"BOY!"
Harry could not suppress his wince as his uncle's shout echoed up the stairs. He had been afraid this was going to be a bad summer, and it looked like he was not wrong.
His summers were never good, but he had been dreading this one even before the final events of the Tri-Wizard Tournament. The last school year had started with such a mix of good and bad; he had been permitted to attend the World Quidditch Finals, the first Professional match he had seen. He had watched Ireland and Bulgaria play an amazing game, ending with an amazing catch by Bulgaria's star seeker, a young Quidditch player that was still in school.
The day had taken a bad turn when a group of dark-robed wizards had attacked the tent city that had housed the guests as they had gathered for the show, and to which they had returned to celebrate or commiserate. They had brought in and tormented local Muggles that lived in the area, and in the end, they had sent up a terrible skull symbol into the sky, for which Harry had nearly been blamed.
That bad turn had been presaged, however, by something that, though he was able to forget for much of that day, had come back to make him ill with apprehension when he finally had to face returning to the Dursley's. Fred and George, the irrepressible pranksters of the Weasley clan, had dropped a candy in the Dursley home when Arthur, their father, brought them with him to pick up Harry and bring him home with them. Dudley, Harry's overweight cousin, had found the candy, as Fred and George, acting on information gleaned from Harry's stories, had known he would. Its name, the Ton-Tongue Toffee, turned out to be appropriate as Dudley's tongue had swollen impossibly, stretching out of his mouth and down to the floor. Arthur, Mr. Weasley, had dealt with the problem, but he had not obliviated the Dursley family.
Harry had actually been shocked when his uncle had not mentioned the Toffee on the entire ride home, and he had not been at all surprised when Vernon had sent him to his room the moment they arrived at #4 Privet Drive, and told him not to bother coming out. He had locked the door behind himself, sealing Harry in his room.
He had not expected to hear from his so-called family until they came up to open his door and slide some food in. That is, if they intended to feed him at all.
Harry had not had the energy to protest his treatment. His guilty feelings about the death of Cedric Diggory, the Hufflepuff that had refused to take the Tri-Wizard Cup without Harry, and died because of it, left him thinking that he deserved this treatment.
What am I supposed to do, Harry wondered as he levered himself out of the bed, where he had collapsed upon entering his room. The door is locked, what does he expect me to do? Harry considered the wand he had hidden beneath the loose floorboard in his room, but knew that to use magic to open the door would not only anger his uncle and push him to make his life even more of a living Hell, it would bring in an owl from the Ministry. Given Fudge's reaction to his claim that Lord Voldemort had returned, the Ministry would be more than happy to see him expelled from Hogwarts, or even incarcerated in Azkaban, the wizarding prison that had until his third year held his godfather, Sirius Black.
As he walked slowly across the room, he considered the likelihood that his uncle would be holding yet another list of jobs for him to complete around the house. Experience said it was fairly probable, and it would be longer than he could possibly complete in whatever time they alotted him. When he failed to complete all the tasks he was assigned, his uncle would probably make him go without food.
The weakness in his legs as he walked across the room elicited a groan. Normally he he came to the Dursley's re-fortified, which was good considering how unlikely it was for him to eat well while he was here, but this time he was already weak and ill-fed when he was picked up from King's Cross Station. He had not been eating well since the Tournament's end, and Voldemort's return, and it looked like the prospects of that changing were poor.
"Coming, uncle," he hollered back, as he reached the door. He gasped with relief when the door opened, realizing that the door must have been unlocked by someone while he was out of it.
As he reached the end of the landing and looked down the stairs, it took him a long moment to take in what he was seeing. A letter? He's got a letter for me? Wait, that's written on parchment! Oh, no, someone's sent Uncle Vernon an owl, no wonder he's angry. But his face isn't red. In fact, he looks almost smug? And why is he carrying his new hunting rifle? Are they going to try and leave me at Mrs. Figg's again?
Or worse, was that parchment something from the Ministry? A chill sent shivers racing up Harry's spine. His mind raced, trying to think of any time that he might have inadvertantly cast magic after leaving the Hogwart's train, but he could think of none.
"Thought you'd just come waltzing back in here, did you?" Vernon sneered, his little piggy eyes narrowed in hate, "free-loading off of us again, did you? Well, your people were kind enough to write and let us know what happened. Did you really think I'd let a murderer stay here with my family?!" His uncle Vernon might be, but he had never shown the least respect for Harry, much less liking. Indeed, he had rarely, if ever, shown even so much as tolerance. A sinking feeling settled in Harry's stomach like a lump of lead as he realized that his uncle must have received a letter from the Ministry about the end of the Tournament, and given the attitude of Minister Fudge to his claims about Voldemort, it had apparently come across as claiming that Harry had somehow been responsible for Cedric's death.
A spine-tingling chill froze Harry's inside as his uncle swung his rifle up, and Harry realized that his uncle was not going anywhere to do his hunting. He was hunting Harry, and in a much more permanent fashion than his son, Dudley, had in his Harry-hunting days. He dove to the side, wishing vainly that he had grabbed his wand before answering his uncle's summons, but it was not for nothing that Vernon practiced his shooting to impress the members of and visitors to the Club he was a member of. The rifle tracked just ahead of Harry's path and fired well before Harry had reached cover.
Harry felt a burst of pain and blinding force as the bullet impacted his skull, even as gladness filled him at the thought of finally joining his parents, then pain and consciousness vanished in an instant as the bullet continued on through his head, accompanied by a number of skull fragments that stirred Harry's brain tissue.
As Harry fell to the floor, dead, his uncle cursed his lack of foresight. The shot had been made at an upward angle. Had Vernon thought through his plan, he would have found a way to shoot the boy when he was on the ground at his feet, thus creating a manageable blood splatter.
The crackle of flame caught his attention, followed by the intense and horrible smell of burning flesh. Vernon made it halfway up the stairs, wanting to see what was happening, when the house shook, distracting him. Torn between them, Vernon in the end saw little of the two most important events that day.
Above him, at the end of the hall where the dead body of the Boy-Who-Lived, Savior of the Wizarding World, lay mangled and crumpled in a heap, a sudden flame had appeared. Though flickering red and gold, colors that did not denote great heat, the flames roared through cloth, flesh, and bone with a hunger that revealed their strength, reducing the last hope of the wizarding community to a simple pile of ash in a few short moments.
This event was accompanied by the fall of charms and wards of great power, wards that had covered the Dursley's home at #4 Privet Drive ever since Headmaster Dumbledore had arranged for Harry to be left there, protecting Harry and his relatives by virtue of Harry's proximity to a member of his mother's blood-kin.
The fall of the great wards was a transfixing sight, so it might perhaps be seen as unfortunate that the only individuals present to observe this event were Muggles, whose memories of it would be wiped by the Ministry's Obliviators. The wards became visible, briefly, a great sparkling dome, translucent and shifting slowly in color between a pale red, almost pink, and a light blue that vanished against the sky. The final fall appeared visually as the shattering of that dome as if it were a thin blown-glass sculpture, dropped from a height, shattering against hard stone. Where the shards of magic hit the ground, they pierced it, and left it blackened and charred. Where they hit the house, they shattered against it, expending their energy as kinetic force. The upper beams were snapped, the foundation cracked, and the house as a whole dropped nearly a foot, but the walls held, though only just.
Certain that whatever cataclysm had befallen him was Potter's doing, Vernon, after the exterior noises finally ceased and his cognition recovered proper function, stomped up the stairs towards Harry's room. He offered the remains of his nephew only the barest token glance, and he ignored the last flicker of flame he saw there. His nephew was dead, but he could still be made to pay for the damage he had done in dying. His beloved owl, the pesky flea-bitten rat-eating pestilence that it was, was still in its cage in his room. If he left it there, it would die slowly of starvation, and stink everything up. If he let it go, it would go to Potter's friends, the freaks, and they might come to check on him.
He burst through Potter's door, fully intent on slowly plucking the bird's feathers before wringing its scrawny neck as a last revenge against the little brat that had been a drain on his family for far too long. He made it only the first step into the room before collapsing to the ground.
---
Dumbledore felt a chill pass over him but he shook it off. Casting the Fidelius charm took great concentration, and he could not spare his attention. He knew the sensation presaged danger to one of his close friends or charges, but then, he had been expecting it.
As the year had ended, he had been forced to make the hard decision to ask Severus Snape, who had been one of his agents in Voldemort's camp in the first war, to return to the Dark Lord and spy for him once more. He knew that Snape risked his life every time he came into contact with Voldemort, or his Death Eaters. If ever they knew his allegiance for sure, his life would end, of that there was no question.
He had sent Remus Lupin and Sirius Black to gather the old crowd, the Order of the Phoenix whose new Headquarters he was even now seeking to conceal, even though he knew that Black was a wanted man, hunted by the Aurors for crimes he had not committed, and which he had already paid for with twelve years in Azkaban prison under the watchful malevolence of the happiness consuming, despair producing Dementors that guarded it, and who were even now eager to perform the Kiss, the final and lasting removal of the soul, on the escaped prisoner.
Regardless of the source, he had to finish this casting before he could turn his attention to it. As he had half-expected, the sensation ceased before he completed the spell. A smile curled his lips as he spoke the words of the spell. His confidence in his people was once more confirmed as one of them managed to extricate him or herself from a dangerous situation without assistance.
---
The Burrow, a quaint if somewhat dilapidated house, was filled with a buzz of activity. With the return of five of her children from a stress-filled year of school, Molly Weasley, harried mother of seven, was busily preparing a welcome home feast for their evening meal.
She was also, and nor was she the only one, fretting about the boy she loved as another son, by choice if not by blood. Unaware of the worst excesses of the Dursley's, she knew enough at least to worry that they would make no effort to ensure that Harry ate properly, which was especially worrisome given the guilt and pain he must be feeling over the terrible end to the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and perhaps worse still, the Ministry's refusal, in the person of Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, to believe in Harry's recounting of the return of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Then too there was the issue of the lack of support he had received. Even though he had had nothing to do with the placing of his name in the Goblet of Fire from which the names of the three school champions were to be drawn, the school had turned against him, refusing to believe him, and he had been isolated.
Molly had to struggle to suppress her anger at her youngest son. He, supposedly Harry's best friend, had joined the rest of the school in abandoning Harry, choosing in his jealousy to believe the explanations and rationalizing of strangers over the pleading protestations of his best friend.
Unnoticed in the rush and bustle of a newly full house, a single clock hand sat in a box, waiting to be presented to Harry as a gift, before being placed on the Weasley clock, to represent his inclusion in their family. Had it been on the clock, it would certainly have been pointing at Mortal Peril and drawing all kinds of attention.
---
In the Headmaster's office, on Dumbledore's desk, there sat an intricate clock. Displayed within a clear glass case that exposed its workings, the face of the clock displayed only the time, as anyone might expect of such a work, albeit in astronomical terms befitting the oddity of the headmaster. In fact that visible face was but a charm. The true face of the clock held a multitude of tiny arms of different lengths.
Where a normal clock would have numbers, this clock held a dense grouping of concentric rings, each marked with a series of small labels. Much like the clock in the Weasley home, each label was a status or a place, rather than a time. The labels included relatively normal states, such as 'Home,' 'At Work,' 'Traveling,' and so on. They also included more esoteric entries, such as 'Casting,' 'In Peril,' 'In Mortal Peril,' 'Captured,' and of course, 'Needs a Lemon Drop.'
The tiny arms were even more complex, as they grew longer and shorter, as well as spinning about. They even merged and split, to properly track the focus of the observer, within the limits of the spell. Some of them referred to individuals, such as Severus Snape, Albus Dumbledore, and Minerva McGonagall. Some of the hands referred to groups of a more general nature, such as the Weasley Clan, or the Old Crowd, one of the many euphemisms used by Dumbledore to refer to the somewhat illicit Order of the Phoenix, a group dedicated to the defeat of the Dark Lord.
With no-one consciously observing it, the arms were a varied hodgepodge arising from the unconscious curiousities of the numerous portraits of former school headmasters and headmistresses.
Not far from this remarkable if apparently innocuous device, Fawkes, a gleaming pheonix that lived with Dumbledore, and whom many regarded, perhaps inaccurately, as the Headmaster's familiar, rested on his perch.
Contrary to what one might perhaps expect, it was not the heavily enspelled clock, nor any of the other detection devices scattered about the office, that reacted first to the death of a hero and the falling of wards closely tied to the Headmaster.
Fawke's brilliant eyes snapped open. He stood, and lifted his wings, and vanished in a gout of flame, long seconds before the alarms by the dozens began to go off, banging here, clanging there, ringing by the cupboard, wailing from the clock, and above it all, shouts and complaints from the startled portraits, which moved about nervously in their frames, questioning each other about what was going on.
After several minutes, silence fell as the alarms ceased their clamor, the crisis passed, though a single hand, labeled "Wards - #4," remained pointed at "Absent." Only the quiet whispers of the portraits held sway over the office air, and the silence steadily grew as the portraits fell silent, feeling the weight of uncertainty as no answers came to any of the questions they had.
---
On Magnolia Crescent, a road not far from Privet Drive, the home of the elderly lady that had often babysat Harry when the Dursley's went on vacation lay mostly silent.
Mrs. Figg, the house's sole human inhabitant, had recently been contacted by an escaped prisoner and a werewolf, and was currently assisting them with contacting certain individuals, many of whom had to be convinced of Sirius' innocence before their cooperation could be regained.
On her wall a large clock hung. Like the one in Dumbledore's office, its true nature was concealed by charms, though not ones cast by Mrs. Figg. Arabella was a squib, incapable of casting more than the most minor of spells. Still, she had enough magic in her to activate and deactivate the existing charm, cast by Dumbledore, that protected the clock from casual view.
Behind the charm, a clock hand labeled "Harry Potter," was spinning slowly, unable to find a resting place. It had rested on Mortal Peril only briefly, but there had been no-one to see, though once the house would have been filled with cats. There would have been nothing they could do or even see, of course, but now there were not even cats in the house. She had gotten rid of most of them after tripping on one and breaking her leg.
---
In a well-guarded room in the Ministry of Magic, a number of Ward Monitors sat on shelves. Each was a simple glass sphere, much like the crystal balls used in Trelawney's Divination classes. Like those crystal balls, the Ward Monitors could be used to obtain visions, in this case of the area being monitored.
They were also charmed and capable of emitting a quite strong wail, as well as inducing a physical vibration in every individual within a certain distance of the sphere, the distance being dependent on the strength of the monitoring spell, rather than the strength of the wards.
The more powerful Monitors, including the Monitor which had for nearly the last fifteen years watched the Wards that protected #4 Privet Drive, could induce a vision in anyone within range when certain key triggering events occurred.
In the corner of the room a small table stood in front of a wooden chair, in which sat a middle-aged wizard, idly playing a solitaire game of Exploding Snap to pass the time. The official Ward Watcher on Watch, or so went his title, had a simple job. He merely had to react to any Monitor that went off, by viewing the scene and informing the appropriate authorities to deal with the situation, assuming such was necessary.
Absorbed in his game, he failed to notice a certain orb flash brightly with a coded pulse. Neither the sound, nor the vibration, nor the vision reached him, though he was well within range of the sphere. It had been silenced long before by certain elements of the Ministry that were loyal to a man most believed dead.
A second silence spell enshrouded it as well, this one bearing a certain tinge of irony. It was placed by a toad-faced subordinate of Cornelius Fudge to suppress any official reaction to the soon-to-be demise of the Boy-Who-Lived at the hands of the Dementors, the soul-sucking guards of Azkaban. The silence of the sphere that would have warned her of the futility of her plan held a smidgen of irony, but more lay in the strong belief of the Minister that nothing truly dangerous had ever happened to Harry, based on the orb's silence, therefore he must be mentally unbalanced to make the claims he made. Had Umbridge, Fudge's subordinate, bothered to check the sphere, and discovered the silencing spell already laid on it, she might have learned the truth of Potter's claims, and changed the outcome of subsequent events, at least in-so-far as they would impact the Ministry.
When the wards finally collapsed entirely, the Ward Monitor gave a final complaint and went dark. There were no procedures in place to check each Ward Monitor on shift-change, or indeed, at any time, since it was expected that a change in a Monitor's state would be immediately noticed. After all, they were designed to be impossible to ignore.
---
Madam Hopkirk presided over a tightly run ship, monitoring all the under-age wizards in Great Britain, issuing warnings and demanding expulsion and wand-breaking for repeat offenders.
Harry had experienced their efficiency once before, when Dobby the house-elf, who at the time was serving the Malfoy's, at a time when the elder Malfoy was master-minding a plot to release the dreaded Monster, which turned out to be a Basilisk, from the Chamber of Secrets, a personal addition of Salazar Slytherin, one of the four Hogwarts Founders, tried to protect Harry by preventing him from reaching Hogwarts. The little elf, though he punished himself for his actions, was insistent that Harry not attend Hogwarts, and tried to enforce his intentions by casting magic with Harry's signature.
That had been the first letter from Madam Hopkirk, warning of his inability to do magic and threatening expulsion. It had definitely placed a damper on Harry's next summer, with the Dursleys aware that Harry was not permitted to do magic. He had feared another of those letters, and expulsion, when he blew up his Aunt Marge that summer, but Fudge had pardoned him, fearing that Sirius Black would find and kill him.
Neither Harry nor Fudge had at the time been aware that Black was innocent, and Harry's insistence on this fact at the end of that year was another point against him in the eyes of the Ministry.
As Harry's life ended in a blast of pain and fire, his wand lay quiescent, nestled beneath the loose floorboards of his room. In all the magical cataclysm that followed, none of the enormous magical energies unleashed had Harry's wand signature.
The under-age magic detectors remained silent as Harry died.
---
In a different wing of the Ministry, in the Department of Accidental Magic Reversal, skilled curse-breakers, talented obliviators, and de-splinching experts were on call, but not on staff. The department had a normal hierarchy of management, and at the bottom were the actual employees, dispatchers who awaited calls for assistance, and sent out the experts to solve the problems.
They also watched a bank of detectors, each responsible for a major wizarding area, detecting a particular magical signature characteristic of high-emotion fueled wandless magic, most often accomplished by very young wizards and witches. These displays had to be monitored because where they occurred to children whose parents were Muggles, there would be no-one aware of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad to be able to call them.
Harry had certainly experienced a severe spike in fear and anger just before the bullet hit him, but no magic was cast then. There was a subsequent spike of emotion fueled magic, but it was masked by the falling of some of the strongest wards ever erected. The detectors for the area of England that included Surrey emitted not a peep.
---
There were no magical monitoring devices in the spotless suburban home. Nor, for that matter, was there much in the way of sugar or other sweets, for this house belonged to dentists.
Yet it was here that the only human reaction to the events surrounding Harry's death occurred, as a girl with bushy brown hair lay sleeping. Tired from the tension of the train ride, and worried about her best friend's reaction to her spur-of-the-moment kiss, she had gone to bed almost as soon as she reached her house, unknowingly echoing her friend's actions.
Her sleep was disturbed by terrifying dreams, and her parents were drawn to her room by her fearful cries, to find her thrashing in her bed, tears pouring from her eyes to soak her pillow.
With difficulty they managed to awaken her. She sat up, sobbing Harry's name but knowing nothing more than that something had made her fear for him. Unfortunately, she had no owl with which to contact anyone. For the first time, Hermione Granger truly regretted having purchased Crookshanks, for though she loved him dearly, he could not carry her letters, and she desperately wanted someone to reassure her. Her logic reasserted itself, as she knew that Harry was well-protected at the Dursley's. He would be fine, and her fear for him was built on a nightmare fueled by stress.
---
Vernon Dursley awoke with a painful crick in his neck. He groaned as he rolled over, wondering why he was on the floor. Above him, as he lay on his back staring upward, he recognized the shelves of broken toys that marked the room as his son's second bedroom, grudgingly yielded to the Potter brat when those letters had come, revealing that the freaks knew where they had previously housed the boy, in the cupboard beneath the stairs.
His neck popped and he gurgled at the pain as he turned his head and stared at the owl cage that had been his reason for entering his nephew's room. It looked closed, but he could not see anything in it. "Must be huddled on the bottom," he mused, unable to see the bottom or the back of the cage due to his severe angle of view.
Rolling over once more, he slowly levered himself to his feet, grasping the door jamb as an aid to rising. Once settled in a solid stance, he turned and looked at the cage. His eyes widened, then narrowed as he stared at the empty cage. The door was still closed and latched, but the bars were bent and twisted at the base, and the gold leaf was peeling.
He smirked and left the room, slamming the door behind him. He had not even bothered to step over by the cage to look for the pile of ash he expected was there. Obviously the bird had self-destructed in the same fashion as his nephew and it had somehow knocked him out when he entered the room. No matter, it was gone now, and Petunia and his Dudders would not be back for . . . he glanced at his watch, momentarily surprised at how much time had passed, another hour and a half.
"Plenty of time," he muttered, pulling open the door to the hall closet and dragging out the vacuum cleaner. He looked around the upstairs hall, wondering what sort of cleaning agent would get off blood, when he realized that there were no bloodstains to be cleaned. "Bloody magic," he growled, knowing that he had seen blood spattered all over the ceiling and walls.
He plugged in the vacuum and ran it over the hall floor, not giving a second thought to giving his nephew's ashes proper treatment. If the freak wanted to cremate himself, that was his affair, but Vernon certainly was not going to pay for an urn.
Finishing, he put away the vacuum and grabbed his gun. He marched down the stairs, firmly ignoring the outside of the house, and the shaking and loud shattering noises he had heard. Settling himself in his favorite chair, he cleaned his gun and contemplated moving. He had little doubt that the freak's freaky friends would eventually come looking for him, and that they would be most annoying if they were still here.
"Time to look into that vacation home in Majorca," he said, grinning as he ran a swab into the barrel of the rifle. There would be no need to sell the house. The freaks would give up eventually, and they could move back in, after he had some contractors in to fix whatever his freaky nephew had managed to do before he died. Until then, they would enjoy a long vacation.
---
"Well, Moody was in right off, obviously, and Arabella did not take much, though there were a few minutes there when I was grateful that we were between her and the fireplace."
Sirius chuckled, interrupting Remus Lupin, his long-time friend. "She was definitely up for calling in the aurors and having me kissed before you managed to talk her down, you sweet-talker!" He was referring to the Dementor's Kiss, the soul-consuming final attack of the dark guards of Azkaban, and it amazed Remus that Sirius could find humour in a death that still loomed as his most likely manner of passing on.
"But given all that, why Tonks next? Dumbledore said to gather the old crowd. She was not part of that. Heck, she has not even been out of school that long!"
Sirius just grinned at his tired friend, who still showed signs of strain from his unwilling transformation into a werewolf on the recent full moon. He started ticking off points on my fingers. "She's my cousin, she's an auror, she's my cousin, she's a metamorphmagus, she's my cousin, she admires Harry, she's my cousin . . ."
"Alright, alright, already," Remus interjected, thumping Sirius in the head and laughing. "We'll see about talking to your cousin. Just don't blame me if she decides the cute doggy needs a perm!"
Sirius shuddered. An Animagus, he had learned to turn into a dog, a great black beast of a dog that looked like a grim, along with two of his former best friends, to accompany Remus during the nights of his painful transformation. Moony, as they called Remus' wolf form, was less likely to punish himself, tearing his own flesh, when he was accompanied by his pack. As for his former friends, one was dead, betrayed by the other, the same little rat that had framed Sirius for the death of the first. His dog form, called Padfoot, reflected his human form, and so, like himself, it was now gaunt, with long straggly hair that was often tangled and snarled.
---
Tonks brightened as she spied the graying head of one of Harry's protectors. The friendship between Lupin, Black, Potter, and Pettigrew had been infamous during her school years, and her heart ached for Lupin, the last of the close friends. Her smile faltered as she fingered the letter from Lupin that had brought her here. She hoped that he wanted something other than to question her yet again about her cousin, and his one-time friend, Sirius Black, escaped murderer, who had betrayed Lily and James Potter to their deaths, and then slain Pettigrew and twelve Muggles, leaving Lupin alone.
"Hello," she said quietly, looking over her cousin's friend. Lupin nodded to her, looking exhausted. He was thin but not painfully so, but there were bags under his eyes, and his face was lined with marks of pain. She totted up the days in her mind, and realized that the full moon was not yet a week past. She remembered what a shock it had been to learn that Lupin was a werewolf, that her cousin had been best friends with a dark creature, particularly given that like her branch of the family, Sirius had openly rejected the Dark Arts. Of course, that all had been a lie, and she could not help a frisson of fear that chilled her as she sat on the bench in response to Remus' welcoming gesture.
She smiled softly at the shaggy black dog that sat at Lupin's feet, trying to tell herself that Dumbledore would not have hired Lupin if Lupin had been involved in Potter's betrayal. Yet . . . had the old man known that Lupin was a werewolf, before he hired him? Could it have been as much a surprise to him as it had been to all the parents to learn that their children were being taught by a werewolf?
The dog grinned up at her, its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth, and Lupin snorted at it, though Tonks noted that his gaze was fond. "Good morning, Tonks," he said finally, smiling, and Tonks smiled hesitantly back at him, grateful that at least he had apparently heard that she hated her first name. Nymphadora, honestly, what had her mother been thinking?
Her hand slid surreptitiously into her robes, fingering her wand as she noticed Lupin's tenseness as he finally began to speak, but she held off, listening to his words, but ready to react.
"I suppose," he began, "you've read the Prophet's coverage of the Tournament, and its end? It's not . . ."
"Bollocks," Tonks interrupted, her eyes flashing angrily. "I may not have had a chance to teach him, like you did, but I'll eat my wand before I'll believe that Harry killed that boy!"
She was startled out of her defensiveness about the boy who so easily aroused her empathy, when Lupin's eyes flashed with humour as he nodded. "As I was about to say, it's not correct. Fudge refused to even consider Harry's version of events, but Harry is certainly not trained enough to create a Portkey. Crouch was discovered, but he was observed the entire time Harry was gone. In spite of Fudge's claims, he had no opportunity to slip away and join Harry. I know Harry personally, and I agree with you. He would never willingly kill. But that also means . . ."
Again Tonks cut him off. "That V . v . that You-Know-Who is back."
Lupin nodded solemnly. "It also means that Harry was right in his third year."
"Right about what?"
"Hmmm . . . yes, I forgot that they kept that out of the press. Fudge refused to believe him, and there was no point in pushing the view myself, he would never believe me. You remember Peter, the fourth of our little group?" He paused, then continued when Tonks nodded. She was startled at the anger that filled his face. "He's alive, Tonks. He was their secret-keeper, not Sirius. It was a double-blind, putting Sirius forward as the obvious choice so that he would be the one attacked, while the real secret keeper would be safe." Tears appeared in his eyes, and the dog whined, licking his hand. "We had no idea that Peter was the leak. He was already on His side. He betrayed them, then he framed Sirius and let him take the fall."
"But, the finger," protested Tonks. "Didn't they identify it?"
Lupin nodded, shuddering. "I never would have believed that the little rat had it in him, but he cut off his own finger and got away." Remus peered into the Auror's eyes, trying to decide how much to trust her before her joining was confirmed. Finally he nodded. "He's an unregistered Animagus, Tonks. We called him Wormtail. And he's lost more than a finger now. He cut off his own hand to bring Him back."
"He?" Tonks paled, her eyes fixing instantly on the dog. Padfoot shimmered, and the escaped prisoner that every Auror in Magical Great Britain was looking for stood before her, dropping quickly to his knees and grabbing her exposed left hand.
"All three of us, Tonks," Sirius whispered, staring at up her out of a gaunt face, his eyes an impenetrable black. "Prongs, Padfoot, Moony, and Wormtail. We kept Moony company."
Tonks could feel her hands growing clammy as her heart raced. Could she trust them? Could she believe them? Her right hand clenched around her wand, wondering if she had a chance to fight back against the two wizards if they really were Dark.
"We had him, we were going to turn him in, but he escaped. The Dementors almost got me, but Harry," Sirius' voice was filled with a loving awe, which finally convinced her that he could not be a criminal seeking to kill Harry, not if he felt that way about him, "he saved us." He fixed his eyes on hers. "Did you know he can cast a corporeal Patronus? In his third year! I've never heard the like."
Lupin grinned. "You've seen the like, though." He looked at Tonks, who still looked shell-shocked. "His Patronus is Prongs, his father's animagus form, even though he was no more than a year old when he saw it last, if he ever did."
Finally accepting that they might be speaking the truth, Tonks only had one more question. "So . . . why are you telling me this?"
"Well, Tonks, after school, we became part of a group fighting You-Know-Who, called the Order . . ."