Heroes Assemble!

Auxiliary Avengers ... Assemble!

Robards simply gave a grunt, a grunt that Harry interpreted as being dissatisfied with Harry's speed in getting there. Nothing much had changed, it seemed.

"Earlier tonight there were a number of attacks," Robards began the briefing. "All against muggleborn families. The only survivor was young David Harkwood. His parents managed to smuggle him out a window and told him to run; gave him a portkey to the Ministry that activated as soon as he was clear of the anti-apparation and anti-portkey wards that had been raised."

Harry glanced again at the boy in the other room. He was small, maybe seven or eight, he guessed, with mousy brown hair and still wearing his pyjamas. Tear tracks were clearly visible on his face as he leant up against the female auror, her hand around his shoulders.

"I'm guessing that there was more to this since you called me in," Harry stated.

"My team and I were the first on the scene," Susan replied. "The house had been pretty much destroyed and we found his parents' bodies inside. They'd been killed by something that we couldn't identify – it didn't look like any sort of spell that we'd encountered before. Our first guess was some kind of blasting curse, but it just wasn't quite right."

"Reports came in of two other attacks," Robards picked up. "Both families were killed, a total of eleven, including five children under Hogwarts' age."

"We managed to get young David in there to give us his memory of what happened," Susan said, indicating the pensieve on the table behind her.

"As soon as we saw what happened, I asked for you to be called in," Kingsley concluded.

"May I?" Harry asked, indicating the bowl.

Kingsley simply waved his hand and Harry stepped forward. Placing his finger into the silvery liquid, he felt himself drawn inside.

He landed in what was obviously a child's bedroom. There were toys – blocks and action figures predominantly – scattered around. A small light globe, obviously the magical version of a night light, hovered in the corner above the bed where the boy, David, was sleeping.

Suddenly, a loud noise, an explosion, rocked the house and David shot up in bed. Ignoring him, Harry crossed the room and stuck his head out through the curtains. A second explosion preceded David joining him there, a look of terror on the boy's face.

"Dark Elves," Harry growled.

Obviously, he hadn't gotten them all – he'd thought that he'd come up short when he was rounding them up.

There were eight of them, all holding some kind of alien weapon that they were firing at the house. Their behaviour, though, was different to what he'd seen in Greenwich. There, the Elves had preferred to rush their opponents, to fight more hand to hand. Here, they stood in a slight arc, equidistant apart and shot from a distance. The position was eerily familiar, but not one that he'd seen since the war. And when combined with the anti-apparition and anti-portkey wards that had been mentioned ...

On impulse, Harry willed himself from the second story window down to the ground amongst the Elves.

With humans, it was possible to tell by looking in their eyes if they were being controlled, but even stepping up so that he was basically nose to nose with one of the Dark Elves, Harry had no idea if what he was seeing was normal or out of the ordinary. Instead, he began searching the outer reaches of the area.

And then he found it. A single wizard was standing under a copse of trees, hidden in the shadows. If Harry hadn't been specifically looking for them, there was no way that they would have been noticed. Unfortunately, it was simply too dark to be able to distinguish any features.