Beyond Hogwarts & More- Chapter 43

-= Beyond Hogwarts & More; Chapter Forty-Three=-

Both of them flung their wands out in front of them, and, in the same breath, they shouted “Stupefy!” Caught off of his guard, their would-be jailor raised his wand as well, but he was too late; the two Stunners hit him before he could open his mouth.
   However, when the two whirled around to face Voldemort, he had disappeared.
   “That was too easy,” Lily gasped. “That was way too easy. Something’s wrong. I know something’s wrong.”
   The large hall was entirely empty. Back to back, Lily and James swivelled to face every degree of the room, but no one could be seen—and, more importantly, there were no doors.
   “Oh, no,” James said disbelievingly. “I could swear that I saw—I did see them, and now they’re gone—“
   “I think that this is what he meant by ‘seal the exists’,” Lily grimaced. “We’re trapped, aren’t we?”
   “The mirrors!” James suddenly exclaimed, and Lily turned her head to look at the wall that Voldemort had been facing. “Look!”
   At least twenty high, oval mirrors were hung in a straight line along the stone wall to the right and left of an ornate fireplace, all of them identical and, from the look of the carved frames, Lily guessed that the mirror she had fallen through at the Malfoy manor was an exact replica.
   “They’re shortcuts,” Lily breathed. “Defero Instantis. I read about these once; they’re really rare, and really, really expensive…”
   “I’ve got one,” James said unexpectedly. “It’s smaller, and won’t transport you, but you can talk to someone else through it. Sirius and I used them when we were in separate detentions. Do you remember which one we came in by?”
   “They’ve got plaques above them,” Lily pointed. “Look at the engravings…Avery, Lestrange, Mulciber, Nott...they’re names! James, look for ‘Malfoy’!”
   They raced towards the line of mirrors, and it took James less than a second to hiss “Over here! I’ve got it—quick!”
   The mirror was placed on one side of the fireplace—apparently Voldemort’s most valued supporters were ranked by the positions of their respective mirrors. It was an ingenious idea; they were completely private, probably unregistered ways of transport—the Death Eater circle would not exactly care if that was illegal or not—and the Floo network’s regulators or the Apparition Agency’s patrolwizards could not track anyone’s movements by the mirrors.
   “Come on,” James nodded, taking her hand. “Okay, I’ll step through first.”
   He raised his foot to set it on the edge of the frame, but nothing happened; the glass stayed as firm as glass in any usual mirror would. Frowning, James pushed on it, and then hit it, hard, with his fist. It did not even make a satisfying noise.
   “He sealed every exit,” Lily said dully, letting her wand drop. “We’re in trouble.”
   “Oh, Merlin,” James exhaled, staring to his left. “Lily…”
   One of the doors that James had seen had reappeared at the end of a short corridor. Without ceremony, it swung open, cracking the heavy, intricate knocker against the wall. And, mercilessly and quickly, a horde of masked Death Eaters glided through the doorway, at least fifteen of them, all with narrowed, cold eyes and wands at the ready.”
   “Any more clever plans?” Lily said nervously, backing down to the opposite wall, where the symmetrical equivalent of the corridor and door would have been. “Gryffindor or not, let’s hear them.”
   “I’m all out,” James admitted, both of them unwilling to set loose any defensive magic unless the Death Eaters attacked first—it was, after all, likely that they were only sent to imprison the two of them. “We could always give in peacefully—“
   “Don’t be stupid” Lily snapped, but so softly that no one else could hear them. “The Dark Lord apparently doesn’t know about the baby, but he will if he gets us where he wants us.”
   Suddenly, they felt cold stone at their backs; they could retreat no farther, and the Death Eaters were only thirty feet away.
   “We’re attacking, then?”
   “We’ve got to,” Lily said coolly. “One, two—“
   They began shouting curses so quickly that the words sounded like a run-together sentence. But the Death Eaters had been prepared for this; one of them fell, Stunned, onto the floor, and one was blasted in the face with a Fainting Hex, but the others deflected or countered the rest of the jinxes and began to bellow curses of their own.
   “Bugger,” James said, with feeling, as he made a Blasting Hex bounce off of his doubled Shield charm but saw his protection shatter in the process. “There is no such thing as a permanent protection device in magic, is there?”
   “Petrifocus Totalus!” Lily shouted, bringing another Death Eater to the ground. However, unfortunately for them, he was revived immediately by one of his comrades near the back of the group, and he was back on his feet in moments. “Nope; don’t think so. Impedimenta! Stupefy! Stupefy!”
   She ducked out of the way of a red jet of light, shouted “Stupefy!” once more, and deflected a bright greenish-blue hex with the Stunner. Without any planning or calculations on Lily’s part, the curse she had averted flew towards the wall of mirrors with double its original force and struck one of them in the dead centre. Something over the mirror, something transparent, splintered into pieces divided by white cracks and smashed to the floor. As everyone involuntarily turned to look at that particular mirror, the shards started to smoke; white mist rose into the air from the pieces, and Lily realised that the pieces themselves were transforming into the mist; within three seconds, there was nothing in front of the mirror but the marble floor.
   James understood what was happening more quickly than anyone else—the barrier was gone. Raising his wand, he yelled “Conduplicare Protego”, and a doubly strong Shield charm bubbled out from his wand and placed itself between himself and Lily and their attackers.
   “Come on!” he yelled, almost shoving her away. “Through the mirror! Go! Go!”
   She almost stumbled over the oversized robes, but, catching herself before she hit the floor, Lily reached for the mirror with one hand, saw it disappear in a whirlpool of sucking grey mist, and immediately plunged the rest of her body into it, holding tightly onto James’ hand. A split second later, she felt him propel himself off of the bottom of the frame, and, several grey, spinning moments later, they felt their feet land softly on a carpeted floor.
   “Lily?” Severus asked. “Potter?”
   “Close it!” Lily yelped. “Shut it off, barricade it—something!”
   Quite rightly, Severus judged that they she was talking about the mirror, and he flicked his wand at it, murmuring “Colloportus.” As a hard seal spread itself across the frame, a faint squelching sound fastened it closed.
   “Oh, God,” James groaned, helping Lily up. “Never thought I’d see the day when I’d be thankful to you for doing something decent of your own accord.”
   “Stop it,” Lily said irritably, swatting at him. “Severus, I’ll find some nice, calm, sunny day to explain this to you, but right now isn’t the best time—I think it’s better if we just leave. We’re—ah, sort of on the run.”
   “Yes, I figured,” Severus frowned. “But don’t go back to your house; they’ll expect that.” He pointed to a half-open door to his right. “In there. Now. They’ll break through the barrier any second.”
   Lily obeyed quickly, flashing him a brief smile, but James reached the door, turned around with a very malicious smile on his face, and pointed his wand at Severus.
   “Stupefy!” he whispered, and Severus, caught off his guard, fell to the floor, eyes blank under closed eyelids and a nasty snarl disfiguring his face. Clapping a hand over Lily’s mouth and grasping her wand hand, he dragged her into the room Severus had pointed out.
   It was his laboratory, obviously; two large cauldrons stood in the middle of the room, one of them smoking bright green steam and the other standing empty. A smaller cauldron stood on a countertop, and the walls were lined with shelves that were filled with books and books on potions and with sealed bottles that held pickled creatures and dried flora and fauna and differently coloured fluids.
   “Ick,” James said, making a face. “This is just gross.”
   “Shht!” Lily waved impatiently. “Hide. Somewhere. I can hear them trying to get through the mirror.”
   James couldn’t hear a thing, but this wasn’t a time to be doubtful. “Behind the cauldrons,” he directed. “Quick!”
   Soon, the hammering cracks that sounded like an axe being sunk into the iced-over surface of a lake grew loud enough for James to hear, and from there they increased until a shattering noise from the next room told the two fugitives that their followers were in the flat.
   James reached an arm out for Lily and pulled her away from the range of vison offered by the open door. Gently, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her hood over her head, doing his best not to touch the wound that was still bleeding liberally. The fire under the cauldron was giving off copious amounts of ash that got into the air and made it difficult not to sneeze or cough, and the atmosphere in the room was humid and filled with chemicals and thickly brewing magic; it was slightly taxing to breathe for the first few minutes.
   They could hear loud, clomping boots and mingled shouts that settled into an accord: half would disperse, the other half would keep watch over Lily and James’ house. It was unnerving to find that each of them knew exactly how to find their house, and James began to realise just how much Lord Voldemort hated him, if he had gone so far as to point out his home to the Death Eaters and to make sure they remembered where it was.
   Suddenly, James turned his head towards the doorway. They had apparently awakened Severus, who was cursing loudly and in several languages. All he said, aside from the foul language, was that he saw two people in black robes climb through the mirror; the bigger one had pointed a wand at him, and he had evidently been Stunned. He also mentioned in detail just exactly where he would like to see that specific person’s wand, and it sounded particularly painful. James winced. No matter what the man’s other shortcomings were, he could summon up spectacular imagery.
   Finally, the voices diminished until Severus’ stupendously annoyed mutterings were the only human-generated sounds in the flat besides the muffled breathing behind the unused cauldron in the laboratory. Furious, Severus stalked into the room, slammed the door open so ferociously that it banged into the wall and caused a few bottles on a shelf that was on the other side of the room to fall to the floor, and fixed his wand at James’ throat, seemingly choking on words.
   “You—you—you utterly asinine—”
   “Shut up,” James said unrepentantly. “I know, I know, I’m a stupid Gryffindor with arse-tissue for brains; can we stop with the immaturity already? I had to Stun you; it wouldn’t have looked realistic if I hadn’t.”
   “I am going to twist off your toes,” Severus said dangerously. “Then I am going to break your legs with a hammer, and then I fully intend to drop a wardrobe on your midsection, effectively cutting off your—“
   “Yes,” Lily interrupted, wincing. “I think you might want to wait until he can fully appreciate pain, though, before doing that to him, because right now he might pass out at the twisting-off-toes part, and I’m sure you want him awake through the rest of that ritual.”
   “Excuse me?” Severus said coldly.
   “He’s got a whacking great head injury. So’ve I, as a matter of fact, but it’s mostly healed and we’ve got to get back to the Malfoy manor. But I quite condone anything you intend to do to him,” she said coolly, shrugging James’ arm away from her shoulders. “That was just stupid.”
   “Oh, come on, Lily,” James said, annoyed. “I—“
   “You,” she snapped, “are going to spend at least a month with some of Argus Filch’s famous torture devices. I hear that hanging people up by their toenails is something of a fetish with him.”
   “You wouldn’t,” he paled. “I didn’t mean to—“
   “You most certainly did,” she retorted, getting to her feet. “Severus, I am so sorry. You’ve saved our necks, and now he does something like this—well, if there’s anything we can do for you, ever, don’t hesitate to ask.”
   “No need,” Severus said, grinning nastily at James. “If you can promise me that he will be hanging from the ceiling by his toenails as soon as you can get hold of Filch, that will be reward enough.”
   “He’s going to be sorry,” Lily promised. “Could we please use your fireplace?”
   “Of course,” he nodded. “Would you like me to come with you?”
   “Oh.” Lily blushed. “I—er—won’t the Malfoys react a bit oddly if they see you with us?”
   “They may,” Severus admitted. “But I need more shelf room, and I’ve got a batch of different healing potions that are taking up entirely too much room. Besides—is Alastor Moody with them?”
   “Yes.”
   “Am I morally bound to bring along coffins for your opponents, or is that something that their families can take care of?”
   “Morals,” James spat. “Right. Like you’ve got them.”
   “And then there is you,” Severus snorted, “who was apparently out to lunch during the entire distribution of human tendencies and only managed to get in line for ‘utter stupidity’.”
   “Ahem,” Lily interrupted. “Much as I agree with Severus right now, we had better be going. Severus—will you follow us, then?”
   “I will have to pack up a box of necessaries, but I will be along shortly. You will definitely have to Floo in; the Malfoy manor does not take kindly to Apparators that have not been permitted through the wards around the mansion.”
   “You’re one of those, aren’t you?”
   “I have that privilege, yes. But go now.”
   “Right,” Lily grinned. Yanking at James’ sleeve, she pulled him out of the laboratory. “Come on, you great big pretentious git!”
   Severus smiled as he listened to her snappish remarks and his interposed and always cut off protests. Things like this needed to happen more often, he thought, and always while he was around. It lent a brighter tint to life.
   When Lily cautiously pushed open the door to the Malfoy drawing-room, which someone had shut but not locked, a vastly hoped-for sight met her eyes. Most people were on their feet, some bending over their own injured friends, some watching over prisoners, of which there were three—Anne’s two guardians, the ones that had been holding her down as the members of the Order stormed into the room, and one of Rabastan’s hooded cronies. All three had been Stunned, and they were tied with ropes and gagged with Malfoy curtain sashes. Lucius had vanished, as had Rabastan and two of his men, but—
   “Oh, no,” Lily whispered, her knuckles rising to her mouth. “James—“
   She pointed to one of the black velvet lounges, and James almost choked as his gaze followed hers. Mortifer Malfoy was stretched out on it, a thick rope around his neck, his face swollen and a sickly blue, his eyes protruding. He was, without a question of a doubt, quite dead.
   “Merlin,” James breathed. “I—oh, God, did I—“
   “You didn’t mean to.” Resolutely, Lily shook her head. “You didn’t. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have helped it.”
   “I killed him,” he groaned. “Merlin…”
   “Lily!” a voice assailed. “James! Oy!”
   Dazed, James looked up to meet Sirius, who looked overjoyed and immensely relieved. “Sirius…”
   “They’re back!” he shouted unnecessarily to the rest of the room. “And they’re standing—oh, Lord, Lily, what happened?”
   Sweating, she had shaken her hood off, and the entire messy conglomeration of blood, tissue, and hair at the back of her head had revealed itself to their friend as she turned to scan the rest of the room. “What do you mean?”
   “Your—your head,” he whispered, gently taking her chin and turning it so that he could see the back of her skull. “Oh…oh, my…”
   “I got slammed into a wall,” she summarized. “I don’t think it’s as bad as it looks; ostensibly, it’s quite gross. I’m all right; I’ll last—and the same thing happened to James, anyway, and we’re both all right. Though he will be less so once I get through with him,” Lily said conversationally, a deceptive smile twisting her lips. “What happened here—it looks like we won.”
   “Oh.” Sirius nodded. “Yeah—yeah, we did. But listen, Lily—don’t go near Caradoc for a few days, at least.”
   “Caradoc.” Lily frowned. “Why? Where is he?”
   “Remus took him home. He’s…ah, he’s a bit off his head, and he’s partly blaming you for it.”
   “I haven’t done anything to him,” Lily said reasonably. “What’s wrong?”
   “Er,” Sirius said nervously. “Lily, we all understand that you couldn’t have helped any more than you did, and none of us thinks it’s your fault—“
   White-faced, Lily shook her head slowly, her eyes fixed on his face. “What happened?”
   He sighed, giving in. “Anne’s dead, Lily.”
                                 NEW STORY STARTS HERE!!
   A slow, rocking wave that felt like the heavy, swinging clapper of a church bell struck Lily between the eyes and almost pushed her balance out of line; she felt her jaw drop behind closed lips.
   “What?”
   “She was already dead when we got here,” Sirius explained, taking her shoulders in both hands. “Listen, you did all you could. None of us could have done any better, and we’re just lucky you’re all right.”
   “We fought,” Lily said distantly, “in the pub, in Knockturn Alley. Or we pretended to fight; I don’t know for sure. We just started snapping at each other…it was my fault, I could have stopped it, and she just stormed off and walked straight into them…”
   “Stop it right now,” James commanded, slipping an arm around her waist. “Listen, Sirius, can you manage without us? Lily’s…well, I want to get a doctor in to see her.”
   “Yeah,” Sirius agreed, his eyes darting to the mess of blood on the back of her head. “A doctor for both of you, I’d say. Malfoy threw a mean curse.”
   “Right,” James nodded, suddenly trying very hard not to look at a particular black sofa. “Er…yeah. Right. I…okay.”
   Sirius gave him a long look, but he let his arms drop. “I’ll stop by your place later to give you the cover-up story we’ll be using—we’ve got to talk to Albus about this before we tell anyone anything, so I might be awhile.”
   “I’ll see you, then,” James nodded, squeezing his friend’s shoulder and taking Lily’s hand. “Come on, Lily, we’d better go.”
   “Oh, God,” Lily whispered as they walked away from the wreckage, “I hate this. I hate this.”
   “It isn’t your fault,” James said sternly, ushering her towards the fireplace. “For once, get that idea out of your head.”
   Lily shook her head, and immediately wished she hadn’t; a slow throb started to swell in the back of her skull, like the heavy banging of a gong. “I’m not—no, I know that it isn’t all my fault. I tried. I did try.” Apprehensive eyes flickered up to her husband’s face. “I did, didn’t I?”
   “Of course.”
   “It’s just that…it’s…I don’t know why I feel like this, honestly, but I keep thinking that I could have done something, anything, and now she’s—“
   “You’re used to blaming yourself,” he said shortly. “Hedera Castellum.”
   With a short whirling of green flames and a snowstorm of soot, they stepped into their own entrance hall, and Lily raised a hand to the back of her head.
   “I can still feel wet,” she grimaced. Drawing her hand away, she turned it over and wrinkled her nose at the brownish-red mess that covered her palm. “It explains the dizziness, at any rate.”
   “If master wishes to send Slenka to fetch the doctor, Slenka is ready and willing to do so,” their house-elf offered, wiping her hands on her favourite little coffee-stained apron.
   “He’s got to think we’re involved in some kind of underground murdering gang by now,” James sighed. “Yeah, that’s probably best. It’s late, but tell him that we’ll pay him double.”
   “Slenka will return immediately,” the elf promised, and, with a loud crack, she vanished, still clutching her apron.
   “C’mon, then, upstairs,” James directed, prodding Lily towards the staircase. “Merlin knows both of us had better lie down.
   “Right,” Lily managed, nodding vaguely. “Bed. Sleep—“
   Suddenly, her eyelids fell, the fingers clutched around his hand went limp, and she crashed forwards, nearly smashing her face on the marble floor. James, however, had almost been expecting this, and as she fell, he threw out an arm to stop her, and slowly and gradually placed her where she would have fallen.
   “Bloody hell,” he muttered, finally acknowledging that he was indeed seeing little black spots everywhere and that this was a result of his vision and that their home had not been infested with oversized flies. He sat back on his heels, looked down at Lily, and knew perfectly well that he couldn’t carry her upstairs. He simply didn’t have the strength to. Temporarily giving up the hope of a mattress, he slid onto his stomach and rested his head on folded arms. He wasn’t going to sleep, he told himself; there was no way that he was going to close his eyes right now—
   When Dr. Nicholsen arrived, the picture on the marble floor was not one that many artists would have chosen as a model; both were spattered with blood and their limbs were placed in several odd and skewed positions. They looked unnatural, like the remains of two victims of a torture chamber, yet they were sleeping almost peacefully. Lily’s forehead was unnaturally blank, whereas James’ nose was wrinkled in the remainders of a worried sort of frown.
   The first reaction Lily had to the waking world, a good twenty hours later, was to clench her fist and sock her husband directly in the side. James let out a muffled yell and shook her awake, feeling his ribs dramatically for breakage.
   “What?” Lily asked indistinctly, suddenly opening her eyes and staring at him, taking in the back of his head, which was a pile of bandages, and his neck, which was in an uncomfortable-looking brace. “Hullo. Are we dead?”
   James blinked. “Er, no, actually.”
   “My head doesn’t hurt anymore,” she explained, reaching for it and encountering a mass of linen strips. “Oh, wow. Do I look as much of a mummy as you do?”
   “You don’t look much better yourself,” he grinned. “I’ve just got the bloody neck brace on for two weeks. Apparently, there’s a possibility something might be thrown out of orbit somewhere in there, and I’m not trusted to keep my head still.”
   “I have something on my face,” Lily observed, trying to push a bit of hair out of her eyes. “What is it?”
   “Sticking-plaster.”
   “Oh, I’m betting it’s simply gorgeous.”
   “You look like a very interesting Mafia victim, actually. Very entrancing.” He tried to lean over to kiss her, but he found abruptly that the neck brace effectively prevented that. Lily smirked rather foully, and kissed him with the same maddeningly superior expression on her face.
   “Ooh, you wench.”
   “I’m not the one with the neck-brace,” she reminded him, lying back down and yawning. “How long are we going to be holed up in bed?”
   “Bed rest for two weeks is what Nicholsen suggested, but I figure we should be up before then. How bad can it be, right?”
   “Bad enough!” Sirius called from an adjoining bedroom. Moments later, he appeared in the doorway, fastening the clasp on his robes. “Consider me your royal guard.”
   “Oh, this’ll be easy,” James whispered to Lily out of the corner of his mouth. “We’ll be walking around the house in a couple of hours.”
   Eleven days, four hours, and twenty-three minutes later, not that Lily had been counting, she was still in bed, and was wondering how she could possibly dislike someone so much who had been quite a wonderful friend just a fortnight ago.
   “Don’t glare at me like that,” Sirius ordered lazily, finishing off another box of chocolate comfits. “This wasn’t my idea, you know.”
   He had planted himself in one of the two armchairs in the bedroom when he arrived and had hardly moved since. It was such a pity, James mentioned nostalgically, that Sirius was much more of a light sleeper than he had been at Hogwarts. Very often, he would wake up around three in the morning and find himself bored to tears, and, as a distraction, he often found himself Summoning little things like candy wrappers and handfuls of snow and downsized Dungbombs into his hands. His Banishing aim was becoming so good that he had frequently nabbed Sirius in the eyelid on a couple of occasions and dumped snow down the back of his robes. He had even caught Lily doing the same thing one night with an evilly large scoop of snow. Sirius had never shot up out of his chair quite so quickly before, and the interpretive dance that he performed while trying to get a crinkly bit of paper out of his nostril was one worthy of being recorded and replayed many, many times and then put away safely for future blackmail usage.
   Part of what constituted their boredom was that no one had really told them anything about what was going on outside their bedroom. The night of the attack on the Malfoy manor, Albus had ordered Sirius to relate the full cover story to the two and could not stay until they woke up. The basis of his invented story was quite close to what Rabastan Lestrange had formerly thought of as truth: two young women had gone incognito to a pub in Knockturn Alley for kicks, and they had been Flooed away by a group of rather nasty characters. In fact, one of the interviewed regulars in the pub swore that the tallest one was actually a troll with an interesting type of body odour, and that a vampire with blood on his chin had led the blonde girl into the fireplace.
   Once they stepped out of the fireplace and were away from the public eye, the gang tried to attack the girls, one of them escaped, and the other was led away. The blonde girl, Lily, Apparated back home as quickly as she could and gathered a few people together to help her friend, but by the time they got to the manor, they found the other girl dead, and, in a frenzy, the dead girl’s fiancé saw red and started attacking the people he found nearest her body: the owners of the mansion; Lucius and the late Mortifer Malfoy. The Malfoys retaliated in self-defense, and the rest of the crew of would-be rescuing friends came to Caradoc’s aid, and in the scuffle Mortifer Malfoy was killed by one of his own deflected curses.
   Caradoc was being held for investigation, but all Sirius would or could say was that Albus was sure to get him off in a few days, and not to worry. After all, he had something of an excuse for acting the way he did; his fiancée had just been murdered. No one, as of yet, knew what had happened when Lily and James vanished through the mirror except themselves and Lord Voldemort.
   Anne’s murderers were hunted for high and low, and the Ministry employees that came to question Lily sixteen days after the incident did not receive much help. Lily had hardly looked at the men that were holding her friend. All she could say was that they were “typical-looking Englishmen, with sort of brown hair and black robes”, which was not exactly useful in the way a full-fledged description would have been; in fact, it was downright useless.
   A side effect just about as pleasant as the blow to the back of Lily’s head came along, a week after she was allowed out of bed, from an unidentified person in Diagon Alley. She had just stepped out of the apothecary’s, was absent-mindedly re-counting her change, and suddenly felt a rush of air tear past her shoulder. She leaped back into the doorway of the shop before she could think, and she just caught half a glimpse of a flash of green light streaking past a crowd of shrieking witches and wizards. It failed to hit anyone; instead, it struck the shop window of the apothecary’s and shattered the glass into smithereens before vanishing.
   By the time everyone thought to look in the direction the curse had come from, there was, naturally, no one to be found. The Ministry was called down to investigate, and, after questioning a long string of witnesses, concluded that the curse had not been an Unforgivable and that the apothecary ought to beg for donations if he didn’t want to pay for a new pane of glass himself, because the damage was in no way the Ministry’s fault. They left behind a very, very grumpy old apothecary, who was momentarily incapable of doing anything but staring up at his former shop window and scratching his five chins with a blank look on his face.
   However, they did take the incident much more seriously than they had admitted to the crowd of frightened people in Diagon Alley. An hour after they returned to the Ministry, a slightly familiar figure with correctly parted hair and perfectly shined shoes knocked at James’ and Lily’s door.
   James was working late, but Lily had come home to find Lora there, whom she had invited over for dinner. Immediately, she swooped down on her and spilled out the entire Diagon Alley business, and by the time Bartemius Crouch called on “official business”, they had formed several fantastic solutions of their own and had even had the idea of trying to find the person who had cast the curse.
   Mr. Crouch, of course, made it clear immediately that he highly disapproved of any step they might take in that direction. He did not ask to sit down, but remained in the entrance hall, standing on two feet with the most irritatingly correct posture Lily had ever seen.
   “If you would heed what I say, and not put delusions of grandeur into your heads, you will be as safe as possible, I assure you.” (Here, he either did not hear the snort Lily gave or diplomatically chose to ignore it.) “The Ministry takes this very seriously, very seriously indeed, and we believe that one of the best steps to take now would be to move you to a different location. Too many people know of your house, and I should suggest, perhaps, a—more moderate dwelling.” Disapprovingly, his eyes lingered on the marble floors and the indigo silk-tasseled pillow that had decided to live on the staircase. “Something not nearly as noticeable, I would say.”
   “Mr. Crouch,” Lily ventured, “this is our home, and I’d really rather not move out of it—“
   “As far as that goes, you are of course free to suit yourself,” Mr. Crouch went on, cutting her off quite cleanly. “If you are determined to stay here, the Ministry has agreed to pay for and install an Apparition Shield, which would prevent anyone from Apparating directly into the house.”
   “I see,” Lily said carefully. “Yes. Thank you. I’ll have to discuss it with James, of course.”
   “Of course,” he nodded shortly. “We are also re-opening the investigation that we unfortunately found necessary to abandon just under a year ago of the apparent presence of a homocidal Muggle burglar in your house.”
   Lily looked up, interested. “Oh!”
   “We will hopefully have results available within a month. Now, if that is all—“
   “Yes, thanks,” she said hurriedly. “Yes. I will certainly talk this over with my husband.”
   “Good evening, then, Mrs. Potter,” he said curtly, turned on his heel, and left.
   “I…don’t…like him,” Lora muttered, squinting out the window as he Disapparated.
   “He doesn’t seem to like me much either,” Lily frowned. “Not that I expect to be liked by absolutely everyone, but...well, I don’t think I’ve given him a reason to—“
   “Hullo!” James called, Apparating into the doorway of the library. “Dinner?”
   “James,” Lily answered thoughtfully, “has Mr. Crouch been…well, odd lately?”
   “Huh. Hey, Lora.” James dropped a stack of papers onto the nearest table and rubbed his forehead, leaning against the doorframe. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him much. Anything wrong?”
   Lily shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe…well, probably not. I…no, never mind.”
   “You two can talk later,” Lora interrupted. “Listen, I think someone said something about inviting Sirius to dinner, and I’ll bet you half my dessert he’ll be here in five minutes.”
   “Dinner!” Lily remembered, smacking her forehead. “Yes! Right. Talk…later. James, coffee?”
   “Coffee’s fine,” he yelled in the general direction of the dining room. “Listen, Lora, you don’t think anything’s actually wrong, do you?”
   Lora looked up at him shrewdly, and then gave a rather wicked grin. “Melodrama. Can’t live without it, can you?”
   “I—wait, that isn’t—“
   “Yeah, yeah,” she winked. “Come on. Food!”
   He beat her to the kitchen, but that wasn’t exactly her fault; she cannoned directly into Sirius as he Apparated into the dining-room just a few feet ahead of her, landed flat on her back, and tried very, very hard to keep from flushing as bright red as her jumper. She failed rather miserably, but didn't particularly mind when he laughed, gave her a hand, and hauled her back onto her feet.