. He and Harry had had their struggles with that.
“Auror partners are not allowed to date each other,” Okazes said.
Draco smiled at him. “You forget what I know,” he said softly. “That there are few recruits you can place into the Socrates Corps. That since I and Harry became partners, there have been fewer deaths, and the majority among the twisted, where they are supposed to be, instead of their innocent victims.”
Okazes half-shut his eyes. “I know those things as well, Auror Malfoy,” he said.
I was right. If he keeps calling me by my title even when I provoke him, I think he does respect me more than he does Harry. Draco sat up and arranged his face in a prim little smile. “Auror Okazes,” he said. “You know them, but you don’t appear to take account of them. What would happen if you ended our partnership, as you are supposed to due to regulations?”
“I had hoped that you had more respect for regulations than this,” Okazes said.
And less respect for Potter. He didn’t need to say it. Draco could read the words working beneath the muscles of his face, as though written under the skin in glowing letters.
“Now you know better,” Draco said, and held gazes, and smiled. “I always feel that my days are improved when I can learn something new about those I share this world with.”
Okazes said nothing for a few moments. Then he nodded, and reached for a folder that lay to the side on a teetering pile as though he had planned to do it all along. Draco accepted it and opened it.
There was a photograph on top. Draco stared, squinting, and winced in irritation when the photographer’s hand intruded into the picture. The hand was shaking, he noted, but he didn’t know why. It seemed to be a photograph of an older book, with pages of parchment so worn that they barely appeared distinct in the picture, and red lettering that made it even harder to read.
Draco paused, then, and looked harder, and reminded himself which Corps he worked in.
“This is a book of human skin, with the writing in blood?” he asked calmly. “That seems excessive, but if our twisted has a liking for making such things, it ought to be easy to catch them. I would look first for someone who had worked in a shop such as Borgin and Burkes and had experience with using spells on Dark books. Or perhaps a more ordinary setting, such as a bookshop or library.”
“Not a book,” Okazes said. “Look at the second picture.”
Draco turned the page. This was a wider shot, and it took him some minutes to make sense of it. When he did, he curled his lip, his stomach churning.
“Will you take the case?” Okazes asked. “You look as if you are about to faint as you sit there. Not that I can blame you, as it is grotesque.”
Draco looked up at him. Okazes was leaning forwards, and once again the letters were visible beneath his skin, though Draco was no longer as pleased with that metaphor as he had been when he first thought of it.
And invaluable Aurors, as you have just been bragging you are, do not faint where they sit.
Draco sat up further and inclined his head. “I think Harry will find this rather interesting,” he said. “Thank you for thinking of us.” He stepped out of the office before Okazes could give him an official dismissal, but that was not quite enough of a violation of the rules of decorum for Okazes to chide him for it.
Once back in the corridor, he opened the file and stared again.
Not a book. Draco was looking at the wall of a room, perhaps once an ordinary parlor, and what he had mistaken for a book bound in human skin and written in human blood was an entire skin, spread over the wall and bound there with large blobs of guts and viscera. Someone turned inside out, and the blood used for the letters.
Draco knew of no spell that could do such a thing, not even the Darkest magic. That still had to yield to physical reality and the control of the wizard over his wand, and the guts and viscera would have slid down the wall and the lettering would be less than precise if cast by a wizard who had used all these spells in quick succession. Perhaps there was someone out there with the mastery to discover these incantations, the patience to wait in between them so that he could recover his strength, and the ability to also cast charms that would unclot the blood and keep the guts fresh enough to work with without losing that newly regained strength or the anger that had driven him to do this in the first place. But it was unlikely.
This was the work of a twisted, Draco thought. Someone’s flaw, Dark wandless magic that reached out and simply did what it did without any reasons except those that existed somewhere deep within the twisted’s mind.
Those flaws had done remarkable things before, things Draco had seen done. Created flawless, glimmering glass globes that stirred incredibly realistic dreams in some who touched them and were harmless to others. Brought a drawing on a wall to life so that it started to devour Harry’s legs. Traveled in time and made others forget every detail associated with them.
But as he stared, stomach quivering, at the display of the body on the wall, Draco thought this might be a new limit to “remarkable.”
*
Draco came in late that morning, and the moment he stepped through the door of the large Socrates office, Harry stood up. Draco’s shoulders hunched, his eyes were on the file in his hands but not glued there, and his strides were less long and effortless than they should be. Something had happened.
Macgeorge looked up to stare at them, and then sniffed and turned away. Draco extended the file to Harry silently.
“Twisted,” he said. “A bad one.”
“Are they?” Harry said, and then opened the folder and saw the top two pictures. It had been a long time since something he saw in Auror work made him want to vomit.
He stared in silence, and then put aside the top photographs and turned to the contents of the file itself.
The victim was Adriana Lugar, a witch who ran a correspondence course for Squibs. Harry resolved to remember that, although he doubted it would help. Unless the twisted was avenging a Squib family member or friend they thought had been taken in by the course, they couldn’t have a connection; Squibs simply didn’t develop this kind of magic late in life.
You thought, once, that twisted only happened when someone studied the Dark Arts enough to go mad. But you’ve seen that it can happen because of pain and swallowing someone else’s blood.
Harry grimaced. That was the problem with challenging the Ministry’s accepted definitions and setting up a different one: you had to give up the comforting certainties that came along with those definitions.
The file contained a lot of speculation and not much in the way of facts. Some of the investigating Aurors thought it was Adriana’s business partner, who had left in in a huff a few months ago; some thought, from questioning of witnesses who had noticed nothing until one of them saw a stream of blood under the door, that Adriana might have been the target of a random twisted. Twisted did go after random victims, Harry knew. And investigating Aurors. And people who had hurt them.
As yet, no leads.
“We will want to find and interview the business partner,” he said over his shoulder to Draco, who had come up behind him.
“Of course,” Draco said. “Did you find the transcription yet?”
“The transcription of the writing on her-skin?” Harry asked, because it was easier to refer to Adriana’s body that way than by the whole of what had happened to her. He felt Draco’s chin brush his shoulder as Draco nodded. “Not yet.” He paged through the file until he found it.
The transcription was biographical facts, but it had no punctuation and no separation between one sentence and another. Exactly the way it had appeared on Adriana’s skin, Harry thought, but he half-wished the recording Auror had troubled to add in the mechanics of ordinary writing; he had to struggle to make sense of it.
adriana lugar born in 1947 ran a correspondence course for squibs always wanted to find a partner never did once dated allison davies once thought things would last they didn’t once wanted to become an auror never made it into the training program said she would lend money to her sister to have a baby did not her sister never had the baby adriana was never an aunt dead sister dead brother last of her family no lugar cousins in the last generation…
And on and on it flowed, a stream of sense both trivial and important. Harry did wonder how the murderer had known some of it. Information on her family ought to have been easy enough to find, but private desires that Adriana had probably never confessed to anyone, or a conversation between Adriana and her sister that would have been in private? Harry wondered how.
“We should look among her close friends first, then,” he said, when he could make himself look at the skin again. It didn’t resemble anything human at all. Adriana’s body looked like a flayed animal, tacked on the wall, with the head and the arms a strange shape with nothing inside of them-
Harry made himself stop. He really would vomit if he kept on, and Macgeorge was watching.
“I’m not sure,” Draco said, and tapped the transcript, which he had tugged out of the pile of papers again. Harry glanced at it, and then away. “I wonder if this isn’t part of the flaw, to turn the body inside out and write the truth of the dead person’s life on their skin at the same time.”
Harry snorted. “How do we know it was the truth? We won’t, until we talk to more people than the Aurors who began the investigation did.”
Draco sighed and rolled his eyes. “Listen to me, Harry. That’s not what I meant. Look at this.” He pointed to the blobs of purple and black that secured the skin to the wall, and which Harry hadn’t wanted to look at it closely. “This is her organs. Liver and lungs, at least, that I’ve been able to identify, and part of the heart. What normal magic can do this? I think the whole thing is part of the flaw. Turning the body inside out, pinning it to the wall that way, the writing in the blood-and what’s written.”
Harry stared at it, and finally had to nod. It would be absurdly rare for someone to master all the spells that were needed to do that without alerting someone, he thought, and although that person might exist, they would conserve theories by going with the idea that their twisted had done all of it for now.
Unless this was going to be a group of Dark wizards rather than a single twisted. Harry had to admit he would almost prefer that theory.
“I don’t know if we can say for certain until we interview someone who knew Adriana,” he said. He caught Draco’s eye and added hastily, “But your theory does make sense.”
Draco nodded. Harry could see the marks around his eyes, the way he breathed, that meant he had had much the same initial reaction to the slaughter as Harry had, but he was calming down and stepping back onto the path of intellectual coolness now, treating the case as a case, and Lugar as a victim like any other.
Harry tried to think of her that way, as Lugar. But the name Adriana kept coming back to him, and he suspected that was how he would continue to think of her.
No one deserved this, he thought. No matter what they had done. No one deserved to be turned inside out and have the truth of their life written for anyone to see on their skin, in their own blood.
His mouth dripped with the sickness of it, his hands clenched, his nails ached.
I won’t let this go unavenged, Adriana. I promise you.
*
“There was something we left out of the reports.”
Draco settled back against the wall, and didn’t show his immediate reaction to that confession. Auror Edward Tympany had a lot more seniority than Draco did, and this was an unusual case, one that had been handed on to the Socrates Corps for a reason. Ordinary Aurors didn’t deal with twisted and the kind of damage they could cause.
But Draco, inwardly, raged. If he hadn’t thought to suggest that he and Harry go and question the investigating Aurors listed in the reports, they might never have known this.
“And what was that?”
Harry’s voice was much more soothing than Draco’s in a situation like this, softer and with a rumbling tone in the back of it that seemed to reassure the people he spoke to that a lion would stand between them and danger. Draco smiled briefly. He wondered what Tympany and his partner would say if they knew that the lion, in this case, was growling at them.
Harry’s eyes had had that familiar, dangerous fire since he looked at the pictures, and Draco knew he would have to be alert in multiple directions, now. Harry had promised on their holiday that he would no longer foolishly risk his life, and Draco trusted his word, as far as it went. But it was a new promise, and Harry was new at keeping it. And he wanted someone to pay for what had happened to Adriana. He might not try to die in the name of protecting Draco, but he might go too far in the name of getting revenge.
Ultimately, the dead were the dead, and couldn’t appreciate such a gesture. So Draco wouldn’t let it happen.
“Everything was fresh,” Tympany said, drawing his fingers over his face and closing his eyes as though that would keep the sight from returning to his brain. Draco rolled his eyes, sure that Tympany wouldn’t notice. His partner was hovering over him, anyway, and had no attention to spare for someone doubting Tympany’s story. “The body hadn’t rotted. The blood didn’t smell. It had to have been a few days since she died, since that was the last time anyone saw her, but-you wouldn’t know it. And I didn’t sense any magic that would keep it that way.”
Harry glanced back at Draco as though checking what he thought of this information, but they both knew that something deeper and shared went on between them. Draco had told Harry he thought everything must be fresh because of the colors in the photographs, and because the blood used in the letters had been bright red, not dried to brown. This was further confirmation.
And while Draco privately wouldn’t trust Tympany to sense that someone was being held under the Cruciatus Curse in the next room, he thought it likely that he was right-this time. Keeping everything fresh was part of their twisted’s Dark gift rather than something achieved through spells. Like everything else.
This flaw was deeper and more complicated, at least on the surface, than that of anyone else they had tracked so far, Draco thought. Perhaps what Alto had been able to do, altering someone’s mind, and what Morningstar had done, traveling in time, were more complicated magically, but they were easier to understand; Draco and Harry could see how the parts fit together. Here, they didn’t, yet.
Unless the whole purpose was to create a brutal “artwork” of the kind that he had done with Adriana Lugar’s body. Or unless the writing was the most important part, the revelation of truth.
Draco thought it might be, but he could not say, yet. He only wished they had some lead, some suspect.
“Thank you,” Harry said, and stood up and followed Draco out of the room. His jaw was set, and the burning in his eyes had gone deeper still.
Draco reached out and clenched his hand down on Harry’s arm, feeling the muscles shift and tense. “I want you to promise me that you won’t go charging into the midst of anything,” he said calmly.
Harry hesitated, then said, “Yes. I was going to suggest splitting up to interview Adriana’s neighbors, but I think we should stay together.”
“I’m always in favor of our being together,” Draco murmured lazily back.
That won a lovely flush from Harry, and a laugh, at last, and they set out side by side, Harry’s strides matching his.
It is terrible, Draco tried to say, through the way his hand lingered on Harry’s arm and the way his eyes stayed on his face. But we will face it, and bring whoever did this down.
His thoughts skittered in another, wry direction as they slid over the recent past and the other arguments they’d had, besides the ones about Harry risking his life. At least I don’t need to worry that this is a twisted Harry will feel compassion for and insist deserves to live.
Chapter Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/465603.html. Comment wherever you like.
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.
The Library of Hades
Chapter One-One for the Books
“You fucked on your holiday, didn’t you?”
Macgeorge spoke with a twist to her voice that Harry thought was supposed to make the words worse. But since he was more proud of what they had done than otherwise, he sent back a dazzling smile and bent over his report a second time. He still had to make his proper contribution to the Morningstar case, for which Draco had done all the paperwork while Harry was lying in bed trying to recover.
“How clever of you to notice,” he muttered. His fingers did tremble, beneath the desk, but he didn’t think Macgeorge could see them. Draco had told him how much of a united front they had to present, so Harry would do that and hope for the best. “I shouldn’t think that more than, oh, twenty other people in the Ministry have been so clever.”
There was silence. Harry didn’t look up, because that would give the stare he could feel too much power. He continued to sort through his memories instead, and finally found the right words to describe what it had been like to feel the barriers of time Occluding his memories on the Morningstar case break. He wrote them down with a flourish and signed the report, then set it aside for Draco to countersign when he arrived later that day.
Silence, still. Harry finally sneaked a peek under his lashes and saw Macgeorge standing in front of her desk, staring down sightlessly at her paperweight, a glass globe with a mummified hand tucked inside it. She stroked the glass, then sighed, sat down, and began to work.
Harry blinked. Then he shrugged and began to countersign some of the reports that Draco had written; Draco hadn’t waited even for that before he dragged Harry off on their holiday.
And what a holiday.
Harry suppressed the shiver of memory, desire, recollection, that coursed through his body, and settled himself with a secret smile. He had worried that he wouldn’t want to be apart from Draco when they returned to work, that he would have trouble concentrating, but now the thought of what might wait at home as a reward that evening gave him both joy and drive.
This is the way it should be, all the time.
This is the way that I never thought it could be, after Lionel.
*
Draco walked through the corridors of the Ministry with his head up and his face impersonal. It was the best solution to the covert glares and whispers that he felt following him. Some of them would come from rumors that he was dating Harry, and some of them would come from his past, and some of them would come from the fact that it was Harry he was dating.
None of them had any validity unless Draco wanted them to have, he had decided. He had broken with his family and suffered seven years without their protection and their money. He had proven himself in the Auror program against the people who wanted him to fail, among them the Aurors who had taught him. It had left him scraped bare, down to the granite, but the nice thing about granite was how slowly it weathered. And if he had considerably fewer favors than he had possessed before this unorthodox holiday he and Harry had taken last week, well. That meant he could sever more ties.
And weave new ones.
“Auror Malfoy.”
Okazes spoke like a branch breaking, sometimes, as dry and as powdery. Draco turned towards him and nodded. “Sir,” he said. It was the best way to talk to someone like Okazes, who hated Harry and would find a fault of respect in his partner if he could.
Okazes just stared at Draco for a time, and then turned his back and snorted. “Come with me to my office,” he said. “We have much to discuss.”
Draco followed him, and the stares increased to the point where the skin between his shoulder blades itched and the whispers rose to the level of audibility. He ignored them. Perhaps he could do nothing about the reactions of those more powerful than him, such as Okazes, but he still believed what he had told Harry in the Forest of Dean: their status as Aurors chasing the worst of Dark wizards meant they could get away with more.
If only Okazes believes the same thing.
Okazes’s office was always smaller than Draco thought it should be for someone of his status, second-in-command to the Head Auror, and with more worn furniture. This time, however, Okazes didn’t give him long to think about that. He sat down behind his desk, staring at Draco, and launched straight into his complaint. “I have heard rumors that you are dating Harry Potter.”
Always “Harry,” never “Auror,” Draco thought, and took a moment to pick his seat, although there were only two chairs before Okazes’s desk, both covered in the same tattered red cloth. “You can set your mind at rest, sir,” he said. “For once, the office gossips are not wrong. We are dating.”
Okazes stared at him. Draco stared back, and amused himself with imagining how the other Socrates Aurors would react to the balance scale of the man’s eyes. Harry would squirm and flush, because that was how he handled anyone staring at him, even Draco. Macgeorge would sit there like a statue, and Rudie would quiver with irritation, and Warren and Jenkins would watch each other and take their cue from each other. That was one thing Draco envied the senior pair of Socrates Aurors, how perfectly they reacted as a team. He and Harry had had their struggles with that.
“Auror partners are not allowed to date each other,” Okazes said.
Draco smiled at him. “You forget what I know,” he said softly. “That there are few recruits you can place into the Socrates Corps. That since I and Harry became partners, there have been fewer deaths, and the majority among the twisted, where they are supposed to be, instead of their innocent victims.”
Okazes half-shut his eyes. “I know those things as well, Auror Malfoy,” he said.
I was right. If he keeps calling me by my title even when I provoke him, I think he does respect me more than he does Harry. Draco sat up and arranged his face in a prim little smile. “Auror Okazes,” he said. “You know them, but you don’t appear to take account of them. What would happen if you ended our partnership, as you are supposed to due to regulations?”
“I had hoped that you had more respect for regulations than this,” Okazes said.
And less respect for Potter. He didn’t need to say it. Draco could read the words working beneath the muscles of his face, as though written under the skin in glowing letters.
“Now you know better,” Draco said, and held gazes, and smiled. “I always feel that my days are improved when I can learn something new about those I share this world with.”
Okazes said nothing for a few moments. Then he nodded, and reached for a folder that lay to the side on a teetering pile as though he had planned to do it all along. Draco accepted it and opened it.
There was a photograph on top. Draco stared, squinting, and winced in irritation when the photographer’s hand intruded into the picture. The hand was shaking, he noted, but he didn’t know why. It seemed to be a photograph of an older book, with pages of parchment so worn that they barely appeared distinct in the picture, and red lettering that made it even harder to read.
Draco paused, then, and looked harder, and reminded himself which Corps he worked in.
“This is a book of human skin, with the writing in blood?” he asked calmly. “That seems excessive, but if our twisted has a liking for making such things, it ought to be easy to catch them. I would look first for someone who had worked in a shop such as Borgin and Burkes and had experience with using spells on Dark books. Or perhaps a more ordinary setting, such as a bookshop or library.”
“Not a book,” Okazes said. “Look at the second picture.”
Draco turned the page. This was a wider shot, and it took him some minutes to make sense of it. When he did, he curled his lip, his stomach churning.
“Will you take the case?” Okazes asked. “You look as if you are about to faint as you sit there. Not that I can blame you, as it is grotesque.”
Draco looked up at him. Okazes was leaning forwards, and once again the letters were visible beneath his skin, though Draco was no longer as pleased with that metaphor as he had been when he first thought of it.
And invaluable Aurors, as you have just been bragging you are, do not faint where they sit.
Draco sat up further and inclined his head. “I think Harry will find this rather interesting,” he said. “Thank you for thinking of us.” He stepped out of the office before Okazes could give him an official dismissal, but that was not quite enough of a violation of the rules of decorum for Okazes to chide him for it.
Once back in the corridor, he opened the file and stared again.
Not a book. Draco was looking at the wall of a room, perhaps once an ordinary parlor, and what he had mistaken for a book bound in human skin and written in human blood was an entire skin, spread over the wall and bound there with large blobs of guts and viscera. Someone turned inside out, and the blood used for the letters.
Draco knew of no spell that could do such a thing, not even the Darkest magic. That still had to yield to physical reality and the control of the wizard over his wand, and the guts and viscera would have slid down the wall and the lettering would be less than precise if cast by a wizard who had used all these spells in quick succession. Perhaps there was someone out there with the mastery to discover these incantations, the patience to wait in between them so that he could recover his strength, and the ability to also cast charms that would unclot the blood and keep the guts fresh enough to work with without losing that newly regained strength or the anger that had driven him to do this in the first place. But it was unlikely.
This was the work of a twisted, Draco thought. Someone’s flaw, Dark wandless magic that reached out and simply did what it did without any reasons except those that existed somewhere deep within the twisted’s mind.
Those flaws had done remarkable things before, things Draco had seen done. Created flawless, glimmering glass globes that stirred incredibly realistic dreams in some who touched them and were harmless to others. Brought a drawing on a wall to life so that it started to devour Harry’s legs. Traveled in time and made others forget every detail associated with them.
But as he stared, stomach quivering, at the display of the body on the wall, Draco thought this might be a new limit to “remarkable.”
*
Draco came in late that morning, and the moment he stepped through the door of the large Socrates office, Harry stood up. Draco’s shoulders hunched, his eyes were on the file in his hands but not glued there, and his strides were less long and effortless than they should be. Something had happened.
Macgeorge looked up to stare at them, and then sniffed and turned away. Draco extended the file to Harry silently.
“Twisted,” he said. “A bad one.”
“Are they?” Harry said, and then opened the folder and saw the top two pictures. It had been a long time since something he saw in Auror work made him want to vomit.
He stared in silence, and then put aside the top photographs and turned to the contents of the file itself.
The victim was Adriana Lugar, a witch who ran a correspondence course for Squibs. Harry resolved to remember that, although he doubted it would help. Unless the twisted was avenging a Squib family member or friend they thought had been taken in by the course, they couldn’t have a connection; Squibs simply didn’t develop this kind of magic late in life.
You thought, once, that twisted only happened when someone studied the Dark Arts enough to go mad. But you’ve seen that it can happen because of pain and swallowing someone else’s blood.
Harry grimaced. That was the problem with challenging the Ministry’s accepted definitions and setting up a different one: you had to give up the comforting certainties that came along with those definitions.
The file contained a lot of speculation and not much in the way of facts. Some of the investigating Aurors thought it was Adriana’s business partner, who had left in in a huff a few months ago; some thought, from questioning of witnesses who had noticed nothing until one of them saw a stream of blood under the door, that Adriana might have been the target of a random twisted. Twisted did go after random victims, Harry knew. And investigating Aurors. And people who had hurt them.
As yet, no leads.
“We will want to find and interview the business partner,” he said over his shoulder to Draco, who had come up behind him.
“Of course,” Draco said. “Did you find the transcription yet?”
“The transcription of the writing on her-skin?” Harry asked, because it was easier to refer to Adriana’s body that way than by the whole of what had happened to her. He felt Draco’s chin brush his shoulder as Draco nodded. “Not yet.” He paged through the file until he found it.
The transcription was biographical facts, but it had no punctuation and no separation between one sentence and another. Exactly the way it had appeared on Adriana’s skin, Harry thought, but he half-wished the recording Auror had troubled to add in the mechanics of ordinary writing; he had to struggle to make sense of it.
adriana lugar born in 1947 ran a correspondence course for squibs always wanted to find a partner never did once dated allison davies once thought things would last they didn’t once wanted to become an auror never made it into the training program said she would lend money to her sister to have a baby did not her sister never had the baby adriana was never an aunt dead sister dead brother last of her family no lugar cousins in the last generation…
And on and on it flowed, a stream of sense both trivial and important. Harry did wonder how the murderer had known some of it. Information on her family ought to have been easy enough to find, but private desires that Adriana had probably never confessed to anyone, or a conversation between Adriana and her sister that would have been in private? Harry wondered how.
“We should look among her close friends first, then,” he said, when he could make himself look at the skin again. It didn’t resemble anything human at all. Adriana’s body looked like a flayed animal, tacked on the wall, with the head and the arms a strange shape with nothing inside of them-
Harry made himself stop. He really would vomit if he kept on, and Macgeorge was watching.
“I’m not sure,” Draco said, and tapped the transcript, which he had tugged out of the pile of papers again. Harry glanced at it, and then away. “I wonder if this isn’t part of the flaw, to turn the body inside out and write the truth of the dead person’s life on their skin at the same time.”
Harry snorted. “How do we know it was the truth? We won’t, until we talk to more people than the Aurors who began the investigation did.”
Draco sighed and rolled his eyes. “Listen to me, Harry. That’s not what I meant. Look at this.” He pointed to the blobs of purple and black that secured the skin to the wall, and which Harry hadn’t wanted to look at it closely. “This is her organs. Liver and lungs, at least, that I’ve been able to identify, and part of the heart. What normal magic can do this? I think the whole thing is part of the flaw. Turning the body inside out, pinning it to the wall that way, the writing in the blood-and what’s written.”
Harry stared at it, and finally had to nod. It would be absurdly rare for someone to master all the spells that were needed to do that without alerting someone, he thought, and although that person might exist, they would conserve theories by going with the idea that their twisted had done all of it for now.
Unless this was going to be a group of Dark wizards rather than a single twisted. Harry had to admit he would almost prefer that theory.
“I don’t know if we can say for certain until we interview someone who knew Adriana,” he said. He caught Draco’s eye and added hastily, “But your theory does make sense.”
Draco nodded. Harry could see the marks around his eyes, the way he breathed, that meant he had had much the same initial reaction to the slaughter as Harry had, but he was calming down and stepping back onto the path of intellectual coolness now, treating the case as a case, and Lugar as a victim like any other.
Harry tried to think of her that way, as Lugar. But the name Adriana kept coming back to him, and he suspected that was how he would continue to think of her.
No one deserved this, he thought. No matter what they had done. No one deserved to be turned inside out and have the truth of their life written for anyone to see on their skin, in their own blood.
His mouth dripped with the sickness of it, his hands clenched, his nails ached.
I won’t let this go unavenged, Adriana. I promise you.
*
“There was something we left out of the reports.”
Draco settled back against the wall, and didn’t show his immediate reaction to that confession. Auror Edward Tympany had a lot more seniority than Draco did, and this was an unusual case, one that had been handed on to the Socrates Corps for a reason. Ordinary Aurors didn’t deal with twisted and the kind of damage they could cause.
But Draco, inwardly, raged. If he hadn’t thought to suggest that he and Harry go and question the investigating Aurors listed in the reports, they might never have known this.
“And what was that?”
Harry’s voice was much more soothing than Draco’s in a situation like this, softer and with a rumbling tone in the back of it that seemed to reassure the people he spoke to that a lion would stand between them and danger. Draco smiled briefly. He wondered what Tympany and his partner would say if they knew that the lion, in this case, was growling at them.
Harry’s eyes had had that familiar, dangerous fire since he looked at the pictures, and Draco knew he would have to be alert in multiple directions, now. Harry had promised on their holiday that he would no longer foolishly risk his life, and Draco trusted his word, as far as it went. But it was a new promise, and Harry was new at keeping it. And he wanted someone to pay for what had happened to Adriana. He might not try to die in the name of protecting Draco, but he might go too far in the name of getting revenge.
Ultimately, the dead were the dead, and couldn’t appreciate such a gesture. So Draco wouldn’t let it happen.
“Everything was fresh,” Tympany said, drawing his fingers over his face and closing his eyes as though that would keep the sight from returning to his brain. Draco rolled his eyes, sure that Tympany wouldn’t notice. His partner was hovering over him, anyway, and had no attention to spare for someone doubting Tympany’s story. “The body hadn’t rotted. The blood didn’t smell. It had to have been a few days since she died, since that was the last time anyone saw her, but-you wouldn’t know it. And I didn’t sense any magic that would keep it that way.”
Harry glanced back at Draco as though checking what he thought of this information, but they both knew that something deeper and shared went on between them. Draco had told Harry he thought everything must be fresh because of the colors in the photographs, and because the blood used in the letters had been bright red, not dried to brown. This was further confirmation.
And while Draco privately wouldn’t trust Tympany to sense that someone was being held under the Cruciatus Curse in the next room, he thought it likely that he was right-this time. Keeping everything fresh was part of their twisted’s Dark gift rather than something achieved through spells. Like everything else.
This flaw was deeper and more complicated, at least on the surface, than that of anyone else they had tracked so far, Draco thought. Perhaps what Alto had been able to do, altering someone’s mind, and what Morningstar had done, traveling in time, were more complicated magically, but they were easier to understand; Draco and Harry could see how the parts fit together. Here, they didn’t, yet.
Unless the whole purpose was to create a brutal “artwork” of the kind that he had done with Adriana Lugar’s body. Or unless the writing was the most important part, the revelation of truth.
Draco thought it might be, but he could not say, yet. He only wished they had some lead, some suspect.
“Thank you,” Harry said, and stood up and followed Draco out of the room. His jaw was set, and the burning in his eyes had gone deeper still.
Draco reached out and clenched his hand down on Harry’s arm, feeling the muscles shift and tense. “I want you to promise me that you won’t go charging into the midst of anything,” he said calmly.
Harry hesitated, then said, “Yes. I was going to suggest splitting up to interview Adriana’s neighbors, but I think we should stay together.”
“I’m always in favor of our being together,” Draco murmured lazily back.
That won a lovely flush from Harry, and a laugh, at last, and they set out side by side, Harry’s strides matching his.
It is terrible, Draco tried to say, through the way his hand lingered on Harry’s arm and the way his eyes stayed on his face. But we will face it, and bring whoever did this down.
His thoughts skittered in another, wry direction as they slid over the recent past and the other arguments they’d had, besides the ones about Harry risking his life. At least I don’t need to worry that this is a twisted Harry will feel compassion for and insist deserves to live.
Chapter Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/465603.html. Comment wherever you like.