Chapter Four of 'A Reign of Silence'- Cuthbert's Corner
Chapter Three.
Title: A Reign of Silence (4/20)
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 Four-Cuthbert’s Corner
“There it is.”
Draco was glad to hear the words, especially emerging as they just had at the end of a dizzy series of Apparitions. He shook his head to get his breath back, and studied the countryside in front of him.
They stood on the edge of a broken, tumbledown cliff, which slanted away rapidly into what Draco would call a valley only if he read in the dictionary that valleys could lie on their sides and, sometimes, stand on end. To the left and right of them, wings of rock stretched, in a pale yellow-brown that reminded Draco of some of the older walls in the Manor. And beyond that piled more rocks, black and yellow and sea-stained brown and grey, mounds and curves and tables, with the sea splashing between them.
The roar of the waves tumbling regularly in obscured the first words Draco tried to speak. He grimaced and shook his head, raising his voice. “Where does the house lie from here?”
Warren, who had been standing in front of him and staring down into the water as though it could tell them the location of Ernhardt all by itself, started and turned to him. “I told you,” she said, swaying her arm ahead of herself. “It’s right there.”
Harry shifted his weight. Draco glanced at him, and was glad to see that he wasn’t the only one who blinked.
“We can’t see it,” Harry said. “Does it have Expectation Wards built on it? Can people only see it if they’re expecting it to appear in a particular place, or if they’ve been here before?” he clarified, when Warren folded her arms.
Fancy not knowing what Expectation Wards are, Draco thought, but it was true that they were still a somewhat experimental branch of magic, and that Warren, for all her expertise in obscure spells, couldn’t know everything.
“It’s there,” Jenkins said. She was perched on a rock next to them, leaning forwards like she was poising for the sculpture of an Auror on the hunt, and her arm pointed straight ahead with more emphasis than Warren’s.
This time Draco forced his eyes to follow that path and only that path, and although they watered and sent tears plummeting down to join the sea below, he found what he was looking for in a minute. The house was built of the same stone as the cliffs, and low and rounded enough to blend in with them. No doubt that had been an advantage for Ernhardt and also his cousin, the mad twisted.
Not that we can use that description by itself now, since it could so easily mean either of them.
The front door of the house was a great arch, filled with what looked like regularly-placed bricks with not a seam between them. Draco refrained from asking how they would enter the house if that was the case. They had to cross the distance between them and the house first, and that distance was filled with the wildly swirling water and the breaks in the stone that looked too wide to simply leap across.
“It has defenses,” Warren said, scanning the rock in front of her. “Or did. It wouldn’t be wise to go prancing up to it.”
“You don’t say,” Draco remarked politely.
Warren turned to face him looking as though she was in control of every muscle of her body, and as though that wasn’t a good thing. “I’ve brought you here, Malfoy, and I’ve sworn to try to help you,” she said. “Because I think it’s more important to end the threat that Ernhardt presents than to maintain stupid rivalries about who’s solved the most cases. But you can turn on me if you like. You’ll find me ready to defend myself.”
“And not just her,” Jenkins said. From the sound of things, she had risen to her feet, but Draco could imagine the threatening posture she would take all too easily.
“This is stupid,” Harry said.
Draco blinked at him. They had come this far and he was willing to give up on the hunt for Ernhardt without even searching the house?
But Harry was glaring at Warren and Jenkins, he saw, and relaxed a little. “This is stupid,” Harry repeated. “You make an obvious comment, Draco makes an obvious comment, and you react as though he’s insulted your children.” Warren took a step to the side, as though to clarify that she didn’t have children, but Harry was plunging ahead and paid no attention. “If you want us to trust you and work with you, then you’re going to have to extend the same courtesy to us, whether or not you want to.”
Jenkins said something that Draco couldn’t hear the whole of, but it sounded as though it involved the word “Peregrine.” Perhaps the name of a twisted they’d hunted, Draco thought, or a place.
Warren shook her arms out, from elbows to wrists, and nodded. “Fine,” she said, and moved off towards the house, taking a route that would lead her onto the more solid part of the cliffs. Jenkins followed without looking back at them. Harry took Draco’s arm and stroked it quickly for a minute, asking with a glance if he was all right.
“Fine,” Draco said. “We should move while it’s still daylight.”
Harry nodded, and fell in behind him. Draco listened to the solid sound of his steps over stone, and permitted himself a private smile.
He should have hated the thought that Warren and Jenkins would respect Harry enough to step away from an incipient fight when they didn’t respect Draco enough to do the same. But at the moment, all he could think was that it was good to be Harry Potter’s partner.
*
Harry didn’t trust anything about the landscape around Cuthbert’s Corner. It was too bright, too open, and the house, once you saw it, simply sat there in the free air without the protective cocoon of wards that he would have expected around a twisted’s lair. Not that any of the ones they had hunted had lairs, really, unless you counted Alto making her home in St. Mungo’s, or the house that Nancy Morningstar had inhabited when she was still Katherine Jourdemayne.
The Gina Hendricks case…
Harry shook his head. He couldn’t think too much about that case, or the taste of bile and steel would fill his mouth, and the sight of what Lionel’s body had looked like when he died would take over his mind. He no longer mourned Lionel with the intense and single-minded passion that he had before he and Draco became lovers, but they needed to be concentrating on the possible defenses of the house in front of them.
None of which had appeared yet, and their little hunting group had covered more than half the distance to it.
Harry closed his eyes, falling deeply into himself. Draco was the one who was really good at sensing Dark magic, thanks to his flaw, but Harry wasn’t bad himself. And since his specialty was defensive magic, he was more likely than Draco to sense wards; Draco picked up more on offensive spells, especially curses and the flaws that twisted used.
He jerked to a halt a moment later and shouted, “Stop walking! Close your eyes!”
He didn’t know if they had obeyed him. He didn’t dare open his eyes to check. He could hear his own breathing rushing towards panic mode, and threw his own mind against the traces that were tugging him there, telling himself to stop that. Sometimes he could exert control over his thoughts even though he was still mostly pants at Occlumency, and this was one of those times.
Draco’s voice came from his right, calmer than Harry had thought it would be. “They’re dark dogs, aren’t they?”
“They are,” Harry said, and kept himself from turning his head towards Draco’s voice, because that would increase the temptation to open his eyes. “If you don’t look at them, they’re harmless. But we have to be careful not to walk into them.”
“Rather difficult, when we can’t open our eyes,” Jenkins said in a dry voice from somewhere behind his left shoulder. “Can you explain the nature of this curse to us?”
Harry sighed. “The dark dogs are illusions summoned by a certain kind of defensive ward. The sight of them enters your eyes if you look at them, and burns itself into them. No matter what you look at again, you’ll never see anything but dog-shapes imprinting themselves over and over on your field of vision.”
There was a small, appalled silence, and then Harry heard the soundless growl from off to the side. He stood still. Hard to walk into the dogs when you weren’t moving.
“And what happens if you touch them?” Warren asked.
“Then they swallow you,” Draco said, his voice distant and muffled. Harry hoped he hadn’t tried to move. “Whatever touches them vanishes. I’ve seen people reach out to pat their heads and pull back a stump instead of a hand. Painless and bloodless, if you like that sort of thing. I don’t.”
More silence, and Harry reminded himself again that dark dogs didn’t move of their own free will. They hardly had to, when they could wait for someone to look at them or walk into them. The growling continued, though, up and down the scale, and impossible to stop hearing once you started.
“I don’t think they could affect me,” Jenkins said. “They enter in at the eye, and affect the mind? My mind is locked and warded against such intrusions, as I think I told you.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Draco snapped. Harry reached out towards him, wanting to touch his hand, and then stopped. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he felt the vague coldness of a dark dog in the air between them. “It could be a mental curse, or classified that way, but it could also be a purely visual effect. Most people don’t study the curse enough to know for sure.”
“Someone said,” Jenkins murmured. “If I fail, then you’ve at least gained a piece of knowledge which you can apply to other occasions.”
“Don’t, Simone,” Warren said, in a tone that Harry imagined she’d used in arguments before this. “You’re worth too much to me.”
Jenkins said nothing for long seconds, then let out a long, irritated sigh. “If you can’t look at them or touch them, then how do you get rid of dark dogs?”
Harry felt Draco’s eyes on him, although neither of them would be looking at the moment. They had worked together long enough by now that some things were instinctive.
“The counterspell is Dark,” Harry said, because he knew what Draco was thinking: they would take word of the cure better when coming from someone like him, Harry Potter, supposed champion of all that was good and right. “And it’s draining. I can use it, but you may have to protect me for the next few hours.”
“Use it,” Warren said. “We’re losing more standing here, vulnerable to Ernhardt if he comes by, than we are if you’re not at full strength.”
“Aren’t you a charmer?” Harry thought he heard Draco mutter, but if he had, then Warren chose to take no notice of it.
Harry nodded, and reached out to his magic. It rose to his will the way it always did, whether the spell was Dark or Light. He would have to conceal that from Warren and Jenkins, he thought, because there was a common perception that only Dark wizards had that much ease with the Dark Arts.
For now, Harry would let them keep their innocent perceptions, but he knew that power had a lot more to do with it than a certain amount of magic practiced did.
He spoke the spell aloud; it was surer that way, and there was no time for nonverbal fanciness. He heard the growl building around him as he spoke, but ignored it. The dark dogs still wouldn’t move and interfere. They were part of a ward, not creatures with a will and bodies of their own.
The growl became a howl as he reached the end of the spell, the last syllables of the incantation seeming to leap from him like sparks and earth themselves in the stone. But it didn’t distract Harry from the magic, and he finished with a clench of his hand on his wand, pouring himself into the spell to make sure it worked.
The howl sounded from a dozen throats at once, and Harry winced, struggling to keep his eyes shut. He wanted to look instinctively at the awfulness of the sound, because it might tell him how many enemies were coming towards them.
They’re not coming. You banished them. Hold tight to that.
The howling shivered into silence, and the growls were gone, too, as well as the intangible feeling of something cold and still watching them. Harry took a deep breath, and, because someone had to be the first to do so, opened his eyes.
The stone around them was once again its natural colors in the sunlight, free of dark dogs. Harry turned to Draco, whose eyes he had never been so glad to see, and nodded. “They’re gone,” he said aloud, to free Warren and Jenkins.
By the time the other two Aurors began to move again, the exhaustion was already hitting Harry. He conjured a crutch to lean on, and then Draco stepped up beside him and gave him a single, extremely even look. Harry stared back.
“Take my strength,” Draco whispered, and held out his hand.
Harry hesitated. Yes, there was a spell Draco could use that would contribute some strength to Harry, too, and if they did it right-as Draco would do it, of course-then it wouldn’t lead to them both being utterly exhausted, the way it otherwise could. But he didn’t know if it was worth the cost. This way, they only had one person who was tired, while Draco was still at full strength. If Draco and he were both half-tired instead, then they might not react quickly enough when another of Ernhardt’s defenses popped up in front of them.
“Take it,” Jenkins said. She was walking on when Harry looked up at her, without glancing back. “If he wants to offer it, then he won’t stop thinking about it until you do take it. And we need you both alert more than we need you both at full strength.”
Warren paused only to nod at them before following her partner.
Less complaining about the Dark spell than Harry had thought he would hear, though of course it was possible that they were waiting until later to scold them. Or maybe they didn’t want to break up their own focus by talking about it now.
Draco’s hand poked his hand.
Harry nodded, and linked his fingers with Draco’s, and listened as Draco whispered the incantation. The strength flowed into him and made him sway, but in a good way, as a little of the exhaustion drowned under it the way thirst would drown under enough water. By the time that Draco stepped back, cradling his hand against him as though it was sunburned, Harry could Vanish the crutch.
“Thank you,” Harry whispered, as they began to make their way forwards again. “But next time, let me do that.”
“Next time, let me cast the spell that banishes the dark dogs,” Draco countered.
Harry leaned his hand on Draco’s shoulder and shoved him a little, recognizing an argument he wasn’t going to win. But it was good to have some arguments that they were never going to settle, and to be alive to have them.
*
They entered the house without triggering any more defensive wards. It turned out that the bricks apparently blocking the house were only an illusion that melted away when Warren murmured a spell she said Ernhardt had taught her.
Looking around, Draco had to admit that he thought it unlikely Ernhardt was here. What were the chances he would forget telling a Socrates Auror about his ancestral home, especially when that Auror had only investigated the case a few years ago?
But it was definitely the home Morningstar had described.
The room they entered was covered with mirrors, down to shiny reflective covers on the chair that confronted Draco with his own face over again when he wanted to turn away from the walls. There was a window in one wall that looked out on a red expanse of desert. Draco shook his head in mild disgust. They had been concentrating so hard on what Morningstar could have meant by the desert, whether it was metaphorical or real, that they had overlooked the very simple possibility of an enchanted window.
Warren moved cautiously through the mirror room, peering now and then at the glass as though looking for something. Jenkins took up a guard position near the door. Draco leaned against the one patch of wall he could find that was clear of mirrors, not far from Jenkins, and closed his eyes, relaxing, focusing on his left arm.
His Dark Mark was the conduit of his flaw, and it often wouldn’t come for the asking; the sensations of Dark Arts would trigger the pain at once, of course, but Dark magic not being actively used at the moment was harder to sense. Draco had hesitated to work with his flaw after what had happened to Macgeorge, but an ability to sense Dark magic was not as inherently dangerous as necromancy, and right now, they needed every advantage they could get.
He concentrated on his breathing until that concentration had replaced most of the other things he could think about, and then turned inwards and descended.
It was the only word Draco had found for his flaw, if not the most accurate one. He seemed to float in an abyss, to hang suspended in seawater, and around him floated stars of power. He could feel Harry’s magic if he reached out, and Warren’s. Jenkins was a contained candle not far from him, flickering but not accessible. Draco wondered if her flaw that locked her mind had something to do with that.
And there were the other glowing stars, one in the room with them, one beneath them-that might be the cellar where Ernhardt had kept Morningstar-and one above. Draco frowned and pushed his senses out further. He would have thought there were stronger defenses, which meant more numerous ones.
Then he remembered that strong enough defenses wouldn’t need numbers, and opened his eyes just in time to see the glass in the mirrors explode outwards.
The shards tumbled through the air in a howling chorus, each one accompanied by enough noise that Draco winced and would have ducked his head if he’d had less strict training among the Aurors. But Dark wizards used noise often enough as a distraction technique that Draco knew what to do. He lifted a Shield Charm around himself as he rolled to the floor, wrapping it in a bubble so that he would be protected from the glass that landed around him as well as what might fly directly at him.
He could see the others doing the same thing, and smiled a little grimly. Perhaps it made a difference to be hunting with other Socrates Aurors, after all, instead of with helpless people who would need to be protected.
Then he turned around and got a look at what had come out from behind the mirrors.
And he began to believe that having other Socrates Aurors with him might not make such a difference after all.
*
Harry stared at the thing that pranced towards them, beak clacking and tail swishing, and tried not to cry or vomit. He wasn’t sure which reaction was uppermost in him, and they tilted back and forth dizzily, leaving him breathless and blinded by turns.
The creature was a dead, and resurrected, hippogriff.
There was nothing anymore of Buckbeak in the foul lines of its body. Harry could see rotting muscles under the dripping feathers, which seemed to have been soaked in water or tar to preserve them, but probably it was just the remains of blood and all the other juices in the body. The claws were still fresh and polished, but everything else was bones and carrion. And the smell that accompanied it was almost worse than anything.
But worst of all was the way the creature of Macgeorge’s creation reared in the middle of the room in a parody of natural hippogriff grace and then came down, unexpectedly, on the front claws, lashing out with its hind hooves at Warren.
She was already gone, dashing to the side and falling to one knee. A boiling torrent of blue-green light left her wand and surrounded the hippogriff. Whatever it had been meant to do-probably to a living opponent-Harry didn’t think she achieved it, but it did succeed in making the hippogriff whip its head around and scream.
Jenkins hit it from the other side at precisely that same moment, with a Lightning Curse that blinded one of the liquefying eyes rolling in their sockets. The hippogriff turned, suddenly clumsy, horse’s tail arched, and screamed again, a bubbling noise that Harry wanted to stop.
And he knew how. Warren and Jenkins had attacked in turn, but it would be a few seconds before Warren got her feet under her and in a better position to strike, and that left the way open for Harry.
He cast a Bladed Silencing Charm, another of those spells he wasn’t supposed to know and couldn’t help knowing, given the life he had led, and it hit the hippogriff’s throat. It flew out the other side again, from the spray of dark flesh and the yell of disgust from Warren, but at least it had the effect he’d intended, and the scream stopped.
This time, the hippogriff focused on him through its one remaining eye, but it only had time to take one step before Draco hit it from behind. The tail and one hind leg exploded, and the hippogriff limped and listed, trying to balance on three limbs.
“Now!” Warren yelled.
Harry thought she was talking to Jenkins, but he caught Draco’s eye and nodded at the same time, which meant four spells hit the hippogriff from four corners of the room, just as it started to drag itself in a circle and flap those heavy, cobwebbed wings. Harry didn’t want to find out if it could fly.
They didn’t have to. Their spells contained and battered the collapsing body, and flesh slid off the bone, at the same time as the Dark magic binding those bones and making them move came up against their spells, and lost. The hippogriff imploded and sagged at the same moment, and nothing flew out to hit them, the way it had with the dead rat. Instead, the hippogriff became an ordinary corpse, if a messy one surrounded by a puddle of deliquescent skin and meat, and slumped to the floor.
They were left breathing harshly, but, hopefully, not too deeply. Harry shook his head and focused on Draco. “Are you all right?” he asked.
Draco nodded. “At least we know that he left some defenses in Cuthbert’s Corner,” he said.
“Came back here since he swallowed the necromancer, and turned the house into a trap,” Jenkins said. Her face was calm, but her voice held an undertone of fury that Harry would have been reluctant to cross. “I don’t know that we’ll find anything here except more traps.”
“I want to see what’s upstairs, at least,” Draco said, nodding towards the far door from the room. “And what’s beneath.”
Harry caught his eye. Draco gave the little nod that meant his flaw had sensed the Dark magic.
“Very well,” Warren said, frowning. “I remember the way to pass the wards on the stairs, at least.” And she set off.
Harry moved closer to Draco, with Jenkins playing rearguard, and they followed. All of them made sure to step wide around the bones in the middle of the floor.
Chapter Five.
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