Savage arrived after nine on Monday morning with a paper bag full of breakfast sandwiches. She dropped two on Harry's desk and sat down on the edge of her own messy desk to consume three herself. It wasn't that her desk was really sloppy-she didn't leave food containers laying around. It was just cluttered.
"So," she said after swallowing a large bite of egg and sausage. "That list. What do you say we visit the first name on it. What was it?"
"Ansley Ashford," Harry said. He had clearly looked at the list quite a few times since Friday as he was very familiar with it.
"Hmm, wonder if she's related to that Ballycastle bloke."
Harry admitted that he didn't know the names of very many professional Quidditch players.
"Oh he was way back when I was a little girl," Savage said. She remembered rooting for him mostly because she liked their black and red uniforms with the bats. "Warbeck's second husband. Nice hair."
"How exactly do we go about tracking someone down?" Harry asked.
It was easy to forget with all the glorious tales of heroism that Harry Potter was a rookie and an eighteen-year-old kid. "Ministry makes all wizards register their locations with the proper authorities. You know... in case muggles report hearing loud bangs or seeing fireworks in October. We can hop down, grab some files for the first few people on our list, and then go pay Miss Ashford a visit."
Harry and Savage did just that. They headed out into the lobby and took one of the crowded elevators to the ground floor. The first floor of the Ministry of Magic was often crowded with visitors there on various business. Some were paying fines, others were registering magical pets, and a few were there to face the Wizengamot, the judicial branch of the wizarding justice system. Savage was used to testifying in court often. She imagined that once the trials for all of the death eaters got started, she'd never get a moment to actually do some investigative work. She was just glad that Dolores Umbridge, one of the least pleasant fixtures of that system (even by Death Eater standards), was behind bars in Azkaban. The woman had never aproned of Alauna Savage's braided mohawk nor her perpetual tardiness.
The records office was a large room filled with rows upon rows of wooden filing cabinets. Savage showed her ministry identification badge and signed a book to access the room. "Only certain people are allowed in here. Privacy, you know," she said. "And we have to sign a log, so you know, in case someone tries to use it for personal reasons..."
"Personal reasons?" Harry asked.
"Stalking an ex. Vigilante justice. People will find all sorts of ways to abuse their privileges."
"I wish I'd had this room back when I was at Hogwarts. It would have made things much easier on countless occasions."
Savage laughed. She had been a fresh face in the office when Harry Potter had found the Chamber of Secrets and stopped the basilisk. Dawlish had grumbled a lot about their whole department getting showed up by a kid because Fudge was more worried about covering the problem (once he'd stopped dismissing it) than solving it. She supposed Harry wouldn't be who he was today (and they'd all be in a much darker place) without that rebel attitude. She respected that.
"Records are all buggered, though, since the Death Eaters ran things. The ministry kept family records, sure, but Voldemort's followers actually went through files and stamped them with blood purity ratings. And clerks had to refile the muggleborns because they put those in a separate place. And the little ones? Well... a whole generation of muggleborns won't see their Hogwarts letter. Every one identified that wasn't already part of our society had their file burned."
The first few rows of cabinets had gold plaques with alphabetical ranges on them (AA-AM and AN-AZ) while the cabinets further back had plaques in silver. "Why do these change?" Harry asked, looking at the first silver plaque.
"Silver are dead wizards. And let me tell you, we still haven't moved everyone over from the war. Dunstan's on that job, confirming deaths and sending those names on to the clerks."
Harry followed Savage to row AN-AZ. She tapped on the front of a drawer with her finger. "Aha! Ashford through Ashton." She drew her wand and tapped the lock. The drawer opened, extending out further than the total depth of the cabinet. Savage pulled the file for Ansley Ashford. It was about half an inch thick and bound in a khaki green folder with a piece of twine around it to hold it all together. "Alright," she said. "Let's get a few more."
"Hope Bishop, Lavender Brown, Reilly Brune," Harry said, rattling off the next three names on the list.
Savage raised an eyebrow. "Greyback sure bit a lot of women." She shuddered. It was some kind of perverse power thing: changing people's lives like that. In interrogations he always said he did it to spread a new race, but Savage knew he just wanted to see the fear in someone's eyes as he rolled the dice; would they die or would they spend the rest of their lives as anathema? She could see his smile now.
They quietly pulled the files and carried them back up to the office. Savage locked the three extras in her desk and then laid Ansley Ashford's file out on the surface. "Thought so!" she exclaimed. There was a big red "Undesirable" stamp on the front page. Next to a photo of a woman with blonde hair was a bold green number, 87%. "She's his niece."
"Eighty-seven percent," Harry said.
"Blood purity. It's rubbish. An absolutely pure wizard was worth a hundred percent. A muggle is zero. They average them together down the line."
"My mother was muggleborn," Harry said. "So I guess that makes me fifty."
"Which is rubbish, seeing how your parents were a witch and a wizard. Anyway, the stamps are charmed and the ink won't just be erased, and it's too much work to replace all the files." Savage knew hers said much worse. She was a good number of things Voldemort didn't like: an auror, a half-blood, an upstart...
"We start here," Harry said, pushing his glasses up his nose as he looked back down at the file. The first page contained a photograph, some basic biographical educational date (she had been a Hufflepuff), and a list of known residences. "Cornwall."
"And we hope this is current." Savage bundled up the file in twine and slipped it into a leather messenger bag. She threw the strap over her shoulder. "Got your wand, Harry?"
"Always," Harry said, patting the wand at his hip.
Savage headed for the door with a little spring in her step. She felt like a kid at Christmas. She was getting to train the famous Harry Potter!
* * *
They apparated to Cornwall. Harry found himself standing on a boardwalk looking out over the sea. They were in the southern-most part of England. For a moment, looking out over the dunes at the seagrass, Savage remembered the little seaside cottage where they had hidden out during the first weeks after Scrimgeour's murder. She had spent evenings with the heavy drapes pulled, drinking wine and talking in front of the fire with Alcibie.
There was a startling crack that snapped her from her fantasy. Harry was sure a loud apparator. So much for stealth. "There you are!" Savage shouted from over the hill. "Come on, this way. Now's not the time for skiving from work."
Harry and Savage walked a street by the sea. There were shops here, and the flats above them came at high prices. They walked up a set of weather-worn wooden stairs over a restaurant that sold seafood to a sea-foam green apartment door. Savage knocked.
They waited, but nobody answered. She knocked again. Harry shoved his hands into the pockets of his robes and looked around. "We really should wear muggle clothing to-"
"Shh!" Savage cut him off. She leaned her ear close to the door and listened. Harry leaned in too. He heard it, a frantic screeching and a flapping, as if an bird were trying to get out.
"Screech owl," Harry said.
"Miss Ashford!" Savage called. She knocked once more.
Harry walked to the window and cupped his hands around his face to see through the glass and into the darkened flat. "A body!" Harry shouted. "She's unconscious in there."
Savage drew her wand and charmed the lock open. Harry raised his own wand and followed her through the door. The flat was dark except for the sunlight that poured in through the windows. In the living room, an owl locked in its cage flapped and screeched. To the right of the front door, inside the kitchen, was Ansley Ashford. She was slumped against the icebox, her head down, her hair covering her face.
Harry crouched down and touched her hand.
"She's dead," he said. "At least a few hours. Probably longer."
Savage swore. She walked around the room, taking in the scene. From the image, she pieced together what Ashford had been doing before her death. "Table set, wine poured, a pot of cold water on the stove. She was probably killed just before dinner last night."
"Killed?" Harry asked. "We haven't even figured out how she died."
"Thirty-year-old witches don't just drop dead on their own," Savage said. She crossed to Harry and crouched down next to him. She used her wand to push Ashford's curtain of blonde hair aside. The image frozen on her dead face, her last expression, was one of fear.
Harry scrambled on his hands and knees to pick up a wand that had rolled under the front edge of the counter. "Priori incantatum," he said. An echo of a spell flashed from the end of the wand, a ghostly bubble that looked to Savage to be some kind of shield charm.
"Signs of struggle," she said, despite the fact that all of the chairs were pushed in and nothing else seemed out of place. "She was defending herself against something."
Harry and Savage spent a few more minutes looking around the flat for clues. In the end, Harry took the owl cage (he wanted to give it food and water, but Savage insisted he couldn't let it out in case it took off) and they apparated back to the ministry.
Harry followed her into Robards's office, where he set the clunky owl cage on the floor.
"Harry. Savage," Robards said, surprised to see them toting an animal. "What is this?"
"We went to speak with the first name on that list, and we stumbled upon a murder scene," Savage explained.
"Murder?" he asked, perking up in his seat. "Magical or mundane?"
"No blood, no bruising on her neck. Probably magical," Savage said. "We need to send a team to collect the body and examine it."
"Yes, yes indeed," Robards said, grabbing a quill and hastily dipping it in ink. He scribbled a note, sprinkled it with powder to dry the ink, and tapped it with his wand. It folded itself into an airplane and zoomed off out of the office.
"And the owl?" he asked.
"Her pet," Harry said. "I didn't want to leave it."
Robards and Savage both smirked. Savage was an animal-lover, but if she took home every orphaned pet she found, she'd have a house full of angry little Krups. At least this owl could deliver the mail. "Alright Potter," she said. "You're on owl duty now."
Ha"Take a lunch and get back on that list," Robards said. "I'll let you know when we have a cause of death."
"Yes sir." Harry turned to the door.
"Oh, and Potter. Send in Weasley and Williamson."
* * *
After lunch, Harry and Savage went to visit Hope Bishop, a middle-aged witch who had been imprisoned for aiding muggleborns during the war. During her capture, Greyback had gotten a little feisty and bitten her shoulder in a struggle.
She opened the door with a wand in hand. Savage immediately was stricken with how pale and frail she looked. Her face was sheet white with dark circles under her eyes. She was thin, and her body trembled with every move. This was the face of someone who had spent too much time with dementors. Savage had seen it on many a face, and she felt a bit of it herself on her handful of run-ins with the old Azkaban guards when she'd brought prisoners to the facility.
Savage and Harry stepped inside. The little house in Puddlemere was filled with cats. Savage counted at least twelve in the living room alone. The cats immediately started rubbing themselves on Harry, depositing long hairs of every color on his robes. They stayed away from Savage, however. One even hissed at her and ran away when she sat next to it on the sofa. She scowled. She used to love cats.
"My babies haven't been quite so friendly to me since I got back. It took weeks before Moonbeam would even let me pet her. And Binx, or he's still rather snotty towards me. I think they feel the wolf."
"That's what we're here about," Harry said, unconsciously scratching the ears of a fat tabby cat who had slipped up under his hand. "The bite. Now, I have a few friends who have been bitten like you have, by Greyback in his normal human form. And Remus Lupin, well he was a friend too. But our boss wants to make sure everyone is managing well. You know, for the safety of others."
She reported the same kind of symptoms Savage expected to hear-an affinity for red meat and heightened hearing and smell. During the full moon, she explained, sometimes the odors made her nauseous.
But soon the discussion shifted from the effects of the bite to symptoms that Savage knew were caused by something else-prolonged exposure to dementors. She felt weak and ill. She was often overcome with a sensation like she was empty. She couldn't get warm at night. Her affections being spurned by her cats (nineteen cats, she told them) didn't help.
When they left, Harry dug down into his cloak pockets. He found the last chunk of a Honeydukes chocolate bar. It was still good, broken off from the rest of the bar and wrapped in gold foil.
"Here, Ms. Bishop," Harry said, handing it to her. "It's an old trick I learned from a good friend. It might help, a little." When Harry handed her the chocolate, she looked surprised. "I'm sorry it's not a whole bar," he said.
But Hope Bishop didn't care. Her cheeks were filling with color and, for the first time since their arrival over an hour ago, she was smiling. She tried to hand it back. "That's fine, dear. Really. You didn't have to. You've already done so much, just stopping them so I could be out here," she said.
"Go ahead, take it," Harry said. "I'll get more."
When Harry and Savage left, she turned and whispered. "Is that for the wolfiness or the dementors?" she asked.
"Dementors," Harry said. "But I learned it from a werewolf."
Savage grinned. She was really beginning to like this kid.
_____
End Note: These chapters will go up as I have time after their weekly posting. Scheduled new chapters will arrive every Sunday on lawandauror.tumblr.com, so if you absolutely cannot wait to find out what happens next, I suggest you follow that blog.