Lumos

Chapter Fifty-Seven: "Inheritance" (I)

Scattered clicks from a set of worn, heeled leather shoes cracked down the flagstone. Torrents of rain smashed the courtyard, and waiting parties gasped at the processional. Whispers circled. A hundred wizards gone, and only twelve returned.

"Muldoon?" one of the shorter wizards called to the leader.

The aged man at the front didn't stop. His cheeks were pasty under the droplets, and his breaths wheezed. The crowd went deadly quiet as the wizards in the back levitated a short girl's body through the gates. Fiery red hair, ash-grey skin, and stains the color of night still rippling over her crumbling corpse.

"Prewett!" a panicked shout rang. "Draca!"

A young man holding a baby broke from the throng, loosing a wail of grief—cut short as Muldoon slammed the keep doors behind himself.

His stride quickened, fast, clipped steps breaking into a run.

Torchlight swam and blurred around him.

The stone walls dampened the panic outside, but didn't quite obscure it.

"Chief Muldoon?" The young squire in his wake glanced towards the windows as he hurried to keep up. "They are saying when Death fonde Prewett, she was as a torche that is brent to duste."

The older man shoved onward without reply.

The squire sped faster.

"My lord, Merlin—where hath he gone?"

Chief Muldoon cast a Confundus charm, and the squire tripped away, blinking.

Muldoon choked on a panicked sob as he broke through his study door. It shut behind him with an ominous boom. Alone in the room, his gasps grew louder and less centered. His entire body began to shake.

He mopped his brow with a handkerchief, and with a tremulous hand, stooped forward to write.

The letters, jagged and frightful: "I have discovered an atrocite."

##

I. "Adagio"

Hermione

July 14, 2003, 1:19 a.m.

"It was a sting."

Ron's statement hung over them, and George didn't move.

Hermione's stomach churned.

George breathed in and out without the slightest flicker of acknowledgement.

Oh no. Oh, no.

George shifted slowly, his hands steepling to cover his face. His navy pyjama sleeves slipped and pooled into cottony ponds around his elbows.

Her wrist trembled as she laid the tracker on the table. "I wasn't sure if it was working," Hermione whispered. "But I didn't want to check it, in case they were watching."

The gnash marks from her teeth glinted like little tally marks of each peril. Of every moment she'd been terrified of losing him.

"It was at first," Ron said. He gripped the cane where it housed the blade in a flexed fist. His gaze darted to George as his voice caught. "But things got complicated. The battle got messy, and after a while, the enchantment died."

"Complicated," Hermione said. The word tasted strange in her mouth.

Ron seemed to stop breathing. "They brought in reinforcements. Lined the cliffs with gits barely out of their bloody Hogwarts and Durmstrang robes. We couldn't get back in the same way unless we wanted to—" He swallowed. "You know." He scrubbed his face. "We couldn't sort it. We tried some age lines, pushing those coast-ward, but they ripped holes in 'em just as fast as we could lay them down. Wasn't till Albert nicked the radio transceiver and made his appeal that we got anywhere."