Shadow Walks
My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
--Green Day, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
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Chapter Eleven:
I know good-bye means nothing at all
-- Maroon 5, "She Will Be Loved"
"I think you know exactly what I want," Harry said evenly, looking Draco Malfoy square in the face. The Slytherin's expression gave away nothing.
"And I think you know that the wandfire and commotion will have registered on the wards. We'll be having company very shortly."
"Then I suggest you tell me what I need to know, or your `company' will find your dead body on your billiard room floor."
"I'm not an expert Legilimens, Potter," Draco said coolly, looking unfazed by the death threat. "Perhaps you'd like to enlighten me." Harry felt his ire begin to rise.
"Where is she?" He gritted out through clenched teeth.
"Where is who?" Malfoy parroted back, the corners of his thin lips twitching in amusement. In a flash, Harry was across the room, wrenching Malfoy's head backwards, and jabbing his wand into the other man's jugular.
"You're obviously not taking this as seriously as you should."
"You won't do anything to me," Malfoy said in a superior tone. "You're too noble, too soft, and too bloody Gryffindor."
"What have I left to lose?" Harry hissed in his ear. "Answer me that. You and your cohorts have taken everything that mattered…everything. You can believe that I mean exactly what I say… I will kill you if you don't tell me what you know about Bellatrix Lestrange and what she did to Hermione."
"I haven't seen Aunt Bella in over five years, before your werewolf killed her. And what - you think I've saved the moldering corpse of the Mudblood down in my wine cellar or something?" Malfoy said in a disbelieving voice, sputtering a little as Harry jabbed the wand more forcefully into the side of his neck.
"Dolohov told us you were there," Harry bluffed. "What was that object you tossed to Bellatrix? Portkey to your lovely villa here? Do you know what will happen to all of your precious influence and family fortune if the fact that you've harbored a known high-level Death Eater for five years becomes common knowledge?" An unpleasant laugh escaped Harry's lips. "Scrimgeour would disavow you so fast your head would spin."
"You're lying," Malfoy said, though his aura of arrogant calm was less convincing than it had been previously. "Dolohov has told you nothing. He wouldn't - " He broke off suddenly, looking unsure as to what it was safe to say.
" - betray you?" Harry finished for him. "He sang like a phoenix. Spilled his guts to be spared the Kiss. I can offer you the same."
"Your precious Mudblood is dead, and - " Malfoy broke off with a cry of pain, as Harry released the back of his neck and slammed his open palm into the Slytherin's patrician nose. Malfoy's arms pinwheeled outwards, as he was flung back from the force of the blow, knocking over a stone half-column on which stood a exquisite statuette, which shattered all over the floor. He lay stunned among the shards, blood from a laceration staining his silvery hair and rushing copiously from both nostrils.
"Get up!" Harry snarled, circling around him and using a Mobilicorpus spell to lift him to his feet. Malfoy looked skewers at the Auror, while he gingerly daubed blood from beneath his broken nose. "While we're repaying debts from sixth year, remember Sectumsempra? Would you still have women falling all over you if I scar up your face? P'raps a lightning bolt?" He traced the shape in the air with his wand. Part of him wanted to recoil from the violence, but a larger part of him delighted in the fear that flashed across Malfoy's face.
"You're mad!" He exclaimed, obviously meaning it as something derogatory, but Harry smiled at him.
"Yes, I am. Now, you're going to tell me what you did to Hermione or I'm going to start breaking fingers." He spewed a low-level Reductor that only barely missed Malfoy's sleeve to show that he meant business. "And then you're going to tell me where I can find Bellatrix Lestrange."
"I'll tell you nothing…" Draco spat. Harry raised his wand, but paused when he saw Malfoy's eyes almost imperceptibly cut over his left shoulder. He didn't hesitate, but twisted Malfoy's wand to where it pointed backwards under his left arm. A hollow clatter told him that his non-verbal Expelliarmus had hit its target. Keeping one wand on Draco, he turned and Petrified the woman who had destroyed his life.
He watched with some satisfaction as Malfoy's Adam's apple bobbed up and down in his throat. Clearly, he'd been stalling, knowing that someone else - and a very skilled witch to boot - was in the house. Harry walked over to Bellatrix's prostrate form, and toed her in the side, watching her dark eyes crackle with impotent fury. With one wary eye on her nephew, he walked over the threshold to retrieve her wand.
"Sort of a shame that you didn't get a shot off, actually," he said casually. "The Aurors stationed in Paris would have been swarming this villa like vampires on the scent. I wouldn't do that if I were you," he added to Draco, lackadaisically gesturing with his wand, and the Slytherin froze in mid-motion, on the point of rising. "Since your aunt isn't going to be able to help you now, are you more willing to help yourself?"
"What could I possibly say that would keep me out of Azkaban now?" Malfoy muttered thickly, his nose obviously beginning to swell badly.
"Oh, out of Azkaban?" Harry asked lightly. "Probably nothing. But perhaps you'd like to go there with your small and repulsive soul still inside your body?" A muscle knotted and worked in Malfoy's jaw, but he said nothing, watching not Harry, but his unmoving aunt. Harry followed his gaze. "She can't help you now. Nobody can, Draco," his voice dripped sarcastically over the Slytherin's given name. "Nobody but me."
He was striving to keep his voice casual, having no desire whatsoever to reveal how desperate he was for information. If any hint of urgency leaked out, the two Death Eaters would withhold it just to spite him, he was sure. They already knew the extent to which their fate had been sealed by his mere presence in the villa - unless they killed him first.
Malfoy was wavering, his eyes flickering uncertainly from the prone figure of Bellatrix to the ruined billiard table, and the scattered forms of his friends, tied securely with magical rope. The smell of burnt, wet felt hung heavily in the air. Water dripped from the billiard pockets to the Oriental carpeting below. The much-maligned house-elf stood within the dampening field, pulling at his ears in misery and occasionally causing the spherical field to bounce harmlessly against one wall.
"What did you do to her? Where did you send her?" Harry asked, his voice trembling only ever so slightly. Malfoy straightened, as if he'd come to a decision, and Harry's wand twitched at the movement.
"I'm afraid I don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about," he answered. Harry did not have to look at Bellatrix to know that malicious triumph was glittering in her eyes. His face remained carefully bland, and he lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
"Your choice. Poor one, I'm afraid." He jerked his head in the direction of the large marble fireplace. "Where's your Floo powder?" he asked.
"The Ming vase on the mantel," Malfoy said sullenly.
"Get it," Harry ordered peremptorily. "I'm sure there are security clearances that you'll have to initiate to open your Floo." He followed Draco to the grate, jabbing him between the shoulder blades with the wands he'd appropriated. "While you're at it, you can call off your dragons too."
Malfoy's eyes flashed angrily, but he'd been backed into a corner, and he knew it.
"Fine," he huffed, with the maturity of a thwarted thirteen year old. "Would you mind not breathing down my neck please?" Harry obligingly backed up a half-step, but did not lower his wand.
"Nice and slow," he cautioned, as Malfoy reached up and scooped out a small palmful of the powder from the hand-painted urn. He knelt on the hearth, and spoke a mumbled password that caused the flames to flare up merrily. He lifted his hand, and a few small granules sifted out from between his fingers, as he turned to look at Harry questioningly.
"Toss in the powder, and I'll give the destination," Harry instructed him. Malfoy moved as if to turn back toward the fireplace, but balked mid-motion, and swung his arm in a wide arc toward Harry, who had just enough time to remember what was cupped in Malfoy's palm before the coarsely ground powder hit him in the face.
His glasses provided a modicum of protection, but the grit that had managed to make it into his eyes burned like acid. He sputtered and coughed at the intrusion of what he'd inadvertently inhaled, and he blinked furiously, trying to see through the blinding pain and bleary tears that were now streaming down his cheeks.
Malfoy had been close enough to grab a wand from Harry's ineffectual hand, and Harry distantly heard him cry,
"Finite incantatem!"
Damn, damn, damn. In desperation, Harry reached up and tore his glasses from his face, scrubbing desperately at his eyes, causing only an increase in the stinging pain. A Summoning charm ripped the other confiscated wand from his hand. All the lights had auras around them. Malfoy was a vaguely human-shaped blob in front of him, and there was another darker shadow that rose up from the floor. Bellatrix was free… and armed.
I am not going to die here. Not when I'm so close. Hermione!
He cast a non-verbal Levicorpus that neatly hooked Bellatrix's ankle and pulled her from her feet, while he disarmed Malfoy for the second time. The pain in his eyes was beginning to morph into a throbbing headache. A green flash hissed by so near to him that he could feel the heat from it, and he instinctively dove toward the carpeting, losing his glasses in the process. But his resulting reductor was so powerful that when it flung Bellatrix backwards into the wall, she cracked the plaster.
"Get up!" he said to Malfoy in a sandy voice. It did not sound nearly as intimidating the second time. Using the Mobilicorpus again, he lofted the Slytherin into the same wall, purposely propelling him nose-first. The wails of pain and dismay almost made Harry forget his injured eyes. He restrained both of them, and this time, he snapped their wands, one right after the other, opening his hands with an air of unconcern and letting the fragments bounce hollowly down to the floor. The flinch Draco gave as the clear crack echoed around the room was almost comical. "Now," he said heavily, straining to see through the protesting fluids of his eyes, "what did you do to Hermione?"
"You'll never find her," Bellatrix taunted, leering up at him, even disheveled and covered with pale, powdered plaster. "She's probably dead by now."
"What did you take from the multiverse room?" Harry asked stolidly, trying another tack.
"Doesn't matter," Malfoy said. "It's been returned. You'll never be able to figure out which one we took. There are thousands."
"Thousands?" Harry asked nonchalantly. His mind was whirling furiously.
Bellatrix brought her hand down violently. The ends of the chain glittered metallically in the light, as they dangled from the Death Eater's fist, and Hermione just faded from view, like a bad movie projection, her mouth open in a soundless plea.
"Well, how many possibilities are there?" Malfoy asked. "How many choices do you make in a day? There is a reality for each of them."
"You sent Hermione to another reality?" Harry's voice was tired, but not really incredulous. There it was. His answer. What he'd been hoping against hope to hear, but never thought he would. And it was all couched in Malfoy's patented elite-class sneer.
"We didn't send her there, Potter. We stranded her there," Malfoy said, with some measure of satisfaction. "You can't get her back."
Harry swallowed convulsively, and the tissues of his inflamed throat protested. He wished he could see the expression on Malfoy's face.
"You're lying," he said.
"What have I left to lose?" The Slytherin retorted in a perfect imitation of Harry's earlier question.
"Tell me which one you took," Harry said, his voice vibrating dangerously. He jerked Malfoy up and away from Bellatrix by his collar, pinning him to the floor with one hand bracketed around his neck. "Tell me…now." His wand was pointed unerringly at Malfoy's face; at this close range, he could clearly make out the nuances of Draco's facial expressions. Malfoy blinked at him for a moment with wide, pale eyes, and said,
"No."
Harry's fingers flexed around Draco's neck, almost instinctively, and for a moment, the Auror was afraid that he would actually kill him. Instead, his gaze bored into that of the prostrate Slytherin, as he tried to push everything he was feeling - his hope, his fear, his fury, his despair - into that stare. And he said one word.
"Legilimens."
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He was dimly aware of the physical aspects of the destroyed billiard room, as he delved into Malfoy's mind. He could feel the soft nap of the rug beneath his knees, he could feel the pulse in Malfoy's neck beneath his fingers. But all that was secondary to actually being inside Malfoy's mind.
There was a struggle at first. Thoughts slid away from him, slippery and elusive, as the Slytherin tried desperately to erect some sort of Occlumental shield around his mind. But Harry had ambushed him, Harry was an Auror, and Harry was not taking no for an answer.
He felt as if he were slicing through random ideas and stray memories like an explorer wielding a machete in a jungle, honing in inevitably, inexorably on what he wanted. Malfoy's mind began to flail less, the fight draining away, and the memories that flashed past him began to pertain to that which he was seeking.
Malfoy was in a dormitory, while Pansy Parkinson tried to press a cool, damp towel to his cheek. He angrily knocked her hand aside.
"Mudblood bitch. How dare she even touch the heir of one of the oldest pureblood wizarding families in existence!"
**
Malfoy eyed Hermione from across the room at the Yule Ball, watching her with an almost disbelieving leer. He tossed a rude remark over his shoulder, while Crabbe and Goyle laughed.
**
Malfoy was hunched around a table in a disreputable looking tavern, with Bellatrix and Dolohov.
"He's in love with her. I'm sure of it. Even he's too much of a stupid git to realize it himself," he said in an assured tone.
"What about that Weasley boy?" Bellatrix asked languidly, tracing the pattern of the wood grain with one finger.
"He doesn't matter. Don't you understand? How she feels about Potter is of no consequence, only how he feels about her."
**
"Did anyone see you come here?" Draco's breath puffed out in the cold air from under the black hood he wore. Bellatrix raked him with a contemptuous glance.
"Don't twitch so, Nephew. You're making me nervous."
"What if someone catches me?"
"No one is going to catch you. The Ministry is geared for war. Do you think anyone is going to care about a ratty old Department in the basement? Put the cloak on."
"But the wards could - " She cut him off.
"It's been taken care of. Now go."
**
"You're going to have to take it back," Bellatrix said. They were sitting in the billiard room, and this memory was much more recent than the others had been.
"What? That's ridiculous. There's no way they could trace anything back to us." Draco chugged back a heavy glass of liquor as a nervous reflex.
"Dolohov's been compromised. Who knows what he'll tell them?"
"He doesn't know how we did it," Malfoy countered, and Bellatrix's eyes flashed in annoyance.
"Yes, but he knows that we did it. You don't think that even those pathetic imbeciles at the Ministry could figure it out? Especially with Harry Potter constantly bringing her up?"
"What could we possibly have to gain by putting it back? Its absence hasn't been noticed yet."
"You said yourself there were thousands. The Department of Mysteries is under-staffed and under-paid. The fake necklace you left behind has obviously not been used; therefore, it has not been noticed. But if Dolohov tells them anything, and they start making connections, they'll go to that room, and start testing. What if they could trace the magical resonance of that necklace back to us?"
"A five year old resonance trace?" Malfoy's tone was scathing. Bellatrix set her glass on the table with a musical clink that nevertheless spoke of finality.
"It's too big a risk," she said. "Take care of it."
**
Malfoy moved stealthily through the Ministry corridors in an invisibility cloak, slinking into the abandoned Department of Mysteries, and moving unerringly to one single door. It was ajar, and as he pushed the door open, he visibly started at the sight of Luna Lovegood at a workstation near the door, brows furrowed in concentration, as she examined a necklace, measuring something with her wand.
Caught off guard, he Stunned her. She had turned to one side as he did it, so instead of collapsing silently to the floor, she hit her head on the table, before partially falling under it. The noise rang out through the room, and Malfoy flinched.
"Luna?" came a voice from the opposite end of the room, blocked from view by a high cabinet.
"Damn it!" Malfoy swore under his breath.
"Luna, are you all - dear Merlin!" Calpurnia had emerged from where she'd been concealed. Her eyes darted from Luna's prone form to the now open door, and narrowed with suspicion. "Who's there?" she called out, raising her wand. "Answer me now, or - "
Malfoy yanked the cloak off with desperation, and Obliviated her before she could react, Stunning her as almost an afterthought.
Then he scuttled to a far corner, shrouded in shadows. Necklaces lined the walls, hung on innumerable tiny gold hooks, but this corner appeared to be long-neglected. Dust was trailing down the tangled chains in viney little tendrils. Draco scanned the corner quickly, selected one, performed an identification charm on it, and tucked it into his pocket. He then hung the necklace he'd had cupped in his hand on the hook in its stead.
With one more anxious look at the two unconscious Unspeakables, he hastily exited the room.
**
There was a firm grip on his upper arm, and Harry looked up to see what was going on. With the eye contact broken, the connection snapped. Malfoy was gasping like a fish out of water, as Harry looked up to see an Auror - Harry recognized him from the Paris office, but could not think of his name - standing above him.
"Let me see your wand, nice and - Auror Potter!" The surprise in his voice was obvious. "What are - what's going on here?"
"An arrest," Harry said laconically, offering no further information.
"We - we got an alert that a registered wand had fired an Unforgivable. We came straight away. Did - did London send - ?" The Auror gestured toward Harry with his wand, obviously confused.
"I received a tip that led me here," Harry replied, being purposefully vague. "I'm taking these two back to London with me."
"Policy dictates that the person or persons being detained - "
"I'm taking them back with me. Get your team to clean up this mess. Go over every inch of this place, and notify me of any Dark artifacts you find. And we'll need statements from everyone in the house, elves included." The other Auror opened his mouth to protest, but Harry didn't give him the opportunity to speak. "Thanks so much."
Harry hoisted Malfoy up none too gently, and Levitated Bellatrix in front of the fireplace. More Aurors were beginning to spill into the room, pausing for a moment to gape at the scene - and its players - and then moving on to do their jobs. Releasing Malfoy, Harry reached warily for the floo powder, but Malfoy was still looking dazed, as if he wasn't quite sure what had just happened.
"You - you - you Legilimensed me!" he said, pointing an accusing finger at Harry, as the flames glowed green.
"Give the man a N.E.W.T.," Harry said, sarcastically. "Auror Detention Facility - Level Four," he shouted to the flames.
The head of a bored looking witch appeared, her eyes flipping casually and without surprise over Harry.
"Purpose of Floo?" she asked.
"Transport of two prisoners," Harry answered.
"Password?"
"Constantinople," he replied. She turned to one side, manipulating a ward with her wand.
"Floo's open. Bring `em through."
"I want Aurors at the ready. High-flight risk." The witch made a nondescript noise that might have been acquiescence, and disappeared from the flames.
"You broke into my mind without my consent," Draco declared.
"Are you still hung up on that?"
"My solicitor - "
"Nobody is going to touch you with a ten-meter Quidditch hoop, Malfoy. For five years, you've been harboring Voldemort's most trusted lieutenant, who has been documented as conspiring against one of the Heroes of the Light. And as for me, they've all been calling me crazy, but I was right, again. They are going to be kissing my arse, but good." Malfoy must have found truth in his words, because he replied, nearly stammering in his rush to get the words out.
"You said - you said if I gave you information, that you'd - you'd keep me from being Kissed. You said - " Harry tossed the restrained Bellatrix into the Floo, and reached for Malfoy, smiling brilliantly as he did so.
"I lied."
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AN: Okay, more action - hope it was up to snuff.
I will be going out of town in a couple of days, so I wanted to get an update out before I go. Don't forget about my story while I'm gone, because I should be able to update again pretty soon after I get back. I will be without a computer for the duration (10 days or so). I really hate to be leaving at a time like this because I have had the best time writing chapters 12 and 13.
See you in a few. You may leave a review on your way out if you like.
lorien
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