Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

A Reign of Silence	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3889 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 14
- 15
- 16
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Fifteen—Confrontations

            The ritual welled around him. Harry found himself wrinkling his nose as a deep stink, like rotting fruit, rose up with the power. He reckoned it was part of the ritual’s magic and he couldn’t do anything to change it, but it was still disgusting. He bit the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t complain and prevent the ritual from succeeding.

            The flow of power among them was complex, from what Harry could follow, but on the other hand, he hadn’t been out of hospital for long. Maybe someone else would feel that it was less complex. He didn’t know.

            Jenkins controlled it, of course, since she was the one who knew the ritual, guiding her hands back and forth the way Harry had sometimes seen a Muggle conductor do on the telly. The magic bubbled out of the cauldron that sat at her feet, into which she’d cast the silver ring on its chain. Harry wondered if they would ever know the significance of the ring, and doubted it. Warren might not have told them about why her diary mattered except that they needed some reassurance before they performed the ritual.

            Whatever reassurance Harry and Draco needed, though, Warren didn’t. She raised her hands and lowered them when Jenkins looked at her, and, when Jenkins caught her eye and nodded, held her wand to her hand at the base of her thumb. A murmur, and a small slice opened there. The drops of blood hung, glittering, for just a second before the magic flowing through the air caught them and funneled them towards the cauldron. Harry coughed and spit at the coppery taste in her mouth, wondering if it was possible to breathe in blood fumes from this distance.

            Draco gave him a significant look even as he took the signet ring from his finger. Harry suspected Jenkins would turn to him next.

            Harry glared back. He knew what he had to do, and he had agreed to this ritual, Dark magic and blood magic and all. He was just allowed to cough, that was all, if fumes got into his nostrils and made him sick.

            At least, he thought he was. Sometimes Draco’s notion of what they should do was too different from Harry’s for reconciliation.

            Jenkins closed her eyes and waved her hands harder than ever as Warren’s blood settled into the cauldron. Her lips moved so fast that all Harry heard was a blurred stream of sound, not so much an incantation as a hum.

            Well, in one way, that might be a good thing. If the Ministry asked him later what the incantations and gestures of this ritual were, Harry would be able to answer honestly that he had no idea.

            The cauldron seethed and hissed and bubbled at them again, and Jenkins thrust out one hand in Draco’s direction. Apparently he wasn’t worth a nod, or else she had to keep her eyes closed and her concentration on the cauldron in front of her.

            Draco didn’t seem offended, which amazed Harry. He performed the same spell that Warren had done, cutting his hand at the base of his thumb, and turned his palm towards Jenkins. The blood rose into the air in a cascade this time, whirling around and around itself like dust in sunlight, and then dived into the cauldron. Peering at it as much as he could without moving from his place in the circle, Harry thought he saw the potion—or whatever it was—that Jenkins was brewing turn a sharper, ruddier color.

            Jenkins’s eyes flicked open, and she turned to Harry.

            Harry hesitated a bare second—he had expected to have at least the same length of time between her calling on Draco and calling on him that there had been between Draco and Warren—and Jenkins hissed at him, her lips wrinkling back to give a glimpse of teeth that were pretty impressive for just being dull and human.

            Harry shook his head and cut his hand at the base of his thumb. The blood glowed for a moment as though reluctant to fall, but the magic had already snatched it and was transporting it, reluctance and all, across the room to the cauldron. Harry shuffled in place in the circle, almost holding his breath, and not because of the copper taste in his mouth this time. Would it work right away? And what was supposed to happen, anyway? Other than telling them they would have to sacrifice blood and treasures, Jenkins hadn’t made clear much about the ritual.

            Jenkins stretched her hands out in front of her and snapped them close to her body, as though she was pulling shut the door of a car.

            The diary flew out of Warren’s hands, and the photographs out of Harry’s. The ring spun out of Draco’s fingers and rose above the others as the point of a triangle formed by the objects. Harry looked back at the cauldron to see whether Jenkins’s ring would rise, too, and found her with her lips moving and her head bobbing a little. No, he reckoned the ring had been the sacrifice to get the ritual going, and wouldn’t join the others now.

            Then Jenkins laid her hands flat in front of her and began to push, as though she was trying to shove together a great mass of something soft and fluffy.

            Harry gritted his teeth. Resistance had entered the room, as thick and sticky as milk poured all over everything. He shook his head several times, and each time, Jenkins made a noise in the back of her throat, so Harry stopped doing it.

            The hairs on his arms rose. Draco was swearing under his breath, but he didn’t move away or break the circle, so Harry assumed that wasn’t an option for him, either. Harry stayed still. Whatever his partner had to endure, Harry would endure with him.

            Jenkins’s hands continued to rise and tremble, but Harry still couldn’t see anything between them. Yet they relentlessly, slowly, traveled closer and closer together. Jenkins gritted her own teeth and began repeating the same incantation over and over, as Harry could tell from the rhythm. He really couldn’t tell what it meant, though, whether it was Latin or something else, and he wasn’t about to force Jenkins to tell him.

            Jenkins bowed her head, her lungs heaving in and out as though she was breathing the invisible stuff she was trying to push around, and then brought her hands together in one final, agonizing clap.

            The room shuddered around them. Harry thought he saw the walls bounce and the wards stretch themselves out in flat, shimmering currents of magic that got interrupted by the walls coming down. He winced. He disliked the image of them suddenly bared to the peering eyes of the Ministry.

            But if that had happened, it must have been too short a time for the Aurors to find the place, because Jenkins moved back, gasping, and held up something round and silvery. Harry realized for the first time that the cauldron had vanished, and so had the objects, their sacrifices, that had hung in midair. All that was left was this flat, shiny silver disk in Jenkins’s hands, and she was gazing at it with her mouth set in a slash like a knife wound.

            “What is that?” Draco asked. Harry was glad that he had asked, because he wouldn’t have wanted to brave the expression on Jenkins’s face for himself.

            Jenkins looked up and blinked a little at Draco as though she had forgotten who he was or why he mattered. Then she shrugged and wrapped her fingers harder around the disk. “The tracking medallion that will take us to Ernhardt and Rudie,” she said.

            “I thought the ritual would take us there right away,” Draco continued, and Harry nodded. He didn’t know if he should have performed the ritual so soon after being in hospital. Now his head was heavy, and his footsteps dragged.

            “It would have if we had more power,” Jenkins said, “or if Ernhardt was less strong. But we have no idea where he is, save that wherever it is, it has wards.” She lifted the medallion. “Or we would be there by now. Come up and hold onto my arms,” she added.

            Warren was perhaps the only one who did that eagerly, Harry thought. Draco came slowly, and so did Harry. But Jenkins held her arms out so they could touch her without bumping into each other, and then raised the medallion higher. There was a triangle etched on the front, Harry saw, and a ruby that resembled an eye.

            Jenkins gave the same slow, hissing, half-incantation that she had used at the beginning of the ritual. The room around them began to blur and move, mist rising. Harry swallowed when he saw it.

            The mist closed in on them.

            Harry felt the same thick, coppery taste invade his mouth again. He swallowed and swallowed, and resisted the urge to spit. God knew what that would do to the magical mist they were standing in, and they had come far enough that any disaster that fucked it up could cost Rudie her life.

            If she isn’t already dead.

            He was glad Draco was there beside him, leaning close to his side, his words a soft, bare murmur in Harry’s ear. Harry couldn’t hear him under the chanting that Jenkins was doing, but he was there, ready to step in if Harry had some kind of fainting fit, the way it felt as if he would, and that was enough.

*

            Draco saw the mist begin to fade and thin before it cleared. Tatters of silver crawled along the walls, and he smiled a bit grimly as he saw the stone through them. Jenkins’s medallion had taken them from one underground spot to another. That made sense; Ernhardt would avoid a manor house, probably, after the last two that they had effectively destroyed.

            Something darted at Draco, silent and fast.

            Draco leaped in the air and turned around to face it, his wand jabbing as he hissed an incantation that he’d had ready on his tongue from the second the mist started clearing up. Something roared into his ear, long and indignant. Draco didn’t care. He had hit whatever it was that had aimed at them, and Harry was moving into position against his back, and every moment the mist cleared more and he saw more of where they were.

            A cave, he deduced from quick glances, some of it natural and some sculpted, perhaps part of a mine that had been shut down. The walls ran smooth for some distance, and then abruptly shrank and turned into a twisting tunnel. The color of the stone was a dull grey with streaks of brown and black.

            And the only light around or with them came from flaring blue torches jammed into the stone.

            Draco remembered reading once about flames burning blue in the presence of necromancy. He lifted his wand and cast a Shield Charm in front of him just as something else slammed into it, although it was so small this time that he thought he wouldn’t have had to worry about it unless it had poison on its teeth.

            When he realized it was a skeletal bat with a mouthful of rotting flesh, he decided that a bite from it might have been of some concern after all.

            Harry shouted from behind him, and tried to move. Draco had no idea whether it was to move away to face an enemy or to try and get protection for Draco, and he didn’t like either possibility. He turned with Harry, moving the shield at the same time, and saw the thing that Harry was fighting.

            It resembled a bear as much as it did anything else. It had huge bones, joined with a sliding tissue of white-pink flesh, and its jaws were grotesque and enormous. With skin plopping off it at every move, it roared and struck out at Harry with clumsy paws.

            Harry had already used a spell that scorched the bones, Draco saw, leaving long, lightning-like grooves down the sides of them. Well, that would have been enough with most ordinary opponents, but Draco doubted this thing was going to be ordinary. Perhaps it could even resist most of the magic that an Auror might use. And Harry was still too weak to use the spells that he might have before he went into hospital.

            Draco touched his wand to the bear’s chest as it tried to bull its way forwards, snapping at Harry with fangs that looked as if they would detach from its jaw at any second and pierce skin and flesh like arrows. “Frango,” he said calmly.

            The bones blew apart, and so did something dark and rotted-purple in the middle of its chest, something that looked like a heart. The bones collapsed, and the tissue clinging to the bear stopped moving, other than the ordinary dripping it would do when it was detached from the bone. Draco stepped back, with a harsh breath and a nod at Harry. “You’re all right?” he murmured.

            “I’m fine.” Harry was examining the bear. “I think…I know that Macgeorge would raise creatures out of bones alone. Every time that we’ve seen the things Ernhardt would launch at us, they’ve had some sort of flesh on them. Do you think that’s because he’s not as skilled a necromancer as she was?”

            Draco frowned and shook his head. “Or more skilled? Wouldn’t it take more skill to raise a body that wasn’t all decayed to bone?”

            “I think this is a question that you can debate later.”

            Draco started and turned around. Jenkins stood behind him, a litter of bones at her feet that looked to be all that remained of some bats that had attacked her. Jenkins wasn’t breathing hard, but there was a tightness to her jaw that made Draco look for Warren. If she’d disappeared again, God knew what Jenkins would do.

            Warren, though, stood on the other side of the cavern, beside a thin line in the stone that looked like a concealed door. “That was only the welcoming committee,” she said over her shoulder. “Left here to take care of anyone who might show up. I know Ernhardt is behind this thing.”

            “Then open it,” Jenkins said, with a rumble in the back of her voice. Draco took a step nearer her. Despite all the bragging she’d done about the way her flaw locked her mind and Ernhardt couldn’t take it over, she looked now as though he was trying. Her eyes were more than half-shut, and her hand groped in front of her to feel the air.

            “What’s wrong, Simone?” Warren hadn’t moved, except to lean a little harder on the stone where the hidden door apparently was.

            “I don’t—know.”

            Draco noticed Harry come up on the other side of Jenkins, level with Draco himself. They didn’t need to talk at a time like this, Draco thought. A flicker of eyelids was enough, and a nod. If something happened to Jenkins, if they saw the slightest flicker of blue in her eyes, then they would spring. Ernhardt taking over Jenkins might be even more devastating than him taking over Macgeorge, not so much because of her flaw as because of her general skill with a wand and knowledge of Dark spells.

            Then Jenkins opened her eyes with a gasp. “So that’s what it’s like to have him reach into your mind,” she said, and smiled grimly as her hands tightened on her wand. “I can see why it’s hard to resist. The voice whispers about treasures and secrets and promises, and makes it seem as though possession would be the same as falling asleep. As if you could have what you wanted instead of him having what he wants.”

            “You did resist,” Draco said, studying her. No one else who’d been possessed had ever managed to hide the blue eyes, although sometimes people who didn’t know what they were looking for might mistake it for a natural color. “Your flaw?”

            Jenkins gave him the look Draco thought she would reserve for something found crawling on the ground. “I did tell you,” she said, and faced Warren. “How soon until you can open the door?”

            “It seems to be locked with the same necromantic wards that Rudie sprang on the door of his last house,” Warren said. Her eyes were shut, her wand moving in front of her like the rods Draco had seen some wizards use to sense water. “If I watched her closely enough, then I think—yes, here.”

            There was the same hissing sound they’d heard when Rudie opened the door of the skull-house, and then a tension Draco hadn’t realized was crowding the cavern relaxed abruptly, like lightning leaving the sky after a storm. Warren nodded and stood back. “That’s the way it works.”

            “She managed to memorize the way to do that after watching Rudie do it once,” Harry muttered behind Draco.

            Draco nodded. More and more likely, it seemed as though Warren’s flaw and genius had to be Dark spells. Picking them up this fast was unnatural.

            “How do we know if Rudie’s dead or not?” Harry asked, loudly enough for Jenkins and Warren to hear him. “The spell was supposed to bring us to her, but we don’t know if she’s still here, or if it’s her body.”

            “Ernhardt may as easily have kept her to negotiate with as a hostage,” Jenkins said calmly. “I don’t believe there’s any way we can know, until we go in and see her alive or dead. At least we know that Ernhardt is not a skilled enough necromancer to reanimate a corpse and make it seem as if it was alive.”

            “I wonder why that is,” Draco murmured. He was thinking of the twisted made by Healer Alto, whom Ernhardt had possessed when he wanted to kill her. They had seemed fully able to use their gifts, or rather, Ernhardt had been able to fully use their gifts when he was in their bodies.

            “We can hope that Rudie was right after all,” Harry said.

            “Or not hope,” Draco said flatly. “Because if Macgeorge is still alive in there, I have to admit that I haven’t the slightest idea of how to rescue her. Do you?”

            Harry didn’t respond, but his face settled into a mulish expression that Draco recognized. Harry was likely to come up with inspired plans when he looked like that, and also to come up with mental things to do that would paralyze Draco’s heart.

            Draco caught his arm low down, where the vicious pinch he gave Harry wouldn’t show up to Jenkins and Warren unless Harry flinched, and hissed into his ear, “You aren’t to risk your life to rescue her. Especially when we have no idea whether it’s possible. We can try to kill Ernhardt and give her her body back, but considering how close we came to killing him last time and how we failed, I don’t know how we would do that.”

            Harry just nodded, eyes flat. Draco gave up. He knew that meant Harry was listening more to the promptings of his own hero complex than anything else at the moment, and he would just have to hope that having three other experienced Aurors on the case, as well as Draco to protect, would keep Harry grounded.

            “Is there any way you can try the spell that would rip Ernhardt’s soul from his body again?” Jenkins asked Draco.

            Draco glanced at her sharply. “You don’t mind Dark magic like that?” he asked, when neither she nor Warren did anything but look back at him.

            “You know we don’t mind Dark magic in general,” Jenkins said. “Since you have seen us use it. So it is the words like that that are the important ones in your formulation, I would suppose.”

            Draco nodded. It felt as though his neck was going to rip itself apart from tension.

            “Not all of us are Elder,” Jenkins said. “Not all of us have the luxury of dealing with the world in true Dark and Light terms.” She turned back to the door. “We should go through, and deal with what lies on the other side.”

            “I wanted to ask you—” Warren began.

            “No,” Jenkins said, although when Warren stared at her, Draco could see the softening along her jawline. No, he didn’t think Jenkins and Warren were lovers, unlike him and Harry, but they were deeply in tune. “We failed with the Joining Circle once before. I don’t think we should use it this time, and give Ernhardt time to interrupt it.”

            After a moment, Warren nodded back. Then she faced the door, and tossed it open.

            Only blackness lay beyond, which made Draco feel silly for how tense his muscles had automatically got as he waited for something to jump out. He shook his head and started forwards.

            Warren was in the lead, Jenkins beside Draco, Harry just behind. Even with Harry only slowly recovering from the draining of his magical core, Draco could hope it was enough power to take on Ernhardt and destroy him.

            Perhaps.

*

            Harry’s skin prickled as he stepped through the low door into the room that waited beyond. It was probably only nerves, he told himself. He didn’t know what Ernhardt had waiting for them, but although he had come close to killing them, he hadn’t managed to even permanently injure them so far.

            That thought wasn’t as reassuring as he had planned for it to be.

            The room beyond was a lot larger than the small cavern they had emerged in; Harry knew that already from the echoes that bounced in front of them. There was a long, silent debate between Draco and Warren that Harry saw mostly as the movement of wands, and then Lumos Charms beamed from all of them. Harry cast nonverbally, his glance darting around, trying to take in any enemies that might come at Draco.

            There seemed to be nothing. The room was still disgusting, strung with huge silken curtains of what looked like cobwebs, but no one moved in it, and none of the skeletal or rotting creatures that had welcomed them on the other side.

            Draco breathed into Harry’s ear, “Do you see any shadows that might be cast by glamour charms?”

            Harry nodded back. They had investigated one report of an apparent twisted together that had turned out to be only a Dark wizard clever with glamour charms that made him seem to disappear. “Let’s see,” he said, and threw a Finite at the darkest corner of the cave, across from them.

            There was a long, sucking sound, and the shadow vanished, revealing a stairway that plunged into the earth. It looked broader but no more inviting than the one leading down to the cellar in Cuthbert’s Corner had.

            “Do we go down?” Jenkins asked after several more seconds. Harry felt Draco’s breathing speed up beside him. All of them had been expecting some sort of attack before now, Harry was certain.

            “We go down,” Draco said firmly. “Where else should we go?” And he marched towards the stairs, casting charms before him as he went that would find glamours, hexes, and tripwires at a knee height.

            Harry followed him, his neck prickling endlessly all the way down, and down, and down.

*

            delia cerrano: Hard to do that with Draco’s parents when they don’t remember him.

            SP777: I didn’t think it would get this complicated, no. I was picturing more an episodic series of stories, rather than one that has an overarching plot.

            Diana: Here you g.
- 14
- 15
- 16
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

A Reign of Silence