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Dark Gods In The Blood	By : Hayseed Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 3951 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
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Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
A/N: The story is
going to pick up a bit of pace from here on out, as the characters have been
(mostly) properly introduced by this point.
By this, I suppose I mean to say that the mystery part is really
beginning in earnest. Thanks for
reading!

Summary: A wandering
student comes home, a broken man pays his penance, and a gruesome murder is
both more and less than it seems. Some
paths to self-discovery have more twists and turns than others.

Rating: R, for
intermittent dark themes, violence, and language

Disclaimer: Nothing
you read here (save the plot and bits of the text itself) belongs to me. Harry Potter and his cronies are the
property of JK Rowling and Warner Bros. (and someone else, probably, but not
me). All chapter headings are properly
credited to their sources.

Dark Gods in the Blood

by: Hayseed (hayseed_42@hotmail.com)

Chapter Thirteen

No
fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out,

disgust simply does not exist where hunger
is; and as to

superstition,
beliefs, and what you may call principles, they

are less
than chaff in a breeze.

-- Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

The office was rather
quieter than usual today. It always
was, after a funeral.

Summerford had been
young. Hadn�t even had his bootlaces
for a year. Ron smiled down at the file
he�d been absently perusing. Bit silly
that, really.

The final examination for
admission to the Aurory was an obstacle course of sorts. A couple of senior Aurors would be �Dark
wizards,� rampaging through some Muggle town (mid-sized, usually, although Ron
knew that Kingsley�s final had been administered in Islington), and the hapless
trainee would have to bring them in.
They were not permitted the standard Auror kit -- this was a test, after all -- and had to rely on their wands
and their wits.

According to the story,
one poor Auror (nameless, as legends tend to be, although Ron had heard
mutterings around office water coolers offering names anywhere from the
ruthless old seventeenth century �witch-hunter� Matthew Hopkins**, notorious
for his brutal pursuit of Dark wizards, to the slightly more modern --
though no less infamous -- Alastor Moody) managed to break his wand in the duel
with his instructors. But the ow, ow,
whoever he really was, recovered nicely and wound up dragging his instructors
back to the Aurory, bloodied and their hands neatly bound with his bootlaces.

Thus, every Auror, upon
his graduation, was awarded a pair of bootlaces, charmed to be
Unbreakable. Use every possible
resource at hand, was the lesson to be taken
from this slightly ridiculous ritual.

Ron let his eyes flicker
down to his own laces, whimsically spelled to a bright red instead of the
standard-issue black. �Red hair and red
shoes,� one of his mates had grumbled.
�Could you make yourself any more obvious a target, Weasley?�

Kingsley had given
Summerford�s bootlaces to his wife, enormously pregnant with their first child,
as she stood graveside. A single tear
had fallen down her cheek, he remembered, as she cradled the small box in her
hand. Ron hoped fervently that she
didn�t put them in some silly box somewhere, that Summerford�s child would wear
those laces as he or she fell out of trees and ran down to the lake at
Hogwarts. Good laces for a kid,
really. Completely indestructible --
not a flame or a blade in the world could make so much as a dent in them.

Blinking as his eyes
began suspiciously stinging, Ron jerked his mind away from the image of that
tear on William Summerford�s wife�s face and tried to focus on the file under
his nose. An untamed werewolf in
Albania.

Only one team needed to
take care of it -- he wrote the number �thirty-eight� on the cover of the
folder and tapped it once with his wand.
Immediately, the file disappeared, ostensibly sent to Higgins and Lee,
team number thirty-eight. Byungki had been anxious for an opportunity to take a case out
of the country, Ron remembered distantly.
Well, now he had his chance. And
Hera Higgins could probably keep him from too much trouble.

Byungki Lee was one of
the more impetuous Aurors in the Ministry.
At twenty-five, he�d already been brought before the Wizengamot four
times for inappropriate conduct and threat of Muggle exposure. s"> That was actually why he�d been paired with Hera lately -- an older, stern
woman, Hera kept Byungki on a fairly tight leash. She was able to use his intensity and creative approach to
situations to its maximum effect, efficiently checking his tendency toward
leaping without first looking. The
number of Oblivate teams sent in after Byungki�s missions now was actually less
than half of what it used to be, thanks
to Hera.

Anotfilefile, another
assignment. A Muggle in Cheshire,
watching a local wizarding family far
too closely. This was actually rather misallocated
-- there was an entire department for Muggle relations that had nothing to do
with the Aurory -- but the family in question belonged to one Robert Wheeler,
whose mother happened to be Cornelius Fudge�s sister.

Ah ... politics.

Finally catching a glimpse
of his expression, she began to giggle.
�Oh, Ron,� she sighed, oddly reminiscent of Hermione as an exasperated
child. Oh, Ron, she used to groan on their adolescent escapades,
hands on her hips and hair flying every possible direction.

The panic was now nearly
in full blossom. �Fran�oise?�

�What?� she managed
between chuckles. �What sort of mother
do you think I am, Ronald Weasley?�

He did have the sense to
blush at that. �I --�

�Don�t you remember?� she
asked. �Nicholas started back at school
today. We talked about it last night,
as well as at breakfast. It�s only
three weeks into the semester, so he should be fine. And I went in to speak with his teacher this morning when I
dropped him off -- she�s aware of the situation. And as for Alice, I left her with Petunia before I came to your
office -- I thought it would be nice to have a meal with some conversation with
polysyllable words.�

Blowing out a breath,
Ron�s expression was growing more chagrined by the second. �I�m sorry, Fran�oise. I did
forget about Nicholas. It�s just
...� He floundered, unable to
articulate his thou o:p>

�I know,� she said
kindly. �It�s been ... difficult.� After a pause, she shook her head, smiling
ruefully. �Consider, Ron, that it took
you the better part of a half-hour to notice that the children weren�t here.�

He couldn�t think of
anything to say to that.

--
-- -- -- --

Their orders were brought
to their table by a round little man, red-cheeked and beaming. �Fran�oise, my dear girl,� he said, sitting a plate in front of her
nose. �I knew I recognized that order
from a mile away -- I just had to bring
it out myself.�

Smiling, she stood,
wrapping her arms around fellfellow, who was barely at her eyelevel. �Fionn!� she cried. �How are
you?�

Ron was dumbfounded. �Fionn?� he echoed.
�And

Gritting his teeth, Ron
bit back a dozen potential replies, none of them appropriate for his
chief. �Is there anything else you
wanted?� he finally settled on asking.

Kingsley�s gaze was
knowing as he regarded Ron. �You look
like shit, Weasley. Go home early
today.�

-- -- --
-- --

**Footnote -- Matthew
Hopkins was, of course, real. He called
himself the �Witch-Finder General� and, according to sources, had anywhere from
200 to 400 �witches� executed during the span of his career, which seems to
have predominantly been the 1640�s. He
remains a controversial character to this day.
I am, naturally, making him an Auror who possibly teetered on the edge
of the Dark arts himself with only the most ironic of intentions.
- 13
- 14
- 15
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Dark Gods In The Blood