Chapter Eleven of 'A Reign of Silence'- Facing the Worst
Chapter Ten.
Title: A Reign of Silence (11/20)
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 Eleven-Facing The Worst
Ernhardt wielded Macgeorge’s body like a puppet. Her eyes shone bright blue, and she stretched out her arms and leaned forwards from the place where she stood, in an unnatural posture, scattering what looked like flakes of ash to the floor.
Harry was rolling before Draco could comprehend what he was doing, shoving Draco behind him and trying to face the danger alone. Draco kicked him in the shins and strove to reach the front again. Harry had no right to hold him back like this, no right to make decisions for him. They had agreed to fight side by side.
Harry ignored him, and then the ash flakes sprang up and turned into serpents with their tongues hanging out of their mouths, bones showing through sliding flesh.
Draco stepped back. Well, all right. That is the kind of threat that he’s qualified to handle by himself, I reckon.
Harry hissed, and the serpents snapped towards him and stared at him with holes in place of eyes, flicking their tongues out. Those tongues were clipped short, and Draco found that he didn’t want to know where the ends of them had gone. Harry hissed again, and the serpents turned and slinked back towards Macgeorge.
She made a few movements that Draco thought were probably related to necromantic control of half-corpses, not that he would know. But the serpents didn’t listen, and came on, moving with horrid humps of their coils.
Macgeorge gestured, and the serpents fell to pieces. Draco nodded. That was the best they could hope for this early in the fight, to distract her and make her waste her energy in something besides attacking them.
Of course, then Rudie came along and spoiled everything, stepping forwards with her chin trembling and her own hands outstretched without a wand in sight.
“Nicolette,” she whispered. “They don’t believe in you. I do. I’ll give you back what you lost. I’ll give you anything you want, as long as you tell me that you’re all right and you’re willing to come back to the Aurors with me.”
Macgeorge turned her head and focused on Rudie. She smiled, and although Draco didn’t see how Rudie could find the smile enchanting in combination with those staring blue eyes, she must have. She clasped her hands, and her breath came faster and faster.
“I know you believe in me,” Macgeorge whispered-but despite his attempt to imitate the voice she’d had before he took her, the only one Draco could hear speaking her words was Ernhardt, and he scolded himself for ever believing that this was Macgeorge. “I’m pleased with that, Isla. I would like to come back with you. But…” She turned back to Elder and Harry and Draco with a slight shake of her head.
Rudie was trembling. Draco understood, of course, then, how very stupid it had been for them to allow her to come along with them. But they had allowed it, and here she was, and she was about to betray them all with her eagerness.
“What?” Rudie whispered. “What do you need?”
“They came to capture me and take me back to the Aurors with them, to execute me and not free me,” said Ernhardt, with a jerk of his head at the rest of them. “If you want to help me, then you need to hold them back so we can make our escape. I’ll come with you, as a pledge of good faith, but I can’t trust them, not after they’ve killed so many other twisted.” A delicate pause. “Or those they think of as twisted, because of course the real truth is more complicated, the way we used to discuss.”
Harry’s mouth was working, but he hadn’t found the words to respond to that yet. Draco was glad. This would take careful handling, and he didn’t think Harry, as great as his strengths were, had the patience or skill for diplomacy.
Before Draco could say anything, though, Elder stepped into the breach.
“I don’t understand how you can believe that she intends any good,” he said to Rudie, frowning at Ernhardt. “Or he, as the case may be. You know that she’s using Dark magic. You know that he seized your former partner and he’s manipulating her, and he made her run away from the rest of the Aurors and use necromancy against us. Why would you even consider that he might be telling the truth? This is just the shell of your partner, not the reality.”
Draco stared at him. Elder didn’t notice, instead continuing to frown at Ernhardt with no sign of fear. It seemed Elder had found the right words, or at least said them openly enough that Rudie would have to contend with them.
All through having no tact or diplomacy at all, even less than Harry.
Rudie had turned to face Elder, and there was a look on her face that made Draco think she would strike at him at any moment. But at least she didn’t look as if she would hand them over to Ernhardt at any second for the mere chance of freeing her precious Nicolette, either.
“You can’t have any conception of what we shared,” she whispered. “Nothing. And you think to lecture me about what I should or should not do?” She clenched her hands, and Draco wondered just for a moment, uneasily, what Rudie’s flaw might be. “You’re only my new partner, my replacement for Nicolette. I would give you up in a moment, give everyone up, if I might have her back.”
“Yes,” said Elder. “And that’s stupid, when you think about it. When you can’t even know if she’s telling the truth, if this is her-”
“From what I know of Ernhardt, he would never make an offer like this,” Rudie said, and shook her head. “He thinks himself too superior to anyone else. He would just attack, not try to fool us.”
“He would do anything to turn us against each other, because that’s what Dark wizards do,” Elder said, with iron patience. Draco had never thought he might want to bless Elder’s stubbornness. “And he’s picking on you because you’re the easy target. And if you tried to slaughter us, that would lessen the effort he has to expend against us. Of course he would try.”
There was a moment when it felt like everyone in the corridor was staring at Elder. Draco thought probably everyone except him and Harry had a different motive for it, but there was no sign that Elder felt the difference in those motives. He just looked from face to face, and shook his head. “Can I be the only one who knows this?” he murmured in a self-pitying tone. “I didn’t want to think it was so, but it seems it is so.”
Then Ernhardt gestured, and this time the snakes appeared right above Elder’s head and fell on him, with no chance that Harry could use Parseltongue to turn them aside.
Elder raised his wand and his right arm, and for a moment Draco thought he had cast a spell. But no spell could be that quick, and no spell Draco could imagine produced that intense, shimmering light around someone, and no spell started at the level of the heart and spread out to encompass the body so fast.
And no light ate attacking enemies the way that light flared and burned around the dropping snakes.
Elder dropped his hand and shook his head at Ernhardt. “You can’t send Dark creatures against me,” he said, almost gently. “I can always defeat them. It’s the gift that I have because I’m a Light wizard, a faithful one. And I wish you would stop trying to trick Isla. It’s the more despicable because she might really believe that there’s something of her friend left.”
A gift, Draco thought, his heart pounding hard enough that he didn’t recognize the bubble of laughter before it left his lips. Or his flaw. Which he doesn’t recognize for Dark magic because of the form it takes.
Elder frowned at Draco as he laughed. Harry stepped in between them, and turned to face Ernhardt, beginning to chant a quiet spell.
“She might still be there,” Rudie said, in the pathetic tone of a child begging for her parents to pay attention to her. “If we tried. We might still be able to free her. I’m sure of it.”
“She’s gone,” Draco said, and why did it fall on him to play the role of comforter? Except that there was no one else, and they only had the freedom to talk about this in the first place because Ernhardt had been so stupefied by Elder instead of attacking. “She was gone from the first moment he claimed her mind. You know that he wouldn’t allow a rival to survive around him, and especially not in his own body.”
“That’s hers, still,” Rudie said, and turned around. Draco turned, too, because he wanted to see what Ernhardt would do next and he wanted to make sure that Rudie didn’t try to interfere with Harry.
Harry crossed his arms in front of him and bowed his head. Ernhardt was watching him now with his fingers on Macgeorge’s lips. His blue eyes had dimmed a little. Draco wondered what he was waiting for, why he had attacked with snakes in the first place, what was going to happen next-
And then Harry’s spell flared and struck out from him, and Ernhardt made another of those gestures, similar to the ones he had made when commanding the dead snakes.
The flesh of the sides of the tunnel snapped down and around Harry’s spell, eating it. Ernhardt moved away from them, shaking his head and clucking his tongue against his teeth in the annoying way that Draco’s mother had often done.
“I wanted to do something more creative with you,” Ernhardt murmured. “I did so wish to enjoy seeing you in battle close up, instead of only mental battle against me. But that isn’t to be. The long-prepared trap will have to do.”
He bowed, and the door Draco had moved out of the way unrolled like a tongue back over him. At the same moment, the corners of the corridor bowed around them and began to squelch inwards.
As if it would swallow them. As if they stood in the middle of an enormous throat.
And we were fools to separate from Warren and Jenkins in order to come here.
*
Harry had really thought that particular spell would work, as long as Ernhardt gave him the time to cast it. And Ernhardt was acting so weird already that he might have, if only to see what Harry came up with.
Now the house was making motions that Harry didn’t have to translate; he knew what they were. The house was trying to swallow them.
Harry didn’t intend to let it. And although his last spells had failed, he thought he could come up with one that would make the house realize they were no easy prey, and perhaps even make it spit them out.
He turned slightly to the side, his wand aiming at various parts of the gleaming, slick flesh on the walls. He saw no obvious weakness, and really, how likely was it that Ernhardt’s house corresponded to a body? This might not be a throat, or the inside of a mouth, no matter how much it looked like one. That meant it wouldn’t have the same weaknesses.
“What should we do?”
That was Draco, close beside him and with a harsh note in his voice that made Harry reach out and place one hand on his arm. He had forgotten that Draco hadn’t heard the silent plans inside his head and might think they had no way to escape. He rubbed back and forth a moment, while the ceiling above them got lower and Rudie scraped and pounded at the tongue-door that had concealed Ernhardt.
“I’m going to get us out of here,” he said. He felt much calmer than he had when the Dementor was attacking Draco, in spite of the greater danger they were in. This was the kind of situation he excelled in, and he was about to excel in it again, despite all the stupid and evil intentions Ernhardt had. “Can you calm Rudie down and make sure that she stays close to us while I cast the spells? I don’t know what we can do if she runs away.”
“You can’t just use one of your Destruction Incantations?” Draco’s voice was low and intense. “Like you used to get the Inferi out of the way?”
Harry smiled at him, a little grimly. “That makes the things that it’s aimed at cease to exist. What do you think would happen if the house ceased to exist right now? We might take Warren and Jenkins along with it.”
Draco paused, then nodded and turned towards Rudie. Elder was poking around as though trying to find an entrance that would take him after Ernhardt. This was the best atmosphere for working undisturbed on a spell that Harry was going to get. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
The magic was waiting in him when he called it, the raw magic, the untamed magic, the magic that he didn’t use often because when he did, he didn’t really remember it afterwards. Lionel had stared at him after he invented the Destruction Incantation, and that had been a simpler situation. Harry didn’t know what would happen now if he unleashed that force.
So he had to do something he had never done before, and tame and channel it.
That was impossible, or so some of his Auror instructors would have told him. But they weren’t here right now, and Harry was the one who had to rise to the challenge and make sure Draco, and everyone else, was safe. So he descended deep into himself, and the magic was waiting.
More than enough magic to have defeated Voldemort, he was sure now. But maybe he hadn’t really had it when he was a teenager, and things had worked out for the best anyway. He and Draco had been connected then, too.
The recollection made him smile, and led him on to other memories, and convinced him of the best way to make the house spit them out. He opened his eyes and lifted his wand, holding it in front of him in a two-handed grip, the way he would a lance. He saw a movement off to the side, and knew that Elder had pressed close.
“Are you going to cast a Dark spell to get us out of here?” Elder asked quietly. He could ignore the digestive juices sloshing around their feet impressively, Harry had to admit. Even if that was because his head could only contain one thought at a time, it might be the very ability they needed right now. “I think it might be better to die than go through that.”
“If you know a light alternative, that’s fine,” Harry said, and felt the magic begin to burn around him, ascending rapidly in bright red and golden ripples. “But I don’t. And I think I’m going to invent a spell, anyway, so can anyone say that it’s Dark or Light until it’s existed a while?”
Elder paused, and seemed to consider that. “Its intention,” he said. “And its effect. If you meant to hurt someone else, then it would be Dark, even if it saved our lives.”
Harry closed his eyes and laughed. His mind was filled with memories of Potions class, and of the questions that Snape had asked him on the first day of class, and his fingers were full of the wand. “Well, think about it and tell me later.”
“What are you going to do?” Elder asked, but already his voice had grown faint and far away, and Harry knew he didn’t have it in him to pay any more attention. He might have to if Elder shoved him and disrupted his concentration, but, well. At that point Harry’s magic would break out of control, and they would probably all die anyway.
The magic built, and Harry’s desire built with it. He would see them out of here and safe. He would see Draco walk away from this. He would see to it that Rudie had another chance to confront Ernhardt and free the remnants of her partner, and he would let Warren and Jenkins live to fight another day. He reckoned that he could even rescue Elder, should it become necessary.
And yourself?
It had always been the least important question, but at least he had thought it, and Draco would probably admit that was progress. Harry smiled, unable to open his eyes now, the magic fastening them shut the way it fastened his fingers to his wand. The power was all around him, and he focused it ahead of him, summoning the substance that, as far as he knew, there was no incantation to conjure. After all, anyone who wanted it as a Potions ingredient could go out and pick it.
But now, Harry wanted it.
He wanted, and he wanted, and his desire rose and fueled the explosion of his magic, until he heard the rushing down the corridor in front of him, and he could open his eyes to look.
He was on his knees, and so were the rest of them, forced that way by the constricting of the passage. In front of him, sprouting from his wand, was a great tumble of green leaves and purple flowers. Harry nodded, and swept them straight into the sides of the throat, back and forth, making sure they brushed against the gleaming and exposed skin. He chuckled as he did it. He thought Ernhardt would regret making his house like the inside of a body soon.
The throat around them wobbled and shuddered. Then something deep inside the body of the house screamed. Another scream rose before the first one had faded, and the skin shivered and began to darken. Harry laughed aloud, and Draco came to his side and stared at the leaves in front of him, shaking his head.
“Harry, that looks like-wolfsbane,” he murmured.
“Also called aconite,” Harry giggled, his magic still rising around him. “And monkshood. And all the other names that Snape could probably tell us, but which he isn’t here to tell us about. I’m sorry for that,” he added, seeing Draco’s wide eyes. “I would have liked it if he could have lived. And seen this.” Another fit of the giggles broke out again.
Draco shook his head. “Wolfsbane is poison,” he whispered, as if reading from a Potions textbook. “Any touch to abraded skin or the mucous membranes-” and he stared at the sides of the throat “-can prove fatal.”
“And vomiting is one of the first symptoms,” Harry agreed, and stood up, leaning on Draco, and motioned to the others. “We have to get out of here as soon as we can,” he said. He began to walk up the corridor, pushing the wolfsbane cluster along before them. The creature that was the house continued to scream, and Harry laughed again, knowing he probably sounded drunk. “Elder!” he called. “Have you decided yet whether this is a Light or Dark spell?”
Elder, who had Rudie’s arm tucked under his, met Harry’s eyes and shook his head a little. “Since it conjures poison, I’m afraid that I would have to say it was Dark,” he said. “To my sorrow, that the Chosen One uses such spells.”
Harry snorted, and giggled, and laughed, and Draco seized him and shook him. “What happens when Warren and Jenkins run into the flowers?” he insisted.
Harry would have answered, but the throat around them shook in what Harry recognized as a probably fatal spasm, and he shook his head. “I think we’ll be vomited out before that can happen,” he said, and turned towards Draco, wrapping his arms around him in a hold that he hoped would both support him and protect Draco as much as possible.
“Warren and Jenkins are already here,” said a calm voice from the other side of the flowers, and someone cut the clusters, making them fall to the floor. Jenkins leaned around them, crushing the wolfsbane under her boot. “Thomasina knows a spell that she thinks can get us out of here alive. Hang on.”
“To what?” Harry thought he heard Draco mutter, but the question made no sense to him. Of course they were supposed to hang onto each other, and there was no reason to think they shouldn’t. He ducked his head and wrapped his arms around Draco’s waist, and he heard someone chanting.
Then a tide of muscles seized them as the house did its best to die, and Elder grabbed hold of Rudie-Harry saw that much, through the flying mass of Rudie’s hair-and they were flying, and then they landed, and pain made Harry lose consciousness for a while. But he knew he held Draco in his arms, and that helped.
*
Draco lay on the grass of the Forbidden Forest with Harry in his arms, and stared towards the convulsing house.
The walls of flesh shook and vibrated back and forth, flying out of the skull’s orifices like tongues, and there were noises that might very well come from a great creature dying of aconite poisoning. All of them were outside now, although covered with a mixture of juices that Draco reckoned they should wash off as soon as they got the chance, and Jenkins and Warren were casting together, spells that should, hopefully, ward back the explosion from touching them.
When the death came, it was less dramatic than Draco had thought it would be. The tongues stopped flapping, and the skull vibrated once more and was still. It rolled over, and part of it broke off, near where the nose would have been in a living human being. Then a trickle of vomit ran out of the mouth.
Warren sighed and straightened up. Jenkins turned around and gave her a sharp smile.
“We survived again,” Warren said.
Jenkins nodded, and Draco thought she probably would have replied, but something dark and misty and loud rose up from the eyesockets of the skull, and then accelerated towards them like a comet in reverse.
Jenkins turned sideways, Warren put her back against her, and they were ready to burst into the battle when Ernhardt landed in front of them, trailing smoke.
Draco didn’t know if anyone was ready when the bones on the floor of the clearing rose up and began to assemble themselves into necromantic constructs, though.
Chapter Twelve.
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