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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.

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Chapter Five—Upstairs

            The first floor rooms were quiet and cool. Draco didn’t recognize any of them from Morningstar’s description, which he thought was an excellent sign that Ernhardt had never brought his prisoners here.

            The first corridor showed a number of shut-up rooms, with the smell of dust strong enough that Draco thought it couldn’t be feigned. Then he remembered some of the glamours he had seen on cases with Kellen, which imitated the smell of dust even though there was life and movement in the place, and grimaced. Impossible to hope that Ernhardt is unaware of those spells.

            “We need to look at every room in here,” Jenkins announced, turning her head from side to side as though she, too, wondered what could be here despite the apparent disuse. “We should split up to save more time.”

            “And what happens if Ernhardt is here, and we do meet him?” Harry asked quietly. “No. We should stay together.”

            Jenkins glanced at Warren, who pursed her lips as though it was necessary to consider the suggestion from every angle before nodding. “We really should, Simone,” she added, when Jenkins’s mouth opened. “It’s unlikely he’s still here, but it took all four of us to defeat that trap downstairs. What happens if another one of those springs on a single Auror unawares?”

            Jenkins made a single, pithy objection, and then nodded. “All right. But can we at least have first choice of which start of the corridor to start with?”

            Draco bowed, an unnecessarily provocative gesture, maybe, but Jenkins didn’t need to sound as though Harry’s sound strategy was oppressing her, either. Jenkins gave him a closed look and chose the right-hand side.

            The first door had no wards or Dark spells on it that Harry or Draco could detect, and Warren chanted a complicated incantation that revealed none, either. Still, Warren opened it with a spell that sent it banging back against the wall, and they stormed in together.

            They stopped a moment later, and Draco noticed that he wasn’t alone in trying to put his back to someone else’s. At least Warren and Jenkins found the right back immediately, so they could stand in a square and scan their find.

            It was Ernhardt’s library, or one of them, at least. The dust was as thick here as out in the corridor, but swirling up and down from the suddenness of their entrance into the place. Draco could feel his shoulders tightening. The last case he and Harry had worked had involved libraries, and books that flew off their shelves to attack you, and he wasn’t feeling very fond of them right now.

            The shelves held books bound almost uniformly in blue and shining leather, which Draco recognized as real wyvern skin, and which seemed like rather a waste given their titles. The Homeliest of Household Charms. Real Potions Making. An Introduction to Advanced Defence. The Joy of Transfiguration.

            “They look like textbooks,” Harry muttered. “Are they the ones that would have been in use when Ernhardt was a Hogwarts student?”

            “Not all of them,” Draco said, nodding at The Joy of Transfiguration. “I happen to know that McGonagall hasn’t changed her textbooks from the ones we used in at least the time since my father was a student, and I don’t think that Ernhardt was older than my father.” Then he shut up, because to think about Lucius now created a certain kind of dull pain around his heart that he could easily do without.

            “Yes, not textbooks,” Warren said suddenly. Draco turned to find her studying the nearest shelf with a quiet eye. A moment later, she waved her wand and said, “Wingardium Leviosa.”

            It must have been a superpowered version of the spell, because all the books rose off their shelves at once. Draco flinched automatically, but Warren seemed not to notice. She nodded at the space where the books had sat. “I thought their spines weren’t quite even with the edge of the shelf,” she said casually.

            Draco blinked. The shelf gave on to what looked like a plain wooden wall at first, but none of the other walls in this room were made of wood. When Jenkins disturbed another, lower shelf, he could plainly see the edge of the locked door.

            “Where can that go?” Harry demanded, sounding a little rattled that he and Draco hadn’t spotted the door first. “This house isn’t that big.”

            “Let’s find out,” Warren said, and after they had surveyed the shelves to make sure they wouldn’t trigger wards by disturbing the books, they cleared them together. Tomes soared overhead, and scrolls, and locked boxes that Draco made a private note to investigate later. They landed in untidy heaps behind them, and then Jenkins stepped forwards and tapped her foot against the edge of the bottom shelf.

            The bookcase spun and floated further out into the room. Draco looked at Jenkins. Jenkins shrugged. “My aunt had similar bookcases, under an enchantment, when she grew too old to move them herself. I recognized the glow of the enchantment and took the chance that they would move the same way.”

            Yes, and you could have blown us up if you were wrong, Draco thought, but he had to wonder how much of his irritation came from the fact that he and Harry would ordinarily have done that sort of thing on their own.

            The door had a sturdy lock on it, but that wasn’t the main problem. When Warren edged a hand towards it, the defenses they had missed throughout this floor came to humming life, gold and bladed blue, like flickering phoenix fire.

            “I think I might know the way around this one,” Harry said, edging forwards. Draco promised himself sourly that he would get the next problem.

            Warren and Jenkins seemed willing to let Harry try, so he crouched down in front of the door and spent a moment delicately groping at the edge. The fire didn’t burn him, but didn’t retreat, either, until Harry made a satisfied sound and stood up.

            “I do know this spell,” he said. “It’s not one that a lot of people use, because they think that you need access to phoenixes to make it work. You don’t.” He smiled in Draco’s direction, but Draco found he couldn’t make himself smile back.

            Harry frowned at him, but Draco gestured for him to go ahead. Harry sighed, nodded, and faced the door. His wand came down in a sharp thrust and wave forwards as he snapped, “Cedo flammam!”

            The door shimmered for a moment, and Draco took a prudent step backwards, afraid it would blow up in their faces. But although the flames leaped, they died down in the next second, and Harry sighed richly as the door trembled and swung open.

            “There,” he said, and bent down to crawl through it.

*

            Harry had to admit that Draco was probably wise to catch him back and forbid him from crawling through the door. They hadn’t checked for further wards or Dark spells, and it seemed likely that they would need to do that every step of the way while investigating Cuthbert’s Corner.

            Warren said something in a low voice to Jenkins at the way Draco caught Harry by the hair, but, well, the entire Ministry knew they were lovers by now. Harry couldn’t imagine what much more embarrassing speculation their new partners would come up with.

            The lock on the door had been a glamour linked to the phoenix enchantment, and with it gone, the way was clear before them. The stairs wound down in a sharp spiral that made Harry glad to let someone else go first once he saw them. Jenkins took point this time, her face sharp and eager in the light of the Lumos Charm on her wand.

            “I wonder if this isn’t just another trap,” Draco murmured when they had descended the first spiral and more and more of them opened up beneath them.

            “It could be,” Harry whispered back. Warren was behind them, and he could feel the way she would have liked to poke her wand into their backs for talking at all. Still, Harry had to say something. “But the hiding of the door at least means that he probably wanted to make it difficult to get to. That could indicate something is valuable down here besides the danger. Perhaps a beast guarding a treasure hoard.”

            Draco grunted, and said nothing more. The tight turns of the staircase really were taking all their concentration to negotiate.

            Harry wanted to hurry, but forced himself to keep his steps slow and steady, and his eyes on the treads that opened up beneath them. It looked as though someone had made the staircase by nailing a lot of iron ingots together. Harry wondered if Ernhardt had actually come down here all that often. Perhaps he’d had a secret lift.

            Then they reached the bottom, and torches flared up on the walls. Harry found himself back-to-back with Draco again, the way they had been in the library, before either of them could speak.

            The torches were reacting to an automatic spell that targeted movement, though, from the looks of it. After a few tense seconds, Jenkins waved them forwards, and began to walk around the large stone room that looked like a Potions lab.

            Draco was the one who dared to open a large cupboard set in the wall, and jumped back in disgust. Harry looked over his shoulder, and shuddered. There was a pile of bones there, chained to the wall, and too obviously not one of those skeletons Macgeorge had called up. The chains looked old, with scratch marks in the floor and walls.

            “He was taking ingredients,” Draco said in a tight voice, and nodded to a pair of scissors on the floor next to the corpse. It would have meant nothing to Harry on its own, but when he squinted, he saw the scissors were delicate, the kind that someone might use to cut small pieces of hair, or toenails. “That was why he wanted this person alive for as long as possible.” Draco backed slowly away from the cupboard, staring into the shadows of the lab. “There are a limited number of potions that need ingredients like that.”

            Harry followed Draco’s gaze, but didn’t see anything else that would explain the nature of the potion. While Draco prowled away to look further, Harry turned back to the corpse in the cupboard.

            It hadn’t been lucky, like him. He had escaped his cupboard and found a world full of people who loved him, or at least with some people who loved him. And that hadn’t ended now that he was an adult. He had had a chance even when Lionel died, although he hadn’t known it at the time, and he had Draco now.

            This person would never have anyone again.

            “I’ll avenge you if I can,” Harry promised quietly. “I don’t know who you were or what Ernhardt wanted you for, but I’m going to see that you’re avenged, that you have justice no matter what the cost.”

            “Don’t make vows like that,” Warren said behind him, very sharply. Harry jumped. He hadn’t realized she had come up. “They have a nasty way of coming true, or at least of obliging you to keep them in the nastiest way possible.”

            Harry raised his eyebrows. “I vowed that I would take down Voldemort,” he said, and noticed she jerked at the name, her hair swaying back and forth. “I kept that promise. I’m going to keep this one.”

            Warren glared at him for a second, then hissed, “Simply remember the price,” and turned away, crossing the lab in response to something Jenkins had called to her.

            Harry turned to find his own partner, and discovered him on his hands and knees, scraping up something dark from a channel carved into the floor. Harry shuddered, then braced himself and went over to see what it was.

            Draco turned and held up a vial of what looked like blood scrapings. “Blood scrapings,” he said a moment later, and made Harry feel stupid for even bothering to guess. Of course Draco would find a solid answer quickly. “He didn’t use his own blood, I’ll warrant.”

            Harry nodded and glanced around the lab again. The shapes on the shelves meant nothing to him, and the books he could see had no titles listed. “Is there any way to tell what he was doing? What kind of potion he was making?”

            “There are a limited number of potions that require a living subject and large amounts of blood,” Draco said. Harry noticed his face was pale, and his fingers were tapping against the vial so that it made his hand look as if it was shaking, the way it had after he saw the Dementor. “I think—Harry, I don’t like what I’m thinking.”

            Harry checked on the positions of Warren and Jenkins. They had spread out to the lab’s far corners and were poking about intelligently, as if they knew what they were looking for better than Harry did. They probably did. Labs like this were still alien territory to him. He turned back to Draco. “What are you thinking?”

            “You know that we learned consuming a twisted’s blood could make someone a twisted?” Draco’s hands closed around the vial. “The way it happened to Alexander.”

            Harry nodded. The third twisted they had hunted had been infected that way, rather than through study of the Dark Arts. “So what?”

            Draco held up the vial full of blood shards in silent answer.

            Harry shook his head in denial. “That doesn’t make sense, though. Ernhardt is already a twisted. He might have captured others, the way he did Morningstar, and taken their blood in order to control them, but why would he drink it?” He could feel ideas stirring uneasily in the back of his head, and he found that he didn’t want Draco to talk about them, as if keeping silent on them would also keep them from coming true.

            “That’s not what I think he was doing.” Draco lowered his voice to a hoarse murmur, which only made him sound scarier. “I think—Harry, shit. I think that he was making other twisted drink his blood. The corpse we found in the cupboard might just be an experiment gone wrong, not the only one he had.”

            Harry made a sharp gesture with his hand. He didn’t want to think that the corpse he’d promised to avenge might have been someone insane and evil.

            But did that make him or her any less deserving of vengeance, if Ernhardt had been the cause of their death? And not all the twisted they had hunted had been equally dangerous, or equally insane. It was one reason that Harry thought the Ministry’s definition of twisted needed some work.

            He took a long, slow breath now, and then said, “All right. We know he was taking other twisted because he held Morningstar captive. Whatever he did didn’t work with her, obviously, since she managed to escape. But the others? What would making them drink his blood do? Beyond the obvious tactic of making them try to spit it out.”

            Draco tried to smile, but he couldn’t make his mouth move. That frightened Harry more than anything else had so far. Draco responded to his sense of humor most of the time. He reached out and grasped Draco’s arm, feeling the muscles shift and lock under his touch.

            “I think,” Draco said, “that he’s trying to create an army of people that would be easy to possess. People with his blood inside them, creating a link between them and his original body. People who, like Macgeorge, would have deadly dangerous gifts without the sanity to fight off his possession.”

            Harry stared at Draco, and couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

            Perhaps it was for the best that the defender Ernhardt had left in his lab attacked them right then.

*

            The torches went out.

            Draco shut his eyes at once and cast a Shield Charm around both Harry and himself. Then he turned in the direction where he remembered the back of the lab being. The torches had been snuffed as though a magical breeze had blown past them, and since they had lit when Draco and Harry and the others came down the stairs, it seemed obvious that the force putting them out would come from the opposite direction.

            Warren cursed, but her voice was lost a moment later in the rising screech of a metal door coming open—or so it sounded like to Draco. He doubted that Ernhardt would use anything as simple as metal doors to defend his secrets, which meant something else that could sound like that. He braced, and could feel Harry bracing beside him.

            “Lumos,” they said at the same time, and the light sprang up from their wands and swept the room in a glowing blaze.

            The thing caught in the light froze for a moment, and then came towards them, shrieking still. Draco swallowed. He thought he could hear words in those cries, which made them seem less like clashing metal and more like the screams of horribly tortured voices, taken and torn until there was nothing human left in them.

Like the voices of those victims who have died in this cellar…

And yes, the light was stabbing through them, or at least through the transparent bodies that led the charge—not through the trail of what looked like mud and smoke that flowed behind them. They were ghosts, probably the remnants of whatever was left when Ernhardt’s feasting finished.

Draco’s hands tightened around his wand. He said to Harry, “These are the remains of his victims. We’ll have to fight them rather—differently from the way we did the hippogriff.”

“You don’t say,” Harry muttered. He was looking at the ghosts, too, and there was a coiled tension in him that made Draco wonder what he was thinking. Then he changed his mind. He wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to know, from the way that Harry’s fingers scrabbled steadily at his wand, and the way his eyes never moved away from the ghosts, either.

“The ghosts,” said Jenkins at the same time, appearing next to them with a little toss of her head. “What do you suggest we do, Auror Malfoy?”

Probably turning to me because she thinks I’m the one who knows the most about Dark magic, Draco thought, but he probably was, and there was the chance Harry might not want to fight the ghosts because of what he knew about the victims. He squared his shoulders and said, “There’s a spell we can use that will tear them apart.”

Harry stared at him. “Do we have to?”

            Draco nodded at him, and then nodded to the way the ghosts were hammering on the edges of their Shield Charm, transparent fists rising and falling mindlessly. “These aren’t ghosts like the ones that live at Hogwarts, Harry,” he said gently. “Do you want to leave them to endure the torments that Ernhardt has in mind for them? Or what he might do to them if he comes back?”

            Harry breathed a few times. Then he said, “No.”

            Draco nodded again, and lifted his wand. Warren was at her partner’s shoulder, now, and looking at him with that same kind of steel faith, the kind that said they knew Draco knew how to survive and they would follow him no matter how much they hated the spells he might use. In his own way, Draco preferred that over the blind trust he would have got from some Aurors if his name had the same connotations as Harry’s.

            “The spell hits them with a blast of life, of living memory, which is the opposite of everything they are now, and they can’t survive it,” he said. “You have to think as hard as you can of some moment when you were doing something that only living people can do. It doesn’t have to be a happy memory, but it shouldn’t be simple despair—that’s something they understand only too well. Fucking, or fighting, or bleeding. Choose.”

            Jenkins closed her eyes, then blinked them open again. Draco would have mistaken it for a gesture of boredom in other contexts, but in this one, he was fairly sure that Jenkins had actually picked the memory and settled it in her mind. She nodded to him, and behind her, Warren did the same thing a moment later.

            “Yes,” Harry said.

            Draco smiled at him, and wondered for a moment if there was a chance that they might be using the same memory. He was remembering the first time he and Harry had slept together, had slept together and talked, and certain things had been made clear to Harry that no one else had ever tried to teach him.

            But they didn’t need to talk about it right now, and there was no time. Draco turned to face the ghosts. “Hold the memory in your mind as strongly as you can, as if you were about to cast a Patronus,” he said. “Then flick your wand up.” He demonstrated the movement. “And say Felicitas.”

            Three voices roared out the word at the same time, none louder than Harry’s. Draco had to wait a moment, from sheer surprise—and because he was busy cutting a hole in the Shield Charm for the spells to get through—and then let his own spell fly.

            The memories struck the churning spirits and washed over them. For a moment, they trembled as though the memories would light their dead eyes and return them to life. Draco swallowed. They were in trouble if that happened, and not just because it would have been a kind of impossible miracle for Ernhardt and Macgeorge to have raised ghosts that could resist this spell.

            But then a golden light spread through the murk and the white parts of the attack both, and split it apart. Thunder filled the lab, and Draco clapped his hand instinctively over the vial with the scrapings of dried blood to make sure it was safe in his pocket.

            The ghosts vanished. The torches came back on, and they stood there breathing in air that felt better without the taint of coming Dark magic.

            “We’ve learned as much as we can here, I think,” Jenkins said, moving for the stairs. “Come on. We have more rooms to investigate.”

            Draco met Harry’s eyes before he followed. Harry nodded. They were united in their decision to say nothing about their conclusions for now as to why Ernhardt might have kept twisted here and taken their blood.

            As they made their way back up the stairs, Draco could feel Warren watching them thoughtfully. No, him thoughtfully. When he turned around and stared at her, her eyes flickered away from him.

            No need to panic yet, Draco decided, deliberately turning his back on her. But no reason to think that she’s friendly, either. She has yet to prove herself either way.

*

            SP777: Thank you!

            And I don’t know when I will continue Heraclitean Fire yet. But I do intend to continue and not abandon it.

            Rina: Thanks. I would say Draco’s reluctance comes from both, and also that Warren and Jenkins might do something to interfere in the case without meaning to.

            Seiren: Well, you’ve seen one thing.
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A Reign of Silence