Unofficial Portkey Archive

Chapter 3: The States

"Is it possible that International floo is even worse than the local one?" Hermione coughed as they were spat out into the Portland hub.

"I think so" Harry admitted, struggling to stand upright as the room still swerved oddly around him. When he was finally straightened out he brushed himself off and took her suitcase to carry for her. "So where do we start?"

"Sleep" Hermione said to Harry's surprise. "I know time is of the essence but if I don't catch a quick nap first I am going to be too tired to function."

Harry couldn't argue with that logic, so they found a nearby muggle hotel and got adjoining rooms, agreeing to meet in the lobby in four hours. When the time came Hermione was still stifling a yawn as she found Harry waiting for her.

"Are you still tired? I can do some investigating on my own if you need to catch up on your sleep" he offered.

"Are you calling me old Potter?" she laughed, giving him a playful shove. When she touched him she could feel the solid muscles of his chest beneath his shirt. He's still in such great shape, I probably look like an old woman next to him. Suddenly, and for no real reason, she wished she'd spent more time on a few cosmetic spells.

"Here are the locations we should check out first" she said, handing him a piece of parchment. "These are all the locations of the victims homes. Broderick gave them to me before we left."

"Okay, so I guess we grab a cab and have them take us to these places?"

"And then what, break into these homes while the cab driver watches?" Hermione laughed. "I'm ahead of you. We have a rental car waiting outside and I happen to own a GPS."

"Look at you and your fancy muggle tech!" Harry laughed, giving her a high-five. "I just hope you know how to drive in America because I've only done it a few times and I find it to be a bit of a frightening thing. Everything's all backwards."

"How bad can it be?" she responded. Forty-five minutes later after several near collisions and a few wrong turns she found out exactly how bad it was. "People are driving like maniacs!"

"Well, I don't think it's any more chaotic than London, but I don't think either of us drive frequently enough to be well practiced."

"I vow to figure out an integrated charm that will get this car to drive itself based on the GPS system."

"Well, if anyone could figure it out it would be you!" Harry laughed, impressed with her vigor. The first place they stopped at was a triple decker apartment right near the outskirts of Portland. Nobody seemed to notice as they walked right up to the door and let themselves in once they were sure it was empty. The apartment was a bit filthy, with dirty clothes from the now deceased owner scattered everywhere, a sink full of dishes that had attracted a swarm of fruit flies, and an odorous, overflowing trashcan.

"This fits the profile" Hermione mumbled, covering her nose the stench. "The victim was a 27 year old single male."

"Sexist much?" Harry retorted.

"It's not sexism, it's a fact that you men can be slobs."

"I'll have you know that I not, and never was a slob. The Dursleys would never have allowed for such behavior. Now Ron on the other hand..."

"Will be a slob until the day he dies" she chuckled, sliding some rubber gloves on before investigating. "Let's split up, I'll take the back rooms, you take the front. Look for anything that seems out of place or is giving off a magic aura. You should be able to sense anything that's cursed as standing out from the rest of these muggle items."

They spent about an hour searching and found nothing. They moved onto the next victim's house but relatives of the deceased were already packing up their belongings and moving them out. The next three victims homes were unoccupied so they were able to investigate, but yet again they came up with nothing.

At the end of their long and fruitless day they headed back to the hotel, tired and discouraged. Harry offered to order some pizza and they each got cleaned up before meeting back in her room to go over their limited and ultimately useless notes.

"I see no connection between the victims besides the fact that they all live in Portland" Hermione sighed, grabbing a slice hungrily as she poured over her notes. "They are different genders, different ages, different ethnicities, and none of them have similar jobs or even similar income. The only thing they all have in common is that they all lived alone."

"And all of their homes were dirty" Harry noted between bites. "I mean, every house we went into was in need of a good cleaning."

Hermione jumped up suddenly, nearly knowing the pizza box off of the bed they were sitting on. "Harry, you're a genius!" She ignored his furrowed brow and ran to retrieve her research notes. "I thought the beetle curse sounded like a long shot, but it makes perfect sense!"

"The curse where a beetle crawls into the ear and eats all of your brains out?" he shuddered.

"Yes, it's rather a lot trickier than it sounds. The beetle needs to be able to consume quite a lot or mass in a fast time span and then not grow any larger so that it can still crawl back out and move onto a next victim. It's a rather miraculous, albeit cruel and sick, bit of magic. I had nearly forgotten, but I read that these beetles are attracted to places that are dirty, places where mold and rotten food and things like that are common."

"So someone cursed some beetle and it's just been crawling around Portland killing people? A single little beetle is going to be awfully hard to find Hermione, not to mention that whoever is doing this could have cursed more than one beetle... what if there are hundreds of these things running around?"

She bit her lip pensively as she considered this. "Based on the rate of deaths I'm willing to bet that there's only one. Furthermore, this curse takes a lot of preparation work according to the book, it's not just a simple enchantment. So no, I think there's only one bug eating beetle out there. But there could be more if we don't work fast."

"There's never enough time" Harry sighed, laying back on her bed and closing his eyes. "What do we do next?"

"I suppose we figure out how this little insect has been transporting itself all over Portland. It's covered a good amount of ground in a short period of time." She took the opportunity to study his face while his eyes were closed. A shadow of stubble was aligning his jaw and he had faint purple bags forming under his eyes. She resisted a strange urge to brush his dark hair back from his forehead and trace the shape of his lightning bolt scar. He's still so handsome she thought, noticing that grey hair was starting to grow along his temples. It's okay for me to think these things, he is my best friend and I love him... it doesn't mean I'm in love with him.

The thought of being in love with Harry was unsettling, and once more she was reminded of her many fights with Ron over his jealousy towards Harry. She felt a sharp pang of guilt for looking at Harry the way she was and she tore her gaze away quickly. After a moment she realized how silent he was and observed the steady pace of his breathing. He had fallen asleep.

She yawned suddenly, realizing how exhausted she was and she cleared the notes and now empty pizza box off the bed. Carefully she laid beside him, making sure there was a good amount of space between them. We're just friends sharing a bed she reassured herself before sleep crept in.

*****

Harry awoke with a feeling of warmth and contentment that he hadn't felt in a very long time. There was a woman in his arms and her steady breathing was soothing. He buried his face against her neck and inhaled, smelling a unique combination of lavender and parchment that reminded him of his best friend. He sighed happily, thinking of Hermione.

Hermione... oh shit! slowly his brain woke up and he realized that somehow he had moved in his sleep into a rather compromising position in which he was spooning her as she slept. Worse yet, a certain part of him was reacting in a way that was more than a bit friendly. Carefully he extricated himself from their position and slipped away, praying she wouldn't wake up in this embarrassing moment. Fortunately, she was deeply asleep and did not budge as he rolled away and retreated to the bathroom.

Splashing his face with cold water his emerald eyes stared back at him in the mirror. She would have cussed me out pretty good if she had woken up. Probably would have hexed me a few times for good measure too. It meant nothing though; I'm a guy, I've been single for over a year now. Of course my body would react like that, it's not like...

"Harry?" he heard her call out and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He smoothed out his wrinkled shirt and tried to come out of the bathroom in the most composed, nonchalant way.

"I guess we dozed off" she shrugged, already gathering her things to head back out. "We need to get moving though. They were all brought to the same morgue after their bodies were discovered. That seems like a good place to start. Go get cleaned up and put on your suit... we'll have to impersonate FBI or something like that."

"You don't think they'll be a little thrown off by the accents and lack of a badge?"

"Honestly Harry, you're a wizard aren't you?" she teased. "We'll confound them."

Her tone was perfectly normal and business-like so he relaxed a bit, feeling certain that she hadn't noticed his aggressive cuddling. Once he was properly dressed she met him in a very business professional black skirt and black blazer. He thought they looked like a fairly good representation of the agents he'd seen in American films, so they headed back out and arrived at the morgue with far fewer incidents than their first driving attempt.

Once inside they were greeted by a security guard who looked half asleep. He was watching something on a small TV and wearing half of a doughnut on the front of his uniform. Hermione barely had to confound him before he was eagerly unlocking whatever door they requested and leaving them alone to investigate. "Almost too easy" Hermione muttered as they set to work looking for signs of the cursed little insect.

"Don't jinx it" Harry responded, pulling back the sheets on a few cadavers to get a closer look.

"Ugh really Harry, do you have to get so up close and personal with those bodies?"

"You make it sound perverse when you say it that way. And yes, I'm guessing that if the little bugger is still around here he's going to be huddling close to bodies. It likes decay right?"

"Your logic is sound, but I don't know how you're not vomiting."

"It's not the first dead body I've seen" he said quietly and she felt a pang of sadness at his words but said nothing. She had known that his job as an auror had been far from pleasant, and that his days of facing death and destruction had not ended with Voldemort. She tried not to think about it too much for the sake of her sanity, but she was certain he had faced unspeakable acts of cruelty and inhumanity. Sometimes the cases she was working on would require reviewing his field reports. Just reading about the details and seeing the pictures had lead to sleepless nights. She couldn't imagine what is what like for him, being there first hand.

She was suddenly reminded of a time shortly before Ron had proposed to her and Harry's partner at the time had been killed. He wasn't allowed to talk about the details of the man's death, but Hermione could see from the haunted expression in Harry's eyes that it had been something horrific.

The day it happened he had come to her and Ron's flat. Ron was still working for George at the joke shop at the time and he was stuck working late on inventory. Harry had shown up on her doorstep looking weak and disheveled.

"I had a bad day" he said when she looked at him with concern in her eyes. She immediately threw her arms around him, wishing for the millionth time that she could take some of his pain from him; that she could somehow absorb it through physical contact. "My partner is dead" he mumbled against her neck as he clung to her.

He was dating Ginny at the time but it was Hermione he had sought out first for comfort. When Ron came home he found the two of them drinking a cup of tea on the sofa, her curled up beside Harry, her head rested on his shoulder, both just staring into the fireplace in silence.

"Sorry to interrupt this romantic moment" Ron said angrily upon seeing them so close to one another.

"Ron-" Hermione hissed, about to scold him, but Harry had already stood up and gently placed the cup of tea on the table.

"Thank you for the tea Hermione" was all he said, and then he simply disapparated.

"What the bloody hell is going on here?" Ron swore, his face growing as red as his hair.

"For once could you stop being such an insane git?" she seethed, worried to death about Harry's psychological state of being. "He just lost his partner on the job, he was here to talk about it..."

"Here to seek comfort was he?" Ron asked, looking slightly ashamed but still not relinquishing his anger. It was the way that he said the word "comfort" that suggested something far more than a hug and cup of tea.

"Is that really what you think of Harry and I Ron? That we would so carelessly disregard you and Ginny? After all we've been through..."

"There's nothing here" Harry declared, exasperated. Hermione was snapped away from her memories and back to their glum surroundings. She nodded to show that she had found nothing either.

"We should figure out if the same vehicle was used to transport all the bodies. That might be a good place to search further."

"Like finding a needle in a haystack" Harry muttered as they headed back out. She barely heard him though because she was still thinking about the unbidden memory. He had never mentioned that night again, had never come to her like that again and she had tried to push it from her memory.

As they walked out of the morgue she turned to thank the security guard for his time, only to find he was passed out asleep on the job, his face planted on top of a bag of potato crisps. As she moved around the desk however, she realized he was not sleeping. His eyes were wide open and unseeing.

"Harry" she whispered, grabbing his arm.

"Do you sense it?" Harry asked, suddenly grabbing his wand. "Magic was used." Just as she brought her wand out they witnessed an earwig crawling down the man's neck. Hermione reacted quickly and instinctually, casting a spell that enveloped the bug in a bubble, moving it away from the deceased security guard and bringing it wiggling through the air towards them. She pulled a plastic bag out of her pocket and let the bubble drop neatly inside.

"I guess it didn't need to travel far to find a suitably dirty host to prey on" Harry said with a frown. "Poor bloke."

"It must have been clinging to people who work in the morgue and jumping from host to host until it found a climate it liked. As you said, in this case it didn't have far to travel."

"What do we do with it?"

"We bring it back to the cavern" she said matter-of-factly. "It's nearly as difficult to diffuse this little bugger as it was to curse him in the first place."

"Can't we just crush him?"

"This mission turned out to be relatively simple, but it's not THAT simple" she responded. "If he was that fragile I'm sure he'd already have been crushed. No, we'll need to take care removing the curse, and for that we'll need the..."

"Yes, I know, we'll need the library. But we aren't any close to catching whoever set the curse in the first place. Six muggles dead and all it took was one little beetle. How could we possibly track it back to the culprit?"

"We can't" she said sadly as they exited the morgue and stepped out onto the dark streets of Portland. Cars zoomed around them, their headlights casting a glow that lit the sidewalk as they returned to the car. "Harry, Broderick knew this wasn't going to be any easy case to close. We may track down several curses like these before we see any hints, and even then we'll be lucky. Whoever is doing this is being meticulous about not being caught. Their victims are random, the locations are scattered, and the objects are so commonplace that they're impossible to trace back to just one individual."

"So people are going to just keep dying and we can't do anything about it?"

"People die all the time Harry, you know that more than anyone. All we can hope to do is to find these cursed objects before they do too much damage. We can keep the number of casualties down until hopefully, whoever is doing this slips up. We do have one lead at least. Whoever is doing this knows about Ancient Magic and they shouldn't. We need to figure out who could have accessed this knowledge without having ever seen the vault."

"That's something at least" he muttered, pressing his forehead against the glass pane of the car window and not even noticing that she had already figured out a way to charm the car to drive itself.

Document created with wvWare/wvWare version 1.2.7

-->