SB: Chapter 9 - Ill Met By Moonlight (Part I of II)
Title: Chapter 9 - Ill Met By Moonlight
Author: Mrs. Hyde and das_mervin
Word Count: 10,760
Summary: Snape and Sands make a few surprising discoveries.
CHAPTER 9 - ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT
PART I
Snape sprinkled a pinch of allium salts into the pale green mixture bubbling slowly in his cauldron, stirred twice, and sniffed the contents.
Hmm. More eucalyptus, I think.
He rummaged around among the bottles of various plant essences that he’d pulled from the neat rows on his shelves and set out on his bench; next to the mortar full of ground rosemary, he found the small green bottle he was looking for and poured in a few more drops.
He sniffed again. Just right this time. He corked the bottle, set it aside, and lowered the heat beneath his cauldron. He stirred three more times, and then let it alone, righting the various ingredients he’d set out to use while it simmered.
His potions stores were rigorously maintained, everything carefully labelled and sorted alphabetically and shelved safely away. A place for everything, and everything in its place. He absolutely could not abide not knowing the exact location of any component he might need in his brewing.
He gathered up the last few jars and bottles, sliding them into their places on his shelves. Then he turned back to his cauldron and eyed the pungent substance inside. It was perfect, and he scowled at it.
He could not believe he was brewing a flea repellent.
That’s what he got for allowing that mangy, parasite-ridden stray access to his house.
That cat was violating the terms of their agreement. It would keep the rats out, and Snape wouldn’t kill it-that was the deal. But no, the nasty little brute was actively stealing into his house now and again; Snape had spotted it dashing to and from the hole in the kitchen, disappearing to who knew where, but always coming back. He suspected that it was using his house as its base of operations-even going so far as to sleep in here. And yet, despite the fact that his sparsely furnished house hardly had anywhere even a cat could hide, he never saw it save for when it crept to and from the kitchen. It was utterly ridiculous.
No-what it was was utterly intolerable. Snape’s first instinct upon realizing that his pest control service had turned into a boarder had been to shut the wretched thing out and be done with it; if the miserable animal was going to renege on their bargain, so would he.
…But he hadn’t seen a rat in months. He hasn’t even heard one. Not a one, not since last Halloween, when that first skirmish between predator and prey had spilled out onto his carpet. So the cat hadn’t exactly reneged, it was just taking advantage of the situation, and Snape was forced to admit that in that situation he would have done the same. And really, he was so used to nasty, unwelcome guests by this point that one more was a small price to pay for no more rats.
And so he had gone about his business, dutifully and deliberately ignoring the erstwhile feline, save for a few dirty looks thrown in its direction when he happened to catch it trespassing.
At least, that was how things had been going-up until last evening. He’d been sitting down in his living room with his teacup, listening to the soft summer rains pattering down on the rooftop and plunking against the glass of his windows, quietly reading the paper after his solitary supper. He’d only just started taking the local paper a month or two ago-now that he had the Santiago brat to fetch it for him. After all this time, his Spanish was finally good enough that he felt comfortable reading it, his income steady enough that he could afford it, and his resignation to staying here for a very long time to the point that he thought it might be prudent to keep up with the local news.
News indeed-it read more like a bloody Who’s Who of Culiacán Crime. He’d been snorting in disgust over the gushing editorial detailing the very large donation made to the church by the current drug lord, when he’d realized that since he’d sat down, he was itching incessantly as his own arm. And when he felt the next itching sting, he looked down at it in annoyance, instead of just scratching-and there was a flea, biting happily into the flesh of his arm.
He’d stared at it, quite unable to believe what he was seeing, before gathering his wits enough to pinch the little bugger right off and crack it between his nails.
…He had fleas.
…That despicable cat had fleas.
And it was bringing them into his house!
That was out of the question. And so he’d marched straight up to his workroom with every intention of brewing up a very quick and very permanent solution to his problem, one that would eliminate both the fleas and their carrier. But just before he could start, he looked in his greenhouse, and as lively as ever was his venomous tentacula, which he’d been feeding tripe lately-and he remembered the way he’d been stuffing it full of all the rats finding their ways in before the cat had come, and he remembered the tooth marks on his furniture, and the rat droppings on his kitchen floor.
So in the end, while the fleas had to go, he had grudgingly decided that the cat could stay.
And so he was brewing flea repellent. This particular brew was a handy mixture well suited to his situation-it was safe to feed to animals, so his unwanted guest wouldn’t be bringing in any more of the pests, but it could also be used around the house to wipe out all the of the cat’s diminutive six-legged friends that had already hitched their ways inside. He already planned on liberally sprinkling his furniture and his carpet with it-he was not about to share his house with insects.
Fleas, indeed.
It looked nearly done; the bait was already sitting to the side on his workbench. He’d felt like an idiot, but when the Santiago boy had come by this morning for the grocery list, he’d added an extra item-one tin of cat food. The boy had made no comment about it on either of his visits (and he didn’t know how lucky it was for him that he hadn’t), but Snape was annoyed anyway and had to restrain himself from explaining everything to the boy anyway, just to soothe his own indignation-he was in no way feeding the wretched thing-he was only baiting a trap. He did not keep pets, nor did he take in strays. This was a business arrangement, and that was all.
Snape popped off the top of the small, flat can with a flick of his wand and dumped the nasty, smelly mass out onto a saucer. His nose wrinkled; well, if nothing else, the foul reek from that revolting paste would cover any odour of the potion. He rummaged in his pocket and came up with a peppermint, popping it in his mouth to mask the stink.
Dousing the fire under the cauldron with his wand, he ladled out just the right dosage for the scrawny little beast, pouring the pale green concoction over the food and mixing it thoroughly. He set it aside, and then siphoned off the rest of the mixture into a bottle with a shaker top.
His workroom was safe; he was sparing with his wards by necessity on the outside of his house, but his workroom was another story, and it was warded and bespelled tighter than a snare drum-nothing got out, and nothing got in-not even fleas. So he went to his bedroom first with his fresh concoction, sprinkling generous amounts of the potion around the base of the walls and at the foot of his bed; it left a pungent but not unpleasant scent in its wake, a fresh, herbal aroma that followed him down the stairs as he went to the kitchen to bait his trap.
He knelt and carefully positioned the plate of potion-laced cat food by the hole in the cabinet, and then stood, looking dourly down at the saucer sitting innocently on the tiles. Even he knew that feeding an animal was the surest way to get it to stay for good. But if it came down to picking between rats, fleas, or the cat, the choice was clear (if necessarily unpleasant).
He left the saucer where it was, where the cat was sure to happen upon it, and went about baptising the rest of his house, cleansing it of its pestilence.
Halfway through his task, he was nearly startled out of his skin by a loud, insistent pounding on the wall.
He barely kept from dropping the bottle in his hand, such was the sudden jolt, but his surprise quickly gave way to furious indignation when he realized where it was coming from.
Where else?
“Greene!” came a muffled, sing-songy voice call from next door, accompanied by more heavy thumps. “Greene-I know you’re in there! Now come out, come out, wherever you are! I am in dire need of your expert services!”
That bloody Yank! What did he want now?
He would not go over there. He refused.
Andrews pounded again. “Greene, if you don’t get your bony British bum over here, so help me God, I am going to eat every meal with you, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for every day of the rest of your life!”
And he would, too.
Dammit.
Growling with impotent fury, Snape slammed the bottle down on top of the cupboard next to his record player and stormed out the door.
That mincing little high-handed twat, he snarled inwardly as he marched through the puddles in the street to the house next door. Who did he think he was? Swaggering into his house as if he owned it, as if he somehow knew there was nothing Snape could do to stop him without tipping his hand, eating his food, harassing him in the square, driving off his customers, and now dragging him out of his house in the middle of the night. What next? Would he just move in?
He threw open the door in a right froth. “What, Andrews?!” he demanded into the dark of the house. “What is so urgent that you couldn’t wait for your little catamite to do it for you in the morning?”
“Blow it out your floppy old he-pussy, Greene, and get in here,” came Andrews’s voice from the bathroom.
“I don’t know what it is that you’re doing in there that requires help,” Snape said after a moment, “but rest assured that whatever it is, I want no part of it.”
“Well, if what you’re thinking were in fact the case, I can assure you that you would enjoy every minute of it, but sadly for you, the situation is not nearly that exciting.” There was a pause, and Andrews’s next words sounded a bit brittle, a bit forced. “What I need is someone with eyes. I knocked over a glass in here and it broke, and I don’t have shoes on.”
Snape smirked. Oh, how precious. After all the trouble that sorry bastard had put him through, here he was relying on him for help. Perhaps this was worth the visit after all.
“How the mighty have fallen,” he purred as he moved through the room. “Tell me, Andrews,” he went on as he crossed into the bathroom, “after what I have endured at your hands, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just-” He stopped mid-sentence, his mouth still open in shock.
Andrews was covered in blood.
He was standing by the sink, the porcelain stained a sickly pink in the basin, with clotted red handprints on the edge. His sleeves were sodden and red, smearing pink streaks wherever they touched. His face was spotted and flecked, and Snape could see that his hair was matted with it as well, and droplets were drying darkly on the lenses of his sunglasses.
“Don’t mind the mess,” said Andrews mildly. “I’m out of tampons.”
“What in God’s name happened to you?” Snape demanded, appalled.
Andrews smiled, and his grin gleamed white in the darkness. “Nothing,” he said.
“Then how do you explain-this?”
Andrews shrugged, and turned back to the sink, twisting on the taps and sticking his blood-grimed hands under the spigot; the water ran red. “I told you, I knocked over the glass.”
He gestured downward, and Snape could see the wickedly glistening shards of glass littering the floor all around Andrews’s narrow bare feet. Drops of still-wet blood had fallen from him here and there, tiny flowers blooming blackly on the tile where they had landed.
“I don’t give a damn about the glass, Andrews,” Snape snarled. “What is all this blood?”
“I think you just answered your own question, there, chickabiddy.”
Snape ground his teeth. “What happened, Andrews?”
Andrews looked at him. “Ninjas,” he said seriously. “They ambushed me. Thousands of them.” And then he chuckled, even as it made his hair tremble and dance and catch in the sticky red runnels of the stuff that clung to his cheeks. Then he turned back to the sink. “Are you gonna get the glass, or just leave me here to cut my feet to ribbons?”
Snape stood still, revolted, but he swept out of the bathroom and into the kitchen; he found a well-used broom stashed in the cupboard under the stairs, and he jerked it angrily out and took it back into the bathroom.
Andrews had removed his shirt, revealing a slender torso and two thin arms, one of which was marred with a pale, twisting knot of scars near the shoulder. The ruined, bloody rag of his shirt was tossed carelessly into the bathtub, and Andrews was rubbing himself down with an unpleasantly pink-stained washrag, whistling merrily all the while. He turned his head as Snape approached, and one corner of his mouth twitched upwards in a smile.
Angrily, Snape swept the broom in wide arcs, the glass ringing and clattering beneath the broomcorn, clearing a path across the tile from where Andrews stood to the door.
“Thank you, Jeeves,” said Andrews dismissively, going back to his grisly ablutions. “You may go-and don’t forget, I’ll expect my breakfast piping hot at seven o’clock sharp.”
“You will not,” said Snape coldly.
Andrews stilled, his head tilted to one side and his eyebrows flitting upwards over the rims of his glasses. “I won’t?” he asked, his voice betraying nothing but mild curiosity, but Snape read otherwise in the downward twist of his mouth.
“No,” said Snape flatly. “I told you that I wanted no part of whatever you were doing in here, and after seeing you, I can tell that I was understating the truth. I want no part of anything you’re doing. Ever.”
Andrews turned to face him, the pale skin of his neck and chest smeared with blood in great drying swaths. They regarded each other in silence for a moment, but then Andrews smiled, a slow, dangerous smile. “All righty, then” he said pleasantly. “Suit yourself. If you want to run with your tail tucked firmly between your legs, that’s fine by me.” He turned back to the sink and picked up the cake of soap, humming quietly to himself.
Snape didn’t rise to the bait. He only snorted and swept out of the bathroom and to the front door, which he shut firmly and decisively behind him for Andrews’s benefit, and then he hastened back into his own home and locked the door behind him.
He leaned back against it, his head against the rippling wood, thoughtful and wary. What had he been doing?
He had a few guesses, and none of them pleasant. Well, they weren’t his problem-no matter what that stupid Yank had gone and involved himself with, Snape was secure in the knowledge that none of Andrews’s Muggle “associates” could find their way to him. And if they did show up with somewhat less than friendly intentions, it would likely be to collect Andrews himself for his no doubt well-deserved comeuppance, and good riddance to bad rubbish as far as he was concerned.
His thoughts were scattered to the wind when he flexed his fingers thoughtfully and suddenly felt wetness between them. He looked sharply down at his hands; there was blood on his left, smeared and crusting between his fingers.
He was in the kitchen like a shot, scrubbing it away under the water before the tap even had a chance to run clear. A poor epitaph, whoever you were, he thought grimly as the water ran down the black eye of the drain, but that’s all I can give you.
He dried his hand on his tea towel and turned-and saw the saucer sitting in the corner by the hole in the cabinet. It had been licked clean, and Snape smirked.
No more vermin in his house.
Good God, but he detested summer in Mexico.
To be perfectly honest, he detested everything in Mexico. But late summer really was the worst.
He’d hated the weather from the moment he’d stepped off the plane. Upwards of ninety bloody degrees was hideous no matter where one was. By midday the whole country was a blast furnace, firing his skin to a cracked pottery brown, leaving his clothes brittle and papery dry, his tongue and eyes glazed and gritty. And that was just the first of the summer.
Here, as the summer wore on, it grew hotter and hotter until it was well nigh unbearable. And then sometime in July, the rains would come.
The sky would open up and drench the town with sandy, scalding droplets that were little better than mud. There would be a tiny respite from the flat dry heat, as the rain would pull down the dust that choked the air, but the storms weren’t continuous, no-they would tease him, mock him, and then clear away, and the heat would return, only now it was wet.
He’d thought the dusty misery of the dry heat of early summer had been the worst part of Mexico, until experiencing the hellish joys of the sticky, muggy heat after a summer rain.
Like he was now.
The clouds from the most recent rainstorm had vanished so quickly that there wasn’t even the slightest wisp left for shade. So he had no choice but to sit here, boiling in his own clothes in the horrible steam room that was August in Culiacán. This year was so bad that he had actually broken down and bought some of the loose-fitting white trousers that were so popular in this country. He looked and felt ridiculous in them, and he only lowered himself to wear them when he was out of the delightfully chilled bubble of the cooling charms on his house. He scowled down at his ankles poking out of the cuffs; all he needed with a spangled sombrero and one of those awful rugs they wore on their shoulders, and he’d blend right in.
He unenthusiastically finished off the remains of his bacon sandwich. He kept his lunches fresh with a few more tiny cooling charms in his basket, but he could do nothing for himself without rousing suspicion, and so the hot blanket of the noonday sky and the damp press of his sweaty clothes rather robbed him of enthusiasm for much of anything save the frosty thermos of cold water tucked down in the corner (and even that pleasure was muted, what with the flat, metallic taste left by his habitual boiling of anything that came from a Mexican tap). Even the moist green flesh of the guava that he’d brought along (having acquired several of the fruits along with the leaves for his potions stores) failed to rouse his spirits. He ate it anyway, but rather gloomily.
Tossing the peel away on the ground, he sighed and looked up. It was past noon, and probably time for him to cross the street and stake out his afternoon haunt across the way, where he was more accessible to the bar. He popped a peppermint in his mouth in a desultory fashion, and then stood to go.
Some idiot had set up a bead-laden handcart in his way, and he’d been forced to take a detour around it. He scowled at the interloper as he passed; the regulars to the square knew their places, and he always hated it when some newcomer swept in and disturbed the peace. He extricated himself from the knot of sellers in the middle of the square, giving a perfunctory nod to the flower seller near the cafe-Inez something-or-other, he thought her name was-when he caught her eye as he passed, and then made his way to his bench, where it was mercifully shady.
Snape had just settled himself tiredly down in his seat when the sounds of a scuffle reached his ears. He turned and looked down the alley behind him; three laughing, shouting boys were kicking a huddled mass on the ground, and from the sounds it was making, it wasn’t hard to deduce that it was another child that they were beating, having cornered him in the crook of the alley behind some crates and a dustbin. Their victim had lost his advantage, and now he had to pay the price; the targets of bullies like those were nearly always able to outrun their tormentors-Snape certainly had-but if they got themselves trapped, then they hadn’t a chance against the superior numbers of their foes.
Snape set his jaw and deliberately looked away, but then he heard someone (and he could guess who) give a grunting cry of pain to the cruel shouts and laughing jeers of the others, and he ground his teeth and stood up. The anti-theft and light Muggle-repelling charms would see to his basket, and it was with rising ire than he stormed down the alleyway towards the altercation.
Years patrolling the hallways of Hogwarts looking for miscreants sneaking about after curfew had helped him perfect the art of descending on misbehaving children without their knowing it until it was too late. He was pleased to see that he had not lost the ability with disuse. He shot out a hand and seized the apparent ringleader, who gave a most satisfying jump beneath his fingers. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded in Spanish, giving him a rough shake.
His companions deserted him-typical. The boy who was unable to run was trying to affect a look of tough indifference despite his situation even as he tried in vain to twist away. Snape, unimpressed by his adolescent bravado, stared him into submission. The young thug finally stopped struggling and met his eye with a foolish boldness that was not entirely masking his very real (and quite justified, in Snape’s opinion) fear. “He had it coming!” he said.
“Really?” Snape drawled, looking deep into his eyes. “And did you have it coming when your older brother locked you in the wardrobe in the dark when you were seven and didn’t let you out all day?”
The flickerings of panic in the boy’s eyes blossomed into full-blown terror; with a mighty wrench he escaped Snape’s grip and went pounding off after his erstwhile compatriots, running as if the Devil himself was on his heels. He has no idea. Snape sneered at his retreating back, and then looked down at the fallen form at his feet.
The boy they had been kicking was younger and smaller than any of them, by the look of him, and definitely more than a little stringy and ill-kempt. He was shaking his head, trying to throw off the effects of his losing bout, and trying to stand, valiantly wiping his eyes, blood trickling down his chin. Snape huffed in exasperation, reached down, and hauled the boy to his feet by one arm. He looked briefly startled, but his narrow face hardened into an expression of defiance. “Let me go!”
“Don’t be an idiot!” Snape snapped.
“I didn’t need your help!” he retorted stubbornly.
“Oh, yes, since you were doing such a marvellous job of defending yourself,” Snape mocked.
The boy flushed a dark red, and Snape snorted. He didn’t wait for the unappreciative twerp to start protesting, just dragged the recalcitrant little pillock by the arm back toward the square and shoved him down onto his bench. “Refusing aid in the face of unbeatable odds isn’t bravery, nitwit-it’s stupidity,” Snape informed him, rummaging in his basket.
“What do you care?” asked the boy sullenly, his ragged fringe flopping limply in his eyes.
Snape slammed the lid shut on his basket with a less-than-satisfying slap of wicker on wicker and glared at him. “I don’t,” he said coldly, tipping a few drops of dittany on a cloth and shoving it at the brat. “Here-put this on your lip.”
The boy gave him an ugly look that Snape returned with interest, but he did as he was told. Snape smirked at the boy’s startled expression when the cloth hissed a little upon contact with his wound, and when he pulled it away from his lip, it was no longer bleeding. “Put that anywhere else you’re bleeding,” Snape directed, and it was with slightly more alacrity that the brat tugged up the leg of his torn jeans and pressed the cloth to the nasty scrape on his knee, and then passed it over the ragged ones marring his elbows.
“Now,” said Snape, taking his cloth back when he was done, “next time you find yourself being chased by an enemy, don’t be stupid enough to get caught with no retreat.”
The little ingrate glared up at him from behind his too-long hair as he stood, but it didn’t have quite the force behind it as before. “Now go away,” Snape said firmly, propelling him forward with a small shove in his back. The boy meandered off, but he kept glancing back behind him, his gaze half suspicious, half confused. Snape glared at him all the way across the square, where he disappeared down a side street. He snorted to himself as he settled back down on his bench. He glanced around and caught the eye of Inez the flower girl; the nosey twit had been watching him, and when she saw that he was scowling back at her, she actually had the nerve to smile at him.
He hated this place.
Back | Table of Contents | Next
Author: Mrs. Hyde and das_mervin
Word Count: 10,760
Summary: Snape and Sands make a few surprising discoveries.
CHAPTER 9 - ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT
PART I
Snape sprinkled a pinch of allium salts into the pale green mixture bubbling slowly in his cauldron, stirred twice, and sniffed the contents.
Hmm. More eucalyptus, I think.
He rummaged around among the bottles of various plant essences that he’d pulled from the neat rows on his shelves and set out on his bench; next to the mortar full of ground rosemary, he found the small green bottle he was looking for and poured in a few more drops.
He sniffed again. Just right this time. He corked the bottle, set it aside, and lowered the heat beneath his cauldron. He stirred three more times, and then let it alone, righting the various ingredients he’d set out to use while it simmered.
His potions stores were rigorously maintained, everything carefully labelled and sorted alphabetically and shelved safely away. A place for everything, and everything in its place. He absolutely could not abide not knowing the exact location of any component he might need in his brewing.
He gathered up the last few jars and bottles, sliding them into their places on his shelves. Then he turned back to his cauldron and eyed the pungent substance inside. It was perfect, and he scowled at it.
He could not believe he was brewing a flea repellent.
That’s what he got for allowing that mangy, parasite-ridden stray access to his house.
That cat was violating the terms of their agreement. It would keep the rats out, and Snape wouldn’t kill it-that was the deal. But no, the nasty little brute was actively stealing into his house now and again; Snape had spotted it dashing to and from the hole in the kitchen, disappearing to who knew where, but always coming back. He suspected that it was using his house as its base of operations-even going so far as to sleep in here. And yet, despite the fact that his sparsely furnished house hardly had anywhere even a cat could hide, he never saw it save for when it crept to and from the kitchen. It was utterly ridiculous.
No-what it was was utterly intolerable. Snape’s first instinct upon realizing that his pest control service had turned into a boarder had been to shut the wretched thing out and be done with it; if the miserable animal was going to renege on their bargain, so would he.
…But he hadn’t seen a rat in months. He hasn’t even heard one. Not a one, not since last Halloween, when that first skirmish between predator and prey had spilled out onto his carpet. So the cat hadn’t exactly reneged, it was just taking advantage of the situation, and Snape was forced to admit that in that situation he would have done the same. And really, he was so used to nasty, unwelcome guests by this point that one more was a small price to pay for no more rats.
And so he had gone about his business, dutifully and deliberately ignoring the erstwhile feline, save for a few dirty looks thrown in its direction when he happened to catch it trespassing.
At least, that was how things had been going-up until last evening. He’d been sitting down in his living room with his teacup, listening to the soft summer rains pattering down on the rooftop and plunking against the glass of his windows, quietly reading the paper after his solitary supper. He’d only just started taking the local paper a month or two ago-now that he had the Santiago brat to fetch it for him. After all this time, his Spanish was finally good enough that he felt comfortable reading it, his income steady enough that he could afford it, and his resignation to staying here for a very long time to the point that he thought it might be prudent to keep up with the local news.
News indeed-it read more like a bloody Who’s Who of Culiacán Crime. He’d been snorting in disgust over the gushing editorial detailing the very large donation made to the church by the current drug lord, when he’d realized that since he’d sat down, he was itching incessantly as his own arm. And when he felt the next itching sting, he looked down at it in annoyance, instead of just scratching-and there was a flea, biting happily into the flesh of his arm.
He’d stared at it, quite unable to believe what he was seeing, before gathering his wits enough to pinch the little bugger right off and crack it between his nails.
…He had fleas.
…That despicable cat had fleas.
And it was bringing them into his house!
That was out of the question. And so he’d marched straight up to his workroom with every intention of brewing up a very quick and very permanent solution to his problem, one that would eliminate both the fleas and their carrier. But just before he could start, he looked in his greenhouse, and as lively as ever was his venomous tentacula, which he’d been feeding tripe lately-and he remembered the way he’d been stuffing it full of all the rats finding their ways in before the cat had come, and he remembered the tooth marks on his furniture, and the rat droppings on his kitchen floor.
So in the end, while the fleas had to go, he had grudgingly decided that the cat could stay.
And so he was brewing flea repellent. This particular brew was a handy mixture well suited to his situation-it was safe to feed to animals, so his unwanted guest wouldn’t be bringing in any more of the pests, but it could also be used around the house to wipe out all the of the cat’s diminutive six-legged friends that had already hitched their ways inside. He already planned on liberally sprinkling his furniture and his carpet with it-he was not about to share his house with insects.
Fleas, indeed.
It looked nearly done; the bait was already sitting to the side on his workbench. He’d felt like an idiot, but when the Santiago boy had come by this morning for the grocery list, he’d added an extra item-one tin of cat food. The boy had made no comment about it on either of his visits (and he didn’t know how lucky it was for him that he hadn’t), but Snape was annoyed anyway and had to restrain himself from explaining everything to the boy anyway, just to soothe his own indignation-he was in no way feeding the wretched thing-he was only baiting a trap. He did not keep pets, nor did he take in strays. This was a business arrangement, and that was all.
Snape popped off the top of the small, flat can with a flick of his wand and dumped the nasty, smelly mass out onto a saucer. His nose wrinkled; well, if nothing else, the foul reek from that revolting paste would cover any odour of the potion. He rummaged in his pocket and came up with a peppermint, popping it in his mouth to mask the stink.
Dousing the fire under the cauldron with his wand, he ladled out just the right dosage for the scrawny little beast, pouring the pale green concoction over the food and mixing it thoroughly. He set it aside, and then siphoned off the rest of the mixture into a bottle with a shaker top.
His workroom was safe; he was sparing with his wards by necessity on the outside of his house, but his workroom was another story, and it was warded and bespelled tighter than a snare drum-nothing got out, and nothing got in-not even fleas. So he went to his bedroom first with his fresh concoction, sprinkling generous amounts of the potion around the base of the walls and at the foot of his bed; it left a pungent but not unpleasant scent in its wake, a fresh, herbal aroma that followed him down the stairs as he went to the kitchen to bait his trap.
He knelt and carefully positioned the plate of potion-laced cat food by the hole in the cabinet, and then stood, looking dourly down at the saucer sitting innocently on the tiles. Even he knew that feeding an animal was the surest way to get it to stay for good. But if it came down to picking between rats, fleas, or the cat, the choice was clear (if necessarily unpleasant).
He left the saucer where it was, where the cat was sure to happen upon it, and went about baptising the rest of his house, cleansing it of its pestilence.
Halfway through his task, he was nearly startled out of his skin by a loud, insistent pounding on the wall.
He barely kept from dropping the bottle in his hand, such was the sudden jolt, but his surprise quickly gave way to furious indignation when he realized where it was coming from.
Where else?
“Greene!” came a muffled, sing-songy voice call from next door, accompanied by more heavy thumps. “Greene-I know you’re in there! Now come out, come out, wherever you are! I am in dire need of your expert services!”
That bloody Yank! What did he want now?
He would not go over there. He refused.
Andrews pounded again. “Greene, if you don’t get your bony British bum over here, so help me God, I am going to eat every meal with you, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for every day of the rest of your life!”
And he would, too.
Dammit.
Growling with impotent fury, Snape slammed the bottle down on top of the cupboard next to his record player and stormed out the door.
That mincing little high-handed twat, he snarled inwardly as he marched through the puddles in the street to the house next door. Who did he think he was? Swaggering into his house as if he owned it, as if he somehow knew there was nothing Snape could do to stop him without tipping his hand, eating his food, harassing him in the square, driving off his customers, and now dragging him out of his house in the middle of the night. What next? Would he just move in?
He threw open the door in a right froth. “What, Andrews?!” he demanded into the dark of the house. “What is so urgent that you couldn’t wait for your little catamite to do it for you in the morning?”
“Blow it out your floppy old he-pussy, Greene, and get in here,” came Andrews’s voice from the bathroom.
“I don’t know what it is that you’re doing in there that requires help,” Snape said after a moment, “but rest assured that whatever it is, I want no part of it.”
“Well, if what you’re thinking were in fact the case, I can assure you that you would enjoy every minute of it, but sadly for you, the situation is not nearly that exciting.” There was a pause, and Andrews’s next words sounded a bit brittle, a bit forced. “What I need is someone with eyes. I knocked over a glass in here and it broke, and I don’t have shoes on.”
Snape smirked. Oh, how precious. After all the trouble that sorry bastard had put him through, here he was relying on him for help. Perhaps this was worth the visit after all.
“How the mighty have fallen,” he purred as he moved through the room. “Tell me, Andrews,” he went on as he crossed into the bathroom, “after what I have endured at your hands, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just-” He stopped mid-sentence, his mouth still open in shock.
Andrews was covered in blood.
He was standing by the sink, the porcelain stained a sickly pink in the basin, with clotted red handprints on the edge. His sleeves were sodden and red, smearing pink streaks wherever they touched. His face was spotted and flecked, and Snape could see that his hair was matted with it as well, and droplets were drying darkly on the lenses of his sunglasses.
“Don’t mind the mess,” said Andrews mildly. “I’m out of tampons.”
“What in God’s name happened to you?” Snape demanded, appalled.
Andrews smiled, and his grin gleamed white in the darkness. “Nothing,” he said.
“Then how do you explain-this?”
Andrews shrugged, and turned back to the sink, twisting on the taps and sticking his blood-grimed hands under the spigot; the water ran red. “I told you, I knocked over the glass.”
He gestured downward, and Snape could see the wickedly glistening shards of glass littering the floor all around Andrews’s narrow bare feet. Drops of still-wet blood had fallen from him here and there, tiny flowers blooming blackly on the tile where they had landed.
“I don’t give a damn about the glass, Andrews,” Snape snarled. “What is all this blood?”
“I think you just answered your own question, there, chickabiddy.”
Snape ground his teeth. “What happened, Andrews?”
Andrews looked at him. “Ninjas,” he said seriously. “They ambushed me. Thousands of them.” And then he chuckled, even as it made his hair tremble and dance and catch in the sticky red runnels of the stuff that clung to his cheeks. Then he turned back to the sink. “Are you gonna get the glass, or just leave me here to cut my feet to ribbons?”
Snape stood still, revolted, but he swept out of the bathroom and into the kitchen; he found a well-used broom stashed in the cupboard under the stairs, and he jerked it angrily out and took it back into the bathroom.
Andrews had removed his shirt, revealing a slender torso and two thin arms, one of which was marred with a pale, twisting knot of scars near the shoulder. The ruined, bloody rag of his shirt was tossed carelessly into the bathtub, and Andrews was rubbing himself down with an unpleasantly pink-stained washrag, whistling merrily all the while. He turned his head as Snape approached, and one corner of his mouth twitched upwards in a smile.
Angrily, Snape swept the broom in wide arcs, the glass ringing and clattering beneath the broomcorn, clearing a path across the tile from where Andrews stood to the door.
“Thank you, Jeeves,” said Andrews dismissively, going back to his grisly ablutions. “You may go-and don’t forget, I’ll expect my breakfast piping hot at seven o’clock sharp.”
“You will not,” said Snape coldly.
Andrews stilled, his head tilted to one side and his eyebrows flitting upwards over the rims of his glasses. “I won’t?” he asked, his voice betraying nothing but mild curiosity, but Snape read otherwise in the downward twist of his mouth.
“No,” said Snape flatly. “I told you that I wanted no part of whatever you were doing in here, and after seeing you, I can tell that I was understating the truth. I want no part of anything you’re doing. Ever.”
Andrews turned to face him, the pale skin of his neck and chest smeared with blood in great drying swaths. They regarded each other in silence for a moment, but then Andrews smiled, a slow, dangerous smile. “All righty, then” he said pleasantly. “Suit yourself. If you want to run with your tail tucked firmly between your legs, that’s fine by me.” He turned back to the sink and picked up the cake of soap, humming quietly to himself.
Snape didn’t rise to the bait. He only snorted and swept out of the bathroom and to the front door, which he shut firmly and decisively behind him for Andrews’s benefit, and then he hastened back into his own home and locked the door behind him.
He leaned back against it, his head against the rippling wood, thoughtful and wary. What had he been doing?
He had a few guesses, and none of them pleasant. Well, they weren’t his problem-no matter what that stupid Yank had gone and involved himself with, Snape was secure in the knowledge that none of Andrews’s Muggle “associates” could find their way to him. And if they did show up with somewhat less than friendly intentions, it would likely be to collect Andrews himself for his no doubt well-deserved comeuppance, and good riddance to bad rubbish as far as he was concerned.
His thoughts were scattered to the wind when he flexed his fingers thoughtfully and suddenly felt wetness between them. He looked sharply down at his hands; there was blood on his left, smeared and crusting between his fingers.
He was in the kitchen like a shot, scrubbing it away under the water before the tap even had a chance to run clear. A poor epitaph, whoever you were, he thought grimly as the water ran down the black eye of the drain, but that’s all I can give you.
He dried his hand on his tea towel and turned-and saw the saucer sitting in the corner by the hole in the cabinet. It had been licked clean, and Snape smirked.
No more vermin in his house.
Good God, but he detested summer in Mexico.
To be perfectly honest, he detested everything in Mexico. But late summer really was the worst.
He’d hated the weather from the moment he’d stepped off the plane. Upwards of ninety bloody degrees was hideous no matter where one was. By midday the whole country was a blast furnace, firing his skin to a cracked pottery brown, leaving his clothes brittle and papery dry, his tongue and eyes glazed and gritty. And that was just the first of the summer.
Here, as the summer wore on, it grew hotter and hotter until it was well nigh unbearable. And then sometime in July, the rains would come.
The sky would open up and drench the town with sandy, scalding droplets that were little better than mud. There would be a tiny respite from the flat dry heat, as the rain would pull down the dust that choked the air, but the storms weren’t continuous, no-they would tease him, mock him, and then clear away, and the heat would return, only now it was wet.
He’d thought the dusty misery of the dry heat of early summer had been the worst part of Mexico, until experiencing the hellish joys of the sticky, muggy heat after a summer rain.
Like he was now.
The clouds from the most recent rainstorm had vanished so quickly that there wasn’t even the slightest wisp left for shade. So he had no choice but to sit here, boiling in his own clothes in the horrible steam room that was August in Culiacán. This year was so bad that he had actually broken down and bought some of the loose-fitting white trousers that were so popular in this country. He looked and felt ridiculous in them, and he only lowered himself to wear them when he was out of the delightfully chilled bubble of the cooling charms on his house. He scowled down at his ankles poking out of the cuffs; all he needed with a spangled sombrero and one of those awful rugs they wore on their shoulders, and he’d blend right in.
He unenthusiastically finished off the remains of his bacon sandwich. He kept his lunches fresh with a few more tiny cooling charms in his basket, but he could do nothing for himself without rousing suspicion, and so the hot blanket of the noonday sky and the damp press of his sweaty clothes rather robbed him of enthusiasm for much of anything save the frosty thermos of cold water tucked down in the corner (and even that pleasure was muted, what with the flat, metallic taste left by his habitual boiling of anything that came from a Mexican tap). Even the moist green flesh of the guava that he’d brought along (having acquired several of the fruits along with the leaves for his potions stores) failed to rouse his spirits. He ate it anyway, but rather gloomily.
Tossing the peel away on the ground, he sighed and looked up. It was past noon, and probably time for him to cross the street and stake out his afternoon haunt across the way, where he was more accessible to the bar. He popped a peppermint in his mouth in a desultory fashion, and then stood to go.
Some idiot had set up a bead-laden handcart in his way, and he’d been forced to take a detour around it. He scowled at the interloper as he passed; the regulars to the square knew their places, and he always hated it when some newcomer swept in and disturbed the peace. He extricated himself from the knot of sellers in the middle of the square, giving a perfunctory nod to the flower seller near the cafe-Inez something-or-other, he thought her name was-when he caught her eye as he passed, and then made his way to his bench, where it was mercifully shady.
Snape had just settled himself tiredly down in his seat when the sounds of a scuffle reached his ears. He turned and looked down the alley behind him; three laughing, shouting boys were kicking a huddled mass on the ground, and from the sounds it was making, it wasn’t hard to deduce that it was another child that they were beating, having cornered him in the crook of the alley behind some crates and a dustbin. Their victim had lost his advantage, and now he had to pay the price; the targets of bullies like those were nearly always able to outrun their tormentors-Snape certainly had-but if they got themselves trapped, then they hadn’t a chance against the superior numbers of their foes.
Snape set his jaw and deliberately looked away, but then he heard someone (and he could guess who) give a grunting cry of pain to the cruel shouts and laughing jeers of the others, and he ground his teeth and stood up. The anti-theft and light Muggle-repelling charms would see to his basket, and it was with rising ire than he stormed down the alleyway towards the altercation.
Years patrolling the hallways of Hogwarts looking for miscreants sneaking about after curfew had helped him perfect the art of descending on misbehaving children without their knowing it until it was too late. He was pleased to see that he had not lost the ability with disuse. He shot out a hand and seized the apparent ringleader, who gave a most satisfying jump beneath his fingers. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded in Spanish, giving him a rough shake.
His companions deserted him-typical. The boy who was unable to run was trying to affect a look of tough indifference despite his situation even as he tried in vain to twist away. Snape, unimpressed by his adolescent bravado, stared him into submission. The young thug finally stopped struggling and met his eye with a foolish boldness that was not entirely masking his very real (and quite justified, in Snape’s opinion) fear. “He had it coming!” he said.
“Really?” Snape drawled, looking deep into his eyes. “And did you have it coming when your older brother locked you in the wardrobe in the dark when you were seven and didn’t let you out all day?”
The flickerings of panic in the boy’s eyes blossomed into full-blown terror; with a mighty wrench he escaped Snape’s grip and went pounding off after his erstwhile compatriots, running as if the Devil himself was on his heels. He has no idea. Snape sneered at his retreating back, and then looked down at the fallen form at his feet.
The boy they had been kicking was younger and smaller than any of them, by the look of him, and definitely more than a little stringy and ill-kempt. He was shaking his head, trying to throw off the effects of his losing bout, and trying to stand, valiantly wiping his eyes, blood trickling down his chin. Snape huffed in exasperation, reached down, and hauled the boy to his feet by one arm. He looked briefly startled, but his narrow face hardened into an expression of defiance. “Let me go!”
“Don’t be an idiot!” Snape snapped.
“I didn’t need your help!” he retorted stubbornly.
“Oh, yes, since you were doing such a marvellous job of defending yourself,” Snape mocked.
The boy flushed a dark red, and Snape snorted. He didn’t wait for the unappreciative twerp to start protesting, just dragged the recalcitrant little pillock by the arm back toward the square and shoved him down onto his bench. “Refusing aid in the face of unbeatable odds isn’t bravery, nitwit-it’s stupidity,” Snape informed him, rummaging in his basket.
“What do you care?” asked the boy sullenly, his ragged fringe flopping limply in his eyes.
Snape slammed the lid shut on his basket with a less-than-satisfying slap of wicker on wicker and glared at him. “I don’t,” he said coldly, tipping a few drops of dittany on a cloth and shoving it at the brat. “Here-put this on your lip.”
The boy gave him an ugly look that Snape returned with interest, but he did as he was told. Snape smirked at the boy’s startled expression when the cloth hissed a little upon contact with his wound, and when he pulled it away from his lip, it was no longer bleeding. “Put that anywhere else you’re bleeding,” Snape directed, and it was with slightly more alacrity that the brat tugged up the leg of his torn jeans and pressed the cloth to the nasty scrape on his knee, and then passed it over the ragged ones marring his elbows.
“Now,” said Snape, taking his cloth back when he was done, “next time you find yourself being chased by an enemy, don’t be stupid enough to get caught with no retreat.”
The little ingrate glared up at him from behind his too-long hair as he stood, but it didn’t have quite the force behind it as before. “Now go away,” Snape said firmly, propelling him forward with a small shove in his back. The boy meandered off, but he kept glancing back behind him, his gaze half suspicious, half confused. Snape glared at him all the way across the square, where he disappeared down a side street. He snorted to himself as he settled back down on his bench. He glanced around and caught the eye of Inez the flower girl; the nosey twit had been watching him, and when she saw that he was scowling back at her, she actually had the nerve to smile at him.
He hated this place.
Back | Table of Contents | Next