A Wizard Among Bats

Chapter 10 - Old Friends

Harry blinked his eyes open, unsure of where he was for the moment and why he was there.

"He's awake," Tim said from right next to where Harry was sitting. Harry looked over at the voice and found him sitting cross legged on the coffee table in front of the couch Harry was laid out on. He was in one of the more well used living rooms of the house. It was still an ornate room and rather excessively furnished if the TV larger than Harry was an indication, but the couches were soft and squishy and this was the room where most of the well-worn and well-loved movies and books were stored in the manor. Harry had already spent many nights curled up on this couch to watch some strange show with Tim or sitting on the coffee table to beat Dick in a video game or sprawled out on the floor doing his summer work as whoever was home at the time would look on with interest. It was practically the heart of the home.

The centerpiece of the room was a picture of a smiling man and woman with their hands on the shoulder of their young son. The family looked happy, and Harry always felt oddly sad at the loss of these people he had never met, but the room would be incomplete without them. They fit in nicely with the warm reds and dark woof of the cozy sitting room.

"What?" Harry mumbled as he sat up, confused at why he was confused. Bruce came over from the other side of the room where Zatanna was sitting on another couch and Dick was talking to her quietly.

"Do you remember what happened?" Bruce asked, and Harry had a vague recollection of a spell being recited and some weird mist coming out of his head, out of his scar. Harry suddenly reached up to his scar, it was still there, but it didn't hurt. Not at all. "I take it that means you do. You fainted shortly after the spell. When Zatanna woke up, she told us that it was just your body compensating for the lost piece, and that you would be fine in a few hours."

"How long was I asleep?"

"About three hours," Tim answered promptly. "We were really worried, but Zatanna woke up about two hours ago and said you should be fine."

"And, er, the thing?" Harry asked, gesturing to his forehead where he remembered the strange entity coming from.

"Zatanna thinks it died, for lack of a better word, when she detached it from you," Bruce answered. "She's done several spells since then and it appears to be gone for good."

Harry shivered despite the warm temperature in the room. "But what was it?"

"She thinks it was a soul," Tim said in a hushed but excited voice.

"That's just speculation," Bruce cut in sharply at Harry's startled face, and elaborated. "Zatanna said it felt like another soul was inhabiting your body, rather than a curse of some type. When she attempted to cleanse your body, it was considered a foreign element and she attempted to pull it out. Since the soul, or whatever it was, was at odds with your body already, hence the pain, she just helped your subconscious magic get rid of it."

Harry wasn't quite sure what to say to that, so he just nodded mutely. Another soul in his body? Whose soul could it have possibly been? And why wasn't it in their body? Harry momentarily thought about dementors and how they stole souls. Maybe he got too close to one and it sort of put one in him? But that was ridiculous, dementors didn't work like that.

Harry was pulled out of his thoughts by Zatanna and Dick getting up and leaving the room. "Where are they going?"

"Whatever was in you, and I will be looking into it, was most likely here when Zatanna set her protection around the house originally," Bruce explained, taking a seat next to Tim on the coffee table. "Since she isn't sure what it is, she wants to completely take down the protective spells and redo them."