Harry
When we talk about Gwen Jolly, there are certain words we avoid around non-Auror personnel.
Words like scarred, or altered. Mangled. Ruined.
Broken.
The word destroyed is out.
Permanently fucked is not on.
When talking to the press, don't mention the crown of roses. Forget the way her skin wraps the wire-fine bones. The way the petals of flesh flush pink, then pale, with every beat of her heart.
Don't say mad, or brutal, or savage, or twisted.
Sick.
The words cruel, and untenable are fully negative, fully forbidden.
Do not say sorcery, or sorcerer. Witch doctor. Root worker.
Standard protocol, this.
Never serve anyone a plate they can spin.
Never, ever say the words dark, or elemental.
When anyone asks, blank out the image of her in the bed at St. Mungo's, curled, hands reaching for the blunt wedge of her toes. Forget the gentle flow of the medi-witches around her, silent but for the one offering sips of water in a whisper.
Don't even breathe the words drawn, or compelled. Lured.
Enticed.
When we talk about Gwen Jolly, she will have encountered the assailant. She will have been abducted.
Don't say strapped or chained. Don't say kept. Say held, as if Prosper Roque spent those weeks she was gone cradling her in his arms like a bunton-swaddled infant.
Don't mutter about undecipherable mechanisms. Don't say feral magics.
Pretend Benoit never stared through the glass to her room, muttering "wildcat voodoo" and "bare hands and sheer will" and "We're in the shit, now, son."
Talking about Gwen Jolly, remember to re-christen her the Victim.
Never, ever let on precisely what she is the victim of.
.........
I'm stopped just inside the tree line, blinking in the sudden razor of sunlight cutting through the branches above, when Benoit glides past, steps light and noiseless as a doe's.
"Rough night, Potter?" he says. "Not that I want to pry, but...you look like shit."
I glance down, expect to see him floating, feet treading on nothing but an inch of air. He stops by the branch of a juniper, wraps the single white hair fluttering from its bristles around the tip of his wand, places the single white hair in the evidence envelope. He seals the envelope with his wand, drops the envelope in the bag hanging from his shoulder, and weaves a Marker into the air.
"I mean, normally, I'd keep my opinion to myself," he says, "but I get the feeling it's the general consensus." He tilts his head toward the tree line, the expanse of city on the other side where all the other people who think I look like shit are milling through their day. I glance behind me. Through the trunks and branches, Gibson sweeps for trace along the bike trail. Muldoon walks the perimeter of the pond. Somehow I doubt those two have registered anything beyond the fact that I'm here, same as they are this Thursday morning, looking for lost pieces of Gwen Jolly.
"That so?" I say, following along into the trees, boots squishing, sinking through the layers of wet leaves. Every step, the ground squelches beneath my weight, but Benoit picks, silent, across the forest floor, stealthy as a wild pig. Or Pan. Some other creature with cloven hooves. I look at the trees, duly search for details in the shifting slats of bright/dark.
A stiff breeze whines through the branches, smacks cold against the skin. The tang of decaying leaves tickles my nose, but it's still not a patch of woods in the park I'm walking through so much as a poor rendering of a patch of woods in the park. A shallow image, everything blurred, flattened to the foreground. All contrast, no perspective.
Ahead, Benoit squats, levitates one white feather. He catches the feather in an envelope, seals the envelope, drops the envelope into his bag, weaves a Marker into the air. I have to admire his practiced efficiency. I lurch through my days like a broken tin toy.
"It isn't an issue, yet, Potter," Head Auror Pendleton had said yesterday afternoon, leaning forward to make sure I could clearly see his eyes beneath the Cro-Magnon brow, "but I'm concerned this air of distraction might eventually result in an unintentional compromise of the investigation."
Despite what everyone seems to think, I am all too aware of this deficit in my perception. Thoughts flit, refuse to light. Nothing pulls. Nothing holds gravity. Not Benoit's voice up ahead, talking, talking. Not Gwen Jolly in her bed at St. Mungo's, her body shivering toward every sound. Not her blown-out eyes dripping tears through pale lashes, or Prosper Roque, or the other one he's taken, or the wild, hybrid magic he's using on us all.
Since I gave up sleeping, nothing touches me.
"Don't misunderstand," Benoit is saying, hunkered, swabbing something from a jutting root. "It's not like I sought her out. She just happened to step onto the elevator last night..."
I've missed something somewhere, and a puff of white dances by on the wind, then another, and I stick out my arm to catch the second on my sleeve before it floats away. Evidence, this. Collectible. More confirmation of what we already know-that Gwen Jolly stumbled all through these woods in the early light, a bleached wraith of wasted arms, legs, and ribcage, her new wings catching on branches, feathers snapping, strewing behind.
The jogger's exact statements this morning were, "staggered from the tree line," and "began to run, but slipped on the grass," and "screeched something ungodly when she touched the pavement." What the jogger couldn't know was Gwen Jolly slipped, unable to gain traction on toes grafted to form a more doll-like foot. She made the only noise she could through the empty space where her tongue used to be.
"...so, I offered her a beignet," Benoit says over his shoulder. "That got a smile."
I guide the white puff into an envelope, seal the envelope, drop the envelope into my bag.
"... asked how I liked it, here, and I told her my partner could be a little quiet, but it was otherwise fine. And then she said you tended toward quiet when you hadn't slept..." He stands, faces me, lifting what looks to be the thin strand of black beads Gwen Jolly had been wearing when she disappeared.
"I'm sorry." My head wobbles. "Who is this, again?"
"Christ, Potter. Your girl. In the elevator. Last night. The "lift," whatever..."
My girl.
Ginny, hair streaming over her shoulders. A safe, split-second blur before I remember that's not right.
And who he really means, I refuse to think.
"The Ministry pay her extra to be around at all hours, or is she just... you know...," he smiles, hair and teeth luminous in the sunlight, "nocturnal?" The last word - the promise inside to find out - lands like a stinging hex to the solar plexus. I take a step back.
The whole of London, and she finds her way into a lift with Benoit.
There are advantages to living outside the reach of things. Cracks smooth in an instant. Holes fill quick with apathy. Only this time it's not happening, and I look past him into the trees, try to think of Gwen Jolly, of what we're supposed to be doing out here, and wait for this conversation to end.
The strand of beads hangs broken, rotates between us. Benoit says, "Because she seems like the type of woman who can handle herself in the dark."
His voice. So damn sure. I hold out an envelope, begin to vomit up words. "I've always known her to be more of a morning person, myself."
"Oh, yeah?" He guides the beads into the envelope. "Could be she's the two things at once."
I shake my head, shove the sealed envelope into my bag, then look up to meet his gaze, square, "Whatever you're thinking, she's not like that."
It sounds harsh in my own ears. Both his brows flick up then settle back to neutral. "Like what?" He lifts his chin, locked in, listening.
"You know what."
"I don't." He smiles, again. A hundred watts beaming. "What is it, exactly, Miss Granger's not like, Potter?"
"Just other people. She's different. With her - what you see, that's exactly what you get."
Hermione, last night in the pub. Her face bare, her eyes too dark. Her hair twisted back, cinched in, that bun of hers like a punishment. The coat that used to fit swamping her shoulders, a thing borrowed from better times.
What I'm saying is, what you've seen is all there is.
What I'm saying is, there are no surprises beneath those Ministry robes.
What I mean is, stay away.
Benoit pretends to not understand what I'm saying. He's still smiling, still knowing something I don't.
"Oh. Well..." He weaves a marker into the air. Then, overlaying my bullshite with a thick spatter of his own, he says, "I'll definitely keep that in mind."
.....
Joan Scarlet says, "I must say, you've done an excellent job of recording-" She recrosses her legs, adjusts her readers, says, "Really, I'm quite pleased you continued..." She sits back, gaze swinging back and forth over the pages in her lap. Her spear grip points the tip of her pen dead between my eyes.
It's nothing personal, this. Just habit, really. A matter of comfort and leverage and the way her elbow settles into the grey suede arm of her chair. It is not the "purposeful dominant posturing" Benoit would call it. Even if it does feel like a bit of an onslaught. Even if it does feel like, if she wanted, she could stain a third eye into my forehead from across the Navajo rug.
I slouch in my seat, out of the line of fire, I think, and let my eyelids drop closed. I try not to count the turn of the pages as she reads.
Joan Scarlet's office is like the desert after dusk- everything the colour of baked sand and a sky going blue-to-black. A room designed for drifting toward inevitable conclusions. No hard vertical lines. Just one gentle horizon after another, and the sound of the aquarium plipping over my shoulder, and the warm, dry air breathing from the vent above. Sleep. I feel it, the velvet black lining plush inside my skull, and for the first time in weeks, I could sink right in. A mutinous little voice says it is my hour. I'm paying for it, I should get to spend it how I like. And it would be so easy to slide away, here, to just lie back and let go. Only, Joan Scarlet is still turning pages. Still holding me in place with the tip of her pen.
She makes a breath noise in the back of her throat, and when I look, my book is still open, spread over the flat surface of her legal pad, the words protected from sight by the hand of one arm grasping the wrist of the other atop the pages. Her pen tip points toward the red chevroned corner of the Navajo rug. I straighten in my chair.
"It's been awhile since we last met, Harry." Dr. Scarlet's voice is the clear aquamarine of an early spring sky. Calm, hypnotic blue. "What brings you back here, today?"
Back here. It's not a judgment, just an acknowledgement. I gesture to my own face, to the aubergine skin sagging around my eyes. The broken capillaries. The sad-clown mouth.
"It's come to the attention of my superior officer that I might not be...functioning as I should. I was urged to speak with someone." I realize my head is bobbing for no reason, then stop. "A professional."
She glances at my book, then back to me. "And you still don't feel comfortable speaking to any of the Ministry...professionals?"
"No."
She nods, her eyes hidden, then not, then hidden by the yellow light reflected from her readers.
"Alright, then. When you're ready."
I swallow. The central heating kicks off. The light over the aquarium hums. Joan Scarlet's office smells of a combination of cold, snapped carrot, fresh reams of white paper, and the wet metal of a dessert spoon licked clean. It's odd and chilly, and defies association. Easier to take in, I suppose, by people who need to breathe deep breaths.
I shake my head, shrug, gnaw at cheek flesh between my back molars. Joan Scarlet shifts.
"You know I prefer you to open the dialogue, Harry, but," she taps her pen twice against my book, "after all these weeks, I must admit to a pressing curiosity-and if you don't mind, this once, may I finally ask-who is 'H'?"
The air in the room contracts. I press my tongue to my teeth.
"It's a friend. An old friend."
"It?"
"Well... she. She's a friend."
Dr. Scarlett looks down at the page under her fingers, then back up to me. "Oh. I was wondering because you never write out her name..."
"Hermione. Her name is Hermione, and it's quite long... to write out."
"Ah. It's just, she's been here - rather prominently - from the beginning, yet you've never spoken of her."
"Well, she's a friend."
Dr. Scarlet smiles. "Yes, you've said."
The flesh finally gives. A thin, iron taste of inside seeping out.
"There's nothing else to say."
......
A few weeks ago, the night he left her, Ron turned up dripping Italian food on my doorstep. Hermione, he said, had gone to Weymouth with her parents. His eyes welled when he looked into the take-away tray, and his hand was a shaking machine scraping through a gory slab of noodles and cheese, but never feeding the food into his mouth. The edge of his stowed trunk jutted from under the steps as we left for pub, and I ignored it. He planted us at a table under a glowing red skull with one burnt out eye, and the whiskey was cheap swill, and I still wanted to pretend this was like every time before, so I said something stupid about the therapeutic value of a few nights in the bedsit over the shop and a pissed chat-up with Rosmerta, and then Ron shifted to dig in his pocket, palmed something onto the centre of the table and said, "Don't think I'll be back in the flat by mid-week this time, mate."
The diamond blazed, a burst of splintered neon red shafting through the black glass box where I hide all the things I should not know; sunset light over dusty blue, the gravity of her body at rest.
Later, Ron, half-hauling, half dragging me back up the steps to my flat, said, but Merlin, I've taken this a titch harder than he expected.
……...
When the barman called her name last night, Ron's only tell was a slight tilt of the head, a quick glance over my shoulder, then done. Lux ticked a fingernail on the rim of her glass, whispered something about awkward, pub-wide silences, and I turned in time to watch Hermione's lips move, make more words than just "thank you," then flex into a smile that died before it reached her cheeks.
It wasn't until hours later, after he'd come back from seeing Lux home to Hogsmeade, as Ron and I were walking to the curry shop down the block, that he blew into his clasped hands, dodged from the path of a blind man tapping the pavement with a white cane, then laughed. "What are the odds, eh?"
And, right then, head marinating in the three shots of firewhiskey I'd downed while he was gone, I wasn't really up for figuring. But, now, leaving Joan Scarlet's office, metabolizing the quarter vial of Berardi's Brain Tonic I necked in the ground floor loo, the recollections swarm bright and unrelenting, and I seem to have suddenly been able to work it all out.
She had shown us the place. She had taken our hands and brought us there one sticky, August evening just after the war. She liked the chips they served, and the house cider, and the "precise way they sliced the pickles." She had been the one who, years ago now, led us to the table in the back corner.
The odds, if I'm calculating, were always better than fair. And, in some way, I may have been depending upon it last night, the better than fair probability of Hermione seeing us. Her seeing Ron, and Ron seeing her, and the two of them somehow realizing they really didn't like this business of parting ways.
What I'm saying is, I might have been trying to put things right.
London is at its ugliest this evening, the tops of the buildings across the street washed in sick, yellow light. A piss pool of a November sunset. Here is what's real, I tell myself, here, now. But this brew is far from the dried doxy droppings wanker Eddie Carmichael tried to pass off to us in fifth year. The vial in my pocket quivers like an idling Firebolt against the pads of my fingers, proof of sound potioneering, and I can't seem to scatter the colours of the golden spring evening gathering edges in my brain. Can't squint and make them blur.
There will never be a good excuse. All I can say for myself is that if magic is just another way of exerting one's intent upon the world, then it stands to reason, maybe, sometimes, a moment of unbound inclination is enough to ripple the smooth surface of what is. Maybe, sometimes, a thing springs into being, a new thing, but with deep roots and a long, hidden history. Maybe, sometimes, What Is becomes Why Is It, and in the shift, in that tectonic recalibration from certainty to query, everything twists, then grinds down screaming.
By Joan Scarlet's clock, it's ten minutes too late to call this a breakthrough.
But as the doctor would have me tell it the way I remember, then it goes like this: What comes first is the light. Late May light through their window. Sunset burning over a dusty blue dress. Not the empty settee that's supposed to be, but instead the keyhole shape of her back. A fall of fabric. The bare soles of her feet, heel nestled into arch. I duck back into the fireplace, but then, no. I've come for the file on the coffee table. She left it for me, and I might as well have it. It's only because I'm watching to make sure I don't wake her that I even notice the lock of her hair snagged around the button on the back of the settee. I think of my best mate, Ron, and of heading off trouble at the pass, and how it will be one less thing to stoke her anger when he finally comes home, and I lean over, unhook what's been caught.
The coil clings to the tip of my finger, then springs away, bounces back into the fray fast as any newly freed thing. Something in the way it moves, the way the light catches in the whorls. Seekers see and follow. It's just reflex, then, my hand dipping into the pool of curls, and once there, it feels too familiar to be something I shouldn't do.
Hermione's hair. An entire adolescence breathing it, tasting it, blowing it away from my lips. A once constant presence I've fished from my food and blinked from my eyes. The autumn she raked it loose by the handful, I'd find long singles in odd places. Woven into the wrist of my jumper. Outside, whipping from the charred twig of a half-burnt limb. And, once, as I about to have a wash, perfectly spiraled down the length of my cock, like the candy stripe on a barber's pole.
The memory rolls through my skin, flares in my hands, sparks the urge to know - what does a man do with hair like this, apart from gather it, tuck it gently against his palm like a tiny, warm animal? Testing, I slide my finger inside one ring, then another, let the strands form around my knuckles. Not hair to stroke, and certainly not hair to comb the fingers through, but if I just move into it, cradle it in the cup of my hand, Hermione's hair sort of cradles me back.
Part of her. Not "one less thing to stoke her anger." Why did I even think that?
Why had I considered her pain only in terms of his convenience?
Why hadn't I just considered Hermione?
What is.
Why is it?
She's not supposed to be here. I look from her hair wound around my fingers to her face. The light touching her cheek, the damp fringe of her lashes. Something went wrong. Ron has come and gone. I listen to her breathe, in then out, and I hope, maybe, she's having the night she is dressed for in her dreams.
This is none of my business, and I should go, leave them to it, snarl the knot of them in my mind that much tighter. But I push it, stand over her, think on it all one beat too long, and like a film run in reverse, all the ways I've forever tangled the two of them together in my head unlace, separate. Total fission. Every filament of Ron shrinks away, and she is suddenly alone in front of me, her own lines coalescing, sharp and clear. The slight upturn of her nose, the tip and swoop of her parted lips, her hand balled, like an infant's, under her chin. Hollows and wedges, slopes and swells filling the inside of the dusty blue dress. Her whole tender body. Skin, bones, and scars.
And she is so fucking human it hurts to see.
When had I forgotten?
Or have I never bothered to know?
What happens next, I can only call it a reckoning.
A torrent of memories. An entire adolescence. A million Hermiones all at once laughing, cheering, reading, running, gasping, fighting, falling. In my chest, her weight minus his solidifies, black hole heavy. I bend with its mass. I want to kneel beside her, wrap myself around her naked legs. I want to guard her vulnerable ankles, defend her bare knees.
I don't understand this sting in my eyes, or the way every queasy, confused cell throbs toward her. Maybe in her sleep she feels whatever this is radiating out of me, because her eyelids flutter, and I panic, let go of her hair, and back away, breath held. And then I'm in the Floo, spinning through, but not crossing the hearth into our flat. I can't, cannot let this inside, and Ginny isn't here to help hold it at bay, so I fold between the walls of the fireplace, sit in the ashes, shake and stare at my hands.
Don't go back.
But, in my head, I'm already there.
Don't.
By their settee, my fingers in her hair, whispering for her to wake up.
Don't.
Don't.
I summon the Ogden's from the sideboard. It's a few shots light, but I hardly ever partake, so it's still more than enough. I spin off the lid, and I drink. Every time her hair brushes my lips, I drink. Every time her body weighs in my hands, I drink. And when the bottle finally tilts from my grasp, there's not enough liquid left to wake to a mess the next morning.
I sealed her under black glass, in the place light wouldn't reach. And It worked for a while. Except, now I see it didn't. Not really. The months and months worth of words in my black book are how much it didn't work, written proof of how impossible it is to hide something so big without displacing several other tonnes of psychic rubble.
This Berardi's is bloody astounding stuff. Instant, overwhelming clarity in a tiny, glass vial. I wish now I'd never laid hands on it, but I can't help but think Joan Scarlet would be pleased. I almost turn around, then, run back before she leaves for the evening, just to show her I'm not as resistant as I seem. I want to tell her it's not her, it's the guilt, and the idea of seeing it splashed across the Prophet if someone ever got hold of her notes: POTTER PAWS GAL PAL; SUFFERS SPELLSHOCK SURGE. It's the fear that I'll have to tell Hermione, that I'll have to admit I'm the one who rippled our smooth surface, and now we've all fallen sideways because of it, and I don't know how to help us back to our feet.
Joan Scarlet would be pleased. And I almost turn around. But then I think of saying Hermione's name aloud for the third time today, and I just keep walking, jogging, running away.
........
From the Apparition point, I see Benoit eating something wrapped in foil at the mouth of the alley, his jaws working in a big, mechanical up and down. He swipes at his lips with a paper napkin, turns his head to track a passing silver Jaguar. He takes another big bite, chews, swallows, chews, wipes his lips again, and then, though I'm now standing right beside him, speaks toward the street.
"Bad news," he says, then looks at the sky. "A neighbour's niece found crosses outside the Pettit flat. Guess where?" He pauses. My head falls back in defeat.
"The urn with the pansies."
"The urn with the pansies." He shoves the rest of the kebab into his mouth, crumples the foil, wipes his fingers, chews, chews, chews.
The urn I checked over myself, one week to the day after Victoria Petit walked out of her flat and disappeared. Nothing but potting soil and purple flowers.
"How…"
"Ague weed? Hemlock? Who knows what all he's tied into the damn things." We begin to walk. Benoit's mouth purses then draws back as he sucks flatbread from his teeth. I want to know about Gwen Jolly, but when the passing uni-age female, eyeing us and muttering to her mate that she'd "like to fit in between that," doesn't even rate a glance, I know he's too far in his head to talk. I wait until we're on the Charing Cross platform to ask whether or not he's spoken to the hospital.
"They'll attempt to reduce the wingspan and separate the grafts. They could remove the crown, but they say she won't heal the way we do, and it'd hurt like fuck." He crosses his arms over his chest, watches the train slide up. "Her eyes… Her eyes are shot forever, and whatever he's done with her tongue..." He stops. We mind the gap. Inside the carriage, we grasp the same pole, do a quick canvas of faces, as if we'd know who we were looking for if we saw him. It's habit, now, looking, I've looked more Londoners in the face in the last seven weeks than I have in all the four years I've lived here, combined. I've memorized more tube routes, walked longer stretches of pavement, traipsed more piss-sprayed alleys. "Prosper Roque's land bound," Benoit had said, "and so are we."
Outside Victoria Pettit's flat, a cross has already crumbled to dust between the forensic technicians' latex-gloved fingers. Benoit flashes some sort of card, tells the two techs to wait in the garden, then, spectacularly sodding all protocol, negotiates a deal with a passing grey hoodie on a skateboard. Twenty pounds and a pack of Silk Cut later, the five of us squat, off property, behind a parked Opel Omega as The Hoodie unties the cross bundle over newspaper.
"Alright," Benoit says, "just spread it out, nice and gentle so nothing snaps." The skin of The Hoodie's knuckles is tight and red with cold. Inside his personal cavern, there's a fierce violet bruise below his ear, a livid ring of teeth marks. Behind his head, the street lamp's reflection flickering in a tail light is warped and fascinating, and I realize my eyes are being pushed from the pile of sticks in front of me. Magic, greasing my brain. Thoughts and intentions slide over, under. I close my eyes, fix my desire to see into a clear point, but when I look down, my eyes fall on the braided laces of one of the forensic tech's shoes.
"Good. You're done, man. Thank you," Benoit says. The Hoodie rolls off, well paid for his five minutes.
But the techs have questions. "How could he…," and "these are like the ones that kept turning up 'round the Jolly flat, aren't they," and "but this property was combed, surveilled…" Benoit deflects their questions. Their eyes have narrowed. They're agitated. And then they're not. They climb into their vehicle and drive away. Sometimes, I want to saw off my wand hand for the things we do to the minds of decent, ordinary people.
Not looking, I gently fold the paper with the broken cross inside. We'll deliver it to the Unspeakables, even though, just as last time, my proximity is already reducing all its parts to black grit. Sticks, weed, and twine-charring to ash without ever having been touched by fire.
We sit on opposite sides of the empty carriage on the way back to Charing Cross. I hold the paper and Benoit stares into the light above, forearms on his thighs, the tips of his thumbs and pointer fingers pressed together, forming the shape of an arrow around the air. He could be meditating, or he could be trying to gather the light to himself inside. He could be focusing it to a laser beam that will stream from his finger-arrow and scorch straight through the floor.
"This won't do, you know," I say. "We can't just pull any geezer off the street every time we need to see something."
"Why not?" He says, trance clearing. "Worked, didn't it?"
"Yeah, but there has to be another way. One that doesn't see us shifting coal dust back to the Ministry."
Benoit smiles. "Six years, you don't think I've looked for another way?" He leans back, pulls a pack of cigarettes from inside his coat, taps one out and tucks it behind his ear. "Do you have any idea what you have there?" He nods toward the newspaper.
"A grotty, old copy of The Telegraph."
"You're a fucking riot. That," he points, "is a proxy, and it's light years from the sweet, little poppets he used to work back home."
Benoit has a solid love/hate relationship with these crosses. He speaks of them with a worshiper's awe while cursing their existence. He says to think of all we've seen, today. How they hide and repel, shield and deceive. He says they discern who might want to gut them for their secrets from who couldn't possibly and then they react accordingly. They keep us away, confuse us and London's Finest long enough for all signs of Prosper Roque's workings to fade, and then self-destruct when we get close enough to harvest traces of him from their insides.
Benoit says, "Do you know how many layers of spellwork it would take for one of us to make an object like that?"
I don't. From the rise of his voice, I can tell he's lost for a number, as well. I open my mouth to say I wouldn't even know where to begin when I get a millisecond flash of Hermione, tongue between her teeth, wand pinched between her thumb and forefinger, flicking spells over a bundle of sticks, curious as a cat. I get a flash of her delight when she figures it out. I get a flash of myself riding in the wake of that delight, and I imagine finding one of these crosses and keeping it whole, wrapping it up in a blue bow and giving it to her for Christmas.
The entire, mad line of thought lasts less than two seconds, and my face is too hot, and I clamp my mouth closed, shake my head and shrug as if to answer.
"Right. Me neither. And yet Roque lights a few candles and slaughters a couple of songbirds and he's able to just think this shit into being." Benoit gestures at the paper, shifts sideways in his seat, lifts a foot into the seat in front of him. "He's getting better and better, Potter. Watch. He'll up the ante, soon."
Better might be the last word I'd use to describe what Prosper Roque's becoming, but I know what he means. Gwen Jolly's still alive, and Victoria Pettit has been gone two weeks, and we're just now certain she's ours to search for.
"That kid could see because he wasn't looking." Benoit rubs his thumb on his chin as he thinks aloud. "He doesn't know Victoria Pettit. Doesn't know she's missing, doesn't even know she exists. Maybe temporary Obliviatiion..."
"But," I jump in before the idea can grow roots, "you were able to see while that boy was pulling it apart."
"Some of it. If you sort of let your eyes slide that way more than any other, you can sometimes catch a glimpse."
"Yeah? So what did you see?"
"What I thought I'd see. A sprig of hemlock. Ague. A sliver of bone. Some black dirt."
The newspaper is weightless between my fingers. "I never saw any of it. None at all."
The carriage glides into the station. Benoit touches two fingers to the window, soft, like a person might touch a pair of lips they love to make them stop moving.
"Yeah," he mutters, stands, stows his hands deep in his pockets, "Well, maybe Mr. Roque's out to blind you but good."
……..
The Unspeakable, a pale, shivery witch named Kandle, blinks moon eyes over my shoulder at Benoit. She accepts the newspaper from me as if it's a newborn monster in a blanket, with both hands, but held far from her body. She works up a smile for Benoit, then trembles off into the dim while I finish signing the receiving forms.
The lift doors open, and I can't ignore the smudging edges, the exhaustion settling so dull grey and heavy I leave it to Benoit to push the right buttons. I lean against the back wall and Benoit stands slightly forward, shuffles to the side when we pick up another passenger from the Atrium carrying a small paper cup of soup. I close my eyes, rest my head against the paneling as the passenger and Benoit discuss the soup-the utter necessity of bay in anything brought to boil in a pot. The lift dings and I open my eyes to the lit number four over the door. The passenger steps off and I look down as, thirty feet away in the corridor, Hermione looks up.
Stutter and recover. Her feet keep moving as her gaze slides off mine to rest on who is beside me. The smile starts in her eyes, washes over her lips. A shy, wordless 'hello' for him before she turns away to the left.
The doors clank shut. My hands hang cold-numb at my sides.
"You know, I think you're right, Potter," Benoit says, the width of his grin distorting the words. He reaches, slaps his flat palm twice to my chest. "What you see really is what you get."
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Thank you so much for reading. And if you'd like to comment, that'd be lovely, too. :)